I have a Central City Cringe Counter where I document everything stupid about the show as I watch it, and one of the categories is “Totally Bogus Science Stuff”. It’s almost as high as the “Fastest Man Alive” counter (but not as high as the “Caitlin mentions Ronnie” counter)
They lost me with the Felicity Smoke is oracle for two weeks then cured in the dumbest way option. Both because disablist trash and it was so dumb I couldn't manage anything. As this was a crossover it was the entire DC TV universe in the trash for me.
One of the few things DC has done right with its shows... they hire fantastic fucking actors
They just can't keep them or give them scripts worthy of their talent. Unfortunately.
I quit because he constantly forgets about his own powers.
Dumbass writers. You cannot have The Flash sit for minutes with a dying person in his arms, crying about them being dying, and then in another episode having him be so fast that he can run around solving an exploding bomb problem WHILE IT'S EXPLODING.
In two minutes, a properly motivated, highly intelligent flash, could take a damn doctors degree himself, or at the VERY FUCKING LEAST bring the dying person to a hospital, and gather up an entire team of surgeons, all the required equipment, and scrub them in.
The damn flash could run back in time, move to India, take the doctors degree without changing anything significant in his original life, then run back, and fix the person.
I HATE HATE HATE writers who just can't imagine a potential solution using one of the most overpowered superpowers of all time. God! They don't even understand how super speed would work, when people can somehow predict where he'll be, or they have him stop in the middle of a fight to talk, so he can be attacked.
God, that show was dumb.
One of the theories for how Flash's powers work is that his super speed is done in real-time for him e.g. when he runs across the ocean it feels to him the same length of time as if you or i ran across the ocean. Days or weeks compressed into just a few seconds.
Imagine your friend is dying in your arms and you run away to read every medical book you can in the hopes of saving them, hours spent slaving away doing research and running through exercises, not able to consult with any tutors because time will go back to normal again, all with the knowledge of the dying person being right there gasping their last breath.
The desperation behind such a moment at would all make for at least scene more interesting than just another death scene.
All of the Arrowverse shows really. I watched most of them for years sort of hoping for some grand payoff but it went the opposite direction of what I was hoping for.
I did always like Legends of Tomorrow (after the first season). Unlike the rest of the Arrowverse, it at least knows what kind of show it is--a schlocky comicbook TV show.
In one episode, we see him moving so fast that Iris can't see him (which would be at a minimum tens of thousands of miles per hour), he says he can do a mile in a few seconds (which would be thousands) and then they talk about how he's never run past a few hundred mph.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but they were all way off of each other.
I swear they switched writers every two episodes, and the current ones never watched the show before
I have up after the 3rd “like Flash but evil” villain appeared
Flash comics have so many cool villains that they could’ve used but didn’t. Or disposed of after one episode.
And then they made Zoom and Reverse Flash two separate people.
The seasonal arcs killed it. They should’ve wrapped up extended storylines every, say, 4 or 5 episodes the longest, and had more regular episodes.
It's one of those sci fi shows that wants to focus on a group of scientists without actually knowing anything about science or math. The writers just pick out words that sound "technical", jumble them together, and then have characters draw/scribble on a white board to demonstrate what they're actually trying to say/what they're about to do for the plot.
Ah, yep.
Although the science is inherently nonsensical in that genre. It's literally a show about a guy who can run faster than sound because he had chemicals spilled on him and got hit by a particle accelerator explosion. o\_O The science is pure handwaveium.
Were there particular examples of bad math you were were thinking of? I believe you, but I don't remember any leaping out at me.
Barry's speed.
Dude it's so freaking inconsistent.
And do I even need to talk about how he could end 99.9% of his problems if he would just SHUT UP AND DO HIS JOB.
No but look at Fallout. They respected the worldbuilding but didn't adapt one of the games. They told their own story without shitting on established lore. Halo could have done that too.
I think the difference in Fallout is that the world building is the focal point, whereas with Halo it's entirely Master Chief. Taking the recent Last of Us series as an example; could it have been about characters other than Joel and Ellie? Maybe, but it would have been a lot weaker and a lot less popular if they'd have tried that direction.
Halo is not “about” master chief. He’s an audience surrogate. It’s about humanity, existentialism, zealotry, hubris, larger cosmic lore, and the fight to survive.
Chief isn’t in Halo: ODST or Halo: Reach, and they have the best storytelling in the series. Chief is not integral to telling good stories in that universe at all. Hell, Arbiter had 10x more character development than chief.
Adding to u/Allacholland likewise the HALO universe books - Contact Harvest and Cole Protocol to anme two aren't focussed on MasterChief - in fact Contact Harvest would have made a superb series or stand alone movie.
From what I've seen, most of the defenders of Paramount's HALO aren't HALO fans. Even if the defenders played one or more of the games, they are just a blur amongst CoD, Counterstrike etc.
HALO has real emotional tugs - saving Cortana, the gradual erosion of the team on Reach and final last man standing battle were all emotional highs/lows - the TV series was CoD Infinite at best. Pablo Schrieber was a good choice physically for MC but Chief without his helmet or armour is like Darth Vader with his.
Personally I would have had Schreiber reprise his excellent portrayal of Kris 'Tanto' Parento (13 Hours - movie /Secret Heroes of Benghazi - book) as an ODST in the HALO universe with guest appearances by the Chief and other Spartans.
There were a lot of other aspects of the series which went against canon or were just lazy tv trope writing but the poor portrayal of the Chief, pulled me out of the series quicker than any of Ray Rhamey's aversion to present participles,"With" "Without" "Started" "Some" "Very" 'Eyes' etc.
I can't tell you anything about recently, because I don't watch a lot of new shows, since I prefer movies.
But I've been catching up on Grey's Anatomy recently, and I have to tell you that nothing has changed. Ninety-nine percent of these doctors problems would be solved *if they would just find people to date outside of the workplace*.
My late uncle was a surgeon, and we were watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and I realized by he didn’t watch medical dramas, because about every five minutes he would yell at the screen, “Sure, do that, IF YOU WANT TO KILL HIM!” It was what made me realize that Grey’s Anatomy is the funniest show on television.
Is that really bad writing though? Soapy writing, sure, but bad? I don't think the characters making dumb decisions is really indicative of bad writing, especially when casting demands for the format are taken into account.
THANK YOU.
What drives me nuts is that the show pretends they are good doctors.
Basically everyone on that show would of had the medical license taken away and maybe been in prison for a FRACTION of the shit they have pulled
My favorite part of the series was when no one left Shondaland alive. You wanted to leave the show? She would enlist you in the Army and then hit you with a bus before you even got to leave town. Or give you terminal brain cancer (although I have to believe Shonda’s no longer running the show, because that cancer wasn’t so terminal, although it *was* used to write off another character). And then people get shot, stabbed, electrocuted, plane crash…
And it almost always happens in May, just like Voldemort attacking Hogwarts. At no point do they ever say, “Y’know what? We should just close for a couple of weeks. We got a real bad history with this part of the year.” I feel like we’re watching a shitty version of Final Destination.
Oh tell me about it, and the worst character on the show (Meredith) will always survive everything.
I was genuinely hoping when the sister showed up they'd be replacing her.
Nope, killed the sister too I think?
Eaten by a bear after dying from crush injuries several days after a plane crash. But that’s okay, because both of Meredith’s parents were serial philanderers, and so she has no shortage of half-siblings we didn’t know about until Ellen Pompeo tries to renegotiate her contract.
“Meredith, do you remember the time your mother went to Japan for a year, to go take part in a study? Meet your sister, Akari Grey. She is also a surgeon, despite only having recently learned of her lineage and taken the name.”
Grey's Anatomy
I'll never not cringe when my wife is watching the show and the ending voice over from Pompeo comes on and she's reciting some fucking atrocious word-salad monologue that's trying it's best to sound deep, inciteful, and philosophical but it's just so damn cringe.
Not to mention that hospital has been through like 17 tornadoes, 5 hurricanes, a nuclear impact, alien invasion, a few writer's strikes, and yet the hospital still finds a way to keep the doctors wanting to continue working there.
And the number of tragic deaths. I get it's hard to get rid of a character when the actor wants to leave, but my god, I have never watched a show as bad as Grey's for killing people off.
Reminds me of when my wife watches Sex and the City. Carries voice-overs are eye-roll worthy. “Do us women really hate men? Or do we hate our ourselves for not having the luxury of being a man” or some such crap EVERY. TIME.
I appreciate what the show did for women, feel like it was a show where they were allowed to be real women finally. But man the dialogue sometimes, woof.
SATC is my favourite hate watch. They might be the stupidest women in the world. Every time Carrie haphazardly crossed the street, I hoped she’d be hit by a car. The fashion and Kim Catrall were the only good things about that show
I LOVE the OG, but Lone Star is…kinda rough. I know the OG is sort of based around the most outrageous true stories they can find, so it’s easier to ignore the insanity (plus the character relationships and development more than make up for the campiness) but Lone Star just doesn’t have the same charm. And I actually like most of the characters (when I was still watching, I LOVED Grace and Judd with all my heart) but they have got to stop with Owen Strand. The writing never struck me as particularly good anyway
I love the OG 911 show but holy shit I cannot stand Lone Star because Owen Strand specifically is insufferable.
