Seasonal Rot / Live-Action TV

Seasonal Rot in Live-Action TV.

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Series with their own pages

• Arrowverse
• Doctor Who
• Full House
• Power Rangers
• Supernatural

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#-F

• The 100:
  • For quite a few fans Season 3 was when the show took a huge nosedive in quality thanks to many questionable behind-the-scenes reasons. Firstly despite building up a potential war between Azgeda and the other members of the Coalition the storyline is abruptly aborted three episodes in when the Ice Queen is killed off by Lexa, especially since she was established to be the one who killed Lexa's First Love Cosita. Instead that conflict is replaced by the much more divisive Pike storyline which many fans felt was just rehashing the same tired Sky People v. Grounder conflict already covered in the first two Seasons. Next were the infamous deaths of Lexa and Lincoln which were so abrupt and controversial that many fans left the show entirely. Finally the A.L.I.E. storyline itself for some fans thanks to the introduction of an AI that's trying to take over the world. Fortunately Season 4 was considered to be a huge improvement.
  • The pacing of Season 7 is very problematic for a final season, with the writers focusing several episodes on secondary characters, while the protagonists Clarke and Bellamy are left severely Out of Focus. Sheidheda and Bill Cadogan are far from being the most interesting villains of the show, and the script forces the heroes to act like complete idiots to justify the pair having to stay alive. Finally, Clarke killing Bellamy was extremely divisive among the fandom, to say the least.
• 24:
  • The fourth series of the show is markedly different from the preceding three seasons; Jack is effectively deposed as head of CTU operations, the building itself has undergone a makeover, and almost everyone from the previous season is gone without explanation. It's not surprising that, by the end of the season, almost all of the major surviving characters from the series were brought back into the fold.
  • Season 6 is the only season that was hated by almost everyone; even the writers admit it was incredibly subpar. It started out promising and then became mired in a complex, ridiculous family drama filled with plot points ripped haphazardly from previous episodes.
  • Since Seasons 2, 3, 5, and 7 are generally considered some of the best seasons (obviously debatable, but at least S5 is universally acclaimed), a distinct pattern can be seen: all non-prime-numbered seasons are subpar.
  • The miniseries Live Another Day. While the majority of fans see it as a big step up in quality from the previous 3 seasons, there are a fair number who think it's a part of the same rot that started on Day 6.
  • 24: Legacy, a reboot/continuation season, already suffered from an Audience-Alienating Premise of continuing the show but not including Jack this time around. As it progressed, many people found new lead Eric Carter to be a lackluster replacement for Jack, the story arc was criticized for its uneven pacing despite the shorter episode count, the ending came off as a huge Anti-Climax to many with the final showdown, which only soured fans further when Rebecca Ingram, whom many felt was a better protagonist than Eric, ended up getting killed off. Not helping was the show hyping up the return of fan-favorite Tony Almeida, only to do almost nothing with him, including having him disappear in the middle of the finale.
• Season 4 of 30 Rock is widely considered to be the show's weakest, with an abundance of gags that had simply become tired by that point and an extreme amount of focus on Jack Donaghy's love life. It's also criticized for its harsh treatment of Liz Lemon as the writers started making her out to be much frumpier and more pathetic than she had been in past seasons. While it isn't exactly universally panned, it was certainly considered a step down from the show's incredibly strong first three seasons. Luckily, most fans agree Season 5 refreshed the series and brought it back to the strength of its earlier days, and that Seasons 6 and 7 have followed suit.
• The last two seasons of 3-2-1 Contact. They rearranged the opening theme to the chagrin of many, used many recycled segments from the first two seasons, relied more on individual hosts rather than a team, and the Bloodhound Gang was absent (except for a few repeats).
• 77 Sunset Strip underwent mass changes in its sixth and final season, throwing out every character save Stu Bailey and inserting Replacement Scrappy secretary Hannah as the only new character. The result thus played out more like an early version of I Spy than a straight private-eye series, and ABC axed it mid-season (although reruns were aired during the summer).
• Airwolf took a bit of a nosedive when it was renewed for a fourth season and Channel Hopped to the USA Network. Since this season was produced on an obviously lower budget, some things had to go, including the original main characters and the actual helicopter (which became mainly portrayed by Stock Footage).
• All in the Family had ended its 8th season with Norman Lear departing as executive producer and the Stivics being Put on a Bus to California which resolved the core premise for the series and provided an emotional Tear Jerker of a finale. However, Carroll O'Connor accepted a huge salary increase that led to the show limping on another year that saw the introduction of Edith's young niece who was abandoned by her alcoholic father that the Bunkers took in. This failed to replace the tension that Archie had with Meathead in the first 8 seasons, and while there were still some funny episodes, Lear's creative guidance was sorely missed. After this CBS decided to ReTool the show as Archie Bunker's Place which limped on for 97 more episodes that saw the series shift from Dom Com to Work Com, the death of Edith and Archie growing into a kinder, less ignorant person with an ethnically diverse social circle, which effectively killed his effectiveness as an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist.
  • In fairness, the episode that dealt with Edith's death, "Archie Alone", was considered the high point of the series and directly impacts the next two episodes. One could argue that Archie's softening after this point was also a result, given his breakdown near the end (particularly since he was yelling at Edith to get out of bed, unaware that she had died of a stroke in her sleep).
• All Irwin Allen series. Each one starts off with an interesting premise, a serious tone, and good production values, but by season three the cast is fighting giant carrots. Fans have long noted that the quality of his series is inversely proportional to how long they lasted — Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea managed four seasons and by the end, most episodes practically had chorus lines of big-lipped alligators; Lost in Space went for three and was transitioning from campy to bad by the end, while Land of the Giants lasted two and stayed So Bad, It's Good. The Time Tunnel, which got canned after just one year, was only beginning to show signs of decay by the end of its run.
• Season 6 of All That is generally agreed upon by fans to be the weakest of its original run (1994-2000). This season had to deal with the losses of both Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell^note Gabriel Iglesias was brought in to fill the void., who were the hearts and souls of the show. With Kenan and Kel gone to focus on their own show, All That was now led by Josh Server^note Who was by Season 6, the only remaining original cast member. and Amanda Bynes, who was by this point, becoming too busy with her own show to appear regularly on All That. This was already coupled with the departure of Lori Beth Denberg after Season 4, which left Amanda and Christy Knowings as the only remaining female cast members for the next two seasons. Meanwhile, the sketches were nowhere near on caliber as earlier seasons^note When Seasons 4-6 were going, it was relying on some of the same cast members, same skits, and same jokes mixed in with new people that weren't as funny as the original cast members. Plus, the original cast members looked awkward with the newer cast members since they were getting too old. Also on the production side, Dan Schneider and Kevin Kopelow were becoming less involved in the writing. As time went on, the popularity of All That declined and the show was cancelled. and even the musical guests throughout this season were pretty weak. This was the shortest season among the first six, with only 13 episodes. Afterwards, Nickelodeon temporarily canceled All That due to crew disputes and a general desire to move on. The next time that first-run episodes were produced two years later, it featured an entirely new cast.
• The Amazing Race:
  • Season 8 was a "Family Edition" which was utter crap, and even the production team later said that It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time but turned out badly. The intra-team drama invariably became parents yelling at kids, having children restricted international travel, teams of 4 also restricted international travel (as the show already requires a huge travel budget with teams of 2), the challenges had to be watered down for the families, and so on. The entirety of the race ended up taking place in North and Central America, and viewers watched families turning seemingly dysfunctional while being challenged to such difficult tasks like pitching a tent in exotic Pennsylvania. Its main shining moment was the injection of unfortunate implications Narm of an African-American family having the surname of "Black" (leading to such captions as "Black Family: Last Place" with narration to match). Thankfully, Season 9 returned to the original format.
  • Season 15 had a whiny, mediocre cast full of pseudo-celebrities running on a subpar course. It did not help either that three teams essentially quit the race when they came up against something too difficult (which included such daunting tasks as going down a waterslide and unscrambling the name Franz). Not helping matters was that the fan favorite team, Zev & Justin, who’d been doing extremely well got put out early over a lost passport. This left the other top team, Meghan & Chayne, with no competition and they waltzed to a Flawless Victory as one of three teams ever with an average placement under 2.0.
  • Season 24 is, perhaps, the most poorly produced season since they shed the Early-Installment Weirdness. It was an All-Stars season with some truly baffling casting, including threepeaters at the expense of fan favorite teams. The editing was inexcusably poor for a show that had been on the air for thirteen years which lead to almost everyone being unlikable. The course was also way too easy for a returnee season with excruciatingly tough tasks like screwing and unscrewing lightbulbs. The travel route is also considered one of the worst in the show because it was boring with 5 Asian Legs and 6 European Legs. They visited several of the Once a Season (or so) destinations like China, Switzerland, and the UK.
• American Horror Story:
  • Fans and critics are divided on whether the first season, Murder House, or the second season, Asylum, is better, but everyone agrees that they were both exceptional seasons of television. The third season, Coven, saw a noticeable decline in writing quality (common complaints included a lack of scariness and a disappointing ending), but it was still widely considered enjoyable and spawned some of the show's most enduring memes. Plus, it was the first season with Angela Bassett and Kathy Bates, who both received critical acclaim. The rot only really came with the fourth and fifth seasons, Freak Show and Hotel. Freak Show was universally panned by fans for its lack of plot, one-dimensional characters, and for randomly bringing in big-name guest stars that would ultimately contribute nothing; to this day, it's an easy candidate for the show's worst season. Hotel, meanwhile, was visually stylish and initially seen as a return to form, only for it to go off the rails later in the season.
  • From there, each new season is polarizing, though even those who don't like the newer seasons see them as better than Freak Show, at least. Roanoke had an unusual structure inspired by Reality TV and True Crime documentaries that puzzled many fans, with some proclaiming it to be among the show's best seasons and others ranking it among its worst. Cult, also known as "the Trump season" for its plot that was based around the 2016 US Presidential election, was likewise seen as either gutsy and urgent in its satire or heavy-handed and flippant in such. Finally, Apocalypse, a crossover featuring characters from several prior seasons, was liked for its Continuity Porn but not so much for its own story being a mixed bag.
• While Ancient Aliens has always traditionally relied on heavy usage of Insane Troll Logic and All Myths Are True, early seasons kept the silliness down and generally kept to well-known conspiracy theories (Egyptians building stuff for aliens, for example). Latter seasons get into spiritual conspiracies (angels are aliens, God is an alien) and increasingly relied on tenuous Beethoven Was an Alien Spy and E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi premises (aliens caused The Great Flood, The American Civil War, superheroes are based on aliens, Greek Fire is alien tech, etc) for episodes, along with large amounts of rehashing episodes from earlier seasons.
• The Andy Griffith Show was supposed to end after five seasons, but it was eventually decided to continue with another three, with the biggest change being the show going from black and white to color. Don Knotts (Barney) had already left the series by this point, leaving a noticeable void. Andy Griffith tried to fill the empty spot with newer characters, such as Barney-clone Deputy Warren Ferguson (Jack Burns) and Howard Sprague (Jack Dodson), which didn't work and led to falling ratings. On top of that, those seasons featured a clearly tired Andy Taylor (and an equally tired Griffith), and an ill Howard McNear (Floyd the barber).
• Angel, much like Buffy, is subject to a lot of argument over this.
  • A minority of fans found Season 4 to be extremely hard-going, thanks to a Bait-and-Switch Villain, a hefty portion of Squick, and the continually annoying Wangst of Connor. Summed up nicely by Gunn's description of the season thus far as "a supernatural soap-opera."
  • However, a sizeable minority of the fandom loved Season 4 above all others for being one long serial with constant plot momentum, providing new revelations and/or resolution for plot arcs dating back to Buffy, and a subset of these were disappointed by the network-mandated episodic nature of much of Season 5.
• The Apprentice:
  • The Los Angeles season. It would have been fine if the location was the only thing that changed, but in the face of steadily declining ratings, the show added a number of gimmicks. Viewers saw former viceroys Carolyn and George replaced by Donald Trump's children (granted, Carolyn had quit the show to focus on her own career and George had become The Ghost in the previous season due to his other work, but the replacement choices stunk of nepotism to many viewers). The show's focus shifting toward boardroom and interpersonal drama at the expense of the task (which generally got no more than ten minutes of screentime per episode), the week's losers having to live in tents, the winning Project Manager staying PM until a loss, said PM getting to sit in on boardroom elimination discussions, an entire team getting immunity for a week and as a result, the losing team being split into two groups that had to compete against each other, and the final challenge pitting two teams of two instead of just two finalists. This resulted in a winner that never served as Project Manager. This led to poor ratings and a near-cancellation. Three "Celebrity" editions and dropping the aforementioned gimmicks kept the show afloat; the tenth season returned to regular folks, but ratings were even more dismal than the L.A. season, so Trump announced at the end of Season 10 the discontinued use of the original version and all subsequent seasons (11 onwards) would be in "Celebrity" format.
  • With the UK incarnation of the show, the second season tends to be seen as something of a Sophomore Slump, due to the generally poor quality of the candidates (with the notable exception of Ruth Badger). After that, many fans consider the show to have gradually gone downhill since Season 7 when the prize was changed from an actual job with Lord Sugar to an investment prize, which has led to many accusations that competent candidates are fired for tenuous reasons simply because Sugar doesn't find their proposed business appealing.
• Are You Being Served?: The more or less universal consensus is that the show took a major nose-dive at Series 8, only marginally recovering over the next two series. This was down to a number of reasons, including...
  • A lengthy gap after Series 7, during which the cast members became involved in other projects — including a two-series Spin-Off in which Mr. Humphries (still portrayed by John Inman) was transferred without much explanation to an Australian department store called Bone Brothers.
  • The departure of Mr. Lucas, who was never seen or mentioned again; Trevor Bannister left to pursue a theatre gig, and also felt that the show's humor was becoming stale and repetitive.
  • The replacement of Mr. Lucas by Mr. Spooner (Mike Berry), whose mean-spirited jabs towards the well-known characters were an unwelcome addition. His characterization would be toned down a fair bit after a while.
  • An attempt to replace the ailing Harold Bennett, who played Young Mr. Grace, by introducing his supposed older brother (played by the much younger Kenneth Waller). Waller's Old Mr. Grace proved to be an unlikeable character and a very pale comparison to his predecessor and was never seen again after the end of the season. Unfortunately, neither was Young Mr. Grace... Harold passed away during the run of the season, and the episode featuring the last appearances of both Grace Brothers ("Roots?") aired months after his death.
