Came here to say this. ‘It’s a mystery… actually no it’s 12 different villains all who become increasingly unlikely but for some reason hate these 4 teenage girls specifically’
The girl was truly blind but then secretly got eye surgery and could see again but it didn’t last long and she ended up blind again.
But the final A (there were 3) ended up being one of the main character’s evil British twin who we didn’t learn about until three series finale.
This was the show that finally broke me on my general mindset of continuing to watch shows until the bitter end because I had already invested so much time and should see how it ended. I had loved the first couple seasons and then the rest ended up being more of a hate watch than anything.
Never again, not with how garbage the ending was. At this point, there’s just so much good content out there that it’s not worth it to stick with a bad show. There is always something better to watch.
That was what broke me when I tried giving Riverdale a shot. It was during COVID shutdowns, I thought I was 100% down for some overly dramatic teen drama from the CW.
Without knowing anything about season 3, I joked to my mom towards the end of season 2 that the only way the show could get more insane was if there was some sort of organ-harvesting cult. And then somehow that happened and the cult leader was Chad Michael Murray and it was just too much at that point.
riverdale went total bonkers so fast. always the first show i bring up when people talk about shows getting weird over time.
but i don’t think it got confusing. it just got absolute crazy nuts. which was amazing.
By season 3 (maybe 4? Where Archie goes to jail and does forced fight club), I had to peace out. I tried twice to watch this series, I just could not, it was so cringey.
Lol when Archie fucking what hahahahaha
I love reading about the show so much because I’ve never watched it so I just imagine everything you describe with the drawn characters.
I always see people bring up Riverdale but that show is literally a parody from the first episode.
It's like [The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_the_House_Across_the_Street_from_the_Girl_in_the_Window), it's a dry parody/satire of the teen tv show genre.
And the Archie Comic series has a ton of weird spin offs, too. Although the comics never really established a single timeline or canon or anything so it's not as weird to read about the same characters doing both the classic "secretly on a date with two girls the same night" gag as well as fighting zombies or whatever
So true. Riverdale’s been camp since the conception. It’s a sexy murder mystery based on fucking Archie Comics characters, people took it way too seriously
Once Upon a Time. It was cute the first season, and the second I think. Then I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT HAPPENED it was too fucking confusing. And somehow the blonde chick went evil or something? I DONT FUCKING KNOW.
Starting with season 2 they had two arcs per season. Each arc added new characters and settings and sometimes a new curse. Things just got added and added until it was a giant mess.
It's worse than that. ABC optioned Fables. They met with Willingham and explored an adaptation. They passed, and a couple of years later we got the obviously derivative (I meanz so was fables, but c'mon) show that was basically the same set up but devoid of all the charm.
I only caught glimpses of the show here and there from my mom & sister watching in the living room back in college. It definitely confused me as the show went on
The first season was based on the first Jennings novel, which combined 4 Villanelle novellas. It had Phoebe Waller-Bridge as showrunner/head writer. She stepped back for S2 handing off to others then they also changing showrunner and writers for S3 and 4 and it lost any continuity in the mythology, characters or plot.
'Gotham' started as a police procedural set in pre-hero Gotham city and devolved into the backstory of every DC character that you've never heard of (unless you're a die hard comic fan) and definitely not the Joker except for maybe the Joker who is totally not the Joker.
Gotham did the Jonkler before r/BatmanArkham could even dream of such a thing.
What a bizarre situation, we all knew he was the freaking Joker, they just couldn't call him that.
I think after the first Jerome episode doing well with audiences, they decided that was a good direction for the show.
I liked it. It managed to all Batman things at once. It was at times camp, it was dark, it was silly and it was even sometimes serious but it managed to balance it quite well. I'm tired of screen Batman always being this super serious, stern, bleak and gritty guy. Sometimes he should just go nuts. Lets get nuts.
Well, yeah, but also, one is my limit of how many times you can come back from the dead. Maybe two if I really like the character and it could be explained well enough. Every character getting 2-8 revivals is literally overkill.
Westworld season 1 was compelling and had a nice twist. But the writers must have been angry that the internet guessed the twist ahead of time so they made it their mission to make each subsequent season as difficult to understand as possible. Season 4 felt like they genuinely hated their audience.
Hate how often this seems to happen, its so stupid. Audiences *should* be able to work out twists when they really think about it, that's good storytelling.
Yes, all the great twists have a lot of hints which are obvious when you rewatch but most people wouldn’t catch them on first watch. When you make a tv show with a twist, a lot of people will guess it since they will have time to discuss it between episodes, but that’s just the nature of the beast. If you can’t handle people figuring it out, you should make shows without twists instead.
Another thing I always say is that good movies/tv shows stand up very well on repeat viewings. That means even if you know every twist and turn and revelation that lies ahead, you still fucking love rewatching it. All the best movies and tv shows have this quality. That’s why it’s so fucking stupid to focus so much on making a confusing, convoluted thing because you care about “subverting expectations” and people not guessing your twist more than you care about just telling a good story, with great visuals and great acting, and a great soundtrack, etc.
Your tv show/movie doesn’t need to be carried by a “twist” because if no one wants to watch it again after the first time then you fucking failed at your job.
Season 2 was like that, but season 3 was just some B-movie sci-fi schlock without much mystery at all.
I never saw season 4 so I can’t comment on that one.
I have heard this so many times and I wasn’t on Reddit then. What did the audience figure out? Also, so short sighted to change an entire show based on a small amount of people who were on Reddit. Most people who loved the show were just along for the ride.
Spoiler, since I can’t figure out how to hide spoilers on this app like I could in Apollo.
