Vote up the best shows that have one season that just stinks.
Not every good show can be good for its entire run. In fact, some of the most revered shows in the world have some real stinker seasons.The valleys make the mountains, though, and maybe these truly awful seasons from these all-time great TV shows made us love the whole even more. That's not going to stop us from taking these weak seasons to task and airing our grievances.
Parks and Recreation is considered one of the greatest sitcoms in TV history. The show is praised for its character development, having launched careers for several stars like Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza and Chris Pratt. What many fans don’t remember is how the iconic show started off, and how it wasn’t a sure bet to continue past season 1 before creator Michael Schur stepped in and made some wholesale changes that might have saved the series.
When people look back on popular TV shows, it’s not often that the first season represents the worst of the bunch, but such is the case for Parks and Rec. When we first meet Leslie Knope (Played by Amy Poehler), she is a shell of the person her character becomes, often coming across ditzy and unsure of herself. As we learn throughout the series, her intelligence and confidence are core character traits that made audiences fall in love with her. In addition, popular characters like April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), Donna Meagle (Retta) and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) start off slow and showcase traits that their characters almost immediately abandon beyond the inaugural season.
The most glaring improvement that Schur and company made in season 2 and beyond is the replacement of the notoriously dry character of Mark Brendanawicz (Paul Schneider), who did not seem to gain any chemistry with his co-stars and did not really add much value to the show in general. His departure paved the way for fan-favorites, Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) and Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe), who were added to the mix in lead roles at the end of season 2.
Remember how great Roseanne was when it first came on the air in 1988? There was virtually nothing else like it. The Conners were a regular, lower-middle class family dealing with all the same problems viewers had: jobs they hated, bratty kids, and piles of bills. It was grounded, relatable, and truly hilarious. Led by comedienne Roseanne Barr, who was controversial even then, along with a stellar supporting cast including John Goodman as husband Dan and Laurie Metcalf as sister Jackie, Roseanne was a smash hit and an instant cultural touchstone. This is what America looked like, and American viewers ate it up.
Then, in episode 2 of season 9, “Millions from Heaven,” the Conners won the lottery. With those “millions from heaven,” the show threw all that grounded relatability out the window, along with basically everything else that made it worth watching. Now, instead of trying to file their taxes properly and keep their various small businesses afloat, they were hobnobbing with the rich and famous and, in probably the worst episode of the entire series, fighting terrorists on a moving train. Goodman, by then enjoying a solid movie career on the side, was mostly absent, meaning Dan was written out of most of the season. When the character returned, he was revealed to be having an affair, essentially undercutting the heart of the show: the love between Roseanne and Dan.
Ultimately, though, none of that even mattered because in the final episode of season 9, which served as the show’s series finale until a 2018 revival, Roseanne reveals that all of the show was just a highly embellished autobiography. She says the family never won the lottery, key events from throughout the series’ run never actually happened, couples we had come to love had never been together, and perhaps worst of all, Dan had really died of a heart attack he suffered in season 8. It was a disastrous ending and an insult to anyone who had loved the show and stuck it out through nine seasons, wondering what would happen to the Conners.
However, even with all of that, what makes season 9 of Roseanne truly skippable is the fact that when the series returned for its 10th season 21 years later, the writers explicitly said they intended to ignore everything that happened in season 9. This means you can watch seasons 1-8 and jump to season 10 without missing a single thing. Perhaps no long-running, successful, critically acclaimed series has ever fumbled the football so blatantly for an entire season. Even season 4 of Community still happened. The ninth season of Roseanne is like a stain on your favorite shirt that’s finally starting to fade. Yeah, it’s there, but you hardly notice it.
Star Trek: The Next Generation provides some of the highest points in Trek (and Sci-fi in general) history. Unfortunately most of the high points come after some of the lowest points in Trek history, AKA the first season. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry insisted that the future utopia that Trek portrayed meant that the characters should be beyond interpersonal conflict, which resulted in some awfully dull television. Unfortunately for Gene, he left after the first season and new showrunners took over, loosening the reins on the types of stories the show could tell. Which made for better TV and better Trek. Truly the best of both worlds.
