I wouldn't say terrible, but the first ten or so episodes of Fringe were pretty rough and it just felt like a retread of The X-Files.
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What TV shows started off terrible and managed to become good?
- Thread starter Winston1
- Start date
uhm, excuse you? WW has been a great show the entire time.
My pick is Naruto. Most of everything up until the Chunin exams is terrible.
Then it gets amazing, then pain arc happens, then it goes down hill, then it completely drops off the planet, and then the last fight happens and its great.
Can't believe no one's mentioned Bojack Horseman yet. No other show has the largest delta between where it started and where it ended up. Season 1 is a slow, dull endeavor with few redeeming moments outside of the Herb arc. From there it slowly evolves into the definitive movie/TV depiction of depression and features some extremely sharp writing.
The first season wasn't outright terrible, but if you'd seen the UK office it was clearly far inferior. When it started doing its own thing it got so much better.
I wouldn't call it terrible, but the first season of The Leftovers is aggressively annoying. Second and third seasons are so much better that it feels like a completely different show.
Parks and Rec's first season is pretty bad. Shit is completely unfunny, every joke falls so flat you wonder if it was even intended to be a joke in the first place. And then it takes the fuck off in seasons 2 and 3 (I'd argue it starts to suck again in S6, but rebounds with 7).
Parks and Rec's first season is pretty bad. Shit is completely unfunny, every joke falls so flat you wonder if it was even intended to be a joke in the first place. And then it takes the fuck off in seasons 2 and 3 (I'd argue it starts to suck again in S6, but rebounds with 7).
eh, I feel like it's a lot more common for good shows to turn bad than bad shows to turn good.
BB was first pitched as an adult swim show. That's why. The weird animation and the cross dressing voices remain, but the grossout humour that was so prevalent in the early season has essentially disappeared.
Anyway, my answer is Beast Wars.
The first episode is G1 level painful. Lots of characters delivering exposition in forced ways (including people introducing themselves to people they already know for the benefit of the audience). The stories were formulaic (they even introduced new characters in the exact same way. First a new maximal redco of an existing character, then a predacon. Then the maximals get a new flyer, then the predacons.) and aside from the mystery of the various alien devices, it was a pretty standard evil plan of the week show. But the long dev time of early 90s CG let them realize this as the first season went on. They discovered people LOVED dinobot, and loved when waspinator got scrapped. They stared making the characters more complex, introduced slapstick comedy that makes the shwo standout to this day.
Come season 2 it was an entirely different show.
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Yeah and I guess the gimmick was the burgers were made of people? But Fox was NOT into the idea but they kept the pilot mostly unchanged besides the ending. Which proved there was no human meat.
Parks and Rec and The 100 are the first two to come to mind. The 100 made a huge jump from trash to excellent genre show imo.
It's hard to pick between TNG, Spartacus, or Legends of Tomorrow as the reigning champ of this trope.
TNG S1 is why I will never call it the best ST. A complete disservice to a great show.
Spartacus has a shitty pilot. But gets better over the course of the first season. But I have tried to get people into this show. Nobody survives episode 1, so I just skip it.
Legends of Tomorrow S1 had good things in it, but the main driving points of the show sucked.
Legends had to change into a different show to work. That is very different that what TNG and Spartacus had to do. So I give the award to LoT.
TNG S1 is why I will never call it the best ST. A complete disservice to a great show.
Spartacus has a shitty pilot. But gets better over the course of the first season. But I have tried to get people into this show. Nobody survives episode 1, so I just skip it.
Legends of Tomorrow S1 had good things in it, but the main driving points of the show sucked.
Legends had to change into a different show to work. That is very different that what TNG and Spartacus had to do. So I give the award to LoT.
Also Bob is much meaner. He'd never call his family terrible now. Oh and tina was a boy but they felt he came off as creepy and rapey so they changed him to a girl.
Yeah, first season is a complete drag to get through. Too much "case of the week" stuff, gets really repetitive. I don't remember exactly when it picks up, but it does turn into some quality edge of your seat television.
Deep Space 9. First 2 or 3 seasons are some really dull TV give or take a few classics. It gets much better over time.
S1 Person of Interest wasn't bad, but it pales in comparison to the later seasons. I concur with SHIELD, Parks and Rec and Legends (especially Legends. I was just about to quit that show before the finale).
I wouldn't quite say that to the 100, Community or Avatar.
For my entry, it's Bob's Burgers. They tried too much to be like the recently cancelled King of the Hill. Luckily, they course corrected in season 2 and never looked back.
I wouldn't quite say that to the 100, Community or Avatar.
