Too Bleak Stopped Caring / Live-Action TV

• 13 Reasons Why, well-known for its controversy, has earned a reputation for becoming increasingly dark over the seasons as well as questionably written.
  • In the first season, all the episodes are painful flashbacks of how Hannah suffered a horrible Trauma Conga Line as she explains the reasons why she ended her life. It becomes harder to watch, it gets worse and worse, and the frustrating perspective of the audience feeling like Clay with nobody explaining anything along with a Black-and-White Morality setting for most of the characters. There's also the fact that each time you feel Hannah gets better, you're hit with the reminder that she's dead. Worse is the setting of Liberty High.
  • The second season upped the ante so much that many online discussions of the series have people who genuinely liked the show crowded out by arguments between people who felt the show was trying too hard and sending the wrong message to the point of offensiveness, and those who found the second season's darker plot twists and dramatic moments unintentionally hilarious and bizarre.
  • Season 3 makes this point much worse; the show's most evil characters (read: actual rapists) are humanized through characters who barely know them and/or weren't introduced prior and Freudian Excuses that wouldn't have been enough to justify their behavior before they crossed the Moral Event Horizon, let alone after it (in addition to them still doing bad things), while the "good guys" do questionable things that they ultimately end up getting away with (up to and including murder). The people who are only guilty of celebrating the death of a rapist are made to feel like monsters by the people who were actually responsible for their deaths. In short, the cast does not offer many characters one can truly root for, on top of the sheer offensiveness that is applying the "He was a human being!" argument to a (up until this season) Karma Houdini rapist with no redeeming qualities who finally faced consequences for his actions^note to the point that a Titanic sequel that tried to make you feel bad for the iceberg would be significantly less offensive.
• 24 was always dark, even from the beginning. But as the show went on, the writers seemed to go out of their way to make sure that every character suffered as much as possible, and then casually killed some of them off. On top of that, so many characters ended up dying that some viewers found it impossible to care about newer characters since there was a good chance they would eventually join the death pool as well. Not helping matters is Jack's predicament - while he's the one character immune to the risk of death, the fact that it's a mandate that his life must always suck no matter what he goes through and he can never, ever get some sort of happy ending from the deal often makes people go, "why bother?" The writers seemed to be aware of this, too. More than once, characters have pointed out to Jack that anyone he gets close to comes to a bad end.
• American Horror Story: Freak Show: The ladies of the previous AHS series Coven were at least able to come together in the face of a common enemy, even if they went right back to backstabbing each other after the threat was handled. Freak Show, on the other hand, has all the backstabbing of Coven but no uniting thread whatsoever.
• Avenue 5: Although it is meant to be a dark comedy, a lot of the humor and any sympathy for the main characters and the passengers on board the eponymous ship can be lost on casual viewers, because everyone in the story of the show is so utterly stupid, entitled, and incompetent, putting themselves or others in danger. To get a taste of how this show handles its first episode: the ship is being "crewed" by "for-show" actors with no real shipboard experience, the real single captain was killed in a freak accident while adjusting the ship's course, the captain who "commands" the ship was just put there to reassure the passengers, the owner of the company that built the ship is someone who wouldn't look out-of-place on a tabloid cover for drinking too many mimosas at a pool party, and the passengers are entitled jerks who want to have their yoga class and piña coladas despite the ship now being three-and-a-half years (later EIGHT) years off-course to return to Earth. Plus, this seems to happen every episode, so the premise gets tiresome rather quickly.
• This was the reason why Backstrom was cancelled after just one season. The main character was such a gigantic prick that it made it impossible for anyone who tried watching to care, leading ratings to plummet.
• Bates Motel. Given that the series is mainly detailing the Start of Darkness of Norman Bates' destiny as a Serial Killer, you can't really blame people for getting turned off by the depressing themes featured throughout the show. Some end up so overwhelmed by all the sad, tragic scenes. It certainly doesn't help the fact that Norma Bates is so massively stupid in her decisions from the beginning. This ultimately gets taken up to eleven in the series finale where Norman's life slowly begins to fall apart and he ends up mercy killed by his own brother when Dylan realizes that there is no way to save him.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003) slid into this trope as the series went on. Helo is the only character who doesn't at least skid on the edge of the Moral Event Horizon at one point or another. (Well, Kacey, Nikky, and Hera never did anything reprehensible, but they were all under 5 years old.) And speaking of Battlestar Galactica, this trope is probably one of the biggest reasons for ratings failure and cancellation of its spin-off, Caprica. It's really hard to find someone to root for in its main cast. This trope is the most significant counterpoint in regards to the original 1978 series being unfavorably compared to the reboot.