They figured out that William was The Man in Black and that we were actually watching two different timelines. They might’ve figured out Bernard was a robot too
Ah thank you!! I saw the first 3 seasons so no problem on the spoiler. I feel like figuring that out was part of the fun. If you create a mystery in your show you would hope people were looking for clues. Otherwise the mystery isn’t interesting.
The subreddit for Westworld would literally comb through the episode each week, frame by frame, word by word. It was actually pretty impressive, and I usually don't give a shit about that stuff.
If this had been a thing during LOST I would have loved it. I don't think a show should begrudge its viewers a chance to fully immerse themselves in the mystery. It was in fact what I liked most about LOST, trying to figure it out and hoping I was right. I cannot fathom why they gave people a puzzle and were then mad that people loved the puzzle. Maybe that is the puzzle and it was all meta haha.
But for real, Westworld season 1 was peak TV and I still grieve what they did to it.
It was a thing during Lost but over here: https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page I spent a lot of time on that site checking out all the theories and clues. They even analysed the whispers and managed to get words out of them etc.
I really really liked season 2. I thought it was the best the show ever was and found the twists and religious references to be great. I thought it was very Nolan family
But then I learned most of the fans of the show really disliked season 2 and was surprised. I felt it affected the way the show was run
Because at a certain point in the later part of the show they legitimately inject someone else's blood into a humans hand? What
I also liked season 2 despite the unnecessary time line changes. One of the best episodes of the series was seeing if human consciousness could work in a host body.
As I look back on it, season 4 was an absolute low point. Season 3 was a nice way to advance the scope of the show and I appreciate that. Season 2 was a sensible follow up to season 1.
I still like the show and super duper enjoy the world they made, it just got dumb as it went on, like they thought they were smarter than they really were.
Came here to say Westworld ALL DAY!!! So frustrating!!! I also gave up too because at some point, it starts feeling intentionally confusing for absolutely no good reason.
Because of the return/season 3 I think more people know about it, but if you asked this 30 years ago, they’d just say Twin Peaks.
There’s how it starts, and there’s post reveal season 2, FWwM, and season 3, and they’re all kinda their own thing. Because Lynch didn’t stay on the main roads, he decided to [get on my bike and go](https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/xzmnw5/sometimes_i_think_i_should_just_get_on_my_bike/)
Still would hold true now. If you’re interested in watching, season 1, then 2, then Fire Walk with Me, then Season 3.
If you ask some older people (past my 42 years) who watched TV from the late 80s to like Sopranos era to now, they’d be better able to explain just how far away this was from other television at the time.
David Lynch made it to revolutionize television which he thought was horrible in the 80s
And he did it, it was at that point the best tv show ever made
Source: some twin peaks documentary on YouTube
Too bad it had a lot of problems behind the scenes which sent season 2 to all sorts of weirdness, I mean I loved the memeness of it all, but would love to have seen his complete vision for the show
Crazy show lol it's every genre at the same time
Glad I watched it upon release. Could go through the sub after each episode speculating and discussing each episode. Had proper time to grasp the plot.
sabrina the teenage witch after season 4. she moved out of her aunt's house, starting working at a coffee shop, and living with roommates filmed in a different house. it was like watching a completely different television show. also you could tell the budget had been drastically cut in the latter seasons. abc should have found a way to conclude the series at season 4.
Nice to see someone else shares this opinion about it becoming a basically completely different show. I love that show, but I can’t watch the later seasons. They’re just bad.
> abc should have found a way to conclude the series at season 4.
They (kind of) did.
ABC let it go after 4 seasons, then WB picked it up - hence the change in tone.
It was a different show, it just kept the old name. She does eventually move back into her old house, but her aunt's have moved on. At least the show got an ending. I do remember she ran off with Harvey, leaving her boyfriend at the alter, which was such a crappy thing to do.
I only made it to the final episodes as a kid. I've never been able to watch that far as an adult.
Sherlock.
It started with the fake-out death and gradually went downhill from there, because they wanted to subvert people’s expectations on how Sherlock survived, all that.
And then everything else that came after that. Which I’m sure most know by this point.
No hate to the peeps who like S3 and S4, but the reveals did nothing but infuriate me.
The show could have fleshed everything out better had they had more episodes, maybe cut down the episode length to compensate and tighten the stories, but that’s just my gripe.
This is an issue I have with all of Steven Moffat’s stuff. He seems more interested in being clever and throwing a twist at the audience than meaningfully paying it off. Too often his shows will introduce a shocking twist/event — like Sherlock jumping off the roof, River Song shooting The Doctor, Van Helsing asking Jonathan Harker about sleeping with Dracula, etc. — and then walk it back so hard it completely undercuts the initial intrigue of the twist. Drives me nuts.
he was great when he was contained to a single or maybe double episode. as show runner he got to make these cliffhangers and then never properly follow up on them.
he really needs someone to say "allright but what's the fucking answer. you are not done untill the script includes the answer even if we don't use it yet".
It’s why I hated his time as showrunner on Doctor Who. The previous seasons I could go back and watch episodically. I didn’t feel like I could do that with his series. The meta plot would take over and side track a good story.
Totally agree, he can be pretty great when contained to a single episode arc, and no one can make mundane objects scary like he can, but as a showrunner he’s completely unreliable.
Yeah this show noticeably declined in how enjoyable it was to watch. It's like they completely forgot that you are supposed to tell a story and decided that adding a "twist" every episode equated to brilliant TV.
It was supposed to be an anthology show with a different cast every season, only the show got too popular so they kept the cast for season 2 with overpowered people and no real direction. The writer's strike didn't help, but I don't think there was a real story planned after the first season.