The downfall of Heroes is a tragic one. The first season took the world by storm with its story of ordinary people with extraordinary abilities coming together that scratched the viewers growing superhero itch years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe had even started. The freshman season garnered awards love and was heralded as NBC's first true hit since Friends. Hype was high for Season 2… and then the writers strike happened.
It's unclear if the second season was killed solely because of the strike or if the show just didn't have much story juice after season one because the quality only continued to nosedive for the remainder of the run. What definitely hurt it was the season ending on a major cliffhanger involving the heroes fighting to stop the release of a virus that causes a global pandemic. Peter has amnesia for much of the short run, Hiro is stranded in feudal Japan, Kristen Bell is there, and one of the big new characters from the season gets stranded in the future in the final episode and is never mentioned again. Not once.
I stand by the fact that the first season of Heroes is one of the great single seasons of television, but season two marked a major decline that the show just never managed to pull up from.
Does this season have one of the most unforgettable season finales? Yes. But everything leading up to that was extremely subpar. Supernatural has 15 seasons, with different storylines crisscrossing between them all. Season 14 just happens to have some of the least interesting storylines at their height. First, there’s “Apocalypse World.” The gang has gotten out of that hellish alternate reality and brought some friends along with them (any type of Bobby, even one from an alternate world, is welcome). However, they’re not the only one who escaped, with alternate-Michael occupying Dean’s body as his vessel. Seeing Jensen Ackles be able to play a different character IS fun, but that enjoyment wears off quickly as his storyline drags on and on. Next, there’s “The Bad Place” - a truly boring name for a world that is anything but. In this storyline we get monsters, magic, death, doppelgängers, and even (gasp) young love. Ultimately, none of this really goes anywhere and is just thrown in to give Supernatural a bit more girl power, which is appreciated, but would be even more so if it was better written and more consistent. Then there’s Jack… who is human, then he’s sick, then he’s dead, then he’s brought back to life by a character we never thought we’d see again (and don’t really care about), then he’s alive but in danger of losing his soul, then he loses his soul, then he gets manipulated, then he hallucinates, and then he KILLS MARY - ultimately, it’s too much, the audience is getting whiplash at this point (or is just losing interest).
Best known as the "Gas Leak Year," the fourth season of NBC's Community is a bit of a mess. Creator and and executive producer Dan Harmon was booted off the show by network execs for his "erratic behavior," and because of this, we all had to suffer.
To be 100% clear, the fourth season of Community is not the fault of Harmon. This is evident because he wasn't there. Nor is this the fault of the cast. This is evident because they are mostly present (Chevy Chase would leave during this season due to issues with being a jerk.)
Because Sony wanted to carry on without the show's creator, who was also a large source of the hilarity, there was a notable dip in quality. Awful, awful decisions were made, like the idea to take the "the darkest timeline" concept and bring it to the "real world" by having those characters battle their "good" counterparts. Or a puppet episode where no of the cloth-versions of the characters acted like themselves. Or the time they went to the Inspector SpaceTime convention every had a different adventure instead of as a group, thus losing the kinetic energy of the show. Instead, they used to convention as a way to poke fun of Doctor Who nerds and focus groups, which in hindsight, is an odd mixture.
The new(ish) folks behind the show just didn't understand what made ‘Community’ good: the gang working together on a goofy adventure. Furthermore, the characters were just acting so strange and different from who we got to know over the last three years that these folks seemed like imposters.
There were the occasional wins, such as Brie Larson as Rachel or the Halloween episode (always a winner), but the season took too many wide swings and had too many misses. By the time Harmon returned, the fifth season just referred to the fourth season as that time Greendale had a gas leak that affected the entire student body. And the audience. And most of NBC.
Its real legacy is now every time a great comedy skips a groove and has a mediocre season, folks refer to it as the “gas leak year.” As it should be.