• Beyond Scared Straight: Has this in spades. Many of the bratty kids featured on the show are jerks and bullies. However, the extreme scare tactics used by the prison guards and inmates can sometimes cross the line and make it difficult to root for them as well (despite their relatively good intentions). The parents of the bratty kids can sometimes be jerks and bullies as well. With so many obnoxious people and the extremely harsh treatment the kids are subjected to, it's hard to really root for or sympathize with anyone on this show.
• Black Mirror: It can be hard for people to root for the main characters of each episode because you know nothing is going to go right for them at all. There is the odd exception, however, such as the episode "San Junipero" which has a more Bittersweet Ending than most, and although it's Lighter and Softer, the ending is one that viewers didn't quite believe was as happy as made out. It certainly says something about the show (focused on technology) when an episode about death and a virtual afterlife seems the happiest ending!
• Carnivàle has a serious problem with this trope, being a dark fantasy show on HBO that predates Game of Thrones by several years. Some critics during the first season even pointed this out, feeling little reason to care for its macabre take on an already very dark time, and characters that are morally ambiguous at best didn't endear itself to most. The show's low ratings led it to be Cut Short, being cancelled after 2 seasons of a planned 6.
• Complications, being the story of a doctor who stumbles into the middle of a gang war, his wife who has been having an affair, and a nurse who exploits the doctor's morally-compromised state to her own ends.
• The reason Damages never got a wide audience could very well be that its main character often seems to lack a conscience, as do her competition.
• Empire runs heavily on Black-and-Gray Morality, with almost every single character in the series being a back-stabbing, irredeemable scumbag who often do all they can to screw everyone else over, and the ones who do have a conscience either end up committing some morally dubious actions at one point or another as well or just end up getting killed by those who don't have any moral convictions, making it fairly hard to root for anyone in the series.
• The Following has issues with this from the start, and it only gets worse over time. The villains are Ax-Crazy homicidal maniacs who gleefully commit very brutal on-screen murders and we see a lot of the story from their point of view; by and large they are selfish, unrepentant and prone to Moral Myopia, and their competence ranges from Villain Sues to Big Bad Wannabes (Joe himself starts as the former and devolves into the latter). The heroes, though, are not the most comfortable people to follow either: Hardy is a vengeful Knight Templar prone to Protagonist-Centred Morality who allows the villain to dictate his moves; the FBI have many fair What the Hell, Hero? critiques to make of him, but they tend to be incompetent and stupid in their own right as both they and Hardy get many minor characters killed; Agent Weston and others become steadily more brutal due to Hardy's influence; and civilian characters (whether major like Claire or one-shoters) are out of their league and make dumb decisions to varying degrees. It becomes difficult to root for anyone the longer the story goes on, particularly since the series so often relies on Fridge Logic and Diabolus ex Machina to move things forward. As a result, the ratings took a big knife to the gut in season two (and cut down to less than half in season three), albeit no more so than anything else that aired on Fox in calendar year 2014.
• An issue with the Netflix Indian miniseries Ghoul. The main characters are a military torture unit working for a totalitarian, dystopic government, their prisoners are a group of Muslim terrorists responsible for several deadly bombings, and the villain is an ancient demonic entity impersonating the jihadi leader. With everyone being various shades of deplorable, there are no real stakes.
• One of the problems with the Gormenghast miniseries is that the most sympathetic, proactive character (Titus) doesn't appear until well after things get underway. Those unfamiliar with the books might initially be turned off by the endless, unsavory antics of a weird, menacing royal family and the Affably Evil man trying to exploit them. Only when Titus appears does the audience really have someone to root for.
• For most of the first season of Halt and Catch Fire, every single victory that the protagonists experience seems to be immediately followed by a crushing defeat, and since the three main characters are assholes, it's hard to argue that they don't deserve those defeats. Consequently, the first season had terrible ratings and almost ended with cancellation. Thankfully, the second season tones down the grimdark and allows the characters to have more moments of happiness.
• The Heart, She Holler is a Black Comedy set in The Deep South, so this is inevitable. The one resident of the Holler who isn't evil is severely mentally handicapped, and he dies.
• Hemlock Grove: EVERY character is reprehensible. Of the two main characters, one rapes two women (one of whom is a relative), and the other kills a supposedly beloved pet for essentially no reason and without a twinge of emotion. Another character is supposed to be Too Good for This Sinful Earth but shows little regard for other people. The only exception is Shelley, who is a Woobie.