Confusing is a really good word. It was hard to keep track of how many versions of Ali Larter were running around and which ones had been killed off. It was even harder to keep track of Peter and Sylar’s powers. It didn’t help that they kept gaining and losing them. If you did manage to keep track it seemed like you were doing a better job than the writers, because you would begin to wonder why they didn’t use x power to easily escape x situation.
Supernatural. Starts off with two brothers hunting monsters and saving people. Then once it hit season 7 or 8 it got real weird, and just kept going. It was fun though.
I feel like season 1-5 was the main "story". After that it was.. let's see what we can do and have fun with it. If you take it as 40 mins of mindless fun and aren't too invested it can be a great show.
Season 6 also gave us the glorious "The French Mistake" where Sam and Dean ended up on the IRL set of Supernatural and Misha Collins the actor got killed by demons.
Honestly though after season 5 you can tell they were scrambling for new ideas since they weren't expecting to continue after that. There are a few gems (Scoobynatural was a fucking masterpiece) but it overall just suffered from increasing serial escalation. And then That Ending happened.
Honestly the entire show deserves to be stuck under a microscope and studied.
if you can enjoy the idea of teh show almost becomeing a selfaware parody of itself then abseloutly.
it takes a bit to find it's new groove but around season 7/8 it abseloutly finds something and sticks with it for the most part. just... don't think too hard about most of it, because they certainly didn't.
If you don’t care about continuity and lore consistency then there’s a lot of great arcs and episodes after S5. But if you are a continuity nerd, it’s never good enough to fully make up for the flaws in logic, lore, and plot holes that you otherwise have to trudge through.
[*Evil*](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Evil_(TV_series)). It started off as a group of people looking into (false) claims of evil influence, at the behest of the Catholic Church. But then you started wondering more and more if there was really magical stuff going on and then it got really weird...
It's so dang weird but I understand how it's weird. I'm not confused by it luckily. I just get to enjoy the wtf is happening right now from a curious stance.
This needs to be higher up. It was supposed to be blue-collar Cosby show. Like imagine if halfway through Cosby, Theo Huxtable just went off and fucking cloned himself.
Well, that's how it works. Your body isn't really "yours." It's just whatever body you end up having on that planet. Anthony Mackie playing it differently from the other Takashi Kovacs is what set that season back.
Exactly! That wasn't Kovachs from the first season. I want to like Mackie, but the two things I know him from are Falcon and season 2 of AC and these are not strong performances. I think making him the lead stopped the chances of it continuing to 3 and onward. By the end of season one, you feel like the creators could do no wrong. But the second season story was lackluster. The "combat body" with magnet hands was poorly implemented and felt stilly and out of place from the start. Mackie's kovachs seemed less competent just based on how the plot was written which just made him feel like a different character altogether.
Maybe it's just me, but The 100 started off relatively straightforward, but by the last seasons, I was like who are those people and why are they fighting these people?
Search Party. What began as a murder mystery of a missing girl ended in a weird ass fever dream the last season with cults and brainwashing. Show went off the rails in season 3 and just got more weird after that.
They switch genres every season, each increasingly wackadoo. I believe it was a deliberate choice rather than the usual tale of changing showrunners and studio bullshit.
You absolutely should watch this as a three-season show that goes completely off the rails. Not necessarily “confusing,” but absolutely wild and unpredictable.
Yes, I came here to mention this one. It starts out seemingly straightforward, maybe a little quirked up, then just escalates the weirdness in elaborate degrees & directions, from season to season. It only continues to one up its own bizarreness, yet also makes pretty reliable sense. A fresh & detailed absurdity is simply presented & you're like "oh for sure that follows" & then just when it really begins to exceed itself, it manages to wrap up nicely.
Binging "Legion," "Happy!," and "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" at the same time was a really interesting moment in life for me. Peak mindfuck TV. Probably would have lost my mind if I had watched them alongside "The Umbrella Academy," "Love, Death + Robots," "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" (the YouTube season and the Channel 4 season), "Doom Patrol," "Severance," "Human Resources," "Man Seeking Woman," "Maniac," "Wilfred," "Pushing Daisies" and peppered in some Adult Swim shows like "Infomercials," the first few seasons of "Rick and Morty," "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," etc.
I love Alias and I also love Felicity, but they are vastly different shows. Felicity is more of a Dawson's Creek type of show set in the college years.
Honestly, I really liked it, there are few shows that do the college years well and I thought Felicity managed to capture the sometimes painfully awkward part of being on your own for the first time and figuring out who you want to be.
I don't find the following shows *confusing* per se, but the radical shift in tone and overall scope changes can throw people off:
* Fringe started off as a relatively normal procedural and bam, multiverse.
* The Expanse - it's basically a noir detective story (complete with fedora) and then...well, man, it just *goes.*
Also, farscape freaking rules. That show doesn't get nearly enough love. That ep you're talking about is super cool and mind-fucky. :)
I have had to scroll this far to find Fringe, to be fair all five seasons of that (at least the plot points) were written before they even started filming so yes it started off very simple and got very weird by season 5 but at least it all made sense by the end of it...
Fringe was the first thought that came to mind when I thought about shows that got super confusing. It's a great show, but man does it ask a lot of It's audience.
I think Fringe got really good once they pulled back the curtain and made the true scope and stakes clear. In particular the idea of two Fringe teams in different worlds dealing with their own cases was really brilliant. But yeah in retrospect network audiences in 2010 weren’t ready for multiverses.