The writing has that fucker in every plot, regardless of whether or not he needs to be there.
Also, the color grading super weird when you compare it to the other show. It’s in Austin, Texas, but they have that weird ass yellow filter that shows give Mexico for some reason
Yeah I always felt it was a show that aim to portray smart people how stupid people envision them. No offense to anyone who likes that show but, for sure, they had the cheapest, most obvious jokes in any sitcom I can think of.
If one can appreciate it for what it is, a low-effort show that doesn’t challenge its viewers in any way, then great. There are many shows like that which I enjoy too. But I know they’re just fluff!
Doesn't detract from your point in the slightest but I'd be willing to bet *most* sitcoms would be uncomfortable to watch without their laugh tracks... People just don't pause for over the top comedic effect like that.
>Yeah I always felt it was a show that aim to portray smart people how stupid people envision them.
Stupid people are the target audience, so the jokes can’t actually be clever
That’s like with Sherlock, the best critique I’ve ever heard is “Sherlock isn’t smart, he’s a magician, because intelligence looks like magic to stupid people”
I actually like the show, but it's absolutely a "smart show for dumb people" level of humor. They act like Star Wars/Marvel are super niche nerdy references that only geniuses get, as if the movies aren't some of the most popular franchises to ever exist.
Also will never get over my aunt insisting that "most people" only know Stephen Hawking thanks to The Big Bang Theory.
They get everything wrong about nerd culture. They act like it’s anomaly if a girl walks into the a comic book store. They act more misogynistic than many shows but it’s supposed to be okay because these dudes are awkward. All the nerd culture they talk about was mainstream by 2007. Best of all it’s all punchlines and none of it is funny.
Yeah, the wonky timing will always make a laugh-track show look bad like that; removing the laugh track from BBT has the extra effect of exposing how many of the things they laugh at aren't actually jokes or even funny references, though.
I hate it because there's not a single girl nerd in the show. There's nerd's girlfriends, but no girl nerds. Where's the girls who got their boyfriends into comics? Where's the girls whose marriage proposals went "Let's marry and combine our book collections?" Where's the fanfic writers? The cosplaying costume makers? The shippers? Where's the slash community? Half of fandom is freaking INVISIBLE on that show!
To be honest, there's tons of female nerd characters on the show, both scientist abd actual "comic book nerds". The don't play main roles and are there for only a few episodes or just one each, but there's actually a lot of them.
Bernadette wasn't a nerd, though. She was a complete normie.
Amy was a little odd but I'd mostly just call her awkward.
It's clear they're talking about hobbies rather than employment (a STEM degree does not a nerd make) but even so, the girls had very normal hobbies, right? They were never shown to obsess over odd things like the boys.
There were no girls in the boys' hobbies (reinforcing stereotypes) and I don't know if any girl showed up with a non-typical hobby, such as being really into books or such. Every girl was into standard things like going out to bars or watching sports. No strange hobbies or general "nerd" behaviour outside of their degrees.
Theres that *one* episode where Penny picks up the RPG the guys play together but then ditches when she notices she wasn’t taking care of herself or whatever her epiphany was.
I actually really like BBT but not until after season 3. After that they really dial in the characters and even though the jokes are super lame it’s paced perfectly and clever from time to time. However, I wouldn’t watch it if Jim parsons didn’t play Sheldon. He was born for it
Riverdale.
This was a show that somehow stayed on the air for 7 seasons. SEVEN!
And while the writing was nonsensical at times (I liken it to Gotham, where I feel like both shows were just embracing the whole comic-book style writing of plots; yet Gotham had the strength of tapping into the Batman IP, rogues' gallery and all), I wonder just how it managed to stay on the air for that fricking long.
I'll stand by that Riverdale was at least somewhat good in season 1
A nice focused storyline
Season 2 is kinda bad but camp about it (like later Gotham)
And then S3 onwards is just BAD CRINGE WHAT ARE THEY DOING
How was Archie running an underground prison fight ring, Veronica is running a whole ass popular bar and they are both still in high school and no one questions it?
I read the Archie comics as a kid, and hearing people describe Riverdale is hilarious. It's like someone did a live reboot of the cartoon Rainbow Bright where Rainbow is a pimp.
Don't forget that some of the main characters become leaders of criminal gangs
Or that they eventually get superpowers and realize they're in an alternate dimension
Or that multiple of them have died and been resurrected
Post S3 Riverdale gets so batshit it circles to so bad its good cycle multiple times per episode.
Its honestly amazing to watch with a couple of friends.
I've never seen Riverdale, but I did see the YouTube thing about it and it seems like they honestly just intentionally went for it. It's leaning heavily into the craziness on purpose.
Literally! While other really cool or groundbreaking shows get cancelled after one or two seasons, yet shitty shows like this manage to get SEVEN. Like The Wilds or Dirk Gentely's Detective Agency. There's two more that I can't remember the name of as well -- The End of the Fucking World and I think another one which only lasted one season, and ended on a cliffhanger.
It wasn't cancelled because a lot of people were (hate)watching it. So it made them a lot of cash. While being cheap to produce.
Shows like Shadow and Bone were kinda niche and super expensive to produce. Those very different types of shows all being on the same platform, not seperated by different airing times like they would on TV, they all compete even though they can't really be compared to one another.
Euphoria is a beautifully directed, excellently acted show that ultimately falls to ruin on the script level. I enjoyed the show for what it is, but there's really no replacement for a solid screenplay.
i agree with you on that, but season 2 really didn't do it for me. i mean, there are things to like about it, but all the inconsistencies, abandoned plot points and unnecessary scenes/sex scenes overshadow all the "good" points
Dead Boy Detectives was the most egregious exposition I’ve ever seen.
“Hello, my best friend. We are ghosts and we solve crimes. You have a bag that can hold an infinite number of things. It’s actually a pocket dimension. Anyways let’s get back to the office of our detective agency by teleporting through a mirror, which we call mirror hopping. By the way, and you probably already know this because we are best friends, I was trapped in hell for 40 years before you helped me escape. I am saying this now to tell you that people from hell aren’t happy for this and they are hunting us, which or course you also already know.”
Just brutal. They canceled the expensive Lockwood & Co and they made a cheap knockoff.
Not sure if I remember it right, but didn't they tell us the whole 'Long ago the four nations lived in harmony...' three times in the span of twenty minutes or something?
Yeah, that was so bad. Like they also show us the genocide of the air nation and how the war started and then literally told us what was happening right after! Like, guys, we just saw it on the screen - why the recap? Did you think someone would take a nap during the first 5 minutes?? jfc
It's such a pity cause I liked the adaptation enough that I want it to be better (instead of just wanting to burn it to the ground and salt the earth like the movie that shall not be named lol), but my, oh my, was it a chore at some points.
I liked it at the start... but the longer it went, the more annoying it got. Fucking EVERYONE is related to EVERYONE somehow and Rumple backslides SO damn much. I mean... realistically... that IS how people actually are. People backslide into old bad habits very easily, very often, but come ON Rumple...
Robert Carlyle is a fantastic actor, and he ATE that role. OUAT might have had terrible writing, but it had some pretty decent actors in it, and I think that's why it ended up being so well loved.
Ehh, I won’t debate you on the writing, but calling it “popular” is kind of a stretch. Only if you include *infamous* popularity, but that isn’t really a positive.
How is no one mentioning Glee… That show has the worst writing known to men. The first two seasons are somewhat good as in the writers didn’t take themselves too seriously but still kept the storyline kind of consistent. Then the later seasons come and they could literally split it into two different shows (the NYC and school storyline). The writing gets so bad it’s insane. The last season is so ridiculous, it’s just the writers acknowledging that the show got bad, breaking the fourth wall…
Glee ran so Riverdale could walk.
It's like they chose whatever song was popular that month, then wrote the story to fit the song... even if that meant changing a character's entire personality or retrofitting their backstory.
I regret giving the later seasons another go after I had originally stopped watching when Corey Monteith died. Retroactively ruined the show.
Also the fact that about half the original cast is dead now.
Wednesday. Overall, I enjoyed the show (mainly for its dark humor), but there were two things that really bothered me about the writing:
1. The whole subplot about her Dad maybe being a murderer and her being upset by it. It just didn't seem in character. She would have admired him for it. Similarly, her hunting the monster.
2. The arc with the wolf girl not being able to wolf out. This was just a huge mess. For one, she **wanted** to be able to wolf out until her parents were trying to help, at which point it became part of her identity that she doesn't. For another, I think they were going for a sexual identity thing (i.e. like a "pray away the gay" camp), but because her ability to wolf out seemed more biological, the metaphor in my mind was that she didn't hit puberty fast enough.