• In History Bites, almost no era in history is depicted in a positive light. Instead, virtually every episode shamelessly depicts the era in focus as a Crapsack World of Jerkass. Everybody is a victim of bias, and everybody is a carrier of it, even if they don't even realize it. At worst, the characters are blatant about their biases.
• Both the British and American versions of House of Cards can be described as more-or-less what Game of Thrones would be if set in the present day. The few characters with any sense of honor or decency either have their lives destroyed by the main characters in their ruthless pursuit of power, have their lives outright taken by the main characters in their ruthless pursuit of power, or both. And the fact that the main characters attain so much power means they're very unlikely to ever face justice for the horrible things they do. The only way Frank Underwood gains his comeuppance is by having the actor publicly accused of rampant sexual assault, resulting in him being hastily written off the show.
• The Inbetweeners, while beloved for a long time in the UK, tends to fall into this category. The reliance on Cringe Comedy, coupled with the fact that every character in its main quartet is a Jerkass, tends to rub a lot of viewers the wrong way. Despite some genuinely heartwarming moments from time to time, the show's modus operandi is to be as mean as possible. Even though characters like Will bring their misfortune on themselves, the audience is still being encouraged to laugh at bullying.
• From the beginning, the so-called "heroes" in Inhumans are established as the tyrannical, hereditary rulers of their society, and generally terrible people, and they do not go through any kind of Character Development to overcome their flaws. Instead, the show reveals Maximus, the Designated Villain rebel against them who most viewers wanted to root for, as having committed more and more acts of over-the-top villainy, which just kills off any desire to watch the show at all.
• The premise of The Invaders (1967): David Vincent learns that hostile aliens disguised as humans are trying to Take Over the World and devotes his life to stopping their Evil Plans (which he's good at) and exposing them (which he's not as good at since they always cover their tracks). The result is a series that depends on Failure Is the Only Option: while the invaders can never get rid of Vincent, he in turn can never prove their existence, and no ally he gains can ever help him in any lasting way. The second season tried to avert this trope by giving Vincent a group of human supporters called the Believers, but it wasn't enough to prevent the series' cancellation.
• Jessica Jones (2015) started off very downbeat in season 1, as many characters are habitually rude, opportunists, or downright Jerkasses, and the villain keeps on causing atrocities even if he's only an ordinary man aside from his Compelling Voice, most tragically Hope's Trauma Conga Line that ends with her killing herself. Still, it ends on a somewhat triumphant finale. But season 2 worsens the situation, as Jessica drives the people closest to her away trying to save a villain with a very personal connection, and Trish Walker, the most unambiguously good character in Season 1, Took a Level in Jerkass and became as broken and fallible as the rest of the cast. The one positive development of the season, Jessica developing a relationship with Oscar, ends early into season 3, which further traumatizes her to the point the last episode ends with Jessica giving up on her job and nearly leaving the country.
• Kamen Rider:
  • A common criticism of the "adult-oriented" re-imaginings, released in Amazon Prime Video instead of broadcast television, is that they're so bleak and lacking in likeable characters that it's difficult to get invested in their plotlines.
    • Kamen Rider Amazons is a biopunk reboot of the 1974 series Kamen Rider Amazon, and it goes just a touch too far with taking advantage of the opportunity to be Darker and Edgier than ordinary Rider shows are allowed to be. While the show boasts awesome, brutal, and bloody fight scenes, the entirety of the cast are Jerkasses or Too Dumb to Live at best and truly abhorrent at worst. The titular Amazons are cannibals with an irresistible craving for human meat, including the protagonists. The few characters that start off with morals mostly lose them over the course of the series, or otherwise become bitter and jaded from their experiences. No character gets a happy ending except for the Big Bad, who gets away scot-free, while Chihiro, the second season protagonist and one of the few genuinely sympathetic characters, is beaten to death by the other protagonists to prevent him from unleashing an apocalyptic plague. Even the color grading is muted to the point of being all but entirely grayscale for the entire run.
    • Kamen Rider BLACK SUN is a similarly excessively dark reimagining of a Showa series. Unlike Amazons, Black Sun uses many of the characters from its source material, but distorted to the point of being In Name Only. If you're expecting this Kotaro to be an upstanding figure fighting for justice in an immoral world, don't get your hopes up, as he's a washed out drug addict who assaults a homeless person in the first episode and sticks to the sidelines for most of the show. Meanwhile, Nobuhiko lacks the cold badassery the original had as Shadow Moon, instead ending the show a broken, hate-filled fanatic whose uprising fails to make a dent. Other characters like Bilgenia and Nick are presented sympathetically but have that sympathy undercut by how repulsive their actions are, with Bilgenia being a sadistic sociopath who did hits for Dounami and who tortured Aoi and murdered her mom, while Nick aided Bilgenia in the latter action by selling Aoi out him (both also get let off the hook for it too). The fact that the setting is largely the same at the end leaves the whole story feeling pointless.