  • Increasingly desperate attempts to find a senior to replace Mr. Grainger. After losing Mr. Tebbs (Series 6) and Mr. Goldberg (Series 7), the series saw two new unmemorable seniors (Mr. Grossman and Mr. Klein) who lasted a mere four episodes apiece. Thankfully, Series 9 and 10 did away with the idea of having a third man in the Men's department, reducing the staff to only Mr. Humphries and Mr. Spooner.
  • Odd and offensive shifts in the show's humor — "Roots?" is notorious for featuring the cast in a blackface routine (thus preventing it from airing on many PBS stations), and "The Erotic Dreams of Mrs. Slocombe" features not only a heavy-handed storyline about Mrs. Slocombe's alcoholism but a completely out-of-character ending in which a horny Mr. Humphries suddenly wrestles Miss Brahms to the floor.
• Arrested Development had a weaker story arc involving Charlize Theron in early Season 3. Acknowledged by the creators in the episode "SOBs":
  George Sr.: Hey, we can have some celebrities in. Oscar winners, like Nicole Kidman...
  Michael: I don't want to just round up a bunch of famous people that have nothing to do with our family as some sort of cheap stunt. What's that got to do with us?
  • Part of the reason Season 3 suffered was having only 13 episodes (Season 1 had 22 and Season 2 had 18), so many plot points were rushed. This could be why George was put under house arrest with no explanation for why he didn't get sent back to jail.
  • Season 4 caused a bit of a Broken Base. Some people thought it was so bad the show should have stayed canceled. Some thought it was good, if not the best season, while others didn't care much for it and thought it was okay. This is in part due to changes in format. Some people also felt all the main characters became too unsympathetic in it.
  • Season 5 was almost just as poorly received, since the humor still didn't feel as fresh as the first three seasons, and most of the loose ends left by Season 4 took forever to resolve.
• The Avengers (1960s) experienced this when Diana Rigg chose to leave the show, forcing fan-favourite Emma Peel having to be replaced with Tara King. The sixth season was a huge Troubled Production and failed in America with ratings. An attempt at reviving the show (without Rigg again) failed too.
• Season 5 of The A-Team had this, with the A-Team being caught and forced to work for the government (and most closely with Robert Vaughn), and then with the addition of Frankie Santana, an annoying mechanic who added nothing but minimized B. A.'s role. Even the opening theme got messed with—they did away with the opening monologue altogether and changed the theme's sound from orchestral/electric guitars to an almost entirely synthesized remix. This unfortunately led to the series's cancellation.
  • Season 4 was really the beginning of the end. After the first three strongly-rated seasons, a major shift began to occur in Season 4, which relied heavily on guest stars and ratcheting up the camp (even for an admittedly campy show). On top of that, the show suffered serious production problems during Season 4. Finally, mercurial lead actor George Peppard and breakout star Mr. T began to have serious problems with each other (which caused the aforementioned re-tool, and casting of Robert Vaughn, a friend of Peppard's, who it was thought would calm the waters).
• It was the fear of this that caused Danny Arnold to end Barney Miller after season 8. As this article describes this is a point well after many series had begun their rots.
• Bunk'd: Fans will agree that the show gone downhill after season 3 when The Ross Kids left.
• Babylon 5: The consensus is that the fifth and final season suffered this badly, particularly during the "Telepath Colony" arc, which suffered from being overlong and centering around a new character widely considered to be dull and uncharismatic. The "overlong" part was mainly due to the show's potential cancellation at the end of the fourth season, which caused many plot arcs destined for the fifth season to be crammed in early, leaving relatively little for the last season to work with. To a lesser degree, Season 4 gets this as well, also due to the plot cramming, which caused weird pacing issues.
• The HiT Entertainment era (2002-2010) of Barney & Friends provides quite a few points of contention for folks who grew up on the Lyrick Studios era (1992-2000), from Dean Wendt's portrayal of Barney and the park set to the more conflict-driven plots and Riff's introduction.
• Batman, despite the stereotype of being overly campy, had a fairly good balance of drama and farce in its first season. The subsequent seasons lost it, with Season 2 becoming primarily ridiculous while Season 3 was both embarrassingly cheap and ridiculous. The first season, even when being an Affectionate Parody of the Superhero genre, was more of a Deconstructive Parody where Anyone Can Die, the villains were intelligent and the Big Budget Beef-Up could afford Visual Effects of Awesome that were seen in Batman: The Movie. The second season exaggerates the parody and becomes an Indecisive Parody, the villains suffered Flanderization, Everybody Lives and the budget is lower, giving place to Bottle Episodes that break the rule of Show, Don't Tell, there were bad special effects and Stock Footage Failures. The third season was the worst: the Flanderization is at its fullest, creating a Stealth Parody or a Redundant Parody, there were almost No Budget, an episode with Invisible Villains and not even the inclusion of Batgirl as Ms. Fanservice could save the ratings.
• Battlestar Galactica:
  • Galactica 1980 suffers from this in spades, assuming you count it as the second season of Battlestar Galactica (1978).^note (Most DVD releases of 1980 just promote it as a second season of BSG, and the episodes outside of the three-part premiere go by "Battlestar Galactica" instead of "Galactica 1980") The show was forced to pander to kids far more due to its time slot, resulting in an overly juvenile feel to the stories, many of the characters from the original show are implied to have been victims of a Bus Crash, and the heavily-slashed budget is evident throughout.
  • As far as Battlestar Galactica (2003) goes, the miniseries and Season 1 are both generally regarded as awesome, and Season 2 is also well-liked despite a couple of patchy episodes in the second half of the season. However, Season 3 is considered to quickly run out of steam after the New Caprica arc wraps up (albeit the two-part finale was well-received), Season 4 is regarded as pretty forgettable, and Season 4.5, outside of the coup storyline, is just seen as a nonsensical mess that completely fails to wrap up the show's storyline. Unusually, most of the individual episodes in the final seasons are actually pretty well-regarded in and of themselves, with the major criticisms being more around the overall story arc (or lack thereof).
• The British children's series Bernard's Watch started out as just a simple series about a boy with a magic watch that could freeze time, which he used to fix various problems he ran into. But post-revival, the show focused mainly on Bernard's misadventures in school, and the series seemed to gain some kind of misogynistic agenda, as now all of Bernard's problems were caused by the Alpha Bitch who was constantly bullying him and his teacher who hates boys and gives special treatment to girls (especially Alpha Bitch).
• Bewitched is the Trope Namer for The Other Darrin, and many people agree that the series went downhill when Dick Sargent took over. The birth of Adam is also a potential cause of this.
• The Big Bang Theory. While there are plenty of fans who think it gets better every season due to more Character Development and more humor, plenty of other fans think the show has been going downhill since Season 4, because of moving away from the original plot, less focus on the "nerdy" elements and more on relationships, and taking away aspects from the characters that many people loved.
• Big Brother U.S.
  • Fan opinion is that Seasons 2-7 were the show's best seasons, and rot set in at Season 8 when Arnold Shapiro left the show and Allison Grodner took over as the main executive producer. While several seasons are still well-received, fans of the earlier seasons complain that the complex house dynamics were thrown away in favor of a simpler "good vs evil" storytelling each season, and an increased emphasis on romances in the house (this was in part due to the popularity of the Boogie/Erika and Will/Janelle "showmances" on Season 7. Ironically, both of these men started the relationships for strategic reasons and coined the term "showmance" to refer to a fake romance for the show. Later seasons ignored this and now "showmance" is mainly used in a sincere way). Season 9 in particular was poorly received, due to a hastily put together cast of Jerkass eye candy (two of whom were later arrested for selling prescription drugs, one of whom as the winner), and a twist that was meant to prompt the couples into romantic relationships, but was ended a few weeks in after it kept getting the likeable people evicted due to the actions of their partners.
  • Season 13: Following in the wake of Survivor: Redemption Island, practically half the cast was made up of returnees, the worst editing this side of Redemption Island giving the Producer's Pet over 95% of the screentime, the new contestants being edited as a Living Prop, Rachel Reiley being unable to go even so much as three days without having some kind of mental breakdown, Evel Dick having a Non-Gameplay Elimination before the feeds were even up, any bit of drama shaking up the status quo in the house quickly being nullified by blatantly contrived twists and safeguards, and almost every one of the returnees sans Danielle and Jordan being entitled bastards claiming they deserved to win because they were the only ones playing the game. It was so bad that several of those people who've applied for years didn't apply the following year... which almost redeemed it despite the obvious Executive Meddling (if only because the Executive Meddling failed to give a Creator's Pet the win like it did in 2011.)
  • After the success of Season 14, the show re-entered a slump with the following 2 seasons. Season 15 was disliked for again having a cast mainly composed of Jerk Asses, the MVP twist favoring Elissa for the first 3 weeks, and a scandal breaking out nationally due to racist comments made by many of the houseguests (Aaryn, largely responsible for the majority of the comments, actually became the first person to be booed while leaving the house). Season 16 suffered from having a much blander cast than previous seasons (largely due to the producers wanting to play it safe after the controversy of Season 15), an 8-person alliance forming in the first week that turned the rest of the season into a Curb-Stomp Battle that was boring to watch, the now-unpopular Battle of the Block twist making it even easier for said 8-person alliance to stay in power, the majority of the cast being The Load, and having one of the biggest Attention Whores in the history of the show in the form of Frankie Grande.
    • Thankfully, Season 17 has been met with much more positive reception, due to a more interesting, likeable cast and all twists ending before jury, resulting in more moments of enjoyable gameplay rather than Executive Meddling or gimmicky twists.
  • The two seasons following Big Brother 17 saw another downward turn for the series. Big Brother 18, while not hated, was largely seen as So Okay, It's Average: there were likeable heroes and unlikable villains, but no true standout players or memorable moments. Combine that with a number of unpopular production moves such as the casting of both new and returning players, and a very large amount of twists, and you have a season that generally ranks on the lower end of season ranking lists. Big Brother 19, on the other hand, almost immediately shot past 9, 13, and 15 in the "worst seasons" discussion thanks to one individual: Paul Abrahamian. Within the first week of the game, he entered as a twist, having been a Base-Breaking Character on the previous season, kicked an Adorkable guy out on day one, and was granted three weeks of immunity. The rest of the season played out roughly as follows: The entire house worshiped Paul as a God, with anyone who dared go against him almost immediately getting evicted. Those other houseguests were also a collection of the most emotionally unstable, manipulative Jerk Asses to ever be on the show, with the season's two "heroes", Jess and Cody, being just as confrontational and unlikeable. You know there's a problem with your season when bullying a veteran to try and trigger their PTSD is an accepted social strategy, and it happened twice.
    • In the midst of some unfortunate moments for the main series, US Big Brother still saw success with two of its Spin-Off shows: Over the Top and the first season of Celebrity Big Brother. Over the Top, while it had its share of good and bad moments, was overall well-received for its smaller scope and shorter length, as well as for the interesting always-on live feed approach (especially the universally loved live Diary Rooms). Celebrity Big Brother 1 received similar praise for being a more contained yet more well-executed version of the main show: It saw several contestants quitting or otherwise asking to be evicted, but had several game players, and the older cast was seen as a refreshing change of pace from the increasingly-younger casts of the main show.
  • Season 22 is another contender for many people's least favorite season. While hopes were initially high due to it being the show's first All Stars season since 2006, the season saw many fan favorites be evicted in the first few weeks and a dominant alliance made of bland and unlikeable players form which proceeded to control every single eviction throughout the season. Many have complained that the season felt like the equivalent of watching paint dry, and the format of the twists throughout the season seemed to stifle drama: many were excited to watch the fallout of the majority alliance finally turning on Ice Queen Dani, only for a poorly-timed triple eviction leading to her being nominated and evicted in the span of an hour.
• The UK version of Big Brother isn't immune from this either with fans generally placing the Seasonal Rot sometime either from series 8 onwards (thanks to uneven casting, bad twists, and polarising production decisions such as Emily Carr's ejection) or from Series 12 onwards (thanks to the show moving to Channel 5 and an over-reliance on casting younger and more polarising housemates, most notably Helen in Season 15/16).
• The Brazilian Big Brother also suffered from this, with many claiming the rot starting with Series 12, but everyone agreeing the latter half of The New '10s was where the show is starting to overstay its welcome, with 19 having the lowest overall ratings. Things reversed in 20, which along with the COVID-19 Pandemic bringing viewers back had the audience getting attached to its diverse cast of mostly subcelebrities, and 21 was also well-liked. 22 then went back into a dip, with viewers frequently complaining on how boring it was compared to the previous two.
• Blake's 7: As legendary as the series finale is, Season 4 is widely considered to be by far the show's weakest season due to the loss of the Liberator, Cally getting a bridge dropped on her and being replaced by the much less memorable Soolin, the plot of every episode being "The crew try to find something with which to fight the Federation, and don't get it," and the episodes in the first half of the season just being generally very poor due to the hasty re-commissioning of the series.
• Season 3 of Blue Mountain State. We never get a full explanation as to what happened to Radon Randell, Thad alternates between being a Jerkass, a prima donna, a nutball, and a good guy throughout the season, Alex flip flops between his lazy self and a changed man, Coach Daniels isn't as funny as he was, the new coach starts off as a Jerkass before inexplicably doing a heel face turn, Mary Jo becomes a lesbian, and Sammy, poor Sammy. He goes from being a Cloudcuckoolander to a total dumbass (part of it has to do with the fact that he hasn't registered for classes since his first semester of freshman year.) Add the fact that the team nearly got the death penalty and Marty, Thad, Alex, and the remaining main Guys are set to leave and an actual game of football was played in the final episode killed any and all renewal hopes.
• Boy Meets World: Season 7 had a few good episodes and some very memorable moments (i.e. "Playswithsquirrels"), but it was not very good overall. It had many wacky and cartoonish plotlines that didn't fit with the series, tons of Mood Whiplash between the wacky plotlines and serious plotlines, Flanderization up the wazoo, especially with Eric who went from being ditzy to being borderline psychotic, and just not as many laughs to be had. Fortunately, this was the final season and the finale ended the series on a good note.
