Giving Up on Shows: When and Why
I’m not the kind of person who gives up on television shows easily, even if it’s well past the point that I should’ve. If you had asked me, “Hey Garth, why are you still watching Weeds post season four or those Steve Carrell-less seasons of The Office?” I would have responded with a pretentious speech about how I’m an aspiring screenwriter, and there’s a specific value for me in watching and understanding bad television and trying to figure out how and why a quality show went downhill so I can avoid the same pitfalls down the line in my own career. (Also, both of those specific examples had at least some merit after they went past their prime, but that’s for another day.) While there’s a certain grain of truth in that speech, it’s mostly a lie. The honest answer to that question is that I stuck around with these shows because on some level, I still cared about them. Even if those shows stopped caring about me in return.
But everyone has a breaking point, and in an era where one can currently have, say, twelve television shows on during the week (four of which are on the same night, and as much as you love the abundance of great TV, you're weirdly resentful of it at the same time) learning when to walk away is something you need to do just to maintain your sanity. I barely have time for the shows I like, let alone the ones I don’t.
So I learned to break the habit. It was far from easy, but I did, and life is better now. I did it by looking at the shows I gave up on in the past, mapping out the patterns, and trying to see them in the shows I watch now. Of course, the patterns depend very much on what I personally care about in a show. You’re going to have to find your own lines in the sand. But hopefully, this can help you realize what those lines are in the first place.
SPOILERS for The Walking Dead, True Blood, and House of Cards!
The Walking Dead
The Last Episode I Watched: The season three finale.
I’ve never read any of the Walking Dead comic books, but even if said popular IP didn’t already exist, The Walking Dead was, and still is to a certain extent, an incredible idea for a television show. I was more excited for this show’s premiere than any other I can remember in recent history, and I wanted to love it more than anything.
And you know what? The show’s first season, lasting six episodes, didn’t disappoint. Sure, it was a little rough around the edges. It had a habit of stalling and it could be needlessly blunt when it didn’t have to be. But it nailed the atmosphere, and though its universe was rather bleak, I found myself wanting to spend time in it every week. Season one was clearly a foundation to build upon, and clearly great things were to come.
Then, of course, season two happened, and some of you were probably snickering a little too hard while reading that previous sentence. I know I was while writing it.
Now, for the sake of fairness, let’s remind ourselves that season two wasn’t entirely the show’s fault. The Walking Dead was, in the end, a victim of some profoundly inept budget fuckery in the AMC ranks. (If you don’t feel like reading that article/don’t find inside industry baseball interesting, a quick summary: AMC realized it couldn’t afford HBO style programming and operate on an ad-based market at the same time, so the network decided to screw with all of their shows’ budgets in the most ridiculous ways possible. What they seemingly didn’t consider was that they did not fully own two of their three most popular shows, and long story short, The Walking Dead got the short end of the stick. Hence why season two was entirely set on that fucking farm.)
However, the incompetently of your own network and what decisions they make in regards to their finances is not an excuse to throw your brain out with the baby and the bathwater. Laziness is laziness, and season two had some of the worst writing I’ve seen in the era of prestige television. It was trying too hard to be brooding, the characters made ridiculous decisions (even by horror standards), and the plot went absolutely nowhere. And don’t make me the billionth person on the internet to complain about that zombie-in-the-well scene.
But I stuck with it anyway. I was on the cusp of giving up, but a primal voice screamed in the back of my mind, “How can you possibly make a show this shitty with such an obviously great premise? It has to get better. It has to.”
And you know what? It did. Sort of.
The first half of season three reminded me of what I saw in the show in the first place. Everything was moving quicker, all the characters had clear established goals, and The Governor made for a compelling antagonist for our group of survivors. Everything seemed on the uptick.
Then it started to lose steam in the back half, despite “Clear,” the strongest episode of the show I saw while I was watching it. It began stalling its story again. It began with the brooding again. Characters starting making dumb decisions again. (Remember Andrea, and most of the things she did? Laura Holden’s great though.) It kept making boring creative decisions and forcing its themes. It went back to the “pick a place and stick yourself there” philosophy of season two, and at some point, I lost faith.
It became clear to me that this show was always going to be at a tug-of-war with itself, and that it would forever flail back and forth between compelling and dull. It was never going to fully realize itself, and even if it seemed like things were going to get better, it was never going to last. So I stopped.