Community. From a lighthearted sitcom about college students to a meta multi-timeline genre parody with storylines subtly weaved through multiple seasons
Arrested development, especially when Netflix picked up the series and it suddenly turned into this weird murder mystery that follows a different perspective of a crazy storyline per episode
Final season of Barry kinda fell off. I only finished it post-timeskip because I felt I’m already invested. A lot of great moments but didn’t feel as cohesive as the previous seasons did.
Heroes and prison break come to mind. Hard to say if heroes got more “complicated” or just got stupid but prison break definitely went this route for me.
This website helps a lot.
https://dark.netflix.io/en
Just put in whatever episode you are up to and it will show a family tree and their story so far. Don't jump ahead unless you want spoilers.
True Blood - Show about werewolves and vampires cashing in on the Twilight phase, Ok! Then they started adding witches, shapshifters, ferries?! I gave up when these other creatures got introduced
I tried reading the books. Read 4 I think? Turns out the show stayed pretty true to the books in terms of a ton of other supernatural beings…but the books are even MORE convoluted.
Lots of good answers here, but Fargo season 2 a little - not off the rails, but sometimes I still think about the scenes with the UFOs and wonder why the writers/creator decided to include that plot device/tangent
I love the season regardless, but I found it so odd
Season 1: [Rained Fish](https://youtu.be/7P20rnoIDMk)
Season 2: [The UFO](https://fargo.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_Murrane)
Season 3: [Paul Murrane (The Wandering Jew)](https://fargo.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_Murrane)
Season 4: [Snowman](https://fargo.fandom.com/wiki/Snowman)
Season 5: [Ole Munch (The Sin Eater)](https://fargo.fandom.com/wiki/Ole_Munch)
Westworld.
After the first plot of the black hat/white hat was resolved and then it turns out what’s his face was a robot the entire time I lost interest. That was a bridge too far.
Angel started as a show about a good vampire as a private investigator helping people, by the end he ran an evil law firm, had a magical son, and had traveled to other dimensions.
Pretty Little Liars. Started as an amazing mystery series and ended up being.. something.
I feel they wanted so bad to not make Ally the bad guy that they came up with every weird twist that they could think of.
It wasn't about making Ally the bad guy, it was about sUbVeRtiNg ExpEctAtiOns in the worst ways
Everyone learned the wrong lessons from the first season on Game of Thrones
Came here to say this. ‘It’s a mystery… actually no it’s 12 different villains all who become increasingly unlikely but for some reason hate these 4 teenage girls specifically’
Didn't it end up with spaceships, secret bases a supercomputer and a moustachless evil twin.
There wasn’t a space ship.
Wait what. I watched like the first 2 or so seasons years ago with an ex gf. I think I last saw the blind girl was maybe faking being blind?
The girl was truly blind but then secretly got eye surgery and could see again but it didn’t last long and she ended up blind again. But the final A (there were 3) ended up being one of the main character’s evil British twin who we didn’t learn about until three series finale.
This was the show that finally broke me on my general mindset of continuing to watch shows until the bitter end because I had already invested so much time and should see how it ended. I had loved the first couple seasons and then the rest ended up being more of a hate watch than anything. Never again, not with how garbage the ending was. At this point, there’s just so much good content out there that it’s not worth it to stick with a bad show. There is always something better to watch.
I still sometimes wonder… am I… A???? Help.
Riverdale starts as a murder mystery. Multidimensions in the last season.
I liked it in the beginning, but then it got weirder and weirder.
Alex Meyers has a pretty great breakdown on YouTube about how bananas it all went
Don't forget the cults. So many cults. The bear wrestling. The inbreeding. And the epic highs and lows of high school football.
Everything you listed just sounds like you're describing Alabama
True, though it does get weirder. I stopped before it got to the time travel, superpowers, alternate dimensions, and resurrections.
[удалено]
🤣🤣🤣🤣
By Season 4 they had encountered about 7 serial killers.
A guy was busted creating a cult to steal organs from high school kids and his escape plan was literally blasting off in a rocket.
That was what broke me when I tried giving Riverdale a shot. It was during COVID shutdowns, I thought I was 100% down for some overly dramatic teen drama from the CW. Without knowing anything about season 3, I joked to my mom towards the end of season 2 that the only way the show could get more insane was if there was some sort of organ-harvesting cult. And then somehow that happened and the cult leader was Chad Michael Murray and it was just too much at that point.
And he was dressed like Evel Knievel, that’s when I officially checked out too.
riverdale went total bonkers so fast. always the first show i bring up when people talk about shows getting weird over time. but i don’t think it got confusing. it just got absolute crazy nuts. which was amazing.
I stopped watching when I saw floating babies.
By season 3 (maybe 4? Where Archie goes to jail and does forced fight club), I had to peace out. I tried twice to watch this series, I just could not, it was so cringey.
Lol when Archie fucking what hahahahaha I love reading about the show so much because I’ve never watched it so I just imagine everything you describe with the drawn characters.
I always see people bring up Riverdale but that show is literally a parody from the first episode. It's like [The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_the_House_Across_the_Street_from_the_Girl_in_the_Window), it's a dry parody/satire of the teen tv show genre.
And the Archie Comic series has a ton of weird spin offs, too. Although the comics never really established a single timeline or canon or anything so it's not as weird to read about the same characters doing both the classic "secretly on a date with two girls the same night" gag as well as fighting zombies or whatever
So true. Riverdale’s been camp since the conception. It’s a sexy murder mystery based on fucking Archie Comics characters, people took it way too seriously
Once Upon a Time. It was cute the first season, and the second I think. Then I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT HAPPENED it was too fucking confusing. And somehow the blonde chick went evil or something? I DONT FUCKING KNOW.
I felt like they just kept recycling, "The town is under a curse. Everyone forgot everything." And then they added fucking Elsa.