• Although not divided into "seasons" as such, many fans felt UK soap Brookside declined rapidly from around 2000 until its eventual cancellation in 2003. The show went from being a thrice-weekly staple of Channel 4, showcasing some of the most controversial storylines of its day, to a Saturday afternoon slot with stories as mundane as Alan trying to give up smoking, in a ham-fisted attempt to reverse the Sequel Escalation in plots since the series' mid-90s heyday. Viewing figures declined in tandem with the storylines.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer is widely agreed that there was Seasonal Rot but less clear which season it was:
  • Season 4 is a popular candidate, losing the high school element and most of the popular characters, with Angel and Cordelia having disappeared off onto another show and Xander and Giles Demoted to Extra. Buffy's relationship with Riley was not well received and the introduction of a demon-hunting military unit was too much of a departure from the show's norm. The season also took far too long to get to the point, waiting until over halfway through before introducing Big Bad Adam and then hardly doing anything with him (only his first full episode and the two-parter that wrapped up his storyline give him any real screen time, with the intervening episodes trying to keep the arc moving by having characters go "We must do something to stop Adam" while confronting unrelated problems), leaving it feeling rather directionless at times. Main plus points were Spike's emerging Ensemble Dark Horse status, the return of Faith in "This Year's Girl/Who Are You? ", and a few decent individual episodes like "Fear Itself", "Hush" and "Restless".
  • Season 6 in particular is a case of divisiveness; many revile it for levels of gloom bordering on Wangst, the pathetic-ness of the Trio of as Big Bad, plot elements such as the widely-detested "magic addiction" arc and an inconsistently written romance between Buffy and Spike, while some praise it for the attempts at emotional depth and character development, a change of pace from the relentless Sorting Algorithm of Evil, and individually beloved episodes like "Once More, With Feeling" and "Tabula Rasa". Lampshaded in this scene:
    Buffy: Giles, everything's just been so... Xander left Anya at the altar, and Anya's a vengeance demon again... Dawn's a total klepto... money's been so tight that I've been slinging burgers at the Doublemeat Palace... And I've been sleeping with Spike.
    Giles starts to laugh
    • A minority praise Season 6, though it does seem to be more common among younger viewers who in some cases did not watch the show when it aired. Many people forget today how vilified Season 6 was at the time, especially on TV discussion boards and forums. It reached a point where Joss Whedon had to personally come out and speak about it, saying that he completely understood WHY people reacted so unfavorably towards it.
  • Season 7 likewise gets a lot of flak when compared to what came before. While it doesn't have as much in it that angered fans like Season 6 did (what with the dissolution of Xander/Anya, Willow's addiction to magic, and the near-rape of Buffy), it also lacks a lot of the highs that Season 6 managed ("Once More, With Feeling", "Tabula Rasa", the final arc with Willow's Heel–Face Turn). Season 7's greatest offering is "Conversations With Dead People", but other than that, the entire run of episodes is spent preparing for a fight with the Big Bad. This provides the season with a lot of weariness, as there are far fewer lighthearted episodes to offer levity, and the Big Bad itself was rather uninteresting (being little more than an incarnation of evil). Its Dragon Caleb had potential but is introduced far too late and killed off far too quickly to be among the show's most memorable villains. The Potentials had a mixed reaction: Individual characters were liked by some and hated by others, but either way giving Buffy a mostly non-speaking Red Shirt Army resulted in long-standing characters being pushed to the sidelines. There are, however, a number of decent episodes like "Same Time, Same Place", "First Date" and the Spike character piece "Lies My Parents Told Me".
• Burn Notice, from Season 5 onwards, can be considered a case of this. Insistence on Status Quo Is God and new, much less interesting villains introduced in Deus ex Machina ways (particularly Anson) while old ones are unceremoniously killed off or never heard from again are the main problems. There's also the ludicrously complex villain storylines, of who's working with whom for what purpose, who's been betrayed, etc.
• Californication first began to slip in season 3, which went off on a wacky tangent of making Hank a schoolteacher, but then made a recovery in season 4 as it finally resolved all long-running plot arcs from the beginning of the show and tied things off with a very well-received Series Fauxnale. Seasons 5 and 6 were less well received as they turned the series increasingly Denser and Wackier. But the rot had definitely set in by season 7: the show became painfully unfunny, introduced the truly loathsome character of Levon, and had strung along the Relationship Revolving Door dance between Hank and Karen for so long that audiences just stopped caring if they would end up together or apart.
• Castle:
  • Many fans have argued that Seasons 3 or 4 have experienced this, with the most common reason given being that Castle and Beckett's developing chemistry and relationship, a highlight of the first two seasons, has suffered through numerous ham-fisted attempts to string out the Will They or Won't They? factor by introducing various third-wheel love-interests, angsty 'roadblocks', and an increased emphasis on the conspiracy plot behind Beckett's mother's murder. Many also argue that Beckett has been gradually chickified into a Faux Action Girl as well.
  • An in-universe example of this trope — according to the interview in the real-life Nikki Heat novel Heat Wave — is why Castle killed off Derrick Storm before the start of the show. According to him, he'd grown to know the character too well and couldn't think up any surprises, so he had Derrick go out with a bang rather than inflict "the slow death of literary mediocrity".
  • Season 6 and especially Season 7 have seen deep fractures of the base and a certain level of agreement that seasonal rot has set in. Increasingly absurd plots, failures to tie up arcs, and generally inconsistent characterization have all contributed. A good deal of the base seems to think the Season 6 finale and Castle's disappearance was the marker of a show that has descended from quirky and clever crime-dramedy into soap opera. Other complaints include Castle's Flanderization from savvy layman detective who had a variety of skills including (crude but effective) hand-to-hand combat, expert marksmanship, and intuitive profiling of criminals, into dim-witted conspiracy theorist who seems incapable of finding his way out of a paper bag without equally-flanderized Action Girl Beckett to bail him out.
  • Coinciding with a change in showrunners, Season 8 was widely derided by many fans for a plot that undid the character and plot developments of the previous seasons just to rehash well-trodden ground about Beckett pushing Castle away to investigate the sinister conspiracy behind her mother's murder all by herself, despite the fact that this plot had been well and truly resolved two seasons earlier.
• Charmed fans are divided on where the show started to go downhill.
  • The second season is viewed as the weakest of the Prue era. It features a sudden Genre Shift that downplays the magic elements and focuses on the sisters' personal drama - with the season's only arc being a love triangle between Piper, Leo, and Dan. Given that Leo was the more interesting character, it was obvious that Piper would eventually pick him. But it was stretched out over nearly all the season. Dan was unsurprisingly written out at the end of the season, and Constance M. Burge regretted having the love triangle dominate like that. Uniquely for this trope, it's felt to have picked up steam towards the end, as the next two seasons are considered the show's peak.
  • Season 5 is despised by a lot of fans. After strong arc-based storylines in Seasons 3 and 4, the episodes in Season 5 were mostly standalone (aside from Piper's pregnancy). Some fans also found the tonal shift to be too jarring - as this season introduced a lot more overt fantasy elements - such as mermaids, leprechauns and wood nymphs. This was also around the time The WB really started pushing for Fanservice - resulting in lots of episodes marketed around the fact that they would require a Cute Monster Girl for one of the actresses (usually Alyssa Milano). Phoebe also Took a Level in Jerkass and fans were annoyed at how her storyline with Cole was treated. Guest stars playing villains also became much hammier and impossible to take seriously. Like Season 2 however, it does have a number of well-received standalone episodes, appreciation for higher production values and some Narm Charm for those who found the sillier aspects part of the show's appeal.
  • Season 6 is divisive, as it features some of the similar tonal storylines as Season 5 - but they were essentially less fun. The season's arc also had to be rewritten to account for Holly Marie Combs' pregnancy, leading to a lot of unanswered questions and clumsy explanations. This was also the season that brought about many of the show's infamous continuity errors. However, it's often compared favorably to Season 5 because of its greater emphasis on arcs, fan-favorite Chris, and an epic two-part finale.
  • Season 8 is a mild example, as it was a Post-Script Season. General consensus is that the storylines and overall episode quality was fine, but the network slashed the budget and demanded loads of new faces. Darryl was written out completely, and Leo had to be Put on a Bus for ten episodes - while a new character Billie was introduced, to negative fan reactions. But it introduced a very likable end game love interest for Paige, gave Phoebe some needed Character Rerailment, and the resulting arc towards the end of the season is considered to have ended the show on a high note.
• El Chavo del ocho: Everyone who knows of this show agrees that the departures of Carlos Villagrán (Quico) and Ramón Valdez (Don Ramón) hurt the quality pretty bad (along with the Recycled Script abuse and the Suspiciously Similar Substitutes that became Popis and Ñoño for Quico, and Jaimito el Cartero for Don Ramón). Even nowadays, most reruns on TV tend to avoid the episodes of the post-1978 seasons precisely because of that.
• Chef! ran three series in the early '90s. The first two are sharp, witty, and a wonderful vehicle for Lenny Henry. The third series... it's almost impossible to believe it is the same show.
• Chico and the Man: While the show was still decent by the middle of the third season, Freddie Prinze's drug use and depression was affecting the quality of his acting. His last few episodes show him looking frail and dazed and his performances were more forced and less genuine. He sadly took his own life in January of 1977, before the third season was finished. While the remaining season three episodes did relatively well with other characters picking up the slack, the show ultimately slipped even further in the fourth season. Though they tried to fill the void left by Prinze by bringing on 12-year-old Gabriel Meglar to play "Raul", an orphaned boy Ed eventually adopted, the show was unable to regain the magic it had without the chemistry between Prinze and Jack Albertson. The show was eventually canned in early 1978, with the remaining episodes being burned off later that summer.
• Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman was the first Sentai series to really suffer from this, and it almost proved fatal — as noted here, the series was seen as very stale amongst fans, and ratings were some of the worst at the time^note Flashman, the 4th highest rated Sentai, had average ratings of 12.29%; Fiveman had average ratings of 6.49%. The staleness was attributed to head writer Hirohisa Soda, who had been in charge since Dai Sentai Goggle Five, having seemingly been burned out^note although some fans would argue that it began with Kousoku Sentai Turboranger, it's generally agreed that he was fully burned out by the time of Fiveman by the time he began writing Fiveman. Low ratings, in combination with poor toy sales, would have led Toei to pull the plug on the franchise...had it not been for the success of the next series, Choujin Sentai Jetman^note although later series would end up having lower ratings — most notably Ohranger — toy sales in those series have generally offset the low ratings.
• Chuck:
  • Whether the show decreased in quality in between Seasons 2 and 3 is up for debate, but season 4 is regarded as a large step down by both fans and critics. This was because both seasons started out with thirteen episode orders and a sense that the show's perpetually low ratings would force it into cancellation, thus necessitating the writers to write episode 13 of each year as a potential series finale. But then, the show would inevitably get an extension from that original order due to its ratings being "good enough" amid the endless ratings bloodbath at NBC, thereby forcing the writers to somehow extend a season arc that had already (and in season four in particular, hastily) been wrapped. Season four in particular was rough on this, given that it was extended ELEVEN EPISODES from that original thirteen-episode order, forcing the writers to do several standalones (albeit ones that were received rather well by the fanbase) between the end of the Alexei Volkoff arc and the beginning of the Vivian Volkoff arc. Vivian's arc in particular suffered from poorer character development than Alexei's and the perception that Lauren Cohan wasn't enjoying herself in the role as much as Timothy Dalton was. This latter point got to the extent that both Dalton and Ray Wise had no problems at all upstaging Cohan onscreen despite Vivian supposedly being the driving force of the second-half arc (until the focus whiplashed back to Alexei after it was revealed that his entire persona was a creation of an old version of the Intersect that had gone haywire and submerged his original persona, Hartley Winterbottom).
  • The mass writer exodus during and after Season 3 (Matt Miller and Zev Borow went to Human Target, Scott Rosenbaum to the V remake, Alison Adler to No Ordinary Family and Phil Klemmer to Undercovers) certainly didn't help, given that all of these departures were veterans of the original staff, who had helped shape the show in a very particular way up to that point.
  • Season 5's plot seemed to be about how nothing that had happened in the series (FULCRUM, The Ring, Shaw, etc.) was a coincidence and that Chuck was being manipulated from the start. But then it turned out that Decker was just working for Shaw and any implication of some Myth Arc disappeared. Then the season meandered before introducing the rather unsatisfying Nicholas Quinn in the last few episodes. A lot of people also didn't like that Morgan became the Intersect because it was said numerous times that Chuck is special and is the only one who could handle it. His brief stint as the Intersect at the beginning of the season was also debatably pointless.
• Season 4 of Community. When creator Dan Harmon was out as showrunner, many think the creative energy left with him; episodes relied more on fan-service, increasingly exaggerated plots and characterizations. It's generally agreed that Season 5 grew the beard again to an extent, thanks to the return of Harmon and fresher, more dynamic episodes. However, both Seasons 5 and 6 also have their detractors (particularly Season 6, which — following the show's move to a purely online model after being taken over by Yahoo — had some changes to the format which took some getting used to), and it's widely argued that even after Harmon came back, something was still missing — probably Pierce, Troy, and Shirley. It's also often argued that, in part due to the behind-the-scenes issues mentioned above, the show stayed within the "community college" setting long after it had passed its sell-by date, with the result that the remaining characters seemed to stagnate or devolve. Not to mention that episode plots in the final two seasons increasingly relied on surreal humor with much less of a foundation in relatable character drama, making it difficult for many viewers to stay emotionally invested.
• We do not talk about season six of Criminal Minds. Thanks to Executive Meddling, A.J. Cook (JJ) got fired, Paget Brewster's (Prentiss) screen time got reduced and the writers and the fans were not pleased. The Writer Revolt of the episode where JJ gets promoted is very justified. About halfway into the season, Ashley Seaver was introduced as a major character. It didn't help that she looked a lot like JJ and had a lot of Mary Sue attributes. CBS fixed their errors by Season 7. AJ got rehired, Paget returned and Seaver got Put on a Bus. Season 7 was much better.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm had multiple cases of this:
  • After Seasons 3 & 4 were very well received, Season 5 is considered to be one of the worst in the series. Both story arcs were boring and a bit too serious for the show, and the bizarre season finale which temporarily killed Larry David off is often cited as the worst episode of the series.
  • After the critically acclaimed seasons 6-8, Season 9 was a lot more divisive. The writing has definitely suffered, and the Fatwa arc was disliked as well. It didn't help that it was resolved with an episode that felt like a complete ripoff of the already divisive Seinfeld finale, only to be brought back and tacked onto the season finale as a cheap cliffhanger.
• Dallas:
  • The ninth season had two things going against it: the departure of Patrick Duffy and new showrunners who were turning the show into a Dynasty knockoff, but it was still watchable. The tenth season, which brought back both Duffy and the original showrunner, lost a lot of fans due to the decision to handwave the previous season as All Just a Dream, not just to bring Bobby Ewing (Duffy) back from the dead but to undo the direction the show was headed by decanonizing the season.