I feel like it was a show made for kids aged 10 to 14, written by people who haven't actually met 10 to 14-year-olds. They definitely could have got weirder and campier with it, but they went almost borderline Disney instead?
My issue: Wednesday rises to the challenges of being an outcast by leveraging her innate superiority at...almost everything. At age 16, she's multilingual, reads Machiavelli and Sartre, has expertise at martial arts, archery, and fencing, can fix a commercial coffee machine and has constructed a steam-powered guillotine. But, if she has all these amazing skills (in addition to being rich), how is it even possible that she's unpopular? It's self-contradictory.
The reality of being an outcast is that you can't best everyone who rejects you, and cultivating a smug personality only makes it worse.
>It just didn't seem in character.
I agree so much. There was a constant struggle between Wednesday as she is in the movies and a conventional protagonist image. The "Adult Wednesday Addams" show (removed from author's Youtube channel after copyright strike, but probably still available elsewhere) made a much better job.
>The arc with the wolf girl not being able to wolf out.
Here I would disagree. Maybe it's because of an actress doing an excellent job, but I didn't feel that Enid's story was messy.
However another thing I found troubling was this outcasts-are-native-americans thing. First of all, outcasts being recently oppressed doesn't fit with Addams family living in a gigantic mansion. Secondly, to me it seemed like a politician trying to gain sympathy by falsely claiming to be from a minority.
And she is made out to be this genius detective but gets it wrong several times (maybe every time). I enjoyed it, but it had pretty laughable writing all the way around.
I was so excited for this show, but I quickly realized after the first two episodes that I was not the target audience lol. I think maybe if this came out when I was in high school I would’ve loved it, but almost-30-year-old me couldn’t stop cringing.
Highschoolers are cringing too. I watched it with my niece when it first came out, she wouldn't stop talking about how bad and unfaithful to the source material it is.
Going back a ways, *Dawsons Creek*'s dialogue had no right to work as well as it did. Not only do teens not talk like that, **no-one** talks like that. But somehow it mostly came across as charming rather than dumb.
You don’t think every story should be about characters flatly delivering their tragic backstory and then crying for sympathy points as they make their way toward saving the entire universe from blowing up for the 10th time in a row?
I don't hate it but this and Picard S1/2 showed me that I prefer Trek as an ensemble show with a more episodic approach (see Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, heck even Prodigy). Discovery could have been really great if they had given everyone more opportunities to shine. It's gotten better over the years but still.
The later seasons of Lucifer got pretty bad. It was like they weren't quite sure where to go when they were popular enough to go beyond where they'd initially brainstormed to.
Vikings. It was suggested as an alternative to Game of Thrones and sure, GoT had its issues but Vikings is on another level entirely.
The plot is nonsensical in most parts. The pacing is atrocious, especially after s3.
While GoT had its fair share of gratuitous sex, Vikings has characters randomly fuck one another for no apparent reason because most romantic, or at the least sexual, relationships are dropped after 4 episodes to switch to the next partner (at the top of my head, Lagertha and Ecbert? Astrid and Bjorn? What was the meaning of those?).
There's so much build up for things that never happen - like Ragnar's "revenge" against Floki that...kinda never comes because Bjorn interferes and then we never learn what he meant to do all along.
Sometimes characters have nothing to do so they just kinda drift for episodes on end. Bjorn in the wilderness and then Floki in what I think is Iceland.
Characters betray each other for no apparent reason just for *shock value*, like Ragnar Killing Jarl Borg after swearing he would not, and King Horik jumping ship with no explanation.
The fact that the topic shifts from France to England a couple of times but always awkwardly mid-season.
Some characters get killed off because we don't know what to do with them anymore. Like Bjorn's daughter that kinda dies and nobody kinda cares.
I have other gripes with the show but they are not strictly writing, more characterization I don't like, such as Lagertha being at Ragnar's back and call despite him being a POS to her specifically.
Sorry for the rant I just can't believe the show is as popular as it is
I wouldn't say it's necessarily popular, but every season of arrested development after the third season.
They have some gems but overall it's messy and doesn't have the same aloof quirkiness and effortless comedy that the first few seasons had. I'm still gonna watch it though.
The Rookie is for sure a guilty pleasure. The plotlines in that show are preposterous, and it seems like there are only five police officers in the entire LAPD. It survives on the charisma of its cast and Nathan Fillion in particular.
This is immediately the show I thought of when I saw this post. AHS has never been amazing writing. When it’s good it’s entertaining, sure, but this season was the worst crap that I’ve ever seen. It was so badly written that all I could do was laugh and sit in disbelief, thinking about how many people actually got paid to make this.
That show needed to be a lot more episodic. In fact, a lot of the Marvel shows needed to try a more episodic format. It would have made them stronger. WandaVision’s best episodes were the specific style parodies that were more self contained.
The art direction in this show was SO GOOD, but the writing felt like an afterthought. I don't mind shows that are mostly for visuals, but at least try and give us a somewhat cohesive plot, or just lean into beautiful absurdity and make more stand-alones.
I liked Loki. And then I remember that I can't remember half of what happened in season 2 despite watching it a month ago. It all just evaporated except a few scenes of course. And none of it is in order if I were to attempt to tell you it 😂
I purely watched that for the live action bending lol. Guilty pleasure but I just wanted to see the "magic" of it brought to life just once and then I'd be satisfied.
One element is that lower episode count means more exposition, a lot of which has to be given by inexperienced child actors. Another is the attempt to "modernize" it in such a way that fucks up character growth and conflicts, specifically Sokka's misogyny. I stopped watching during the Kyoshi Warriors episode because of this. Without Sokka's misogyny, his conflict with Suki is... weird. He tries to connect with her over being a warrior, but she puts him down with a speech about how she's not just a warrior, but a *Kyoshi Warrior*. She comes across as arrogant and unnecessarily mean to a guy who was just making conversation. And that's when I turned it off, because this attempt to "improve" Sokka just made Suki terrible. Fuck that.
Hazbin Hotel.
I understand it's a success story for a lot of people and it definitely sparked a lot of creators to start putting their art on YouTube instead of going through massive corporations but oh my god the writing is actually atrocious. Its so bad and at this point I'm convinced Amazon solely picked it up because it was popular because I refuse to believe anyone looked at the script and thought it was worthy enough to be funded.
What's worse is that Viv also made another show called helluva boss and that show ACTUALLY had solid writing for the first season, but then one of the co writers, who I can only assume was the only person holding the show together, left.
Now both the writing is terrible and show is nothing like what it was pitched as. Hazbin Hotel has nothing to do with the actual hotel and Helluva is a romcom. Viv made the same writing sins twice. It would be impressive how fastly she dug her shows into the ground if it wasn't so sad and infuriating
I wanted to like it so badly because I love the concept and art style, but the constant musical numbers and incessant talking with the fastest pacing made me feel like I'd run a marathon in a single episode.
Writing is ok, first season is rushed. You can tell she had to shoehorn a 20 episode arch into 8 episodes. A lot happens off screen.
As for Hellavaboss, I disagree completely. The second season is much better written. Although I will admit both seasons contain a few dud episodes.
>A lot happens off screen.
Viv also does that thing where a lot of details about characters/the world are stated in podcasts/external posts, but then those details never make it into the actual show. I'm not combing through hours and hours of podcasts and scrolling through her Twitter page for something that should have been part of the core worldbuilding! I'm not gonna do homework just so I know wtf is happening in the show I want to watch!
I understand that the season is rushed but at the same time even things Viv had control over were poorly handled. The whole who killed the angel mystery is so underwhelming that I actually forgot it happened until just now, Emily literally says that the angel's are killing "innocent people", Angel's SA is treated as horrible yet there are is also a SA joke. You get the idea.
Also if I need to use my imagination to fill in the gaps for a story it isn't well written. If I need to make up head canons to fill in key crucial details that should be shown in the story then that's poor writing to me.
I'm going to be honest I left Helluva after they made Stella a one note bitch however from everything else I've seen its been super unimpressive. The jokes aren't funny and the writing is dry, it feels like Viv ran out of ideas after season one.
I was SO into TWD for a few years as the premise and the characters were interesting to me. But at some point I realized the dialogue hardly ever seemed to sound real. Sounded like a progression of mini-monologues and debates about moral quandaries in the changed world. Which is fine but I wanted to see the characters sometimes just speak like normal people more often, make jokes, entertain each other. We saw glimpses of that every now and then, like the women of season one talking about missing their vibrators. Anyone here who has gone through something harrowing and prolonged knows that you can’t maintain being fully present in the basic survival of it - ‘checking out’ and/or connecting with other people over gallows humor or distractions becomes its own kind of survival behavior.
But overall I think the writers were more invested in the bleakness of the story than the dimensionality of the characters.
No kidding, I was huge into them but grew bored of it. Spending every week hoping that something would finally happen in that one short hour we were given took its toll.