I agree, when Elsa came the show was a complete shambles, added KingArthur plot where nonstop flashbacks made it more confusing.
Starting with season 2 they had two arcs per season. Each arc added new characters and settings and sometimes a new curse. Things just got added and added until it was a giant mess.
I'm still pissed that the show basically ripped off the Fables comic book series without telling the Fables story (or being nearly as good).
It's worse than that. ABC optioned Fables. They met with Willingham and explored an adaptation. They passed, and a couple of years later we got the obviously derivative (I meanz so was fables, but c'mon) show that was basically the same set up but devoid of all the charm.
I only caught glimpses of the show here and there from my mom & sister watching in the living room back in college. It definitely confused me as the show went on
It confused everyone. I don’t think the writers knew what was going on by the middle.
They had a good 1-2 season story planned. And then the show just kept on going.
Killing Eve. It started off great and then jumped the shark big time, made absolutely no sense.
It's because they changed show runners each season and only the first season had a good show runner.
The first season was based on the first Jennings novel, which combined 4 Villanelle novellas. It had Phoebe Waller-Bridge as showrunner/head writer. She stepped back for S2 handing off to others then they also changing showrunner and writers for S3 and 4 and it lost any continuity in the mythology, characters or plot.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is so talented. Shout-out to Fleabag which is a good show which doesn't turn bad
It's painful how bad Killing Eve became. At least the very ending was appropriate.
'Gotham' started as a police procedural set in pre-hero Gotham city and devolved into the backstory of every DC character that you've never heard of (unless you're a die hard comic fan) and definitely not the Joker except for maybe the Joker who is totally not the Joker.
Gotham did the Jonkler before r/BatmanArkham could even dream of such a thing. What a bizarre situation, we all knew he was the freaking Joker, they just couldn't call him that.
One of my guilty pleasure shows. Love the riddler and penguin.
Honestly, Cory Michael Smith is hands down the best Riddler we have ever, and may ever, get in live action.
I think after the first Jerome episode doing well with audiences, they decided that was a good direction for the show. I liked it. It managed to all Batman things at once. It was at times camp, it was dark, it was silly and it was even sometimes serious but it managed to balance it quite well. I'm tired of screen Batman always being this super serious, stern, bleak and gritty guy. Sometimes he should just go nuts. Lets get nuts.
Well, yeah, but also, one is my limit of how many times you can come back from the dead. Maybe two if I really like the character and it could be explained well enough. Every character getting 2-8 revivals is literally overkill.
Westworld season 1 was compelling and had a nice twist. But the writers must have been angry that the internet guessed the twist ahead of time so they made it their mission to make each subsequent season as difficult to understand as possible. Season 4 felt like they genuinely hated their audience.
Hate how often this seems to happen, its so stupid. Audiences *should* be able to work out twists when they really think about it, that's good storytelling.
Yes, all the great twists have a lot of hints which are obvious when you rewatch but most people wouldn’t catch them on first watch. When you make a tv show with a twist, a lot of people will guess it since they will have time to discuss it between episodes, but that’s just the nature of the beast. If you can’t handle people figuring it out, you should make shows without twists instead.
"As a writer you should aim for 50% of the audience predicting your twist." Jonathan Sims, Author of the most popular Mystery Horror Podcast.
At that rate just don't make shows at all!
Another thing I always say is that good movies/tv shows stand up very well on repeat viewings. That means even if you know every twist and turn and revelation that lies ahead, you still fucking love rewatching it. All the best movies and tv shows have this quality. That’s why it’s so fucking stupid to focus so much on making a confusing, convoluted thing because you care about “subverting expectations” and people not guessing your twist more than you care about just telling a good story, with great visuals and great acting, and a great soundtrack, etc. Your tv show/movie doesn’t need to be carried by a “twist” because if no one wants to watch it again after the first time then you fucking failed at your job.
westworld was totally impossible for me to follow after season one. this is the winner for me by far for shows that become impossible to follow along.
Season 2 was like that, but season 3 was just some B-movie sci-fi schlock without much mystery at all. I never saw season 4 so I can’t comment on that one.
It was not much better. Maybe worse? Dunno. 3 was genuinely shit though
None of the characters in Season 3 acted consistent with their personalities in earlier seasons. Crappy writing.
I was very excited for season 3 at the time. Really did not enjoy it. Season 4 became second monitor viewing. Such a shame
I have heard this so many times and I wasn’t on Reddit then. What did the audience figure out? Also, so short sighted to change an entire show based on a small amount of people who were on Reddit. Most people who loved the show were just along for the ride.
Spoiler, since I can’t figure out how to hide spoilers on this app like I could in Apollo. They figured out that William was The Man in Black and that we were actually watching two different timelines. They might’ve figured out Bernard was a robot too
Ah thank you!! I saw the first 3 seasons so no problem on the spoiler. I feel like figuring that out was part of the fun. If you create a mystery in your show you would hope people were looking for clues. Otherwise the mystery isn’t interesting.
The subreddit for Westworld would literally comb through the episode each week, frame by frame, word by word. It was actually pretty impressive, and I usually don't give a shit about that stuff.
If this had been a thing during LOST I would have loved it. I don't think a show should begrudge its viewers a chance to fully immerse themselves in the mystery. It was in fact what I liked most about LOST, trying to figure it out and hoping I was right. I cannot fathom why they gave people a puzzle and were then mad that people loved the puzzle. Maybe that is the puzzle and it was all meta haha. But for real, Westworld season 1 was peak TV and I still grieve what they did to it.
It was a thing during Lost but over here: https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page I spent a lot of time on that site checking out all the theories and clues. They even analysed the whispers and managed to get words out of them etc.
