Some years ago I had a friend whose favorite thing to do at parties was tell people he hasn’t seen Breaking Bad because getting yelled at by people who love Breaking Bad was apparently fun to him. People get really attached to the media they love and are willing to defend to the death their right to be free of anything less than absolute blind love and loyalty to that media. That being said, I’m here to discuss the worst parts of otherwise good-great TV shows (other than problematic or a lack of adequate representation because that’s true of nearly all media). So, let’s get to slaughtering some sacred cows.

Space opera! That’s not the bad part though. I love science fiction, let’s just get that out of the way. Obviously any genre can ask what it means to be human, but sci fi does it with robots! And Battlestar Galactica asks some really interesting and deep questions about personhood, agency, individuality, and, as mentioned above, the nature of humanity.

Except all of those fascinating points were completely undercut within the first few minutes of the pilot episode. Cylons are terrifying enemies and excellent devices for delivering philosophical questions because there is no marker of difference between them and humans -except- apparently when a Cylon has sex their spine glows bright red for… reasons. So this can only mean, and considering how much fucking was happening in that show this seems unlikely, that no one had sex with a Cylon from behind or in a room with a mirror.

Okay, but here’s the thing: stop doing the flash forward thing to show some sort of dramatic moment/aftermath out of context in order to contrive some more drama. Like, your show is already good. I think I’m especially mad at Breaking Bad for doing this because 1) they should know better and 2) a good show doing this bad thing gives licence to every other terrible show doing the same thing. Just make your stories start off interesting for fuck’s sake.

The most egregious example of this from Breaking Bad was basically the entire second season. Here and there you’d see flashes of an eye floating in water, smoke rising from houses, body bags in the yard all to find out that the cause was, drum roll, a plane crash. A crash that had nearly nothing to do with the story and was caused by a character we just found out existed two episodes earlier. In a word: anticlimax.

I’m sure there are a small handful of exceptions, but I’m pretty sure that no TV show should last longer than five seasons. As it turns out, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the worst examples I’ve seen of a show’s fall from grace. In the middle of the sixth season Buffy fights a demon that can cause extremely vivid hallucinations. The particular hallucination that was inflicted on Buffy was her in a mental institution with her parents convincing her that the last six years of vampire slaying was all just in her head. Also, all those times she died was her waking up from her hallucination and coming back to life was her falling back into it.

So the whole episode is a whole Shutter Island etc. story where you’re not sure which reality is real and whatnot. But not only are her parents, if they are her parents, trying to get her to wake up to the mental institution reality, but the best way for that to happen is for her to kill her friends in the vampire slaying reality. She chooses slaying with her friends. And, of course, because there’s no way for any writer to resist this, the last shot is of Buffy laying in the hospital bed, thus confirming that everything that came before was complete nonsense and didn’t matter. However, the show didn’t end there. If you’re committed to finishing what you start, you have to watch a whole season and a half knowing that none of this matters whatsoever. Or, you know, less than it normally would.

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE.
RAPE.
RAPE.
RAPE.
RAPE.
RAPE.
RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE.
RAPE. RAPE.
RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE. RAPE.

Everything is too pretty. I mean, not really, but kind of? This one I have less conviction about because not having lived in the 60s, it’s hard to tell how much of the stylization is too much. Like, everything in the show resembles the collective unconscious’s image of what that time looked like that it appeared practically plastic. The set and costume designers were aggressively good at their jobs. The retro setting became intrusive to the point where sometimes I was like, “Hey, look, the 60s!” and I wouldn’t even hear the raspy voices emanating from square jawed squinty faces in nice suits.

I’m going to be honest with you. Never seen it, have no opinion. Moving on…

Basically, my biggest beef with The Wire is the second season. The second season was when the writers thought they were a formula show. It makes sense, the first season was so good that I would want to copy it too. You take a rag-tag group of misfit cops and stick them on a hopeless assignment just to have them defy the odds and solve the big case. It’s a winning formula, for sure. But the problem with the second season is that we just saw it play out the previous season. All those “This a bullshit detail, I don’t even want to be here” grunts are significantly less believable when everyone knows and basically gets along with everyone else. Also, you already know you guys solved the big case last time, so just give them a chance McNulty!