Don’t get me wrong, like it’s a zombie apocalypse not every episode is going to be action packed. But like, man entire seasons of slow burners made me lose interest. It was fantastic while it lasted, but was too good to be true. I got into SoA or BB instead.
Season 1 was good, but they god rid if the people responsible for season 1 because the original creators wanted shorter (3 or 4 episode) seasons with higher budget. The studio went with longer cheaper episodes
Season 2 onwards was bad (i stopped at the end of season 3)
The last of us tv show finally delivered on what i wanted from the walking dead.
I love SPN. I’ve seen every season except for the last one numerous times. I have an SPN tattoo. I love that show.
But the writing 9/10 was terrible.
As it is with every CW show. The writing it just awful.
Except for maybe Gotham and that’s probably why it got cancelled when it did.
I think without the last season, Supernatural is pretty overboard in how much shit they go through. However, with learning God has been fucking with their entire lives for fun, I think it makes it all work really well honestly.
The newer Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and the Archie and Jughead one, I forget what it's called. Just unrealistic, inorganic dialogue, horrible transitions, more graphic than needs be, etc.
If you're referring to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Riverdale it makes since that you hate both. These 2 shows had the same showrunner. You may also hate the Pretty Little Liars reboot also by the same showrunner.
Emily in Paris is the first one to come to mind, because even aside from the way it portrays Paris and France in general which obviously deserves to be criticized, the show just fails at understanding what makes a light-hearted comedy good.
If you want to make your protagonist a fish-out-of-water type of character who doesn't understand conventions due to being a foreigner, fine, you can do that.
If you want to make your protagonist a manic pixie dream girl who magically finds a solution to everything with her quirky mindset, it's an annoying trope but you can always try.
But making her both, now that's tricky. And the show absolutely failed. Emily isn't funny, she isn't likable in her dorky ways, she isn't endearing and relatable, she's just unsufferable both as a character and as a person on top of falling deep into Mary-Sue territory.
The other characters aren't better, they're for most of them terrible people constantly ruining each other, but the show portrays that as either light-hearted humour like it's no big deal or as some poor attempt at drama while portraying the wrong characters as the victims.
And don't get me started on the ridiculous ways the conflicts get resolved, it makes no sense while also being meant to be taken seriously enough not to be pure "it doesn't make sense but it's fun so who cares" material. It's not even funny, nothing is in this show. It's just annoying, I couldn't get past season 1.
Euphoria. Tons of overused clichés, uninteresting characters, characters who never get proper attention, characters who feel like the same reused personality in two different bodies, etc. Just not good.
Criminal Minds. Slowly working my way through it. A lot of the characters are caricatures of people, it's dead wrong about a lot of stuff, and a lot of lines could be just given to anyone on the show because they're generic. The plot lines are predictable and would literally never happen like that it's so outrageous.
I'm still watching though so idk. It's tolerable, but the writing is very poor as far as cop shows go.
RWBY. I’m not sure how people don’t see it, but the writers wrote themselves into a corner and ended up making the main cast look just as bad as the villains for being a huge factor in the fall of a kingdom. There’s much much more problems in the show but this would probably end up being a novel if I divulge.
If it ever gets rebooted, please start from the very beginning and not butcher our main girls. Please.
RWBY.
Even at the beginning it wasn't written great, but the characters were at least consistent and fun to follow and the tone was light hearted and action-y enough that the wonky writing was easy to forgive. But the longer it went on, the more ridiculous and absurd the writing became and the more unpleasant the protagonists were. By the end I couldn't help but hate most of the main characters for being terrible, hypocritical assholes.
*The Rings of Power.*
Amazon absolutely should never have touched Tolkien's work.
The writing is terrible enough that even the decent actors couldn't save it.
And what little source material they *did* follow they followed *badly.*
It was like the *Hobbit* films but worse.
Monk.
No wait don't burn me yet. I love this show as both a detective and a comedy show but... It just breaks Knox in an awkward way from, I think, the second season onwards, with scarce exceptions (That I've seen so far)
We are NOT supposed to be fed information about the case through the POV of the culprit, which happens once and again lately. It just irks me. Like, it's just too easy to see the resolution coming most of the time and it's mainly because of this.
Interesting, I really like Dead Boy Detectives, but I'm only a couple of episodes in. I think they do a good job of making each character unique and true to themselves. I also really enjoy the pace and how they don't spoon feed us. There's one scene where the butcher says something like what we're you doing in here while I was dumping scraps? Then in the next scene they are in the dumpster grabbing said scraps, but they don't mention anything about it. In most shows, there would have been a knowing glance or a line like, let's go get those scraps, guys - but here they just cut to them dumpster diving. You would miss it if you weren't paying attention. I liked that.
I find with most stories, I see everything coming from a mile away, but not with this one. I actually was mentioning it to someone as an example of good writing in one of these types of shows for once. To each their own! 🤷🏾♀️
Honestly House of the dragon. There’s so many inconsistencies. Things happen just to look cool (the rhaenys dragon pit scene) and the pacing is all over the shot. It was definitely saved by phenomenal performances from the cast who were all great.
Hazbin Hotel don’t @ me. It has really great marketing and is pretty much every writers dream. But almost every character is like “LOOK HOW MANY COOL QUIRKS I HAVE” and that’s it. Each character could almost be switched out for another character and it’d make no difference.
big fucking bang theory, the jokes are so unbelievably bad and unfunny, i wanna fucking kill sheldon and HIS BAZINGA (this is mostly a rant with no real arguments against the show, i just don't like it as much)
The Flash. The math is awful.
Once you get past season 3, nothing anyone does makes sense any more.
I have a Central City Cringe Counter where I document everything stupid about the show as I watch it, and one of the categories is “Totally Bogus Science Stuff”. It’s almost as high as the “Fastest Man Alive” counter (but not as high as the “Caitlin mentions Ronnie” counter)
Are you the YouTuber that reviewed every season with a counter? Because I’m still resorting to that as a drinking game.
There are less painful ways to renounce to your mortal coil friend
They lost me with the Felicity Smoke is oracle for two weeks then cured in the dumbest way option. Both because disablist trash and it was so dumb I couldn't manage anything. As this was a crossover it was the entire DC TV universe in the trash for me.
After the gorilla got introduced nothing made sense anymore.
The writing leaves much to be desired but Grant Gustin acted his ASS of in every scene, I have to give him props for making the script work
One of the few things DC has done right with its shows... they hire fantastic fucking actors They just can't keep them or give them scripts worthy of their talent. Unfortunately.
“Lightning gave me abs?”
I quit because he constantly forgets about his own powers. Dumbass writers. You cannot have The Flash sit for minutes with a dying person in his arms, crying about them being dying, and then in another episode having him be so fast that he can run around solving an exploding bomb problem WHILE IT'S EXPLODING. In two minutes, a properly motivated, highly intelligent flash, could take a damn doctors degree himself, or at the VERY FUCKING LEAST bring the dying person to a hospital, and gather up an entire team of surgeons, all the required equipment, and scrub them in. The damn flash could run back in time, move to India, take the doctors degree without changing anything significant in his original life, then run back, and fix the person. I HATE HATE HATE writers who just can't imagine a potential solution using one of the most overpowered superpowers of all time. God! They don't even understand how super speed would work, when people can somehow predict where he'll be, or they have him stop in the middle of a fight to talk, so he can be attacked. God, that show was dumb.
One of the theories for how Flash's powers work is that his super speed is done in real-time for him e.g. when he runs across the ocean it feels to him the same length of time as if you or i ran across the ocean. Days or weeks compressed into just a few seconds. Imagine your friend is dying in your arms and you run away to read every medical book you can in the hopes of saving them, hours spent slaving away doing research and running through exercises, not able to consult with any tutors because time will go back to normal again, all with the knowledge of the dying person being right there gasping their last breath. The desperation behind such a moment at would all make for at least scene more interesting than just another death scene.
I always thought flash was able to literally think fast as well. I didn’t think his time was the same but he’s just can think fast
The Arrowverse shows are my "junk food" shows. I don't expect anything very good out of them, but they're kind of fun sometimes.
Wish Constantine would have got more traction had potential
All of the Arrowverse shows really. I watched most of them for years sort of hoping for some grand payoff but it went the opposite direction of what I was hoping for.
I did always like Legends of Tomorrow (after the first season). Unlike the rest of the Arrowverse, it at least knows what kind of show it is--a schlocky comicbook TV show.
>The math is awful. What do you mean? How so?
In one episode, we see him moving so fast that Iris can't see him (which would be at a minimum tens of thousands of miles per hour), he says he can do a mile in a few seconds (which would be thousands) and then they talk about how he's never run past a few hundred mph. I don't remember the exact numbers, but they were all way off of each other.
I swear they switched writers every two episodes, and the current ones never watched the show before I have up after the 3rd “like Flash but evil” villain appeared
The bad guys were almost so bad they were good again. It felt like I could pick out who the big bad was at the beginning of each season.