For my entry, it's Bob's Burgers. They tried too much to be like the recently cancelled King of the Hill. Luckily, they course corrected in season 2 and never looked back.
You're impressively patient. I only lasted 5 episodes before I gave up on this "supposed" improvement over the films.
Yep. It was a bland The Office clone. It took them 1.5 seasons to find something in the cast and another half-season after that to ditch one boring character and bring in two much better ones.
Season One is still excellent, though. I'm pretty sure Gun Fever and the creepy one where they turn the bar into a haven for high school kids are in that season, and those are both top-level episodes.
That you for this.
I tried watching the show sometime back and couldn't get past the first couple episodes. Now that I realize the problem wasn't just me, I'll give it another shot.
Uh....the bridge arc is anything but terrible. The series goes downhill after the Pain arc, sure, but wtf at callingthe bridge arc 'terrible'
I said most of everything before the exams is terrible.
Bridge arc has a lot of bad and little pockets of great.
I disagree. Devito is hilarious and probably is part of the reason why the show is so long-running but season 1 is still hilarious.
Obviously, Star Trek: TNG was so bad, I almost quit watching. It insulted my sensibilities even as a ten year old.
I think you should also add Deep Space Nine, I actually DID bail on it and it really wasn't until it was on Netflix that I realized the show as the masterpiece that it is.
I think you should also add Deep Space Nine, I actually DID bail on it and it really wasn't until it was on Netflix that I realized the show as the masterpiece that it is.
Good call. Season one was awful and now Legends is the only DC show I consistently watch.
My vote is for Halt and Catch Fire. Around 2/3rds into season one it goes from being a bland Mad Men knock off to great. And then stays there until that weird last season.
ooh good one
tried more than once to get through season 1, just could not do it
from season 2 on it's great
My wife and I argue about this lol it's so awkward and makes you feel so uncomfortable which is why I love it and she hates it.
As people have already pointed out, it's Spartacus. The first episode is absolutely awful, then there are two or three pretty cheesy ones... but push through that to about the fifth episode and you'll be rewarded with probably the best-scripted show ever made, with three further seasons that are all incredible.
Gods Of The Arena, the prequel series that came between the first and second seasons, should be required viewing in every screenwriting class on the planet. Hell, it should be forced on anyone who wants to write for any medium. It's an incredible feat of storytelling under the tightest constraints.
And all that started life as a crap 300 knock-off with extra boobs.
Gods Of The Arena, the prequel series that came between the first and second seasons, should be required viewing in every screenwriting class on the planet. Hell, it should be forced on anyone who wants to write for any medium. It's an incredible feat of storytelling under the tightest constraints.
And all that started life as a crap 300 knock-off with extra boobs.
That show starts off SO bad it's actually amazing. Agents of SHIELD starts just like...mediocre. But the 100 makes Arrow look like The Wire.
I'm so jealous of you. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine my mind clean and rewatch Agents of Shield for the first time
Huh? Westworld goes downhill after season 1 and arguably so does BB (season 2 is easily the weakest with that stupid plane crash nonsense).
Naked Now and Conspiracy are good fun and worth one's while too. Problematic episodes aside, season 1 of TNG has a lot of fun campy episodes reminiscent of TOS. It's the weakest season but I wouldn't advise skipping it in its entirety. It's just best not to take it too seriously.
This is the one instance where I think the "Homerizing" of a character really worked. Andy was a pos in that first season and as he got dumber and dumber you kind of forgot all about that.
People raved to me about Blackadder and I didn't get it. Now I want to try later seasons.
Parks and Rec, The Office, Brooklyn 99
Really any Michael Schur comedy takes a minute to get decent. Never cared for "The Good Place" all that much though.
There aren't many comedies that are fantastic out the gate though.
Maybe not a popular opinion but "Man in the High Castle" got much better to me after the first season which felt like it just absolutely dragged. "The Expanse" took a while for me to get into as well.
Really any Michael Schur comedy takes a minute to get decent. Never cared for "The Good Place" all that much though.
There aren't many comedies that are fantastic out the gate though.
Maybe not a popular opinion but "Man in the High Castle" got much better to me after the first season which felt like it just absolutely dragged. "The Expanse" took a while for me to get into as well.
Good call. I initially bounced off the show pretty hard after watching the first couple episodes. So glad I gave it another chance like a year later.
Seinfeld didn't truly find itself until The Chinese Restaurant, though The Pony Remark and The Phone Message were earlier hints to its potential.
Simpsons S1 may as well be a different show given how different it is. I wouldn't say it's bad, though. It's just not the show we now know.