• Every character on Little Britain is either repugnant or weak. The Prime Minister seemed to be the only exception until it was revealed that he cheated on his wife, illegally sold weapons to Iran (and tried to have the evidence destroyed), and was eventually flanderised into sleeping with everyone except Sebastian. With nobody to cheer for, audiences understandably got tired of watching horrible people get what they want while honest people suffer.
• By the fifth season of the Chilean series Los 80, fans were growing bored with all the misfortune heaped on the protagonists. Some TV critics even accused the writers of putting Juan and his family through the wringer because they hate him and the story more than anything else.
  "They [the writing team] very obviously don't love the series anymore."
• The American version of Low Winter Sun is an extreme example of this, and shows what happens when this trope is taken too far. Possessing all the dark subject matter of fellow crime dramas like The Shield and The Wire without any of their interesting characters or flashes of dark humor, the relentlessly oppressive, nihilistic tone, complete lack of levity, and morally bankrupt protagonists alienated audiences and left critics lukewarm at best. After it finished its 10-episode first season, it was quietly cancelled.
• While most of the main characters of Luther are sympathetic, all of them have committed some morally dubious acts, the atrocities the criminals commit each episode are always horrific with some outright getting off scot-free for their crimes, Luther usually fails at saving the victims, and the whole outlook gets more and more cynical by the second, which can really make it hard for someone to try and get invested in the show.
• Mad Dogs slips into this in the extremely short last season (Two episodes!) - The series goes out of the way to invalidate everything the main characters worked for, and they all decide to go right back to where their lives were at risks after spending most of the previous series trying to get away from it. It then goes into a massive downward spiral that is so unendingly bleak that the average person becomes utterly desensitized to it. It is so mean-spirited, bleak, and unnecessary that many fans choose to just take the ending of series 3 as the true ending.
• Mad Men essentially badmouths The '60s, so it can be rather difficult for some viewers to find anyone to root for over the show's long run because there's hardly a single character that isn't a selfish asshole. None of the main characters are in happy relationships and almost all of them are unfaithful to their partners at one point or another. The first season alone consists of the main character drinking and cheating on his wife without any consequences. He never learns from his past behavior and keeps entering into an endless cycle of hurting himself and those around him.
• The Magicians (2016) has a tendency to end seasons on a very dark note. The first season ends with what looks like the bad guy winning, and the second season ends with the protagonists accidentally causing the complete removal of magic from the world. Then at the end of season three, a main character attempts a Heroic Sacrifice only to have it fail and unleash an untold evil upon the world, and the Library gains control over the flow of magic. While plenty of victories are had along the way, it's been a downward trend for the good guys.
• This was one of the biggest reasons that Millennium (1996) never caught on, along with The Chris Carter Effect taking hold. The unrelentingly bleak tone along with the complete lack of levity made it hard to watch. While it earned the respect of the viewers able to handle it, most ended up alienated. Vince Gilligan, the man behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, would reference it as being "instructive" regarding this trope.
  Vince Gilligan: I would watch every episode, and afterward, I would just feel like I couldn’t sleep at night, it was so dark. I guess that was instructive to me. That show told me, “Be honest with your show, make it as dark as it needs to go, but you’d better find a way to leaven it with humor, otherwise people are going to want to slit their wrists after they watch it."
• This trope, along with the producers sacrificing story for scientific accuracy, is generally believed to be the reason Moonbase 3 was cancelled after only six episodes. Much of the series consisted of directionless conflict among the main cast, something further exacerbated by the claustrophobic environment and general aura of hopelessness.
• Narcos. The most common criticism about this show is that the characters are hard to root for. While Pablo Escobar had some sympathy points, he's a drug lord who committed many heinous crimes. The DEA agents themselves crossed several lines as well, particularly Murphy. The show is based on the Real Life ongoing drug war in Columbia and Mexico, and it's a Foregone Conclusion that despite Escobar's death, there would be other drug lords who would take his place. The apathy gets hammered at the end of Season 3 when one of the DEA agents quits his job after discovering that his own government is also involved with the drug trade, making him lose hope.