The Walking Dead has its diehard fans, and I’m glad they’ve found something they love so much. For me at least, it was a show that was always going to hobble itself on its way to greatness, and I didn’t need the frustration of watching it forever backslide.
True Blood
The Last Episode I Watched: Season four finale.
There was a strange reaction to True Blood when it first premiered. Though some were into it pretty much from the the jump-off, there were some detractors, and they certainly didn’t hold back. (I remember reading Scott Tobias’s rather scathing AV Club reviews of the first season. Though I disagree with him more than not, they're damn good reads.) Of course True Blood always had its flaws, but I think I lot of it came down to people not knowing how to react to it. After all, it was created by Alan Ball, whose previous creation, Six Feet Under, earned its reputation as one of the most beloved shows of all time with its (mostly) subtle character work and its low stakes approach.
But I loved True Blood for two particular reasons. The first (admittedly dumb) reason was that True Blood premiered while Twilight fever was hitting its peak, and there was a certain petty joy I got from the conversation about vampire fiction going from chaste dreamy vampires in the northwest to hyper violent sexualized vampires in the bayou. (Of course, nothing was going to detract from Twilight’s popularity except time, and I don’t think True Blood ever had as much of a zeitgeist defining run. But it was still funny.) I wasn’t one of those people who put a lot of time into raging against Twilight or anything like that, and the Twilight fans I was friends with in high school were never obnoxious about it. Still, I elected not to tell them about the, um, rather strong opinions I formed about the series after reading the first few chapters of the book in a Barnes and Noble, and let’s just say I enjoyed True Blood’s existence a little more because of it.
The second reason was that I’m a sucker for creative one eighties, and I loved that Alan Ball went from Six Feet Under, a heartfelt rumination on death and trauma and its effects on a family, to True Blood, a gory over-the-top soap opera that was, I think, aware of its own ridiculousness. In other words, I liked it because it was a show that was content to be dumb and fun, and sometimes I need that. Some wanted another thoughtful Six Feet Under type show about vampires. I didn’t.
Season one was far from perfect, but it did a lot of things right, especially when you have a premise as broad as that of True Blood. It introduced its world well, showing how testy society had grown now that vampires have integrated into the world of humans. It had a decent mystery driving the story that kept everyone’s character arcs focused and in each other’s orbits. (Or at least that’s how I remember it.) It had decent character work and did a good job breathing life into everyone. It was a good show that could be better.
And season two was much better. Though there’s plenty we could talk about, the main highlight for me was that it felt more creatively ambitious, and unlike The Walking Dead, it was actually interesting in evolving its relationships and characters. We had Jason’s indoctrination into an anti-vampire cult, we had the search for Godric in Dallas, and we had Maryann, a woman who gains a mysterious power over the town. We later learned that she’s a maenad, a creature from Greek mythology that enticed humans with drunken parties, music, and orgies. “Oh.” I remember thinking, “Everyone’s mythology exists. That’s really cool.” And suddenly the show's universe felt infinitely bigger.
It sometimes felt a bit overstuffed, but it had a creative energy to it that was hard to deny. That’s why season three, at least to me, was such a letdown. It wasn’t a “bad” season of television, but it didn't feel as inspired. We went from maenads to werewolves, and the inner-workings of the vampire hierarchy weren’t as interesting as they once were because they failed to evolve. The plot felt clunkier and the character arcs felt more disparate, and when the credits rolled, I had nothing to offer my friends the next day but an old fashioned, “Eh.”
Then season four came, and that's when the show fell apart for me. Whereas, to a certain extent, the previous seasons felt like they had some sort of direction, season four felt like it was making everything up on the fly. It started with a time jump that had my eyes rolling to the back of my head, then went immediately to an amnesia storyline with Eric, one of the show’s most interesting characters/not the character you give amnesia to. All of this had something to do with its big bad, a witch named Marnie (played by the wonderful Fiona Shaw). But I can’t for the life of me remember what.
In the end, the center couldn’t hold, and the show couldn’t put itself back together. It went from “self-aware fun schlocky dumb” to “unaware just regular dumb” and I had no reason to assume that it would ever get back on track. So I stopped. To this day, I have no idea what the later seasons are about, or how it ends, and I never cared enough to find out. I have some friends who stuck with it though, and it seems to me that it went back and forth between better and worse, and the valleys between the two kept getting higher or lower, depending on your perspective.