  • The eleventh season is generally agreed by fans to be the point where the show's plotlines went from campy and fun to absurd and overwrought. This was buoyed by the departure of Victoria Principal, who is last seen heavily bandaged and sent off with a hastily-concocted excuse that she doesn't want her son to see her condition and that she would rather go into hiding. Budget cuts due to declining ratings led to the firing of key cast members every season, which got so drastic that Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy, and Ken Kercheval were the only actors from the show's original cast that remained all the way to the end. On top of that, audiences didn't fall in love with the new characters, including new wives for J.R. and Bobby and an illegitimate offspring of J.R. Increasingly-ridiculous and overused plotlines became the norm, coupled with awkward sequences where J.R. aggressively pursues women and a ripoff of Fatal Attraction. This ultimately led to a series finale that ended on a cliffhanger that wasn't resolved until a reunion special five years later.
  • The third season of the reboot near-instantly became this. Having wrapped up nearly all of the show's overarching plotlines at the end of season 2, the showrunners decided to reverse several character decisions, most notably by having John Ross cheat on Pamela with Emma Ryland after a season of their mutual attraction blossoming into a full-fledged relationship (and eventual marriage). The show then proceeded to rehash plots from the original series' history, driving viewers away in droves and seeing ratings for the show plummet to historic lows, not just for Dallas but for TNT itself. By the end of its run, the series was barely garnering a fraction of the ratings it had three years earlier, and it ended with a whimper, having a Cliffhanger that will most likely never be resolved.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation: The seasons that get the most flack are seasons 6 through 8.
  • Season 6 split focus between kids already at Degrassi and the college lives of graduates Marco, Paige, Ellie, and occasionally Jake - great for fans of the graduated characters in theory, but in practice it just ended up splitting focus between the two settings with hardly any character interaction. It also killed off fan-favorite J.T. halfway through the season, causing stories to take a dour turn (not that they couldn't already get dark, but they seemed to Shoo Out the Clowns during this time).
  • Season 7 continued the split focus, except now the plotlines for the original characters were significantly worse quality and the supposed power couple of the season, Peter and Mia, had their characters overhauled to be a rockstar and teen model respectfully. Character Derailment was not only rampant but used to justify said characters being written off.
  • Season 8 clearly hoped to undo some of the issues of the previous seasons by dropping the graduates almost entirely and introducing a new group of students to the school. However, there was also a new set of graduates in the form of Emma, Liberty, and Manny, which meant the show was essentially juggling three generations of students across twenty two episodes - and the last four are actually a tv movie bringing Paige, Marco, Ellie, and Jake back for a very divisive finale plot. Suffice to say, a lot of people were happy when season nine cut the original cast appearances down to cameos and were able to focus on the new blood, and it's generally well-received (apart from, again, a divisive tv movie at the end).
  • After some pretty siginificant acclaim in seasons 10 through 12, thanks in no small part to the new telenovela format on Much Music doubling the number of episodes per season and increasing the amount of character development everyone got, the show hit it again in season 13. The first eight episodes are taken up by an arc that splits the cast between Paris and Degrassi during summer break, introducing borderline unlikeable characters in the former and killing off Adam in the latter in what many feel was a poorly-thought-out move. It also sucked most of the cast into tired love triangle plots. While it managed to find its footing by the end, it was likely a sign of the times that the next season had a reduced episode count and then became the final one.
• Desperate Housewives: The Season 5 time jump aborts numerous storylines such as Bree and Orson being new parents while the relationship between Mike and Susan once again got haphazardly changed in order to drag out the "Will they or won't they" drama.
• Dexter is largely considered to have nosedived after its fourth season (except for Season 7, which was well-received).
  • The fifth season was criticized for the Lumen character, the weak resolution of its plotlines, and for being an overall underwhelming follow-up to Season 4's shocking finale.
  • The sixth season was outright panned for poor pacing, ridiculous scenarios, and an obvious plot twist.
  • The eighth and final season disappointed many people thanks to its by-the-numbers villain, its heavy focus on Hannah McKay, poor wrapping up of plot arcs for both major characters and B-plot cast, and its lack of urgency and finality. The fact that it aired right alongside Breaking Bad's universally adored final season, did not do it any favors either, only making all of its flaws stand out even more.
• Many feel Diff'rent Strokes took a nosedive at the tail end of Season 6 when Phillip Drummond married Maggie McKinney. Maggie (Dixie Carter, and later Mary Ann Mobley) and her son Sam (Danny Cooksey, the new cute kid) became regulars the following season. The last two seasons focused largely on Arnold Jackson playing big brother to Sam, leaving eldest brother Willis with little to do. Furthermore, Kimberly was no longer a regular (though she would make occasional appearances) due to the firing of Dana Plato.
• Downton Abbey:
  • Season 2 was very divisive, featuring plots that were started and stopped at random — a disfigured soldier turns up claiming to be the original heir, only to disappear forever at the end of the episode — and the show's Dashed Plot Line nature working against it.
  • Season 3 had to suffer from the loss of three main cast members, two of which had to be Killed Off for Real.
  • By Season 4, Character Development had become forgotten and Replacement Scrappies were everywhere. Dan Stevens lampshaded this on The Graham Norton Show, joking that he only ever gets people saying "I loved the first season." Fellow guest Hayden Panettiere sympathised, saying she got the same with Heroes (see below).
• The fourth season of Due South. Several problems contributed to this: the season premiere (Doctor Longball) is not nearly as memorable or exciting as the others from seasons past, the episodes go back to the well of "unmentioned friend/colleague from Fraser/Stanley's past is in need of help," there are no real guest stars or memorable episodes (until the finale), and there's an increasing reliance on Fraser's spiritual conversations with his dead father. The loss of Paul Haggis as a contributor also meant that a lot of the imagery, themes, and quotable lines that were prevalent in the first two seasons disappeared. Luckily, the series slightly rebounded with the two-part finale, "Call of the Wild," but the second part of finale is loved by some fans, and hated by others who think most of the characters didn't get satisfying and happy endings.
• The Dukes of Hazzard began to rot when Bo & Luke exited and were replaced with Coy & Vance. But even after Bo & Luke returned, the show had already shown its age. We already know that the Dukes clan was all goody-goody. It got to the point where you were no longer booing and hissing at the star villains Boss Hogg & Sheriff Coltrane, but looking forward to their stark contrast to the Dukes' personalities, and relishing in their comic-relief antics — especially since Roscoe Took a Level in Dumbass to become more of a 12-year-old who lives for "hot pursuit". ("Good news, good news! Yuk yuk yuk!")
• The third and ultimately final season of the reboot of The Electric Company had to cope with Lisa being Put on the Bus (the explanation being that she was away at science camp), which left Jessica as ostensibly, the only remaining girl on the Electric Company team. Plus, they added Marcus and Gilda on the Pranksters' side, who naturally became like the Cousin Olivers of their respective groups. Meanwhile, too much time was spent on Marcus "learning the ropes", and the animated version of Francine stopped hosting the "Prankster Planet" segments at the end of the episodes. It was also in the third season that new animated characters served as "hosts" for the show, commenting on the plot and segueing to the segment breaks as well as their own shorts.
• The second half of the second season of Elementary, which is already a case of Sophomore Slump as a whole, mainly due to the deterioration of Sherlock and Joan's relationship and an underwhelming story arc involving Sherlock's brother Mycroft at the end when compared to last season's Moriarty arc.
  • Many fans point to Season 5 as the weakest when it comes to the seasonal Story Arc, as it revolved around an Unintentionally Unsympathetic character (Shinwell Johnson), a forced conflict emerging between Sherlock and Joan, a lack of personal stakes, and ending on the Shocking Swerve of Sherlock developing brain damage for the sake of setting up the next season.
• ER had several points where the quality of the writing and characters notably slipped.
  • Season 5: Ratings-wise, the season was very popular, but the introduction of Lucy Knight wasn't well handled (she was a Cousin Oliver at this point) and the exit of Doug Ross (George Clooney) is divisive even though, debatably, the two episodes in which it occurs were very well-written.
  • The first half of Season 6 involves a lot of cast shuffling, as Jeanie leaves and five new characters are added. The season redeemed itself with "All In The Family", the episode where Lucy Knight is killed, and a happy ending for Doug and Carol.
  • Many, many fans argue that the quality dropped off after Season 8 when Benton and Greene both left the show and handed the reins of the show to Carter. This period of the show is often remembered for its divisive Doctors Without Borders story arcs (while the producers were proud of these, the cast had mixed feelings); a constantly shuffling ensemble in an attempt to recapture the chemistry of the original cast; and dramatic event episodes often culminating in gruesome character deaths. Season 8's "On the Beach" is considered the final episode by certain fans.
  • Relatedly, Seasons 10 and 11 with Carter in the lead. Carter was the designated protagonist after Greene's departure. But because the audience had already seen Carter go from ingenue med student to seasoned attending, there was little character growth left for him, at least in the world of County General itself. Carter's storylines thus take place away from the hospital. For some fans, these seasons devote too much time to Carter's love life and African adventures at the expense of other characters still working at County, and the show bounces back in the next season when Carter departs.
• Endeavour: Series 6 took a decidedly Darker and Edgier tone to its predecessors, following which Series 7 and 8 featured a greater emphasis on series-long storylines, suffering in quality compared to earlier series.
• Eureka: Season 4 was extremely formulaic and overused Chekhov's Gun, plus the alternate-timeline subplot didn’t really amount to anything other than a few superficial changes. Season 5 is much better.
• Frasier: It's common for fans to claim the show underwent some form of this after the great will-they-or-won't-they tension was resolved in Season 7, with Daphne and Niles finally getting together. Though Season 8 mostly deals with the complicated fallout of the relationship, Seasons 9-11 often seem somewhat confused as to what to do now. The character of Daphne in particular is often seen as taken an unpleasant turn post-marriage, with her earlier dotty, charming personality being largely phased out in favor of a new role as a somewhat naggy wife and the chronically exasperated and put-upon family fixer, particularly after her obnoxious mother and brother become major characters in the series.
  • Season 10 gets the worst of it since it's the season where Daphne's obnoxious mother is present in almost every episode, along with a developing love triangle between Frasier, Roz, and a newcomer in the form of the also obnoxious Julia Wilcox, where the supposed romantic undertones of Frasier and Roz falls flat on its face. Mix that in with Frasier becoming an even more pompous jerkass than usual, and... well. The season ends with a juggling of the Jerkass Ball and the Idiot Ball, where Roz demands Frasier chose between her or Julia. Mercifully, season 11 fixes that in its first two episodes, the first dedicating itself to shooting down Froz and blowing up the smoldering remains, the second to getting rid of Julia, and the season as a whole, while still having some rougher patches, is generally considered to be a major improvement that sent the series out on a high-note.
• Friday Night Lights: Season 2, which bafflingly changed gears from the first season's subtle, understated, and authentic portrait of small-town life to Landry murdering a rapist and hiding the body, Matt having a sexy affair with his grandmother's live-in caretaker, and Tim Riggins running afoul of Dillon's dangerous local meth dealer. Many fans feared that the show had lost the plot for good, only for it to return for a brilliant third season once again in the best spirit of the show's original intentions and with even less filler than the already-brilliant first season.
• Friends: Despite taking on a Denser and Wackier tone towards the end of Season 3 and Flanderization kicking in sometime around Season 5, most fans and critics agree that it generally remained a high-quality sitcom and had very strong ratings up to the last episode. But even most agree that its last two seasons (9 and 10) are where it really lost its luster. Common complaints are that the Flanderization was stretched beyond believability (to the point where the characters had become caricatures of their former selves), the plots were less creative and more outrageous (for example, one episode centered around Joey not even being able to successfully repeat basic French words), and the actors were very visibly bored with doing the show. While Rachel and Ross having a kid together in Season 8 could have been a great way to finally end the Will They or Won't They? saga between them since the very first episode, they didn't stop it, leading for the whole thing to continue until the last five minutes of the series finale. Luckily, the show went out on a high note with a solid finale that averted the flaws with the last two seasons, for the most part.
• Fringe: Not as pronounced as in a lot of cases but for some people the switch to an alternate timeline starting in Season 4 and the confusion as to whether we should see these characters as those we knew for the first three years or merely alternate versions caused problems and emotional distance from the storyline. Season 5 (the final season) brought a lot of changes, with a shift to a post-apocalyptic future following an invasion by the observers, all with very little build-up beyond a flash-forward episode in Season 4 which similarly came out of nowhere. It also had to proceed with a decreased budget and episode count, leading to a rushed pace. The changes alienated many viewers, but fans are overall forgiving of the season because they very nearly didn't get a season 5 at all so getting any kind of ending was a blessing, and because the finale (the final scene in particular) is very well regarded.

G-M

• Gabriel's Fire, starring James Earl Jones as a former cop who went to prison, and became a private detective after his release, won four Emmys in its first season. After an ill-advised Retool, it ran for only 12 more episodes under the title Pros and Cons.
• The general critical consensus at the end of the series was that Game of Thrones began to decline in quality once the showrunners made the decision to stray away from faithfully adapting Books 4 and 5, and declined further once they moved past the published material in Seasons 7 and 8. This began in Season 5 and continued until Season 8, where the rot hit a peak:
  • Season 5 was highly contested for the show's radical alteration and streamlining of several important storylines from the books, which resulted in sudden characterization shifts, anticlimactic resolutions, and plot holes becoming more frequent. Another point of contention was the series' increasing tendency to prioritize shock value over narrative coherence, with scenes such as Sansa's rape at the hands of Ramsay Bolton and Stannis' burning of his daughter Shireen as a ritual sacrifice receiving criticism for coming across as gratuitously violent and mean-spirited. However, even in the context of an overall controversial season, the Dorne storyline is generally considered the lowest point of the entire series for its blatant idiocy, the involvement of the widely despised Sand Snakes, and a Cruel Twist Ending that essentially renders the entire subplot pointless.
  • Season 6 was generally considered an improvement over the previous season due to its tighter pacing and a much more satisfying climax, with its final two episodes, "Battle of the Bastards" and "The Winds of Winter" being counted among the show's highlights. However, it also marked the point where the show began to abandon the slow-paced storytelling, complex political drama, and moral ambiguity of the earlier seasons in favor of spectacular action scenes and a much more straightforward, conventional High Fantasy narrative with clearly defined heroes and villains.
  • While Season 6's change of direction wasn't necessarily considered a problem at first, Season 7 is where it began to be seen in a more negative light. For all its impressive visual effects, it was widely criticized for exploiting Offscreen Teleportation and Easy Logistics to justify its rapid pacing, conflicts driven by supposedly smart characters making illogical decisions, and a diminished emotional impact due to the increasing use of Plot Armor for the protagonists — all of which are elements that the show had been praised for averting up until this point.