• Nashville always had dark moments to go with the lightness but it started to take this tone in season three, with the characters seemingly forced to carry one burden after another - Gunnar's endless love woes, Will's sexuality, Maddie's Bratty Teenage Daughter tendencies, Deacon's liver cancer, Juliette showing signs of mental instability after giving birth... and it went From Bad to Worse in season four with seemingly no one allowed to be happy, especially Deacon's sister/Scarlett's mother Beverly becoming a liver donor and winding up dead (with the mourning continuing for several episodes and Beverly being posthumously raised to sainthood) and Juliette's postpartum condition dragging her (and the show's ratings) down in an endless spiral to the extent of being Driven to Suicide, which resulted in Jeff taking a fatal plunge after saving her. Hayden Panettiere's real-life health issues in that regard don't make it any easier to watch in the least. Thankfully The Series Finale had a welcome case of Earn Your Happy Ending.
• Nip/Tuck was especially guilty of this, most characters either being assholes, hypocrites, idiots, or criminals, with the added bonus of graphic plastic surgery sequences.
• Once Upon a Time fell midway into its fourth season, with the main heroes always having to fight villains, endure trauma, and never being allowed to have any moment of peace and happiness. The mantra of "having hope" starts to wear thin when Big Bad after Big Bad keeps on disrupting the cast's lives with no end in sight.
• A common criticism of the later seasons of Orange Is the New Black was that it was a Foregone Conclusion that certain events would end in the worst possible outcome, such as Taystee being convicted of a murder she did not commit.
• This is one of the trademark issues with The Outer Limits (1963) and in particular the 1995-2001 version: people from all walks of life suffer from nasty, cruel, and depressing fates regardless of the optimistic direction that the story may have seemed to be going in or even if they're truly deserving of it or not (to the point that Cruel Twist Ending was originally named Outer Limits Ending). While it may have lasted longer than the first two of rival series The Twilight Zone's revivals combined, it's still much harder to come by than its competitor and has yet to receive another revival of its own.
  • To elaborate on the differences between the two series: in the original, the main characters and/or their loved ones often wound up badly, but at least they always saved humanity through a Heroic Sacrifice. In the revival, those sacrifices often turned out to be All for Nothing, as many episodes ended with the world being taken over or destroyed by evil aliens despite the heroes' actions... or sometimes, because of them.
• Oz takes place in a hellish maximum security prison where rape, backstabbings, torture, murder, and mutilation are all regular occurrences, only a fraction of the truly evil inmates ever get their just punishment, and the handful of relatively decent inmates get put through more hell than anyone else. While it does have the occasional funny or heartwarming moment to lighten the mood, any of the characters' triumphs are diminished by the ever-present horror of prison life, and the knowledge that many of them will never get out. There's a unique kind of horror in meeting irredeemably evil characters in a prison drama, as we learn the hard way that there are very few ways to punish them once they're already behind bars.
• The Practice. At the beginning of the series, the attorneys are bright, fresh-faced, and idealistic. By the end, they've completely sold out their standards and principles, end up representing drug dealers and undeniably guilty clients with money to keep the firm running, hire an anti-trust attorney who was fired from his previous job for embezzling money, and rely upon several questionable defenses (patriotism, doubt) in order to bolster their cases. And the majority of unambiguously innocent clients get convicted while most unambiguously guilty clients pull a Karma Houdini, sometimes just for the sake of the protagonists winning their case even if it makes no sense.
• This is a big problem with Revolution on NBC. The bad guys start out as heartless, totalitarian monsters, and only go downhill from there. Everyone who could reasonably be considered good has been killed by mid-first season. What we're left with is a collection of amoral unlikeable jackasses, willing to torture, maim, and murder in the name of expediency and surprising pettiness.
• Ringer is full of awful people. Bridget is the protagonist simply because she's the one telling the story. The most likable character is a former drug addict who is aiding and abetting a fugitive, accepted a bribe, and is covering up murders, while everybody else is having affairs, lying and manipulating people, pretending to be somebody they're not, running a Ponzi scheme, murdering people (or at least hiring hitmen to do their dirty work), falsely accusing a teacher of rape just so they can turn around and sue for defamation of character and split the settlement, faking deaths, etc. Everybody is corrupt in one way or another. The situation is interesting enough, but it's hard to care what happens to any of the characters. It's fun to see how they make things worse for themselves by continuing to be such terrible people.