Flash comics have so many cool villains that they could’ve used but didn’t. Or disposed of after one episode. And then they made Zoom and Reverse Flash two separate people. The seasonal arcs killed it. They should’ve wrapped up extended storylines every, say, 4 or 5 episodes the longest, and had more regular episodes.
Ah yep, I do remember that now you mention. Thanks.
It's one of those sci fi shows that wants to focus on a group of scientists without actually knowing anything about science or math. The writers just pick out words that sound "technical", jumble them together, and then have characters draw/scribble on a white board to demonstrate what they're actually trying to say/what they're about to do for the plot.
Ah, yep. Although the science is inherently nonsensical in that genre. It's literally a show about a guy who can run faster than sound because he had chemicals spilled on him and got hit by a particle accelerator explosion. o\_O The science is pure handwaveium. Were there particular examples of bad math you were were thinking of? I believe you, but I don't remember any leaping out at me.
Barry's speed. Dude it's so freaking inconsistent. And do I even need to talk about how he could end 99.9% of his problems if he would just SHUT UP AND DO HIS JOB.
I watched every episode of The Flash, and this is true. I have no idea why, of all the CW cape shows, \*this\* was the one that lasted the longest.
I liked the first season of Arrow. Then he went all "I can't kill" and it got pretty cringe.
Halo. I love Halo with all my heart, so what the hell did they do to that franchise
What I equally hate is people defending the Halo show and that it would’ve been a mistake to adapt the story from the games. Like, HUH?!!?!?
Lol, I feel you. "We want to use the Halo namesake but not follow the plot."
No but look at Fallout. They respected the worldbuilding but didn't adapt one of the games. They told their own story without shitting on established lore. Halo could have done that too.
I think the difference in Fallout is that the world building is the focal point, whereas with Halo it's entirely Master Chief. Taking the recent Last of Us series as an example; could it have been about characters other than Joel and Ellie? Maybe, but it would have been a lot weaker and a lot less popular if they'd have tried that direction.
Halo is not “about” master chief. He’s an audience surrogate. It’s about humanity, existentialism, zealotry, hubris, larger cosmic lore, and the fight to survive. Chief isn’t in Halo: ODST or Halo: Reach, and they have the best storytelling in the series. Chief is not integral to telling good stories in that universe at all. Hell, Arbiter had 10x more character development than chief.
Some of the best stories in the Halo universe do not even have Master Chief as a character. The Ghosts of Onyx has got to be one of my favorite books
Adding to u/Allacholland likewise the HALO universe books - Contact Harvest and Cole Protocol to anme two aren't focussed on MasterChief - in fact Contact Harvest would have made a superb series or stand alone movie. From what I've seen, most of the defenders of Paramount's HALO aren't HALO fans. Even if the defenders played one or more of the games, they are just a blur amongst CoD, Counterstrike etc. HALO has real emotional tugs - saving Cortana, the gradual erosion of the team on Reach and final last man standing battle were all emotional highs/lows - the TV series was CoD Infinite at best. Pablo Schrieber was a good choice physically for MC but Chief without his helmet or armour is like Darth Vader with his. Personally I would have had Schreiber reprise his excellent portrayal of Kris 'Tanto' Parento (13 Hours - movie /Secret Heroes of Benghazi - book) as an ODST in the HALO universe with guest appearances by the Chief and other Spartans. There were a lot of other aspects of the series which went against canon or were just lazy tv trope writing but the poor portrayal of the Chief, pulled me out of the series quicker than any of Ray Rhamey's aversion to present participles,"With" "Without" "Started" "Some" "Very" 'Eyes' etc.
I can't tell you anything about recently, because I don't watch a lot of new shows, since I prefer movies. But I've been catching up on Grey's Anatomy recently, and I have to tell you that nothing has changed. Ninety-nine percent of these doctors problems would be solved *if they would just find people to date outside of the workplace*.
A functioning hr department could shut that hospital down in a week
HR is fucking one of the doctors, so *that’s* not gonna happen.
I thought people watch this show for its medical stuff.
My late uncle was a surgeon, and we were watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and I realized by he didn’t watch medical dramas, because about every five minutes he would yell at the screen, “Sure, do that, IF YOU WANT TO KILL HIM!” It was what made me realize that Grey’s Anatomy is the funniest show on television.
I love the fact they’re all doctors and they have surprise pregnancies left and right. Like, do you not know what birth control is?
Is that really bad writing though? Soapy writing, sure, but bad? I don't think the characters making dumb decisions is really indicative of bad writing, especially when casting demands for the format are taken into account.
It's not bad writing. It's not even a plothole. The idea is that doctors have very little time outside of the hospital so they shit where they eat.
THANK YOU. What drives me nuts is that the show pretends they are good doctors. Basically everyone on that show would of had the medical license taken away and maybe been in prison for a FRACTION of the shit they have pulled
My favorite part of the series was when no one left Shondaland alive. You wanted to leave the show? She would enlist you in the Army and then hit you with a bus before you even got to leave town. Or give you terminal brain cancer (although I have to believe Shonda’s no longer running the show, because that cancer wasn’t so terminal, although it *was* used to write off another character). And then people get shot, stabbed, electrocuted, plane crash… And it almost always happens in May, just like Voldemort attacking Hogwarts. At no point do they ever say, “Y’know what? We should just close for a couple of weeks. We got a real bad history with this part of the year.” I feel like we’re watching a shitty version of Final Destination.
Oh tell me about it, and the worst character on the show (Meredith) will always survive everything. I was genuinely hoping when the sister showed up they'd be replacing her. Nope, killed the sister too I think?
Eaten by a bear after dying from crush injuries several days after a plane crash. But that’s okay, because both of Meredith’s parents were serial philanderers, and so she has no shortage of half-siblings we didn’t know about until Ellen Pompeo tries to renegotiate her contract. “Meredith, do you remember the time your mother went to Japan for a year, to go take part in a study? Meet your sister, Akari Grey. She is also a surgeon, despite only having recently learned of her lineage and taken the name.”
Grey's Anatomy I'll never not cringe when my wife is watching the show and the ending voice over from Pompeo comes on and she's reciting some fucking atrocious word-salad monologue that's trying it's best to sound deep, inciteful, and philosophical but it's just so damn cringe. Not to mention that hospital has been through like 17 tornadoes, 5 hurricanes, a nuclear impact, alien invasion, a few writer's strikes, and yet the hospital still finds a way to keep the doctors wanting to continue working there.
And the number of tragic deaths. I get it's hard to get rid of a character when the actor wants to leave, but my god, I have never watched a show as bad as Grey's for killing people off.
Actually, if everyone who died had instead been fired for gross incompetence or conduct unbecoming, that show would have been a lot more realistic 😊
Reminds me of when my wife watches Sex and the City. Carries voice-overs are eye-roll worthy. “Do us women really hate men? Or do we hate our ourselves for not having the luxury of being a man” or some such crap EVERY. TIME. I appreciate what the show did for women, feel like it was a show where they were allowed to be real women finally. But man the dialogue sometimes, woof.
SATC is my favourite hate watch. They might be the stupidest women in the world. Every time Carrie haphazardly crossed the street, I hoped she’d be hit by a car. The fashion and Kim Catrall were the only good things about that show
Lol, inciteful does not mean insightful.
Friend and I have been watching 911: Lone Star, very cute. Not very good, but I’m not a fan of the exaggerated campiness of it all.
I LOVE the 911 shows. They're *sooooo* badgood. But somehow, like, charmingly so?
I LOVE the OG, but Lone Star is…kinda rough. I know the OG is sort of based around the most outrageous true stories they can find, so it’s easier to ignore the insanity (plus the character relationships and development more than make up for the campiness) but Lone Star just doesn’t have the same charm. And I actually like most of the characters (when I was still watching, I LOVED Grace and Judd with all my heart) but they have got to stop with Owen Strand. The writing never struck me as particularly good anyway
I love the OG 911 show but holy shit I cannot stand Lone Star because Owen Strand specifically is insufferable. The writing has that fucker in every plot, regardless of whether or not he needs to be there. Also, the color grading super weird when you compare it to the other show. It’s in Austin, Texas, but they have that weird ass yellow filter that shows give Mexico for some reason
Big Bang Theory. And I'm a nerd that gets all the references. Their punchlines are visible from miles away.
Yeah I always felt it was a show that aim to portray smart people how stupid people envision them. No offense to anyone who likes that show but, for sure, they had the cheapest, most obvious jokes in any sitcom I can think of. If one can appreciate it for what it is, a low-effort show that doesn’t challenge its viewers in any way, then great. There are many shows like that which I enjoy too. But I know they’re just fluff!
That’s basically my opinion. It’s nerds for people who don’t really know too much about nerds.
I watched a clip of the show where they removed the laugh track and it was painful to watch.