  • Season 8 was lambasted by fans and critics alike for making characters act Out of Character for the sake of plot advancement or drama (with the resolution of Jaime's and Daenerys' arcs being particularly contentious), a number of glaring continuity errors, and a very uneven pacing due to a shortened runtime of only six episodes. Aside from underutilizing some of the show's most popular characters, several plot points that had been built up for multiple seasons were dropped entirely or ended anti-climactically (one of the worst-received decisions was to resolve the threat of the Night King and the White Walkers in a single episode halfway through the season). The baffling Hollywood Tactics employed during the Battle of the Dawn in that episode and the approach seen in the episode that followed were also ridiculed when compared to high points of the series in that department such as the Battle of the Blackwater, the Battle of Castle Black, and the Battle of the Bastards. Obvious bloopers such as a scene where a modern coffee cup was left in full view confirmed, for some viewers, the declining standards of the show.
• While Series 3 of GamesMaster has its flaws, such as host Dominik Diamond leaving because of the McDonald's sponsorship and being replaced by Dexter Fletcher as host, and the challenge format being changed to the Games World-esque Team Championship, it still stayed true to the competitive gaming nature of the program. However, Series 5, 6, and 7 all marked the slow death of the show due to being less about video games and more about Dominik's comedic talents, frequent innuendos, and constant flirting with female celebrities, losing the aspect of punishment along the way, all of which hurt the show far more than Series 3.
• Get Smart: The beginning of the end generally goes to Season 5 after it was Un-Cancelled, from going in the Friday Night Death Slot, to a long storyline about Agent 99 being pregnant and ultimately giving birth to twins in the two-part episode "And Baby Makes Four," to Don Adams (and thus Max) refusing to appear (apart from a brief cameo) in "Ice Station Siegfried" with José Jiménez… uh, Bill Dana filling in for him, to Siegfried being Put on a Bus after that episode. Little wonder CBS pulled it after its only season there, only to resurface with…
  • The 1995 reboot, full of lame, stale jokes that make the fifth season a lot better than the six episodes aired by Fox. Zack took over as the Designated Hero and fails to match the lovable stupidity of his father, now Demoted to Extra as the Chief of Control. The reboot did the series in until it came back with the cinematic reboot thirteen years later.
• Ghost Hunters has the end of Season 4 or the end of Season 5 being this point for some fans. Even Jason and Grant seem bored while investigating locations. Part of the issue is the similarity of everything from episode to episode as well as the lack of evidence found (especially in relation to shows like Ghost Adventures where they seem to capture far more shadow figures and physical apparitions). Another issue is that the show and the TAPS group has seemed to become more popular as opposed to the next-door neighbors they started out as.
• Gilmore Girls is a rare show that was able to survive the transition from high school to college because of the strong mother-daughter dynamic and quirky town of Stars Hollow... give or take a season or two. Then Season 6 would introduce universally loathed Cousin Oliver April (even Vanessa Marano admitted herself that April was a show wrecker), made Rory into a delinquent, had whole episodes where the girls didn't interact with each other, and extended the Will They or Won't They? even further after a fake-out resolution. Come The CW merger, creator Amy-Sherman Palladino and her husband were forced to leave the show, the actor who played Christopher getting more of a role in the show against the entire fandom's wishes, and many fans had abandoned the show. The new people left in charge (including an executive producer who went off the rails and previously wrote a one-man show about how he wanted Heidi Klum) had no idea how to continue a successful long-running series, and The CW maligned the show by trying to turn it into a teen soap with one adult couple in a hellish love triangle with a hated character, while forgetting a whole town of supporting characters existed, along with new writers who did no research on character canon. A proposed Netflix revival A Year in the Life, with A-SP at the helm, was created in the hopes of rectifying this and giving the show some closure.
• Many viewers think that Glee, a once-clever and promising show, underwent a steep decline as it went on. Part of the problem was that around the time of Season 2, Glee was at an all-time high for its popularity to the point where it ended up displacing American Idol as Fox's flagship series and Adored by the Network started to kick in full force. With the aforementioned decline in quality of the plots, by the third season, ratings began to tank so rapidly that by the end, they were actually lower than the first season's. By the time Season 4 premiered, Fox caught on to the declining popularity and moved the series onto Thursday nights.
  • The show ran into serious trouble in its second season with characters constantly changing motives and personalities, character development going backwards, plots coming out of nowhere, and the show becoming the preachy Public Service Announcement it used to mock. Any pretense of realism had disappeared by the end of Season 2 — the Glee Club inexplicably went from a broke bunch of misfits in Season 1, which was a huge part of the show's charm, to being able to assemble and perform any musical number instantly, complete with jaw-dropping effects, by the Season 2 finale.
  • The decline was much more noticeable in Season 3, with Broken Aesops galore and constant RetConning of forgotten plots. Characters broke up, cheated, and hooked up for no good reason, or else were Flanderized beyond recognition (especially Quinn).
  • In the fourth season, the show had multiple concurrent plots, with New Directions members in Lima, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Kentucky, and New York City, and couldn't develop and pay attention to all of those at once. Fan-favorite Sue appeared less and less, they added a bunch of new characters who were Flanderized versions of the original cast (for example, Kitty is a fill-in for Quinn), and Sectionals, Regionals & Nationals, previously a huge part of the show, came out of nowhere and disappeared afterwards.
  • Season 5 attempted to rectify this by dropping Lima altogether and moving more of the original kids to New York, but the damage had been done, and Season 6 was the show's last (the death of Cory Monteith is another reason).
• The Good Doctor:
  • Although it has some praised episodes like "Friends and Family" and "Hurt", Season 3 has received backlash from some fans for an increased focus on romance drama, with more of Shaun's struggles now being on his love life rather than his social and professional lives. Criticism increased after the writers made some controversial decisions in the season finale, more specifically, the sudden death of Melendez, and Shaun and Lea finally becoming a couple.
  • Season 4 received criticism for two reasons. First, for introducing four new residents to the series, which many fans accuse of being uninteresting or irritating, spending an absurd amount of time that could be devoted to the main characters (the show alleviates this as the season progresses when two of the new residents leave). Also, some fans are not keen on multiple episodes this season focusing on social and political affairs in an unsubtle way (particularly "Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices", which has the lowest user rating of the series on IMDB).
• The Good Wife never really recovered after its co-lead Will was killed off in the final third of season 5. The following season pushed protagonist Alicia into a plot that went nowhere. She ran for a state-level political office and then quickly stepped down after a scandal, only a season after what most people saw as the natural conclusion to her arc, opening her own law firm. Season 7 introduced another love interest for her that also went nowhere as the show ended.
• Gossip Girl:
  • Some fans would place this in Season 3 with its poorly received NYU plot and the way the writers sabotaged Chuck and Blair's relationship. Generally, though, Season 4 is considered to be suffering from this trope, with far too much focus on guest stars and the show becoming more and more plot-driven at the expense of characterization being the initial reasons, followed by sidelining Chuck and Serena in uninspired subplots in order to isolate Dan and Blair so they could become friends. The Dair storyline is subject to debate in this regard since some fans felt the show got much better but there are just as many fans who hate the pairing with a passion and feel the show has been ruined.
  • Season 5 had far too much focus on Louis and the Blair/Louis engagement was not a good idea when the majority of the fans are either passionate Chair shippers or passionate Dair shippers and both sides hate Louis. The season quickly turned into "Blair and all the men who love her", making Serena almost irrelevant and Blair herself rather unlikeable. You'd be hard-pressed to find a fan who's really enjoyed the fifth season.
  • Season 6 was the last for which the actors were contracted, but as a result of Joshua Safran's insistence on turning it into Everybody Loves Blair And Dan And So Will YOU, Dammit, it was the final season and a reduced season at that (very reduced — to 10 episodes, less than half of each of Seasons 2-5 and less than even the first). It also had the show's lowest ratings ever. And having Dan be Gossip Girl with everybody letting him off the hook for his behavior wasn't universally well-received, to say the least.
• Oxygen's show Hair Battle Spectacular suffered this with its second season. While the first season had a So Bad, It's Good vibe to it that was zany, Season 2 screwed the show over, dropping everyone except for the queertastic mentor Derek J. The main problem was that it dropped the likable Brooke Burns in favor of Eva Marcille, therefore removing the main reason why the first season was better than Oxygen's previous attempt in the "hair competition" genre Tease.
• Happy Days is the Trope Namer for Jumping the Shark, thanks to the infamous fifth-season premiere where Fonzie performs a death-defying stunt in shark-infested waters. Although this episode is seen as the moment when the show's quality began to slip as it led a slew of other episodes with ridiculous or Narmy plots (although one about an alien appearing is forgivable for giving Robin Williams his big break, bringing the house down with it), it is thought to have gone completely downhill in Seasons 8-11 after Ron Howard left with the show's seventh season and the focus shifted firmly to Fonzie's antics, if not Joanie and Chachi's relationship, and is said to have gotten worse as it dragged on with the introduction of Chachi, Ted McGinley, and a slew of other unlikable characters. As such, some believe of the show's 11 seasons only about 4 and a half are actually worth watching.
• A common view among the fans of Homeland is that the series' writing quality gradually declined after a universally celebrated Season 1.
  • Viewers started to divide a little bit about the show's quality as early as Season 2. While many aspects of the season is considered to be improved from Season 1, such as having higher pacing to the main plot, more action scenes and thrilling moments, it is also considered to spend too much time to weak or underwhelming sub-plots such as (Brody helping Bassel escape, Mike's investigation of Walker's death, Aileen being Back for the Dead, Mike and Jess' relationship, Brody's nervous breakdown to name a few. If that wasn't enough, the season finale involves pretty egregious examples of Diabolus ex Machina, Ass Pulls and Plot Armour that negates everything the heroes have been fighting against in these two seasons and was seen as one of the weakest episodes because of it.
  • The general consensus is that Season 3 is the worst, mainly due to having an entire subplot about a teenage Romantic Plot Tumour which doesn't at all fit in a show that is otherwise a spy-thriller about stopping terrorists; having a major Ass Pull plot-twists in the middle of the season that negates the logic of an entire subplot; and several characters and supblots never appear again in the second half of the season, also making the season as a whole feel like two different seasons mashed into one.
• Hell's Kitchen went through this starting in Season 8, due to the excessive focus on crazy and/or incompetent contestants rather than talented ones. Season 9 got a lot of heat for Gordon Ramsay's blatant favoritism toward the incredibly bitchy and unlikeable Elise, though for some it was redeemed by the final two of Paul and Will, widely regarded as one of the show's best finalist pairs. However, Season 10 is where many feel the wheels fell off, with virtually every contestant being obnoxious and narcissistic beyond belief, something which wasn't helped by what was widely seen as racist behavior toward popular contestant Barbie by the other women on her team — though like Season 9, it might be redeemed by the season's winner, Christina, regarded by more than a few to be the single best contestant in the show's entire history. Season 11 also faced significant backlash for having one of the worst casts ever. In general, the series went on a significant decline after 10 and 11, with a few exceptions (12, 14, 18, and 19) mixed in.
• Heroes:
  • Season 2: Half the characters had boring storylines, one of the more interesting ones was mostly offscreen, and Maya Herrera. The season was cut short by the 2007 writers' strike and acknowledged by the writers as inferior to Season 1. The main plot also required Peter Petrelli to carry the largest Idiot Ball in recorded history to keep it from being resolved before the season ever started.
  • The first half of Season 3 was worse. The writers heard the complaints that Season 2 was too slow-paced and lacking twists. Their answer? A Random Events Plot and one Aborted Arc after another. Fans could no longer say it was predictable or slow-paced, but the result was even worse. The show mostly returned to form with the second half of its third season and the fourth and final season, though fans argue by how much.
  • Interviews with the creators later clarified (though not necessarily justified) a lot of the problems with Season 2 that led into Season 3. Originally, Peter wouldn't have caught the virus and it would have been released, causing the bad future he foresaw. What was supposed to be the first half of Season 2 involved a lot of setting up for the second half; plot points that ended up being abandoned were originally Chekhovs Guns (for example, Claire's blood was going to be used to cure victims of the virus, and Maya's power would have had some level of control over the virus). Instead, when the writer's strike happened, they decided to change what was supposed to be a mid-season finale into a season finale and chose to take the story in a different direction when they returned.
• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: Minor example. Despite some problems with Season 4 due to Kevin Sorbo suffering an aneurysm, it remained constantly good throughout its run. But Season 5 was REALLY good. It introduced a main villain, had much more drama, introduced deconstruction elements towards The Cape archetype, had Hercules facing mythical figures from other lands and legends, and was just really well done. Season 6 was cut short due to Sorbo being done with the role and had to be wrapped up. It was good but Season 5 left a high bar.
• Highlander takes a steep dive in Season 6. The main character and supporting cast disappear most of the time, and different Immortal women are "auditioned" for a possible spin-off series, which ultimately became moot as none of the actresses got the part and the role was instead given to recurring cast member Elizabeth Gracen. Of the 13 episodes, only "Indiscretions" and the two-part series finale are worth watching along with maybe one other.
• The fifth season of the MTV reality show The Hills. After several seasons of growing controversy and mockery over perceived fake drama, Lauren left the series, distancing herself as much as possible while new lead (and fellow Laguna Beach cast member) Kristin Cavalieri joined the cast. The resulting sixth season saw tanking ratings and contrived circumstances to have the characters get into arguments, culminating in a Gainax Ending (yes, for a reality show) that suggested most, if not all, of the series was faked. Needless to say, fans were not pleased, and the resulting years saw several cast members (including Cavalieri) disparage MTV and the producers for going too far in the opposite direction.
• Homicide: Life on the Street took a dive in Season 6, which saw Howard and Brodie be Put on a Bus and began focusing on the newly introduced Falsone and Ballard in favor of the other, pre-established and already beloved characters, even the show's Breakout Character Pembleton. Season 7 suffered again from the loss of Pembleton; the show tried to replace him with both Falsone and the newly introduced Mike Giardello; Falsone had become widely despised by fans, while Mike Giardello was not particularly hated but regarded as an inferior replacement. Season 7 also saw the show turning into a Law & Order clone, and while it had a few good episodes, couldn't recapture the quality of previous seasons.