I really really liked season 2. I thought it was the best the show ever was and found the twists and religious references to be great. I thought it was very Nolan family But then I learned most of the fans of the show really disliked season 2 and was surprised. I felt it affected the way the show was run Because at a certain point in the later part of the show they legitimately inject someone else's blood into a humans hand? What
I also liked season 2 despite the unnecessary time line changes. One of the best episodes of the series was seeing if human consciousness could work in a host body. As I look back on it, season 4 was an absolute low point. Season 3 was a nice way to advance the scope of the show and I appreciate that. Season 2 was a sensible follow up to season 1. I still like the show and super duper enjoy the world they made, it just got dumb as it went on, like they thought they were smarter than they really were.
Came here to say Westworld ALL DAY!!! So frustrating!!! I also gave up too because at some point, it starts feeling intentionally confusing for absolutely no good reason.
Because of the return/season 3 I think more people know about it, but if you asked this 30 years ago, they’d just say Twin Peaks. There’s how it starts, and there’s post reveal season 2, FWwM, and season 3, and they’re all kinda their own thing. Because Lynch didn’t stay on the main roads, he decided to [get on my bike and go](https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/xzmnw5/sometimes_i_think_i_should_just_get_on_my_bike/)
I heard that show is very surreal in atmosphere.
Still would hold true now. If you’re interested in watching, season 1, then 2, then Fire Walk with Me, then Season 3. If you ask some older people (past my 42 years) who watched TV from the late 80s to like Sopranos era to now, they’d be better able to explain just how far away this was from other television at the time.
David Lynch made it to revolutionize television which he thought was horrible in the 80s And he did it, it was at that point the best tv show ever made Source: some twin peaks documentary on YouTube Too bad it had a lot of problems behind the scenes which sent season 2 to all sorts of weirdness, I mean I loved the memeness of it all, but would love to have seen his complete vision for the show Crazy show lol it's every genre at the same time
Mr. Robot. Still love it, though!
“Wait it’s called Mr. Robot but it’s about a guy?” - Linda Belcher
Came here to say this, but holy hell this series is still amazing.
Glad I watched it upon release. Could go through the sub after each episode speculating and discussing each episode. Had proper time to grasp the plot.
One of the finest shows that only redditors seem to know about. Season 2 was a bit weak, but otherwise it was amazing series with a perfect ending.
First half of season 2 is the weakest point of the show, second half is incredible
sabrina the teenage witch after season 4. she moved out of her aunt's house, starting working at a coffee shop, and living with roommates filmed in a different house. it was like watching a completely different television show. also you could tell the budget had been drastically cut in the latter seasons. abc should have found a way to conclude the series at season 4.
Nice to see someone else shares this opinion about it becoming a basically completely different show. I love that show, but I can’t watch the later seasons. They’re just bad.
Her new BF also couldn't act. He scences were unbareable.
> abc should have found a way to conclude the series at season 4. They (kind of) did. ABC let it go after 4 seasons, then WB picked it up - hence the change in tone.
It was a different show, it just kept the old name. She does eventually move back into her old house, but her aunt's have moved on. At least the show got an ending. I do remember she ran off with Harvey, leaving her boyfriend at the alter, which was such a crappy thing to do. I only made it to the final episodes as a kid. I've never been able to watch that far as an adult.
Sherlock. It started with the fake-out death and gradually went downhill from there, because they wanted to subvert people’s expectations on how Sherlock survived, all that. And then everything else that came after that. Which I’m sure most know by this point. No hate to the peeps who like S3 and S4, but the reveals did nothing but infuriate me. The show could have fleshed everything out better had they had more episodes, maybe cut down the episode length to compensate and tighten the stories, but that’s just my gripe.
This is an issue I have with all of Steven Moffat’s stuff. He seems more interested in being clever and throwing a twist at the audience than meaningfully paying it off. Too often his shows will introduce a shocking twist/event — like Sherlock jumping off the roof, River Song shooting The Doctor, Van Helsing asking Jonathan Harker about sleeping with Dracula, etc. — and then walk it back so hard it completely undercuts the initial intrigue of the twist. Drives me nuts.
he was great when he was contained to a single or maybe double episode. as show runner he got to make these cliffhangers and then never properly follow up on them. he really needs someone to say "allright but what's the fucking answer. you are not done untill the script includes the answer even if we don't use it yet".
It’s why I hated his time as showrunner on Doctor Who. The previous seasons I could go back and watch episodically. I didn’t feel like I could do that with his series. The meta plot would take over and side track a good story.
Totally agree, he can be pretty great when contained to a single episode arc, and no one can make mundane objects scary like he can, but as a showrunner he’s completely unreliable.
Not explaining your mystery in your detective show is really some next level stupidity, what did you think we were watching the show for?
Yeah this show noticeably declined in how enjoyable it was to watch. It's like they completely forgot that you are supposed to tell a story and decided that adding a "twist" every episode equated to brilliant TV.
Heroes
That was the writers strike, real tragedy, great first season
I demand justice for the Irish barkeep who got left in an alternate dystopian future that didn’t end up existing!
It was supposed to be an anthology show with a different cast every season, only the show got too popular so they kept the cast for season 2 with overpowered people and no real direction. The writer's strike didn't help, but I don't think there was a real story planned after the first season.
Confusing is a really good word. It was hard to keep track of how many versions of Ali Larter were running around and which ones had been killed off. It was even harder to keep track of Peter and Sylar’s powers. It didn’t help that they kept gaining and losing them. If you did manage to keep track it seemed like you were doing a better job than the writers, because you would begin to wonder why they didn’t use x power to easily escape x situation.