• After being a fairly light and fun adventure romp, the second series of Robin Hood ended with the inexplicable decision to have Guy of Gisborne brutally murder Maid Marian. Having removed the show's moral and emotional center, not to mention any chance of the heroes ever reaching a happy ending, the writers struggled to find a reason for the audience to care. Between the plummeting ratings and the unceremonious cancellation at the end of Series 3, it's clear that they failed.
• Scream Queens (2015) is centred on a sorority menaced by a serial killer. Unfortunately that sorority is made up mostly of nasty Alpha Bitches with the few 'good' characters being incredibly dull.
• SeaQuest DSV. The original premise of the story starts out with humans having wrecked the surface world, and needing the Sea Quest to protect various miners and nations from undersea terrorists, so we start with an unhappy ending. Most of the stories in the first season are monster-of-the-week bottle episodes, and we never really see if anything the Sea Quest crew is making the surface world any better. Indeed we rarely ever see the surface world, and when we do it's usually a building, some barren compound, or a barren field somewhere that establishes the surface world as a hopeless place to live. In both the first and second season finales, Sea Quest is seemingly permanently destroyed in hopeless gambits to save the world. And then there's the second season itself, which shows that the surface world is dabbling in genetic engineering and outright slavery, thus pitting the benevolent crew of the Sea Quest against a group of Designated Villains, and dragging the plot thread through the rest of the series with constant reminders of how poorly the surface world that they're trying to protect treats people. Season 3 takes the show firmly into this trope, as it is revealed that most members of the Sea Quest have been killed offworld, and while they have been gone, the world has gone even further to the dogs, terrorists and rogue states have become superpowers unto themselves, and in addition, the good guys have no way to build another Sea Quest to remedy this. By this point in the story, the idea of saving the world or making it any better has been thrown completely out the window, with the primary mission simply being to maintain the awful status quo.
• Sex/Life: Pretty much everyone barring Francesca on the show is an unlikeable asshole at some point (even Cooper), leading a lot of viewers to just give up on the show because there's no reason to care about these people.
• Shameless (US) starts off as a Dramedy with some Black Comedy sprinkled throughout, but the show takes a big turn into Cerebus Syndrome in Season 4. By Season 7, that, combined with several instances of the Gallaghers getting all sorts of good opportunities and chances only to screw them up and go back to their old ways can lead to this feeling for some viewers. The little progress that they do make that sticks just barely keeps the show from being too depressing to watch.
• Six Feet Under features characters who are not exactly evil, but tend to be so weak, neurotic, or just apathetic that the events of their lives are at least as doomed as anything in a Soap Opera. The series drifted away from quirky deaths and focused more on the Fishers' love lives, which took a lot of variety out of the show.
• The Sopranos: One of the most common criticisms of the series, particularly in the latest seasons, is how having humanized characters who are extremely unpleasant can become strangely discordant. The main cast of the show have only the bare minimum of "redeemable" traits, and so many flaws that it's very difficult to sympathize with them. Between seasons 5 and 6, everyone is so deeply corrupted, petty, hypocritical, unrepentant, and/or just plain stupid that there are hardly even somewhat likeable characters left to root for—only assholes you are probably going to see die. It's no wonder the show ended at Season 6, because it became nigh impossible to feel any sort of sympathy for Tony after seeing the awful stuff he does over the course of the season, on top of backpedaling on all his character development, making it clear he has no hope of escaping his criminal rut and is only getting worse as a person. Perhaps not coincidentally, viewership of the show fell from usually reaching 9-12 million viewers per episode in Seasons 3-5 to only about 6-7 million in the second half of Season 6 (with only the last two episodes being an exception). The way the show ended certainly doesn't help.
  • It's telling that The Sopranos can be affected by this trope in a way that even Breaking Bad couldn't even compare. While Breaking Bad balanced its dark and gritty plot with a fair share of flawed yet genuinely likable and relatable characters, the same cannot be said for The Sopranos.
  • While we can't deny in any way that the show was critically acclaimed for how groundbreaking it was for its time, it certainly hasn't prevented it from aging poorly, with many of the show's tropes, jokes, and attempts of dark humor making them appear uncomfortable, distasteful, and mean-spirited by today's standards.
• Stargate Universe: It's hard to care about the characters in a show whose first episodes exude an aura of hopelessness and mostly contain directionless conflict among the team. This is only compounded because its predecessors were thematically about adventure and prevailing over other adversaries. More to the point, the main characters in both of its predecessors bond fairly quickly as teams, and by the end of their respective series, view their teammates as family, with Stargate SG-1 in particular getting to that point less than a quarter of the way through their ten-season run. In Universe, the main characters mostly just despise each other, which bludgeons the fandom with this trope far harder than the hopelessness of their situation.