• The third series of the Horatio Hornblower. The first two series adapted Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and Lieutenant Hornblower fairly straight, with some Adaptational Expansion. The third series, based on Hornblower and the Hotspur, takes one foiled French effort to stir up rebellion in Ireland and turns it into a story about implausible deep-cover agents in the Navy. Styles goes from impudent-but-likeable to surly seaman of the week and Pellew, a competent and fair captain, becomes a clueless admiral who only seems to care about Hornblower. The production values took a hit, with several instances of Special Effect Failure and gratuitous Stuff Blowing Up. It didn't help that the Forester estate mandated the death of Kennedy, a very popular Ascended Extra, at the end of the second series. Although this was not an unreasonable demand, given that he drastically changed the dynamic of Hornblower and Bush, it did mean that the third series was starting with a disadvantage in the eyes of the show's fans and made them less willing to forgive its flaws.
• House: There is a long debate where the rot actually really began.
  • Season 3 had its moments, but most fans remember and dislike it for a pair of story arcs: The Tritter arc is disliked for severe Deus Angst Machina, Wangst from House, Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, and a resolution that felt forced and anticlimactic, while the "Foreman Is House" was disliked for turning Foreman into a Creator's Pet. The resignation of House's original team at the end of the season also upset many fans.
  • Season 5 also gets accused of this. Plot points that were never brought up again, Wilson and Cuddy acting like bigger asses than House was, an overemphasis on Foreman and Thirteen and giving Foreman all the big plotlines, Chase and Cameron being very rarely seen, the medicine being even worse than before, House turning pathetic and rather stupid and Kutner's suicide made this season even worse than Season 3 in the fans' eyes.
  • Season 6 isn't exactly liked either, being accused of removing almost all of the character traits from House that made him a compelling character in the first place.
  • Some say it happened in Season 7 when House and Cuddy became an official couple and several episodes were now revolving around trying to figure out their new work relationship that was now influenced by their private life relationship or had House interact more with Cuddy's adopted daughter and seemed to domesticate him. But the final straw for many fans was the ending, in which House, having been dumped by Cuddy, drives his car into her house (while she's in the kitchen, no less). House has always been a jerk, but even so, this went well beyond fans' Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
  • Others say it was in the final season, Season 8, where House gets out of jail after having been imprisoned for driving a car into Cuddy's living room when she broke up with him. Aside from this season making Foreman the new Dean of Medicine, the team was once again changed with two new people, then re-altered to include Chase and Taub from before and the overall episodes were not that well-written anymore.
• House of Cards (US):
  • Following the critical acclaim of the first two seasons, coupled with the epic cliffhanger of Frank weaseling his way into the presidency, many viewers found the third season to be a step down in quality. Now that Frank had become president, the writers seemed to try to make him face more challenges and obstacles, but instead it made the cunning, Machiavellian Frank come off as bumbling and counter-productive. The season focusing around a single state primary that even by Frank's admission would make very little difference to who would win the nomination also came across as somewhat unambitious, especially after two seasons in which he worked his way into the Vice-President and then President's roles. Additionally, this season saw Frank and Claire pitted against each other in what felt like drama for the sake of drama.
  • After managing to Win Back the Crowd with the exciting return to form fourth season, common consensus is unfortunately that Season 5 also falls under this. The show's longevity was beginning to show not helped by the change in showrunners and many viewers felt that since the writers had nearly covered every aspect of the Underwoods' rise to power, they were running low on ideas. The result was that Season 5 just dragged featuring such highlights as the use of Deus ex Machina to move the plot along, the repetitiveness of nearly every scene with the Conways and Claire/Tom, the Underwoods pitted against each other again and worst of all was Frank revealing to the audience near the end of the season that his plan all along was to resign from the Presidency and rule things from behind the scenes in the private sector. Why couldn't he do that from the start? Why even bother becoming President in the first place? After spending all of Season 5 building up hype that the Underwoods would establish a dynasty and rule with an iron fist and previous seasons showing Frank fight tooth and nail to land the Presidency and fight even harder to stay in the position, this felt like a big "fuck you" from the writers to the viewers who are now expected to believe that Frank Underwood would be okay with just giving up.
  • Season 6 had an uphill battle already with the show continuing without its main character now that Kevin Spacey had been fired and Frank had died in a Bus Crash between seasons. Instead of completely focusing on Claire, though, the season has Frank's shadow over everything, with the major story threads for the season all centering on how he died, what's going to be his legacy, and how Claire will distance herself from him as President. As for Claire herself, she makes many awful decisions as President (including threatening to start a nuclear war if her cabinet doesn't uncover the details of an assassination conspiracy against her) and uses sexism and motherhood to shield herself from criticism by framing such critiques as misogyny. Combined with an extremely disappointing finale that leaves many questions and plot threads unresolved, and House of Cards ended with a whimper instead of a bang.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Season 5, which came packed full of Flanderization, terrible handling of a romance plotline, piling on the Denser and Wackier for an already Dense and Wacky series, far fewer of the show's signature Flash Forwards or Flash Backs, and a focus on random hijinks repetitively lampooning the characters' personalities instead of the first four seasons' emphasis on Future!Ted needing to explain a lot of seemingly-random hijinks in order for the crucial elements of the main plot to make any sense. After Barney and Robin's breakup, the characters had no real development for the rest of the season, which crippled the show's ever-present character-driven momentum. However, it never actually did anything criminally stupid, so the writers could make do with what they had by using Season 6 to undo most of Season 5's damage and introduce lasting change to the characters (especially Marshall and Lily's attempts to conceive), and giving Season 7 a very focused, plot-driven direction with a great deal of foreshadowing, the "bride" mystery, and the Barney/Robin Will They or Won't They? arc.
  • Judging by the HIMYM message boards, Season 8 left many fans either A) exasperated with the whole "How Ted Met the Mother arc", B) exasperated with the Barney and Robin Will They or Won't They arc, C) thinking the writers have run out of ideas and the show is just running on fumes and needs to end, or D) all of the above.
  • The final season is mostly devoted to the wedding weekend. However, while it started off strong and featured a number of well-regarded episodes, it resulted in the controversial finale which is executed poorly as they crammed 17 years of the story which also destroys the character development of Barney, Robin, and Ted in order to fit the original ending back in 2006 (when the ending had been shot; no, seriously). Despite the amounts of Foreshadowing that Ted is actually telling the story of how he fell in love with Robin, even though quite a few episodes had shown all the ways they simply weren't good for each other, the later seasons still couldn't match the delivery of the first four.
• iCarly:
  • Season 2 was the Growing the Beard season and Season 3 looked to be setting up the show for more mature characterization, continuity, and a resolution to the Shipping aspect of the show. However, Season 4 became reliant on guest stars when the show hadn't really used them at all in the past, the addition of Gibby to the main cast divided fans and some found the shipping arc to be very forced, with one of the cast suddenly being "in love" and having a computer program reveal it without any clear foreshadowing. This happened because of new Nick show Victorious. The same production company and showrunner produced both. Limited resources meant that at the time they couldn't film both at the same time. It led to a yawning gap of months and months in airings of iCarly episodes. There is also a distinct impression that the best ideas of the production group were being used on Victorious. There are also annoyed fans who disliked how obvious the push over the new show over the old one had become. One major example of this push is that the Crossover between the two shows used 3 episodes out of the 13 that had been budgeted for iCarly Season 4, despite revolving around the Victorious cast.
  • Season 5 had taken the show to new lows in ratings and quality. While Seasons 2 and 3 were all roughly similar-rated on average, Season 5 with its Seddie arc dropped the average of the other 4 seasons by millions, and the final episode of the Seddie arc, "iLove You", was at the time the 2nd lowest rated episode ever.
  • Season 6 began with "iApril Fools", a nonsensical episode with no storyline that rated poorly. An overhyped One Direction guest episode coming short of 4 million viewers (for the show's standards) despite record Twitter activity and iTunes sales figures. Though the following episodes were, in general, better received by fans, the ratings didn't improve. Only 2.8 million viewers watched "iOwn A Restaurant", making it the worst-rated episode in the history of the show, and the "iHalfoween" episode that came shortly after it only had 2.9 million. The latter half of Season 6, however, was a bit of an improvement, with slightly improved ratings and a greater number of well-received episodes, but it wasn't enough to save the show.
• Season 5 of In Living Color! The fourth season saw showrunner Keenan Ivory Wayans stepping away from the show due to Executive Meddling by Fox — and taking his family/fellow castmates (Damon (who had left after the previous season to pursue a film career, but would make guest appearances), Marlon (joined the cast in season 4, but left after 13 episodes), Kim and Shawn tried to leave, but both were contractually obligated to remain left at seasons' end) and other members of the staff with him. Scrambling to fill the void, Fox hired a host of new castmates, and of the returning ones, Jim Carrey barely appeared due to his burgeoning film career. What was left were a group of new castmates who didn't elicit much reaction from the audience, jokes and skits that often fell flat, and a general lack of excitement among the cast. Ratings plummeted as a result of general audience apathy, and the show was unceremoniously cancelled in mid-1994.
• Jeopardy! has seen many divisive changes:
  • Season 14 (1997-98): Changing the iconic Jeopardy! Thinking Music (which was used in the Fleming years and the first thirteen seasons of Trebek's run) to a new arrangement, the first video clues read by celebrities, an increase in themed and punny category names, travel shows, and the removal of the podium microphones.
  • Season 17 (2000-01): Contestants no longer walking onstage in their introductions (partly due to Eddie Timanus' five-day run), and the Teen Tournament winner no longer being invited to the Tournament of Champions (due to said winners having to face a difficulty spike in terms of material for the latter tournament).
  • Season 18 (2001-02): The introduction of the Clue Crew, a set of Lovely Assistants who present even more video clues, the doubling of dollar values, and host Alex Trebek shaving off his iconic mustache.
  • Season 20 (2003-04): Removal of the five-game cap for champions, followed within mere months by Ken Jennings' 74-game run that lasted into the next season, a decline in clue quality following the death of longtime writer Steven Dorfman, and Alex acting goofier ever since.
  • Season 25 (2008-09): Removal of the classic clue "pop-in" effect used since the 1984 premiere, and after this season without any popping-in effect, was replaced by another sound effect in the 2009-10 season.
  • Season 31 (2014-15): Removal of the co-champion rule which allowed players who finished tied to compete again on the next show. All ties are now decided with a tiebreaker clue; the winner plays on and keeps their winnings and the loser goes home with $2,000, though none occurred until March 31, 2018.
  • Season 37 (2020-21): The clue writing in general suffered, with a few Final Jeopardy! clues garnering controversy (including two in the span of a week), as well as an increase in poorly-worded and/or misleading clues thanks to new executive producer Mike Richards. In addition, Trebek's death meant that a rotation of guest hosts would take his place for the rest of the season. Some like Ken Jennings, Buzzy Cohen, and David Faber were widely accepted by fans, while at least one (Dr. Mehmet Oz) was universally rejected by fans, former contestants, and at least one contestant who played on one of his episodes. Luckily, the show got out of it in Season 38 thanks to Richards' firing and replacement with Michael Davies.
• In the sixth and ultimately final season of Kate & Allie, both of the daughters had gone off to college and no longer (or rarely) appeared. Even more awkward was Chip now being at a period of adolescence where his voice constantly cracked and had a newfound horniness for girls that was only marginally convincing. They also weirdly wrote in that Allie's new husband was away from home frequently so Kate could move in. By this point, the character of Allie became really insufferable once she married Bob. All of this was likely a result of the series being cancelled and then brought back for half a season. Plus, the creative forces behind Kate & Allie (Bob Randall and Bill Persky) had left after Season 5. And while it was also affected by a writer's strike that affected the quality, it really was trying to go beyond its premise at that point. Jane Curtin for her part, was not happy with quality of the final season, as she called the scripts "uneven".
• Many people felt this way about Kickin' It in season 4, due to the entirely new setting and Kim's departure.
• Some people felt that Kyle XY began to suffer when it became less about Kyle himself (as in Season 1) and more about the evil MegaCorp that was pursuing him (as in Seasons 2 and 3).
• With The L Word, the later seasons in general are often accused of this, but particularly the final season — which is so universally hated that some fans prefer to pretend it didn't happen.
• Fans of Lab Rats thought that the show hit this when season 4 came around. Because of some... "thing" happening in the show, the series was moved from Leo's basement to a bionic island. The only thing that fans thought was good was the crossover with Mighty Med, and only because it didn't have anything to do with the season's plot; and the season's special episodes (Bionic Rebellion, Bionic Action Hero, On The Edge, Space Colony, and The Vanishing) since those have consistently been the show's greatest strengths. Fortunately, it ended with a good note...
  • ...until Lab Rats: Elite Force, fifth season/spinoff/fusion with Mighty Med. The show had nothing to do with the original series, not to mention only two actors from Lab Rats actually appearing. The show flopped and was cancelled after 15 episodes.
• Laguna Beach: The third season saw an entirely new cast of characters (including the sister of one of the main characters from the first two seasons) take the stage, though audiences quickly soured in the face of middling plots, relationship teases which went nowhere, lines and dialogue that quickly gained infamy for their cheesiness and a main character (Tessa) who came off as unlikeable to some. As a result, the show was retooled into Newport Harbor: The Real Orange County, which was set several miles up the coast and featured an entirely different locale and cast. It didn't work, and the flagship franchise died with that season.
• L.A. Law:
  • The rot began when the show lost three of its original cast members (Harry Hamlin, Jimmy Smits, and Michele Greene) at the end of the fifth season. New cast members Conchata Ferrell, Michael Cumpsty, and Sheila Kelley tried gamely, but Season 6 was nowhere near the quality of previous seasons.
  • Season 7 was even worse: Ferrell, Cumpsty, Amanda Donohoe, Cecil Hoffman, and original cast member Susan Dey all departed the show, along with series creator/executive producer Steven Bochco and consultant David E. Kelley. The show lapsed into an Audience-Alienating Era, with ridiculous soapy stories, Big Lipped Alligator Moments, Romantic Plot Tumors and a severe decline in script quality. The series began to (slightly) pick itself up mid-season, when John Masius and John Tinker, Bochco's replacements, were let go and William Finkelstein took over, but by then much of the show's fandom had abandoned it. L.A. Law limped through one final season before it succumbed to low ratings.
• With Last of the Summer Wine being the longest-running live-action sitcom ever at 31 seasons, it's inevitable that some seasons would be better than others. However, it's generally agreed that the show was never quite the same after Compo's death, and the advancing age of Peter Sallis and Frank Thornton resulting in Clegg and Truly being Demoted to Extra in the last two seasons and replaced with a new central trio brought the show to its lowest point.