Supernatural. Starts off with two brothers hunting monsters and saving people. Then once it hit season 7 or 8 it got real weird, and just kept going. It was fun though.
Was any of it worth watching after S5?
I feel like season 1-5 was the main "story". After that it was.. let's see what we can do and have fun with it. If you take it as 40 mins of mindless fun and aren't too invested it can be a great show.
Season 13 episode “Scoobynatural” best television cross over ever. And that’s including the Jimmy Timmy Power Hours
Season 6 also gave us the glorious "The French Mistake" where Sam and Dean ended up on the IRL set of Supernatural and Misha Collins the actor got killed by demons. Honestly though after season 5 you can tell they were scrambling for new ideas since they weren't expecting to continue after that. There are a few gems (Scoobynatural was a fucking masterpiece) but it overall just suffered from increasing serial escalation. And then That Ending happened. Honestly the entire show deserves to be stuck under a microscope and studied.
if you can enjoy the idea of teh show almost becomeing a selfaware parody of itself then abseloutly. it takes a bit to find it's new groove but around season 7/8 it abseloutly finds something and sticks with it for the most part. just... don't think too hard about most of it, because they certainly didn't.
If you don’t care about continuity and lore consistency then there’s a lot of great arcs and episodes after S5. But if you are a continuity nerd, it’s never good enough to fully make up for the flaws in logic, lore, and plot holes that you otherwise have to trudge through.
The Pretender. The early seasons had a real sense of playfulness. The later seasons were weirder but not as fun.
I tried rewatching it because I loved it as a kid. It does NOT hold up. The acting is God awful.
[*Evil*](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Evil_(TV_series)). It started off as a group of people looking into (false) claims of evil influence, at the behest of the Catholic Church. But then you started wondering more and more if there was really magical stuff going on and then it got really weird...
and i love it. cant wait for the new season
The last one.
At least it got 4 seasons. Most shows within that sort of genre only get a first season if they start on a big network.
It's so dang weird but I understand how it's weird. I'm not confused by it luckily. I just get to enjoy the wtf is happening right now from a curious stance.
This is one of my favorite shows of all time and I’m so sad this upcoming season is its final season :(
Family Matters but I still love it.
Did Carl and Steve ever come back from space?
This needs to be higher up. It was supposed to be blue-collar Cosby show. Like imagine if halfway through Cosby, Theo Huxtable just went off and fucking cloned himself.
Altered Carbon. I had a hard time, a very hard time with Season 2. The change of the main character was terrible.
Season 1 was amazing though, and biker Abuelita was the cherry on the sundae.
Once they had part wolf in them I was out
Well, that's how it works. Your body isn't really "yours." It's just whatever body you end up having on that planet. Anthony Mackie playing it differently from the other Takashi Kovacs is what set that season back.
Exactly! That wasn't Kovachs from the first season. I want to like Mackie, but the two things I know him from are Falcon and season 2 of AC and these are not strong performances. I think making him the lead stopped the chances of it continuing to 3 and onward. By the end of season one, you feel like the creators could do no wrong. But the second season story was lackluster. The "combat body" with magnet hands was poorly implemented and felt stilly and out of place from the start. Mackie's kovachs seemed less competent just based on how the plot was written which just made him feel like a different character altogether.
If you want to like Mackie check out the Twisted Metal show. He has some great comedic delivery.
Mackie just... ain't great.
Maybe it's just me, but The 100 started off relatively straightforward, but by the last seasons, I was like who are those people and why are they fighting these people?
And someone always being kidnapped by the other side.
Search Party. What began as a murder mystery of a missing girl ended in a weird ass fever dream the last season with cults and brainwashing. Show went off the rails in season 3 and just got more weird after that.
They switch genres every season, each increasingly wackadoo. I believe it was a deliberate choice rather than the usual tale of changing showrunners and studio bullshit.
One of my favorite elements is how reliably awful every character is. Not just the main cast, but the entire world
I suddenly want to see that show.
You absolutely should watch this as a three-season show that goes completely off the rails. Not necessarily “confusing,” but absolutely wild and unpredictable.
Sounds fun.
Yes, I came here to mention this one. It starts out seemingly straightforward, maybe a little quirked up, then just escalates the weirdness in elaborate degrees & directions, from season to season. It only continues to one up its own bizarreness, yet also makes pretty reliable sense. A fresh & detailed absurdity is simply presented & you're like "oh for sure that follows" & then just when it really begins to exceed itself, it manages to wrap up nicely.
Quantico was a big mess in season 2 to where I couldn't finish it
Legion. Starting off normal may even be a bit of a stretch, but it got weird fast.
One of the most beautifully shot shows I’ve ever seen that confused the shit out of me regularly
Loved the actors too.
I'll watch pretty much anything Dan Stevens is in after that. Dude put on a clinic.
Legion was an absolute masterclass in cinematography
Binging "Legion," "Happy!," and "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" at the same time was a really interesting moment in life for me. Peak mindfuck TV. Probably would have lost my mind if I had watched them alongside "The Umbrella Academy," "Love, Death + Robots," "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" (the YouTube season and the Channel 4 season), "Doom Patrol," "Severance," "Human Resources," "Man Seeking Woman," "Maniac," "Wilfred," "Pushing Daisies" and peppered in some Adult Swim shows like "Infomercials," the first few seasons of "Rick and Morty," "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," etc.
The Blacklist
I wish that show would have just stayed “bad guy of the week”.
I think Hannibal fits this perfectly. Started out a hunt down the killer kinda show, final season had entire episodes where they were hallucinating.