• Star Trek: Discovery: At least with regards to the series' first season, which started with a War Is Hell arc between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, and then moved to a full Story Arc set in the evil Mirror Universe. It got to the point that even a supposedly positive review of the show's twelfth episode, "Vaulting Ambition," commented that the constant Conflict Ball between characters and the sheer amount of Darker and Edgier present meant that both the characters and the audience were "not having fun". That said, the producers and writers on Discovery recognized this going on and compensated by going distinctly Lighter and Softer in the second season and beyond.
• The premise of The Supersizers Eat is simple: in each episode, Giles Coren and Sue Perkins eat the diet of wealthy people in a certain period in history. They even get to dress the part. Sounds amazing? Well, instead of acting like their normal selves or even acting like Spoiled Sweet upper-class characters viewers would root for, Giles and Sue portray their characters as Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists, sometimes to the point of Historical Villain Upgrade.
• Tiger King is the chronicle of the strange, sleazy world of exotic animal keeping and trading, and the eccentric characters that inhabit it. It's largely compelling due to the sheer Bile Fascination factor: this is a bizarre, morally-grey world full of con artists, addicts, and just plain crazy people (and arguably at least one cult leader). And as the series progresses, it becomes clear that they're all just looking to screw each other over, first simply for money, and then to save their own skins as Joe Exotic's luck finally runs out and the authorities close in. The only people who come out of the situation not looking like completely reprehensible human beings are a couple of the animal keepers themselves, and they point out the fact that, despite everyone's claims to want what's best for the animals, not a single animal benefited from any of it.
• On True Blood, the humans opposed to vampires are invariably portrayed as nasty, mean-spirited, narrow-minded, bigoted, and unpleasant. But when it comes to vampires, it all too often seems like they're completely right. The overwhelming majority of vampires on the show treat humans with ill-disguised contempt or don't even bother hiding their contempt, regularly murder humans for food or pleasure, and have their own laws and punishments they inflict on humans despite having no bearing on human laws and punishment (translation: they kidnap and murder people for "vampire crimes" and call that arrest and sentencing). Every character who started out on the show as human and later got turned into a vampire has murdered people, so there's now no vampire we can definitely say has never killed a human. Instead several of the "good, sympathetic" vampires (Bill, Eric, Jessica, even "saintly" Godric) have been shown murdering humans who weren't trying to harm them. So that leaves us with a conflict where both sides are murderous assholes while making the humans who support vampires and vampire rights Too Dumb to Live.
• Tyrant (2014): There's the eponymous tyrant, who is a Stupid Evil bully with too much power to be stopped (and his atrocities are showcased with no discretion). There's a Blood Knight General Ripper who wants everything to go to hell so he can freely commit murder via war. There's the tyrant's Lady Macbeth of a wife who hates him but loves the power, and the tyrant's White Sheep brother (who has been shown in flashbacks to not be all that good, definitely foreshadowing a He Who Fights Monsters Story Arc), who tries with some (for the most part feeble) effectiveness to keep everything from going to hell.
• Veep has a very dark take on American politics — virtually every character suffers from Chronic Backstabbing Disorder or is incredibly naive and clueless. The title character, Selina Meyer, is willing to do anything to get elected, including supporting genocidal dictators abroad. The last season suffers from it even worse — Selina alienates her allies when trying to secure the nomination, and she's still considered the lesser of two evils when compared to Jonah... She nevertheless accepts him as her running mate. The last episode sees all of her friends abandon or betray her, with the exception of her assistant, Gary...on whom she pins some fiscal misdeeds of her late husband, without even having the heart to tell him. The last scene shows us her funeral, which is quickly overshadowed when Tom Hanks dies the same day. To twist the knife further, it is mentioned that for all of her efforts she only was President for a single term and it's not unsubtly implied that she is utterly forgettable as far as Presidents go.
• Vikings starts to veer in this direction during season 3. Ragnar goes from an egomaniac but ultimately well-meaning ruler to an extremely cunning, ruthless king that resorts to murder to further his own plans.. The absolute nadir is mid-season 4; with the downfall of Ragnar, innocents are dying left and right, including two unborn children and a toddler that dies of neglect, and you cannot really root for anyone anymore: Ragnar is now a decrepit junkie, Floki has become a paranoid wreck, Lagertha is no less ruthless than her ex-husband, Aslaug only cares for herself and her children... and the Franks and the English are not better at all.