Whereas The Walking Dead was a show that was never going to find itself, True Blood was a show that knew exactly what it was, then lost it. Thus the fall of True Blood has always been more disappointing to me then the non-starting The Walking Dead.
Oh well.
House of Cards
The Last Episode I Watched: Season three finale.
I considered many shows for this third slot. Originally, this was supposed to be a section about Sons of Anarchy, a show I watched until the beginning of season six. However, I realized that I remember next to nothing about seasons four or five. (I don’t mean that to be catty or dismissive. Even at its worst, Sons of Anarchy was kind of fascinating in a specific way I want to talk about some day.) I also considered a number of other shows that I dismissed for a variety of reasons, be it because it’s been written about to death (Dexter), because I didn’t make it far enough into the show to consider it worth talking about in this specific article (Nip/Tuck and Big Love), or for reasons that aren't substantial enough to maintain an article (American Horror Story and 24).
However, I went far out of my way to try to think of other shows I gave up on not just for the reasons stated, but for one particular reason above all else: I didn’t want to write about House of Cards. This is supposed to be an article about losing interest in shows I once enjoyed, and I hated House of Cards from the very beginning.
I’m going to say lots of petty things about this show, and I apologize ahead of time, because it’s a show that bothers me on a primal level. But I can’t help it. I find its constant pontifications on the nature of power tedious, I find everything everyone says and does on House of Cards shallow, and every fucking time Frank turns and talks to the camera, I break out in anger hives. Because I love it when protagonists outright tell the audience the subtext of what’s going on. Clearly, this is a show that thinks you’re intelligent.
Now just to take a bit of step back, House of Cards wasn’t always terrible. I liked the college episode in season one that, if memory serves me correctly, is the first glimpse into Frank’s convoluted sexual preferences. I also enjoyed poor Freddy’s episode in season two, mostly because it’s done with at least some elegance as Freddy doesn’t talk to the goddamn camera. (Did I mention that I don’t like it when people talk to the camera in House of Cards?) Also, yeah, I’ll admit to loving the twist in the first episode of season two.
But despite these episodes, I didn’t stick around with House of Cards because it showed any promise. It didn’t. I stuck around out of curiosity. You have to remember that there was a time when Netflix debuting a big show like this was a huge deal, as opposed to now, when it seems like there’s a new Netflix show every other week. It’s rare to know that you’re watching a paradigm shift in real time, and I wanted to know where it was going.
But the show was so graceless and maladroit that it was hard for me to ever give a shit. (Remember when Frank pisses on his father’s grave? “Oooooooooh, how character-y!” thought some random dumbass.) As Netflix produced higher and higher quality shows, especially Orange is the New Black and BoJack Horseman, House of Card’s existence became increasingly useless to me, and at a certain point, embarrassingly late into my time with the show, I realized that I was engaging in the growing phenomenon of “hate-watching.” Or watching a show out of the joy one gets from criticizing it.
I get why people do it. If you want the most profanity laden rant you’ve ever heard in your entire life, find me on the street and ask me about 13 Reasons Why. But it’s not healthy for me, because when I decide I hate a piece of pop culture, and “hate” is a word I use sparingly when it comes to TV, I commit. And I don’t want to be that guy.
But I kept going into season three, mainly because there were small moments when I thought the show was becoming aware of how ridiculous it had become. After all, the political reality of House of Cards in season three was no longer even attempting to look like something from this planet, let alone this country. However, all of it was for nought. Frank wound up on top again, as always, only this time Claire left him. But nobody on Earth bought that this would last.
I wish there was an interesting reason that prompted me to not watch season four when it rolled around, but there isn’t. My mouse was hovering over the play button when I had a sudden profoundly eloquent thought: “Wait a minute. Why the fuck am I doing this?”
That’s it. It simply never occurred to me that I could stop watching the show I didn’t like. Binging. You gotta love it. You also gotta hate it with all of your might.
I want to love every show I watch, and its hard to accept that in most cases, the love won’t last forever. It was even harder for me to accept that the rational move to make is to walk away, and not to punish myself by watching something I used to care about destroy itself. I realize I’m describing this in loftier terms then I have to, but engagement with the art matters, as well as your time. And besides, when you put one show to bed, you’re now free to go find something new. Have you seen Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a great show. Go watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Or anything new. I would prefer it if you watched Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but watch whatever your heart desires. And when it doesn't desire it anymore, find something else.