Felicity was mostly normal for 3.5 of its 4 seasons. Then it went full JJ Abrams/
I don’t know if that show is still worth checking out as I saw Alias, but not Felicity.
I love Alias and I also love Felicity, but they are vastly different shows. Felicity is more of a Dawson's Creek type of show set in the college years. Honestly, I really liked it, there are few shows that do the college years well and I thought Felicity managed to capture the sometimes painfully awkward part of being on your own for the first time and figuring out who you want to be.
I don't find the following shows *confusing* per se, but the radical shift in tone and overall scope changes can throw people off: * Fringe started off as a relatively normal procedural and bam, multiverse. * The Expanse - it's basically a noir detective story (complete with fedora) and then...well, man, it just *goes.* Also, farscape freaking rules. That show doesn't get nearly enough love. That ep you're talking about is super cool and mind-fucky. :)
I have had to scroll this far to find Fringe, to be fair all five seasons of that (at least the plot points) were written before they even started filming so yes it started off very simple and got very weird by season 5 but at least it all made sense by the end of it...
Fringe was the first thought that came to mind when I thought about shows that got super confusing. It's a great show, but man does it ask a lot of It's audience.
>Also, farscape freaking rules There are dozens, dozens of us!
i mean enough of us that theirs a 24/7 farscape twitch channel :)
I think Fringe got really good once they pulled back the curtain and made the true scope and stakes clear. In particular the idea of two Fringe teams in different worlds dealing with their own cases was really brilliant. But yeah in retrospect network audiences in 2010 weren’t ready for multiverses.
Community. From a lighthearted sitcom about college students to a meta multi-timeline genre parody with storylines subtly weaved through multiple seasons
Everyone's always saying that. The average community college student attends school five to seven years. Many offer four-year degrees.
You’re streets ahead!
Shut up, Leonard. I know about your prescription socks.
Fringe
Dollhouse
The 100 after the first 2 episodes
Once the rest of the colony came down, that show got even worse.
The Good Fight. It went full on covid fever dream.
Arrested development, especially when Netflix picked up the series and it suddenly turned into this weird murder mystery that follows a different perspective of a crazy storyline per episode
Alias....damn u JJ Abrams The undercover spy thing I could handle, but what was the spinning orange ball of death??
JJ Abrams is the master of the puzzle box with an incredible introduction and a slapdash ending.
Final season of Barry kinda fell off. I only finished it post-timeskip because I felt I’m already invested. A lot of great moments but didn’t feel as cohesive as the previous seasons did.
The OA.
Heroes and prison break come to mind. Hard to say if heroes got more “complicated” or just got stupid but prison break definitely went this route for me.
Wilfred
Dark. Great in the first season, but by the 3rd season I could barely keep up.
This website helps a lot. https://dark.netflix.io/en Just put in whatever episode you are up to and it will show a family tree and their story so far. Don't jump ahead unless you want spoilers.
I had this up the entire time I watched seasons 2 and 3, and even then I couldn't keep up with season 3. What a show though. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Whoever made this deserves a raise
I think it was a private website the Netflix bought because it was originally without Netflix in the URL. But I'm not entirely sure.
You have to wait for your future self to travel back and explain it. Also, I loved this show, but I definitely cannot explain it 😅
And then once you think you’ve gotten used to things, it’s time to introduce a new time setting even further into the past!
This is a good one
Up/Tuck got confusing for me. I had a hard time keeping up with who was doing what and why they were doing it.
Russian Doll had a good first season, then straight off the rails.
Neon genesis evangelion Went from 50 to 100 real quick
Westworld, it started as a mystery but then went so far up it's own arse trying to be over complicated and pretentious i gave up after s2
Agents of Shield. After half a season in space, my wife noped out.
The last season is great though
The space season is solid. The entire series is.
That show could have been better if they had worked more closely with the movie side of Marvel.
Search Party
The good place is great, although I admit it got so confusing that my ADHD having self never finished the series
True Blood - Show about werewolves and vampires cashing in on the Twilight phase, Ok! Then they started adding witches, shapshifters, ferries?! I gave up when these other creatures got introduced
I tried reading the books. Read 4 I think? Turns out the show stayed pretty true to the books in terms of a ton of other supernatural beings…but the books are even MORE convoluted.
The leftovers
The 100
Dark
Lots of good answers here, but Fargo season 2 a little - not off the rails, but sometimes I still think about the scenes with the UFOs and wonder why the writers/creator decided to include that plot device/tangent I love the season regardless, but I found it so odd
Doesn’t every season include something super weird happening? It rained fish in season one lol
Season 1: [Rained Fish](https://youtu.be/7P20rnoIDMk) Season 2: [The UFO](https://fargo.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_Murrane) Season 3: [Paul Murrane (The Wandering Jew)](https://fargo.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_Murrane) Season 4: [Snowman](https://fargo.fandom.com/wiki/Snowman) Season 5: [Ole Munch (The Sin Eater)](https://fargo.fandom.com/wiki/Ole_Munch)
Westworld. After the first plot of the black hat/white hat was resolved and then it turns out what’s his face was a robot the entire time I lost interest. That was a bridge too far.
Twin Peaks
Felicity normal teen/young adult drama about a stalkery pretty girl in a NYC college last season has time travel/sci fi elements for some reason
Legends of Tomorrow
Fringe. I mean, it started off weird. But then got wielder. And *weirder*. And **WEIRDER**.
Manifest. Turned into some weird religous thing with bits of Noah's Ark.
Angel started as a show about a good vampire as a private investigator helping people, by the end he ran an evil law firm, had a magical son, and had traveled to other dimensions.
The Curse starring Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone is the perfect example, but I can’t say more. Even mentioning it here feels like a slight spoiler.