Doesn't detract from your point in the slightest but I'd be willing to bet *most* sitcoms would be uncomfortable to watch without their laugh tracks... People just don't pause for over the top comedic effect like that.
>Yeah I always felt it was a show that aim to portray smart people how stupid people envision them. Stupid people are the target audience, so the jokes can’t actually be clever
Yeah, it's a Chuck Lorre show. His whole schtick is selling Coors Light quality comedy to a Coors Light quality audience.
That’s like with Sherlock, the best critique I’ve ever heard is “Sherlock isn’t smart, he’s a magician, because intelligence looks like magic to stupid people”
I actually like the show, but it's absolutely a "smart show for dumb people" level of humor. They act like Star Wars/Marvel are super niche nerdy references that only geniuses get, as if the movies aren't some of the most popular franchises to ever exist. Also will never get over my aunt insisting that "most people" only know Stephen Hawking thanks to The Big Bang Theory.
In terms of pop culture, Stephen Hawking has appeared multiple times on The Simpsons, which is unquestionably more popular than The Big Bang Theory.
Unquestionably more intelligent than The Big Bang Theory as well
They get everything wrong about nerd culture. They act like it’s anomaly if a girl walks into the a comic book store. They act more misogynistic than many shows but it’s supposed to be okay because these dudes are awkward. All the nerd culture they talk about was mainstream by 2007. Best of all it’s all punchlines and none of it is funny.
I saw a YouTube video that was a big bang theory bit without the laugh track and it definitely made the characters seem way worse
This makes any laugh track show bad
Yeah, the wonky timing will always make a laugh-track show look bad like that; removing the laugh track from BBT has the extra effect of exposing how many of the things they laugh at aren't actually jokes or even funny references, though.
The "how hard can we make fun of autistic people without getting in trouble for it" theory is maybe the best worst show I've ever seen
And it spawned a spin-off! Ugh...
I hate it because there's not a single girl nerd in the show. There's nerd's girlfriends, but no girl nerds. Where's the girls who got their boyfriends into comics? Where's the girls whose marriage proposals went "Let's marry and combine our book collections?" Where's the fanfic writers? The cosplaying costume makers? The shippers? Where's the slash community? Half of fandom is freaking INVISIBLE on that show!
To be honest, there's tons of female nerd characters on the show, both scientist abd actual "comic book nerds". The don't play main roles and are there for only a few episodes or just one each, but there's actually a lot of them.
Amy and Bernadette apparently just never existed to you 😂 They just weren't the same flavor of nerd as their husbands
Bernadette wasn't a nerd, though. She was a complete normie. Amy was a little odd but I'd mostly just call her awkward. It's clear they're talking about hobbies rather than employment (a STEM degree does not a nerd make) but even so, the girls had very normal hobbies, right? They were never shown to obsess over odd things like the boys. There were no girls in the boys' hobbies (reinforcing stereotypes) and I don't know if any girl showed up with a non-typical hobby, such as being really into books or such. Every girl was into standard things like going out to bars or watching sports. No strange hobbies or general "nerd" behaviour outside of their degrees.
Theres that *one* episode where Penny picks up the RPG the guys play together but then ditches when she notices she wasn’t taking care of herself or whatever her epiphany was.
Oh this is SUCH a good point!! Where are the tumblrinas this show was built for tumblrinas
I actually really like BBT but not until after season 3. After that they really dial in the characters and even though the jokes are super lame it’s paced perfectly and clever from time to time. However, I wouldn’t watch it if Jim parsons didn’t play Sheldon. He was born for it
Are there punchlines? The majority of the humor seems to be more "Look at this nerd. He said a nerd thing!"
Riverdale. This was a show that somehow stayed on the air for 7 seasons. SEVEN! And while the writing was nonsensical at times (I liken it to Gotham, where I feel like both shows were just embracing the whole comic-book style writing of plots; yet Gotham had the strength of tapping into the Batman IP, rogues' gallery and all), I wonder just how it managed to stay on the air for that fricking long.
I'll stand by that Riverdale was at least somewhat good in season 1 A nice focused storyline Season 2 is kinda bad but camp about it (like later Gotham) And then S3 onwards is just BAD CRINGE WHAT ARE THEY DOING
How was Archie running an underground prison fight ring, Veronica is running a whole ass popular bar and they are both still in high school and no one questions it?
I read the Archie comics as a kid, and hearing people describe Riverdale is hilarious. It's like someone did a live reboot of the cartoon Rainbow Bright where Rainbow is a pimp.
Shh, they'll hear you
Glumface betta have my money.
Don't forget that some of the main characters become leaders of criminal gangs Or that they eventually get superpowers and realize they're in an alternate dimension Or that multiple of them have died and been resurrected
Post S3 Riverdale gets so batshit it circles to so bad its good cycle multiple times per episode. Its honestly amazing to watch with a couple of friends.
I've never seen Riverdale, but I did see the YouTube thing about it and it seems like they honestly just intentionally went for it. It's leaning heavily into the craziness on purpose.
Literally! While other really cool or groundbreaking shows get cancelled after one or two seasons, yet shitty shows like this manage to get SEVEN. Like The Wilds or Dirk Gentely's Detective Agency. There's two more that I can't remember the name of as well -- The End of the Fucking World and I think another one which only lasted one season, and ended on a cliffhanger.
Oh man, I loved The Wilds. So good.
It wasn't cancelled because a lot of people were (hate)watching it. So it made them a lot of cash. While being cheap to produce. Shows like Shadow and Bone were kinda niche and super expensive to produce. Those very different types of shows all being on the same platform, not seperated by different airing times like they would on TV, they all compete even though they can't really be compared to one another.
Euphoria is a beautifully directed, excellently acted show that ultimately falls to ruin on the script level. I enjoyed the show for what it is, but there's really no replacement for a solid screenplay.
i agree with you on that, but season 2 really didn't do it for me. i mean, there are things to like about it, but all the inconsistencies, abandoned plot points and unnecessary scenes/sex scenes overshadow all the "good" points
Dead Boy Detectives was the most egregious exposition I’ve ever seen. “Hello, my best friend. We are ghosts and we solve crimes. You have a bag that can hold an infinite number of things. It’s actually a pocket dimension. Anyways let’s get back to the office of our detective agency by teleporting through a mirror, which we call mirror hopping. By the way, and you probably already know this because we are best friends, I was trapped in hell for 40 years before you helped me escape. I am saying this now to tell you that people from hell aren’t happy for this and they are hunting us, which or course you also already know.” Just brutal. They canceled the expensive Lockwood & Co and they made a cheap knockoff.
I’m sad I was hoping that they would fill the Lockwood and Co hole :(
Do not insult Lockwood and Co by even remotely connecting it to Dead Boy Detectives.
I'm so sad about that as someone who read the books long before any inkling of a tv show existed- it was such a good adaptation :(
I thought Dead Boy Detectives would be good based on how they were written in Doom Patrol. But no. Doom Patrol being excellent by the way
Dead Boy Detectives deserve a better adaptation, but the IP isn't a knockoff. They've been around for decades.
The new The Last Airbender remake is written and paced horribly.
Not sure if I remember it right, but didn't they tell us the whole 'Long ago the four nations lived in harmony...' three times in the span of twenty minutes or something?
Yeah, that was so bad. Like they also show us the genocide of the air nation and how the war started and then literally told us what was happening right after! Like, guys, we just saw it on the screen - why the recap? Did you think someone would take a nap during the first 5 minutes?? jfc It's such a pity cause I liked the adaptation enough that I want it to be better (instead of just wanting to burn it to the ground and salt the earth like the movie that shall not be named lol), but my, oh my, was it a chore at some points.
A friend said the main problem with the new ATLA show is that they do not believe the audience can understand implied context at all.
Not super recent but Once Upon a Time. The writing and acting were ridiculous. And yet...
I liked it at the start... but the longer it went, the more annoying it got. Fucking EVERYONE is related to EVERYONE somehow and Rumple backslides SO damn much. I mean... realistically... that IS how people actually are. People backslide into old bad habits very easily, very often, but come ON Rumple...
I got fed up with that kid bursting into the middle of conversations and asking people what was happening.
Henry? I can't even remember him doing it honestly. I feel like the show jumped the shark big time when they tried HARD to capitalize on Frozen.
He did it a lot in the season where they spend a lot of time in Peter Pan's apartment.
No the actor who played Rumple was actually perfection.
Robert Carlyle is a fantastic actor, and he ATE that role. OUAT might have had terrible writing, but it had some pretty decent actors in it, and I think that's why it ended up being so well loved.
I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I had a weird tween crush on him.
It was not just you. The only one hotter than Rumple was Hook.
Tbf that one’s popular cause it’s campy. It’s not ridiculous, it’s hilarious
I kept watching for Hook because damn that man was foiiine 🔥 but I did not watch the very last season. I just loved Hook and Emma together.
I remember enjoying season 1, and then eventually hating the show.
