History YMMV / ShortlandStreet

** Selina To'a already hit this territory in 2023 within weeks of getting there. Two of her first storylines were co-opting Harper's bravery during the shooting as her own story to impress influencer Max Lynch and telling Max about Monique's urostomy bag–a horrible violation of privacy–to gain the edge on Monique for Max's attention. Selina somehow combines the worst traits of both Schmidts (Angel's obsession with social media and attention seeking, Desi's lack of tact) and lacks the hidden depths Desi had. Selina does have the occasional moment of being tolerable and behaving like a normal human being, but they're few and far between.

** 2011 and 2012 featured very little interesting and felt like the writers were just half-arsing everything, including returning characters they clearly didn't do any continuity research on, the laziest anniversary season ever written, long, boring storylines which ran way too long. We also had multiple characters who'd been around since at least 2006-2008 still hanging around making the show feel rather stale. On the flipside, however, they'd slowly begin leaving and be replaced with characters who didn't have the same strong personalities or likeable traits.

* GrowingTheBeard: Once the show began receiving more of a budget in 1993, along with its first big mystery storyline featuring the disappearance of Tom Nielsen, the show started getting a more positive reception, along with slowly adding in new fan favourite characters such as Carmen Roberts and Rachel Mckenna.

** 2011 and 2012 featured very little interesting and felt like the writers were just half-arsing everything, including returning characters they clearly didn't do any continuity research on, the laziest anniversary season ever written, long, boring storylines which ran way too long and awful new characters who didn't stick around very long.

** Nicole is this for some people where Maeve is concerned. In just three years of being married to Maeve, she has: distanced herself from her wife at the suggestion of a therapist she barely knew, including going on what was supposed to be their honeymoon by herself (well, with Pele); falsely accused Maeve of cheating on her with Theo when all that went on was a one-sided crush and unwanted kiss while Maeve was stuck in a hospital bed; defended Madonna after she was blatantly homophobic to Maeve and Nicole (her new boss) on her first day of work; and kissed another woman twice, in the midst of Maeve struggling through the trial of Rebekah, who manipulated Maeve's emotions and was retconned to have murdered Maeve's son. There's also the hypocrisy with Harper and Quinn: in 2022, Nicole freaked out over Maeve kissing Harper once when both were drunk and Nicole had all but ended her marriage to Maeve. Nicole and Maeve were this close to reconciling and Maeve admitting to the drunken kiss with Harper completely changed Nicole's mind back in favor of divorce. Six months later, though, Nicole kissed Quinn on two separate occasions when both were sober and Nicole and Maeve were very much back on as a couple. Nicole never apologized to Maeve for kissing Quinn (at least not on screen), and it was Quinn–not Nicole–who told Maeve about the cheating in the first place. Detractors of the Nicole part of the Maecole relationship often cite that Nicole tends to be the one cheating more often than Maeve.
** ...But people make the same argument about Maeve. She's had three cases (Millie, Alexis, and the kid with the tetanus shot) where she clearly crossed the line ethically speaking as a nurse, which put Nicole in a difficult position as DON. She doesn't express remorse for either one, framing the situation as though she was helpless and had no other option than to cross ethical lines even though she did it very deliberately in every case. She arguably didn't do enough to shut down Theo's attention: she kept the pounamu Theo gave her for Christmas and didn't tell Nicole about it, and she even admitted to being attracted to Theo. Maeve also secretly accepted Leanne's money for a vacation for her and Nicole when Nicole wouldn't have wanted to do so, lying about where she'd gotten the money until Nicole caught her, with nothing to suggest that she'd ever intended to tell Nicole the truth. There was also a period when Tom lived in Ferndale where Nicole felt as though Maeve would talk to anyone else but her, specifically Tom. Finally, there's Maeve kissing Harper. It was clearly unethical of her to kiss Harper specifically, since Harper was happily married to Drew, but it's not as clear-cut of an ethical issue when it comes to Maeve and Nicole's marriage, as Nicole had distanced herself heavily from Maeve at that point and their marriage was implied to be all but over. Before the storyline was aborted and pivoted to Maeve vs Brightshine, Maeve began acting extremely entitled and possessive of Nicole after being dumped. Detractors of Maeve and Nicole's relationship who criticise Maeve will point out Maeve will put herself and her need for what she sees as justice over Nicole, often for extremely selfish reasons such as protecting Cassie during the worst of her drug addiction no matter what and using her as a child surrogate for Wilder, randomly running off and being upset when Nicole called the police to sort the problems with Cassie. Either way, consensus among critics of Nicole and Maeve's relationship is their relationship is toxic no matter who you blame.

** Just because we needed another reason to hate Rebekah Anderson at the end of her storyline (for some reason), we were treated to a retcon where instead of her psychotic youth pastor Scott, who was shown drowning Maeve Mullens' son Wilder, Scott couldn't finish the job and Rebekah did it herself.

* HollywoodHomely: Chris Warner once described Emily Devine as "one of the most physically unattractive women I've ever met." Michaela Rooney is FAR from ugly.