• The Walking Dead (2010): Granted, a Zombie Apocalypse show is hardly a walk in the park, but the series' relentlessly grim (if not downright nihilistic) atmosphere can eventually wear down on viewers after a while.
  • Season 3 showrunner Glen Mazzara cited averting this trope as the reason behind Judith being Spared by the Adaptation — good things need to happen to the characters too, not just bad, or else the show will become too depressing and the audience will lose interest.
  • It seems that the apathy has set in as of Season 8, as is evident by the show's rapidly falling viewership and Carl's death midway through the season doing little to rectify them.
• Westworld gets hit with this very hard. A lot of characters (host and human) are morally shady which makes the audience care less about them. Then, there's the misanthropic narrative that "humans are simple-minded and violent assholes" which is repeatedly invoked many times by the characters. And despite there being some sympathetic humans, they either ended up dead or turned out to be a host. It doesn't help that the showrunners keep on insisting that humanity is doomed which eventually came true in the last two episodes of Season 4 with the main cast dead except for Dolores who states that sentient life will go extinct. HBO officially canceled the show in November 2022 — to no one's surprise, given the overall bleakness, cynicism, and rampant death of beloved characters.
• The War of the Worlds (1988) series was guilty of this by its very nature, as the main conceit of the plot was that the world at large couldn't know that the aliens from 1953 had come out of suspended animation and were once again trying to take over the planet. As a result, the heroes usually achieved a Pyrrhic Victory, at the cost of innocent lives. The second season took this to extremes, as half of the supporting characters from the first season (including Colonel Ironhorse, Norton Drake, and the general who was overseeing the Blackwood Project) were killed off in brutal ways, the Blackwood Estate was destroyed and the main group was driven into hiding. This, coupled with the 20 Minutes into the Future/Always Night aesthetic and downright oppressive atmosphere, led to many episodes where most or all of the supporting characters were killed in gruesome ways while the main group suffered from emotional or mental trauma. This continued all the way to the finale, where it somehow tried to be upbeat just minutes after a teenage boy was shot to death by the leader of the Morthrai (who in turn was shot by the boy's friend), and the remaining aliens were left to figure out what to do with their lives.
• Joss Whedon's shows are sometimes in danger of falling into this, due to his admission that angst is the driving factor in much of his writing. This tends to be the reason some Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans call Fanon Discontinuity after season five. You had Buffy Summers Wangst throughout the majority of the sixth season, had a mutually destructive and degrading hookup with Spike, and then became a complete Jerkass. It had gotten so bad that Buffy's close circle of friends would rather have Faith, a once Ax-Crazy rogue Slayer, lead the Potentials because she looked saner than Buffy around that point. The Scoobies themselves are no better, if they're not on a Wangst fest then they're doing something that makes them look unlikable to the viewer’s eyes and they are supposed to be the heroes of the series. Whedon has acknowledged this is an issue with season 6 of Buffy, as he signed off on a bunch of dark story ideas he liked, without considering that having them all happen at the same time might be a bit much. Whedon's self-admitted tendency to kill off the most beloved characters in his shows also discourages many from getting too attached to any one character. His other family members' work don't differ much from this Signature Style, either.
  • Season Five introduced the idea that previous Slayers tended to die after a few years because they got weary of constantly fighting and trying to save the world. After reaching this despair horizon, they would start to give less than 100% and would eventually die by letting their guard down. Towards the end of the season, Buffy has a mental breakdown because she also experiences this weariness and realizes that it may end up costing not her own life, but that of her sister. This belief that her not giving 100% may have contributed to Dawn's capture and possible death drives her into a coma. Fast forward a couple of years, and after Buffy is unable to save the life of a doomed teenage girl, she spends nearly the remainder of Season Seven going through the motions and becoming apathetic toward whether anyone around her suffers or dies, even her close friends or sister.
  • Dollhouse suffered from this right from the start, with even many of Whedon's existing fans finding the show's basic concept to be just too unpleasant, the whole idea of what the (mostly female) Dolls are subjected to teetering far too close to outright sex trafficking.
• One of the reasons British historical dramas of the 1980s (like The Borgias and The Cleopatras) flopped so badly was because they were trying to reproduce the success of I, Claudius. But whereas I, Claudius had evil characters who were partly sympathetic and always entertaining to watch, the shows that came after it featured much weaker, less sympathetic villains. The Cleopatras was especially bad in this regard, as it was essentially a drama about horrible rulers murdering their equally horrible family members. If a character started out decent, there was a good chance he/she would be forcing their subjects into costly wars for their own selfish benefit and dismembering several of their own children by the time their story arc was over.

---