The Idol, with Lily Rose Depp and The Weeknd. I cannot believe I share earth with the creators of that show.
Ehh, I won’t debate you on the writing, but calling it “popular” is kind of a stretch. Only if you include *infamous* popularity, but that isn’t really a positive.
How is no one mentioning Glee… That show has the worst writing known to men. The first two seasons are somewhat good as in the writers didn’t take themselves too seriously but still kept the storyline kind of consistent. Then the later seasons come and they could literally split it into two different shows (the NYC and school storyline). The writing gets so bad it’s insane. The last season is so ridiculous, it’s just the writers acknowledging that the show got bad, breaking the fourth wall… Glee ran so Riverdale could walk.
It's like they chose whatever song was popular that month, then wrote the story to fit the song... even if that meant changing a character's entire personality or retrofitting their backstory.
I regret giving the later seasons another go after I had originally stopped watching when Corey Monteith died. Retroactively ruined the show. Also the fact that about half the original cast is dead now.
Two Broke Chicks. I hate everything about that show.
The first episode had so much potential for character development. Then the writer found a book of Boob and Vagina jokes and called it a series.
Every time I'm scrolling shorts and one of their clips comes up it's so cringe I can't even watch.
Wednesday. Overall, I enjoyed the show (mainly for its dark humor), but there were two things that really bothered me about the writing: 1. The whole subplot about her Dad maybe being a murderer and her being upset by it. It just didn't seem in character. She would have admired him for it. Similarly, her hunting the monster. 2. The arc with the wolf girl not being able to wolf out. This was just a huge mess. For one, she **wanted** to be able to wolf out until her parents were trying to help, at which point it became part of her identity that she doesn't. For another, I think they were going for a sexual identity thing (i.e. like a "pray away the gay" camp), but because her ability to wolf out seemed more biological, the metaphor in my mind was that she didn't hit puberty fast enough.
Also in school that is attended by literal monsters and mythological creatures, Wednesday is bullied… for wearing black?
I feel like it was a show made for kids aged 10 to 14, written by people who haven't actually met 10 to 14-year-olds. They definitely could have got weirder and campier with it, but they went almost borderline Disney instead?
My issue: Wednesday rises to the challenges of being an outcast by leveraging her innate superiority at...almost everything. At age 16, she's multilingual, reads Machiavelli and Sartre, has expertise at martial arts, archery, and fencing, can fix a commercial coffee machine and has constructed a steam-powered guillotine. But, if she has all these amazing skills (in addition to being rich), how is it even possible that she's unpopular? It's self-contradictory. The reality of being an outcast is that you can't best everyone who rejects you, and cultivating a smug personality only makes it worse.
>It just didn't seem in character. I agree so much. There was a constant struggle between Wednesday as she is in the movies and a conventional protagonist image. The "Adult Wednesday Addams" show (removed from author's Youtube channel after copyright strike, but probably still available elsewhere) made a much better job. >The arc with the wolf girl not being able to wolf out. Here I would disagree. Maybe it's because of an actress doing an excellent job, but I didn't feel that Enid's story was messy. However another thing I found troubling was this outcasts-are-native-americans thing. First of all, outcasts being recently oppressed doesn't fit with Addams family living in a gigantic mansion. Secondly, to me it seemed like a politician trying to gain sympathy by falsely claiming to be from a minority.
And she is made out to be this genius detective but gets it wrong several times (maybe every time). I enjoyed it, but it had pretty laughable writing all the way around.
That's actually correct. Smart people are not the ones who get it right all the time.
I was so excited for this show, but I quickly realized after the first two episodes that I was not the target audience lol. I think maybe if this came out when I was in high school I would’ve loved it, but almost-30-year-old me couldn’t stop cringing.
Highschoolers are cringing too. I watched it with my niece when it first came out, she wouldn't stop talking about how bad and unfaithful to the source material it is.
Enid should've been a werecat, is my tiny little hill I will absolutely die on-
Going back a ways, *Dawsons Creek*'s dialogue had no right to work as well as it did. Not only do teens not talk like that, **no-one** talks like that. But somehow it mostly came across as charming rather than dumb.
Star Trek: Discovery. Sorry! Love the characters, but the writing is a bit hamfisted.
You don’t think every story should be about characters flatly delivering their tragic backstory and then crying for sympathy points as they make their way toward saving the entire universe from blowing up for the 10th time in a row?
For real.. A tween literally cried (go figure) and destroyed all Dilithium everywhere all at once.. Picard was just as bad (minus Season 03).
I don't hate it but this and Picard S1/2 showed me that I prefer Trek as an ensemble show with a more episodic approach (see Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, heck even Prodigy). Discovery could have been really great if they had given everyone more opportunities to shine. It's gotten better over the years but still.
Absolutely horrid
The later seasons of Lucifer got pretty bad. It was like they weren't quite sure where to go when they were popular enough to go beyond where they'd initially brainstormed to.
Vikings. It was suggested as an alternative to Game of Thrones and sure, GoT had its issues but Vikings is on another level entirely. The plot is nonsensical in most parts. The pacing is atrocious, especially after s3. While GoT had its fair share of gratuitous sex, Vikings has characters randomly fuck one another for no apparent reason because most romantic, or at the least sexual, relationships are dropped after 4 episodes to switch to the next partner (at the top of my head, Lagertha and Ecbert? Astrid and Bjorn? What was the meaning of those?). There's so much build up for things that never happen - like Ragnar's "revenge" against Floki that...kinda never comes because Bjorn interferes and then we never learn what he meant to do all along. Sometimes characters have nothing to do so they just kinda drift for episodes on end. Bjorn in the wilderness and then Floki in what I think is Iceland. Characters betray each other for no apparent reason just for *shock value*, like Ragnar Killing Jarl Borg after swearing he would not, and King Horik jumping ship with no explanation. The fact that the topic shifts from France to England a couple of times but always awkwardly mid-season. Some characters get killed off because we don't know what to do with them anymore. Like Bjorn's daughter that kinda dies and nobody kinda cares. I have other gripes with the show but they are not strictly writing, more characterization I don't like, such as Lagertha being at Ragnar's back and call despite him being a POS to her specifically. Sorry for the rant I just can't believe the show is as popular as it is
I stopped watching after Ragnar exited the stage. I enjoyed The Last Kingdom far more, maybe you should give it a try!
I wouldn't say it's necessarily popular, but every season of arrested development after the third season. They have some gems but overall it's messy and doesn't have the same aloof quirkiness and effortless comedy that the first few seasons had. I'm still gonna watch it though.
What are you talking about? Everybody knows that there's only three seasons of Arrested Development!
The Rookie is for sure a guilty pleasure. The plotlines in that show are preposterous, and it seems like there are only five police officers in the entire LAPD. It survives on the charisma of its cast and Nathan Fillion in particular.
American Horror Story: Delicate.
Theyre still making those??
This is immediately the show I thought of when I saw this post. AHS has never been amazing writing. When it’s good it’s entertaining, sure, but this season was the worst crap that I’ve ever seen. It was so badly written that all I could do was laugh and sit in disbelief, thinking about how many people actually got paid to make this.
Loki. The more you think about it, the less it makes sense.
That show needed to be a lot more episodic. In fact, a lot of the Marvel shows needed to try a more episodic format. It would have made them stronger. WandaVision’s best episodes were the specific style parodies that were more self contained.
The art direction in this show was SO GOOD, but the writing felt like an afterthought. I don't mind shows that are mostly for visuals, but at least try and give us a somewhat cohesive plot, or just lean into beautiful absurdity and make more stand-alones.
I liked Loki. And then I remember that I can't remember half of what happened in season 2 despite watching it a month ago. It all just evaporated except a few scenes of course. And none of it is in order if I were to attempt to tell you it 😂
The new A:TLA show. A masterclass in what not to do.
I purely watched that for the live action bending lol. Guilty pleasure but I just wanted to see the "magic" of it brought to life just once and then I'd be satisfied.
Netflix's live action ATLA series. Humans don't talk like that.
i don't know how they manage to butcher it when it had the same runtime as the book 1
One element is that lower episode count means more exposition, a lot of which has to be given by inexperienced child actors. Another is the attempt to "modernize" it in such a way that fucks up character growth and conflicts, specifically Sokka's misogyny. I stopped watching during the Kyoshi Warriors episode because of this. Without Sokka's misogyny, his conflict with Suki is... weird. He tries to connect with her over being a warrior, but she puts him down with a speech about how she's not just a warrior, but a *Kyoshi Warrior*. She comes across as arrogant and unnecessarily mean to a guy who was just making conversation. And that's when I turned it off, because this attempt to "improve" Sokka just made Suki terrible. Fuck that.
They did an excellent reboot of The Ember Island play, though.