• For fans of Laverne & Shirley, the show went downhill when the main characters moved to California after the 5th season. Even those who still liked the show after the move were put off when the final season took the series to Franchise Zombie levels by featuring Laverne... without Shirley.
• Law & Order: The undeniable highlight of the show was its run from Season 3-14, with the loveable Deadpan Snarker Det. Lenny Briscoe, played by Jerry Orbach. While the prosecutors, junior detectives, and district attorneys varied, as well as the show's overall tone (Season 10 was far Darker and Edgier than the rest), many fans tuned in solely for Briscoe. It should be noted that Jack McCoy was ever-popular during this run, and Lieutenant Van Buren helped draw in minority viewers; however, District Attorney Nora Lewin's (played by twice Academy Award-winning actress Dianne Wiest) run from Seasons 11-12 was so unpopular that she was written off by having her lose an election by a landslide. After Orbach's untimely death, the show dropped in ratings, though Det. Fontana was considered a Lovable Rogue from 15-16. However, Season 17's primarily young cast and sensationalist storytelling was such a departure from its roots that it began the show's downward spiral, despite having strong cast members such as Jeremy Sisto and Linus Roache in Seasons 18-20.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: While it's arguable exactly where the show's rot truly began (although good candidates for such include Season 9, when Benson grabbed the show's Idiot Ball by helping out her wayward long-lost brother and nearly losing her badge; and Season 8, which brought both the inclusions of Lake and Beck, the latter of whom added yet another layer to the already complex Love Triangle between Benson, Stabler and Stabler's wife), but Season 13 is when many have pinpointed where the show started going south. Even with his base-breaking status, people will agree that the show lost some of its heart when Stabler resigned from the force in the season finale and was replaced by Amaro, who, after a year or so of having little to no personality, devolved into a Stabler-clone to many fans' chagrin. Additionally, Munch was Demoted to Extra again in favor of a new character, Rollins (only this time, he eventually would retire while her character got to stay), storylines were rehashed, the Ripped from the Headlines plots became rather over-the-top and it became the Crime Time Soap that its detractors had always accused it of being.
• Law & Order: UK: The rot began in Series 5 with the departure of two of its original cast members, then kicked into high gear by Series 6 with the departure of Jamie Bamber and really ramped up by Series 7 with Bradley Walsh as the only original cast member remaining. Their replacements, while not bad characters or actors in their own right, simply did not generate the flawless chemistry of the original cast. In particular, Ronnie and Matt's rapport was never duplicated with either of Matt's replacements. The remaining episodes, while not bad — "Deal"/"Survivor's Guilt" are almost unanimously considered among the series' best — were not nearly as good as those from the first 4 series.
• LazyTown: Seasons 3 and 4 were made years after the second one, so this was inevitable to happen. Interactive dance sequences were added to the musical numbers in season 3, Stephanie got flanderized and her flaws were removed, Robbie and the kids were dumbed down, and overall people felt that while they had their moments, they didn’t have the same charm as the first two. However, everyone agrees that without these seasons, we wouldn't have had the series' Signature Scene, "We Are Number One," or Robbie's A Day in the Limelight episode "The First Day of Summer."
• During Season 5 of Leverage, the team began depending upon more outlandish cons requiring unlikely levels of technology from Hardison to pull off (from the Really Big Bird Job's false flight of the Spruce Goose to the "Close encounter" in the First Contact Job to the White Rabbit job's Inception/holodeck system. This was not helped by the increase in contrast between the sophistication of many of their cons and crucial plot points increasingly being played for laughs. This had been a problem in earlier seasons as well but was much worse here. While the season still offered several truly excellent episodes, especially the series finale, the drop in quality was noticeable, and doubtless helped contribute to the series' eventual cancellation.
• Line of Duty, despite being a well-loved British Series Detective Drama, has had multiple cases of this:
  • Season 3 is where the rot was really considered to have set in, with Pacing Problems and Filler episodes being a major criticism from the viewers. In general, the problems were largely down to "The Caddy" Story Arc, and Hate Sink Gill Biggeloe and Lindsay Denton, the Big Bad, was seen as a Filler Villain despite being in the well-liked Season 2.
  • Season 4 was largely seen as one Filler Story Arc, with unlikeable characters (although this show is set in a Crapsack World), including Jodie Taylor, who was divisive and seen as a Jerkass at best, and in general, the plotline was seen as average. Despite a good cast, it was seen as having too many episodes with filler and the pacing being poor.
  • Some viewers/fans even considered Season 5 Fanon Discontinuity due to Filler and sluggish pacing, although Natalie Gavin's appearance as Sergeant Martina "Tina" Tranter (who's liked by the fandom) softened it a bit since she is a well-regarded actress in the UK who doesn't often get major roles, although it was a case of supporting a villainous character that she played. In general, some fans feel that it's been difficult to keep the momentum up in recent series.
• Lost has had this:
  • What's known for sure is that Season 2 lost many viewers because of an overly large Kudzu Plot. The first six episodes of Season 3 (the "pod") were widely panned and turned off a lot of fans (who would then go on to miss episode 7, "Not in Portland," considered one of the show's finest, and the nearly unbroken line of incredible episodes that followed it). Fortunately, with the series' end scheduled to the sixth season years in advance, Seasons 4 and 5 started expanding the context of the story and tying together some of the various loose ends.
  • Season 6 suffered from this as well for a lot of viewers, mainly because of an alternate-universe subplot that was generally seen as unnecessary and uninteresting, and an increasing emphasis on mystical and metaphysical themes (which the show hadn't really embraced until that point), all culminating in an extremely polarizing series finale which answered very few questions.
• The third season of Lucifer (2016) proved to be deeply unpopular with the fans. While the addition of Charlotte Richards as a regular character was well-received the rest of the season was widely panned. Lucifer and Chloe's relationship decayed, straining the patience of fans who didn't ship them, and Chloe's suddenly hooking up with Marcus Pierce just made the Romantic Plot Tumor even worse. Meanwhile, Maze Took a Level in Jerkass, becoming completely self-centered and lashing out at everyone around her. With ratings slowly dropping Fox cancelled the show at the end of the season. Netflix eventually revived the show and the writers took several steps to correct the issues from season 3. The resulting fourth season is considered the best season of the entire show.
• The last couple of seasons (the starting point depends on the viewer) of MacGyver aren't viewed as favorably as the first couple seasons due to the Genre Shift of the show. By the last season, it was practically little more than a soapbox for the major issues the writers viewed as important. Most of the elements that made the show successful were toned down or phased out in favor of Anvilicious issue-of-the-week episodes.
• Some fans have accused the later seasons of Mad Men of this, especially since Don married Megan.
  • Season 5 got a lot of complaints about its extremely uneven tone and pacing, and for its focus on more melodramatic subplots, plus fan-favorite characters Don and Joan acting at times quite Out of Character without a compelling explanation. For some, it seemed like Mad Men was descending into the territory of high-gloss soap opera.
  • Season 6 in particular seemed to suffer from this, with a number of odd episodes ("The Crash" standing out in particular) and a slower season-long plot that some accused of being too scattershot. There was much acclaim for the final few episodes of the season, though, with the finale ("In Care Of") being particularly well regarded.
• The third season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (during which the approach was changed to ride the coattails of Batman, which also affected The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.) is hated by most fans — two low points being Kuryakin riding a bomb full of essence of skunk that's falling onto Las Vegas and Solo dancing the Watusi with a gorilla — and considered to be the season that killed the show, although it did get an abbreviated fourth season that tried to reverse the damage (too little, too late — and as Jon Heitland's book on the series pointed out, if the third season was too comical the fourth season was too serious).
• Married... with Children had Season 7: The first half or so of the season had the Bundys become an adoptive family for Peg's nephew Seven. Seven was an unfunny obnoxious brat, while Peg became a genuinely caring mother to him, rather than the Love to Hate negligent mother fans had been accustomed to. Even the crew didn't like him. He was thankfully removed completely and Put on a Bus in the middle of the season.
• All fans agree M*A*S*H had Seasonal Rot, but depending on who you ask, it starts at Season 4, 5, 6 or 8. And for some, it's Seasons 1-3.
  • Season 4 saw Henry Blake and Trapper replaced by Colonel Potter and B.J., and the series started moving from its tone firmly from comedy towards more drama. Head writer and developer Larry Gelbart left after Season 4.
  • After Season 5, Frank Burns was replaced with Charles Winchester, executive producer Gene Reynolds was replaced by Burt Metcalfe, and Alan Alda (who played Hawkeye) got more control over the series, with the anti-war message becoming more and more Anvilicious.
  • Radar O'Reilly disappeared from the series in Season 8, by which point the entire original writing staff had been replaced. Harry Morgan (who played Colonel Potter) has said in interviews that he felt the cracks were starting to show by Season 9.
  • A lot of commenters bring up the fact that Season 10 has an episode in which a goat eats the camp's payroll as a sign of obvious creative bankruptcy.
  • Despite the increasingly worn plots, boffo ratings demanded renewal until the main stars refused to make a season 12. And yet season 12 happened anyway in the form of a successor series featuring three of the supporting cast.
  • And said show may have been a victim of this as well. The first season actually did pretty well finishing 19th in the ratings, a standing that any producer of a first-season show would be over the moon about. But Creator/CBS wanted ratings equivalent to a M*A*S*H season 12, and so instituted a major campaign of Executive Meddling for the second (and last, as it turned out) season of AfterMASH. The writing of the first season, which was closer to the "dramedy" of seasons 4-11 of M*A*S*H was replaced with broad comedy closer to the first three seasons. Many of the supporting cast were replaced with more comedic characters (and in Mildred Potter's case, was just plain recast, with her character devolving from a level-headed spouse to a more sitcom-y ditzy wife), and Klinger started wearing dresses and pretending to be crazy again. CBS seriously thought that the retooled show could be the thing to dethrone the ratings juggernaut of The A-Team (whose own date with Seasonal Rot was just around the corner), and so scheduled AfterMASH against it, running (in retrospect, hubristic) ads depicting Klinger in a nurse's uniform shaving off Mr. T's distinctive mohawk. Viewers abandoned the show for The A-Team, and it never recovered, being unceremonoiusly cancelled halfway through its second season.
• Maverick lost most of its appeal after James Garner's departure from the series, and Seasons 4 and 5 are often considered the low points. The former introduced two new characters to fill Bret's cowboy boots, but Beau and Brent did not last very long, and in the latter season, the series' last, the new episodes featured Bart alone.
• Seasons four and five of Merlin (2008), due to the writers not caring about previous plot details, like Arthur knowing his mom died due to magic, despite Uther going to great lengths in season two to hide that fact. This also applies to the Dragon's prophecy falling apart because of Mordred showing that Arthur will die on the fields of Camlann by a druid's hand. And on top of that, the dream of Morgana's death in season four is nothing like her death in the finale. That, and Arthur can't remember Mordred at all. And the whole Aithusa debacle.
• Miami Vice: Season 4 is considered to be the worst season, due to the Lighter and Softer approach, with some of the lighter episodes veering wildly into science-fiction and comedy, most infamously the seventh episode "Missing Hours", which is often cited as the show's worst episode. The disparity between dark episodes and light episodes leads to a decidedly uneven season. There's also Tubbs being Out of Focus and Jan Hammer's musical contribution noticeably reduced, with many of his cues from earlier seasons simply being recycled.
• Misfits:
  • Many fans consider the quality to have dropped in Series 3, particularly the departure of Nathan. Despite his replacement by Rudy and the promise that the characters would get completely new powers... it amounted to Curtis being able to turn into a woman and Kelly was now a rocket scientist. The show vaguely meandered for several episodes, before shifting focus to power-dealer Seth and his quest to resurrect his dead girlfriend, before culminating in a lackluster finale, which ended with the Stupid Sacrifice of Simon, who after the death of Alisha decided to go back in time to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to save her life in the past. Fans were left baffled why he couldn't have prevented both things from happening since they'd previously used time travel to alter history dozens of times before?!
  • By Series 4, with the further departure of Kelly, this left Curtis, oft-considered the least interesting character. Add two new characters many reviewers believe to be bland, the Cringe Comedy moments from Rudy are the only thing that made the show marginally entertaining. And then Curtis died. Series 4 also irritated fans by hardly ever featuring the characters' powers. However, the fifth and final series was generally quite well-received as a return to form.
• This trope set in on Mission: Impossible after the third season, with the departures of producer Bruce Geller and co-stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. Landau’s role was taken over by Leonard Nimoy, who made the most of his opportunity but never seemed completely comfortable with his character. The lack of continuity in the female co-lead also affected the show's chemistry, with Lee Meriwether (adequate), Lesley Ann Warren (clearly miscast), Lynda Day George (a slight improvement over Warren), and Barbara Anderson (a temporary replacement for George when the latter went on maternity leave) taking on that role and falling short of filling Bain's shoes. Later seasons were also hit with increasingly limited budgets, which resulted in formulaic scripts that had the IM Force almost exclusively battling organized crime.
• Fans of Modern Family believe that the show declined in season 7 when Joe became a speaking character who became a typical verbose sitcom kid rather than an interesting child character like his predecessors when the original child characters became older, and the show became more and more reliant on farcical stories as opposed to slower-paced, more realistic ones, guest stars, and location episodes. Season 11, the final season, which wasn't supposed to happen was a particular example of this because instead of focusing on Haley's life as a new mother and Phil and Claire's new role as grandparents, it focused more on Manny's love life with the universally hated Sherry and featured widely disliked plots such as Claire leaving her family business.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: John Cleese left the show after the third series. Without his rigorous quality control, the fourth season, renamed simply Monty Python, featured way too many half-baked ideas and thin premises stretched well past breaking point, resulting in a horribly uneven batch of episodes. This was acknowledged by the remaining Pythons, their excuse being that, unlike Cleese, they didn't have a project to move on to (Cleese was writing Fawlty Towers as well as writing for other TV series), so they were uncomfortable about letting go of their only work.
• Mork & Mindy went from being 3rd place in the Nielsen charts in its first season to 27th place in the second, and failed to really recover from the ratings drop, due to Executive Meddling at ABC. The network wanted to appeal more to a younger, hipper crowd, jettisoning Mindy's dad & grandma as regular characters, introducing more and more bizarre or cartoonish characters to the show to play off Robin Williams (granted, formerly one-shot character Exidor did get a bit of popularity rivaling Mork when he was featured in episodes), and the show was given a disco rearrangement. The executives also wanted Mindy to dress more sexually with more cleavage and curves, before Robin stepped in and protested. This, along with a move from Thursday night to Sunday night, introducing special guests like Raquel Welch and Barbara Billingsley and moving its stories from the "space alien observes Earth customs" theme to making Mindy and Mork a couple (and later, a married couple with a child played by Robin's idol Jonathan Winters) did not help ratings at all. The show struggled on until its cancellation in 1982.