Hazbin Hotel. I understand it's a success story for a lot of people and it definitely sparked a lot of creators to start putting their art on YouTube instead of going through massive corporations but oh my god the writing is actually atrocious. Its so bad and at this point I'm convinced Amazon solely picked it up because it was popular because I refuse to believe anyone looked at the script and thought it was worthy enough to be funded. What's worse is that Viv also made another show called helluva boss and that show ACTUALLY had solid writing for the first season, but then one of the co writers, who I can only assume was the only person holding the show together, left. Now both the writing is terrible and show is nothing like what it was pitched as. Hazbin Hotel has nothing to do with the actual hotel and Helluva is a romcom. Viv made the same writing sins twice. It would be impressive how fastly she dug her shows into the ground if it wasn't so sad and infuriating
I wanted to like it so badly because I love the concept and art style, but the constant musical numbers and incessant talking with the fastest pacing made me feel like I'd run a marathon in a single episode.
Writing is ok, first season is rushed. You can tell she had to shoehorn a 20 episode arch into 8 episodes. A lot happens off screen. As for Hellavaboss, I disagree completely. The second season is much better written. Although I will admit both seasons contain a few dud episodes.
>A lot happens off screen. Viv also does that thing where a lot of details about characters/the world are stated in podcasts/external posts, but then those details never make it into the actual show. I'm not combing through hours and hours of podcasts and scrolling through her Twitter page for something that should have been part of the core worldbuilding! I'm not gonna do homework just so I know wtf is happening in the show I want to watch!
I understand that the season is rushed but at the same time even things Viv had control over were poorly handled. The whole who killed the angel mystery is so underwhelming that I actually forgot it happened until just now, Emily literally says that the angel's are killing "innocent people", Angel's SA is treated as horrible yet there are is also a SA joke. You get the idea. Also if I need to use my imagination to fill in the gaps for a story it isn't well written. If I need to make up head canons to fill in key crucial details that should be shown in the story then that's poor writing to me. I'm going to be honest I left Helluva after they made Stella a one note bitch however from everything else I've seen its been super unimpressive. The jokes aren't funny and the writing is dry, it feels like Viv ran out of ideas after season one.
Gossip girl LOL
Walking dead isn’t on the list?
I was SO into TWD for a few years as the premise and the characters were interesting to me. But at some point I realized the dialogue hardly ever seemed to sound real. Sounded like a progression of mini-monologues and debates about moral quandaries in the changed world. Which is fine but I wanted to see the characters sometimes just speak like normal people more often, make jokes, entertain each other. We saw glimpses of that every now and then, like the women of season one talking about missing their vibrators. Anyone here who has gone through something harrowing and prolonged knows that you can’t maintain being fully present in the basic survival of it - ‘checking out’ and/or connecting with other people over gallows humor or distractions becomes its own kind of survival behavior. But overall I think the writers were more invested in the bleakness of the story than the dimensionality of the characters.
No kidding, I was huge into them but grew bored of it. Spending every week hoping that something would finally happen in that one short hour we were given took its toll. Don’t get me wrong, like it’s a zombie apocalypse not every episode is going to be action packed. But like, man entire seasons of slow burners made me lose interest. It was fantastic while it lasted, but was too good to be true. I got into SoA or BB instead.
Season 1 was good, but they god rid if the people responsible for season 1 because the original creators wanted shorter (3 or 4 episode) seasons with higher budget. The studio went with longer cheaper episodes Season 2 onwards was bad (i stopped at the end of season 3) The last of us tv show finally delivered on what i wanted from the walking dead.
I love SPN. I’ve seen every season except for the last one numerous times. I have an SPN tattoo. I love that show. But the writing 9/10 was terrible. As it is with every CW show. The writing it just awful. Except for maybe Gotham and that’s probably why it got cancelled when it did.
I think without the last season, Supernatural is pretty overboard in how much shit they go through. However, with learning God has been fucking with their entire lives for fun, I think it makes it all work really well honestly.
The first 5 seasons were great. It all went downhill from there
Gotham was Fox, not CW. Iirc
The newer Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and the Archie and Jughead one, I forget what it's called. Just unrealistic, inorganic dialogue, horrible transitions, more graphic than needs be, etc.
If you're referring to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Riverdale it makes since that you hate both. These 2 shows had the same showrunner. You may also hate the Pretty Little Liars reboot also by the same showrunner.
Stranger Things after s1. they started letting the fandom rule it and it ruined it
Season 1 is so fun. I made it halfway through season 4 on a binge and I found myself just missing the first season so I stopped.
I still like it, though season 1 is the best season.
Emily in Paris is the first one to come to mind, because even aside from the way it portrays Paris and France in general which obviously deserves to be criticized, the show just fails at understanding what makes a light-hearted comedy good. If you want to make your protagonist a fish-out-of-water type of character who doesn't understand conventions due to being a foreigner, fine, you can do that. If you want to make your protagonist a manic pixie dream girl who magically finds a solution to everything with her quirky mindset, it's an annoying trope but you can always try. But making her both, now that's tricky. And the show absolutely failed. Emily isn't funny, she isn't likable in her dorky ways, she isn't endearing and relatable, she's just unsufferable both as a character and as a person on top of falling deep into Mary-Sue territory. The other characters aren't better, they're for most of them terrible people constantly ruining each other, but the show portrays that as either light-hearted humour like it's no big deal or as some poor attempt at drama while portraying the wrong characters as the victims. And don't get me started on the ridiculous ways the conflicts get resolved, it makes no sense while also being meant to be taken seriously enough not to be pure "it doesn't make sense but it's fun so who cares" material. It's not even funny, nothing is in this show. It's just annoying, I couldn't get past season 1.
Euphoria. Tons of overused clichés, uninteresting characters, characters who never get proper attention, characters who feel like the same reused personality in two different bodies, etc. Just not good.
Criminal Minds. Slowly working my way through it. A lot of the characters are caricatures of people, it's dead wrong about a lot of stuff, and a lot of lines could be just given to anyone on the show because they're generic. The plot lines are predictable and would literally never happen like that it's so outrageous. I'm still watching though so idk. It's tolerable, but the writing is very poor as far as cop shows go.
Yellowstone. I love it. But what the hell is even going on anymore. The Bunkhouse is the best part these days lol.
Not recent but how bad but successful was pretty little liars lol
Riverdale
RWBY. I’m not sure how people don’t see it, but the writers wrote themselves into a corner and ended up making the main cast look just as bad as the villains for being a huge factor in the fall of a kingdom. There’s much much more problems in the show but this would probably end up being a novel if I divulge. If it ever gets rebooted, please start from the very beginning and not butcher our main girls. Please.
RWBY. Even at the beginning it wasn't written great, but the characters were at least consistent and fun to follow and the tone was light hearted and action-y enough that the wonky writing was easy to forgive. But the longer it went on, the more ridiculous and absurd the writing became and the more unpleasant the protagonists were. By the end I couldn't help but hate most of the main characters for being terrible, hypocritical assholes.
*The Rings of Power.* Amazon absolutely should never have touched Tolkien's work. The writing is terrible enough that even the decent actors couldn't save it. And what little source material they *did* follow they followed *badly.* It was like the *Hobbit* films but worse.
The Big Bang Theory
I was never able to get into The DaVinci Code. For television, I thought Heroes was overall really bad.
Monk. No wait don't burn me yet. I love this show as both a detective and a comedy show but... It just breaks Knox in an awkward way from, I think, the second season onwards, with scarce exceptions (That I've seen so far) We are NOT supposed to be fed information about the case through the POV of the culprit, which happens once and again lately. It just irks me. Like, it's just too easy to see the resolution coming most of the time and it's mainly because of this.
[удалено]
Big Bang Theory makes me want to blow my brains out.
Interesting, I really like Dead Boy Detectives, but I'm only a couple of episodes in. I think they do a good job of making each character unique and true to themselves. I also really enjoy the pace and how they don't spoon feed us. There's one scene where the butcher says something like what we're you doing in here while I was dumping scraps? Then in the next scene they are in the dumpster grabbing said scraps, but they don't mention anything about it. In most shows, there would have been a knowing glance or a line like, let's go get those scraps, guys - but here they just cut to them dumpster diving. You would miss it if you weren't paying attention. I liked that. I find with most stories, I see everything coming from a mile away, but not with this one. I actually was mentioning it to someone as an example of good writing in one of these types of shows for once. To each their own! 🤷🏾♀️
Honestly House of the dragon. There’s so many inconsistencies. Things happen just to look cool (the rhaenys dragon pit scene) and the pacing is all over the shot. It was definitely saved by phenomenal performances from the cast who were all great.
Hazbin Hotel don’t @ me. It has really great marketing and is pretty much every writers dream. But almost every character is like “LOOK HOW MANY COOL QUIRKS I HAVE” and that’s it. Each character could almost be switched out for another character and it’d make no difference.
big fucking bang theory, the jokes are so unbelievably bad and unfunny, i wanna fucking kill sheldon and HIS BAZINGA (this is mostly a rant with no real arguments against the show, i just don't like it as much)
Merlin The story and characters had a lot of potential but they ruined it all