• It was fear of this that caused Jim Henson to end The Muppet Show after five seasons, despite being at the height of its popularity at that point.
• Fans of My Family tend to admit that the later seasons, were marked by a general decline in the writing, with increasingly grating Flanderization, jokes being run into the ground, and a character who had spent several seasons near-obsessed with women suddenly and arbitrarily coming out as gay. Season 11 marked the point when the long-suffering Robert Lindsay and Zoë Wanamaker, who had spent several seasons complaining about the scripts, gave up and quit.
• Mythbusters began to develop this reputation when the show began moving into scenarios drawing more from fantasy or controlled environments instead of the urban legends in which it began to the point where Adam began to call them tropes instead of myths. The seasons in which the Build Team left are also a point of contention, as they took their unique personality and additions to the show with them. The most significant instance was the dragon lady myth, which was considered to feel like an excuse for the spectacle presented with no actual testing, recreation, or fact-digging with the myth itself only referred to once at the end of the show.

N-S

• Some viewers feel Nashville started suffering this in Season 2 following the departure of T-Bone Burnett on the musical front, but his other commitments meant he was only going to work on the series in its first season anyway. Others feel it started suffering this following moving the focus from the music industry, an increase in melodrama (not helped by several of the show's original writers leaving) and introducing a revolving cast of Scrappies; it continued in Season 3, with the show courting Too Bleak, Stopped Caring by staying on the same creative path. Because of the misguided faith in misery and recycled plots (especially in regards to Gunnar and Scarlett) — as well as giving Juliette a postpartum depression storyline that not only didn't work with viewers (or critics) but wound up backfiring horribly due to Hayden Panettiere having it for real — Season 4 was its last on ABC. It made a Channel Hop to CMT with new showrunners and the departure of Aubrey Peeples and Will Chase, meaning no more of the widely disliked Layla Grant. Thankfully, the series was given a Series Finale that went down much better with viewers.
• The third and final season of Necessary Roughness was a nearly-complete overhaul of the series, with Dani being fired from the Hawks for stupid reasons and instead going to work for an agency that was obviously corrupt as hell. Meanwhile, most of the regular cast was either Put on a Bus or Demoted to Extra, and the storyline about T.K.'s efforts to redeem himself (or at the very least, restore his public image) was tossed out in favor of a Romantic Plot Tumor that magically undid all of his Character Development from the previous two seasons. None of this was received well by fans, and thus the series was cancelled.
• For Northern Exposure, the fourth season (featuring Anthony Edwards' gratingly insufferable bubble-bound eco-activist Mike) was wobbly, but the real trouble started at the beginning of the fifth season when the series got a new Showrunner in the person of David Chase. Chase openly despised the show's basic premise—calling it "...something I couldn't understand."—and admittedly only took the job for the paycheck. Clearly at sea with a show set in a "non-judgemental universe", the Chase-led fifth season lurches along never sure about what it's trying to be, clearly unable and unwilling to go for offbeat whimsy but also not really going for dramatic either. The decline accelerated the following year after Joel Fleischman left and was replaced as town doctor by the uninspiring Phil Capra.
• When The O.C. premiered in 2003 it became a pop culture sensation overnight. Critics praised the show for its clever dialogue, excellent writing, and interesting characters, and it was one of the highest-rated television shows in its time slot. For its second season, Fox moved the show to a competitive Thursday night time slot, which ended up costing it viewers. There's also a general agreement among fans that the quality of the show declined in the second season, although it was still pretty good. Season 3 is almost universally considered to be the show's worst season due to it introducing several new characters who were disliked by fans as well as the overall tone becoming more serious and angsty, thus causing the ratings to drop even further. When Season 4 rolled around the show began to improve in quality, returning the focus to the main cast members and bringing back the comedy. Unfortunately, by that point, most people had given up on The O.C. and it was cancelled due to low ratings.
• Fans' opinions on when The Office started dipping in quality differ wildly.
  • While Series 2 and 3 are almost universally adored and considered the show's golden age, Season 4 divided fans a little by its focus on darker storylines and some sudden changes to main characters (though with the newly unemployed Jan and the newly enshrined Ryan, it could make sense in context), and some thought actually putting Jim and Pam together brought on a case of sharp Shipping Bed Death. The fact that the writer's strike cut into the number of episodes (14 down from the originally planned 22-episode season) meant that some story arcs probably didn't get their full time to grow and be resolved.
  • While Season 5 got some sighs of relief as the show seemed to regain its goofier, warmer, improv-friendly tone of previous seasons, some thought the characters were slowly descending into caricatures and the plotlines were becoming increasingly tame and redundant. Season 6 onwards is widely considered when the show took a sharp dip in quality, as there seemed to be little urgency to their plotlines, and the various quirks and ticks of the ensemble had become increasingly ho-hum and the show started begetting too many Out of Character moments. Only Jim and Pam's wedding at Niagara Falls and the build-up to Michael's leaving of Dunder-Mifflin were considered noteworthy plotlines.
  • Seasons 8 and 9 are generally considered the worst of the show, although the Series Finale is generally well regarded. Season 8 is criticized by the addition of the Creator's Pet Nellie to the plot and a general inability for the show to keep itself afloat with Jim and Pam's now uninteresting relationship and the lack of Michael's presence. Season 9 was absolutely reviled by characters becoming extremely more unsympathetic, Nellie's extended focus, the addition of the Pete/Erin romance, a plotline generally disliked for being a poorly done rehash of Jim and Pam's earlier dynamics, and derailing Andy's character.
• The Yorkshire Television sitcom Oh No Its Selwyn Froggitt enjoyed three series of big audiences and favourable, if not rave, reviews from critics as it followed the antics of cheerful but clumsy council labourer Selwyn Froggitt (Bill Maynard), whose Catchphrase, "Magic!" (delivered with a big grin and double thumbs up), became part of everyday slang. However, everything changed for the worse for the fourth series in 1978, re-titled Selwyn. All of the original cast (except Maynard) and writer Alan Plater left to pursue other interests, and Selwyn was now the entertainment manager at a run-down holiday camp on the east coast of England. Everything and everyone that made Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt work was gone, replaced with a hackneyed personality clash between Selwyn and the camp manager's nephew Mervyn (Bernard Gallagher), and critics and audiences turned on the series en masse, leading to plans for a second series under the Selwyn name being scrapped.
• Fan and critical consensus is that Orange Is the New Black stumbled during Season 5. Season 4 set up the prison riot with Poussey's death at the hands of a guard, but the resulting riot was seen as a big disappointment. In an apparent lack of nerve the writers seemed unwilling to commit to the drama that the occasion warranted and instead relied heavily on slapstick comedy and lighthearted antics. This resulted in a tonally inconsistent season with episodes juxtaposing Taystee's crusade for prisoner's rights with scenes like the guards partaking in an American Idol audition and the meth-heads holding court where they are grilled about Saved by the Bell trivia. The following seasons moved to the maximum security prison, and while they are generally seen as an improvement, the change in setting resulted in half of the cast being Put on a Bus, never to return except for a brief cameo here and there. Fan favorites like Boo and Sophia were sorely missed, and while the ending is generally well regarded, many considered it unnecessarily bleak, with multiple characters being given life sentences for crimes they didn't commit.
• Only Fools and Horses: At the very least, nearly everyone agrees that the 2001-2003 trilogy is markedly weaker than the rest of the series. Some consider the series to have been at its best when it was just two guys and their grandfather/great-uncle trying to pull off "get rich quick" schemes, and that its initial premise was derailed by the introduction of Cassandra and Raquel.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • There is a widespread dislike for Season 2, especially its second half following Emma and Snow's return from the Enchanted Forest. Season 1 is beloved and opinion on Season 3 is split down the middle, but Season 2 is usually criticized for all the new character additions and multiple storylines being piled on at the expense of the characters and stories the show already had.
  • Season 4 as well. Like Season 2, it had a strong start, with the Frozen story arc breathing new life into the show and giving it popularity it hadn't had in a while, but this has sadly been undone by many questionable story decisions, a padded two-parter killing the Frozen arc's momentum, and a second story arc with an unpopular premise and so much stuff packed into it that it was met with derision before it had even begun airing. And when it did air, reactions were even more negative, culminating with outrage over the Ass Pull reveal that Maid Marian was Zelena the Wicked Witch in disguise all along.
  • The first half of Season 5 has its own problems. Several fans were not happy with Zelena being upgraded to a regular. Merida was largely criticized for overshadowing the main arc and taking screen time away from the core characters. What's more, the show quickly became overloaded with another Kudzu Plot — with the revelation that Hook is now a Dark One causing the season to do a complete 180 and abandon the arc it had been building with Camelot. Likewise, the midseason finale ending with an Ass Pull was met with outrage by many fans. Others, however, like how the season, in spite of some flaws, managed to fix most of the problems Season 4 had.
  • While Season 5's second half is considered better than 5A by some for avoiding the problems that arc had and fixing some of the things the show has been criticised for in the past, others don't agree. The arc ended up using the same basis as the Neverland arc but made the primary criticism of that arc (it is character-based and progresses very slowly) even worse. Another factor is the three biggest focuses of the arc: people who don't like Hook disliked the show killing off Robin Hood in the same episode Hook is revived (after it looked like he would stay dead), people who don't like Regina don't like how she once again seems to skate by on her crimes even when many victims she's killed are right there in the Underworld and she even seems to benefit from her time spent down there, and people who don't like Zelena hate how much time is spent on her and her out-of-nowhere romance with the Big Bad.
  • The first half of Season 6 has been met with scorn by many fans for abandoning the Land of Untold Stories concept a few episodes in, wasting several characters like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, bringing in versions of Aladdin and Jasmine that were considered underwhelming, having a much campier and less threatening Evil Queen as the Big Bad, bringing Rumple's behavior toward Belle to very uncomfortably abusive levels, adding further unwanted Retcons, and generally feeling like there's no coherent plot. The second half has also been receiving flack with Hook revealed as the killer of David's father which led to Hook and Emma being separated again for three episodes, the Split Queen arc ending with Regina absorbing some of the Evil Queen's darkness and her doppelganger getting her chance at a happy ending with wish!Robin, and the Big Bad generally being a rather underwhelming villain despite being the one prophesied to kill Emma, with the one pulling his strings seen as something of a Generic Doomsday Villain despite a fun actress playing her.
  • Season 7 was already in a tough spot by dumping most of the old cast including the main lead and looking like it would break up the show's main couples. The fact it also reuses the plot of Season 1 was seen by many as a sign the writers were running out of ideas. However, the back-to-basics approach, the ways the season resolves the casting issues and adds several twists to the season 1 plot has won some people over, and just as many people love the series finale at the end as there are who hate it.
• The second season of The Outer Limits (1963), while not horrible and still having masterpieces (most notably Harlan Ellison's "Soldier" and "Demon With A Glass Hand"), was of very uneven quality, due in part to it being moved to a Saturday night timeslot against The Jackie Gleason Show, which in turn caused major staffers (including very major ones like Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano) to leave in protest. Then the production budget was cut even lower than it already was, and they tried to make the show more commercial than before. That the second season was a ratings flop and triggered its cancellation midway shows how well that turned out. (It should be noted, however, that Ellison — ever the contrarian — is one of the very few people who prefer season two to season one ... although that could be because he was unable to sell a single story idea to the season one producers, while the season two producers bought two.)
• Later series of Outnumbered, in particular the fifth and final one, are considered not to be as strong as the earlier series, as the children were getting older and, in contrast to the largely improvised earlier series, their dialogue was more scripted and less natural as a result. A few years after the final series there was a Reunion Show that was meant to act as a springboard to further specials, but it received similar criticism — by this point the eldest child was in his twenties and the youngest was very definitely a young adult — and no further specials have since been produced.
• While the last three seasons of Oz are still well-received overall, some felt the increasingly bizarre elements (such as a quickly abandoned storyline about accelerated aging drugs) jarred with the sometimes quirky, but still generally down-to-earth and gritty tone set in earlier seasons. The loss of fan-favorite Adebisi is also used as an argument against the later seasons.
• Party of Five got hit with this hard in Seasons 4 and 5. First was Charlie's cancer storyline, which cranked the emotional tone of the series (which had been kept tastefully downplayed) Up to Eleven and episodes followed a formula of 'Charlie Wangsts about being sick for forty minutes' until he made a miraculous recovery. Then there was Julia's storyline, which got so dramatic it was almost to the point of parody - she and Griffin get married and both are unfaithful until it ends in disaster, she ends up seeing her new best friend's boyfriend who then turns out to be abusive and she develops Stockholm Syndrome for him. By Season 6, fans were just bored with the series, and the actors visibly were as well.
• A Place to Call Home was hit by this from Season 2 onwards, with accusations of Pacing Problems, and there was a lot of Filler in a series which had 13 episodes a season. It went beyond Sophomore Slump to the point where the last two seasons (Seasons 4 and 5) had too many filler episodes despite the Channel Hop and budget changes.
• ITV's Police, Camera, Action! ran for sixteen years, and though not quite as controversial as some of the series on this page, it still draws arguments concerning whether and when rot occurred:
  • Season 7 in 2000 was seen as a very Filler-based season, and only the episodes "In The Driving Seat", "On The Edge" being liked.
  • The first few episodes of Season 11 were seen as dull due to Clueless Aesop, pacing, and other issues.
• The Price Is Right:
  • For Season 18, host Bob Barker on some episodes looked lost and likely was bored, while his ego was swelling after he became executive producer. There were backstage issues beginning to crop up with the staff (most prominently The Announcer Rod Roddy and Lovely Assistant Holly Halstrom). This also seems to be the point that the staleness and "phoned in" nature of the show in the 1990s began, not at all helped by Rod's health problems making his announcing a lot less enthusiastic. Rod also stopped appearing on-camera in Season 31 due to said disputes, and the show's distributors covered it up by saying that they had enacted a policy against announcers appearing on-camera. It also didn't help that throughout the 90s, the show continued to cling to outdated game show technology such as trilons and eggcrate displays, even as all of its contemporaries were freshening up and modernizing their sets.
  • The later Barker seasons as well: the hideous "Hollywood mural" on the Turntable was used early in Season 31 and clashed with every other set piece; the aging Bob was continuing to have senior moments; more and more contestants were playing the idiot card, seemingly for 15 minutes of fame; and Rod's death in 2003 led to a succession of mostly-mediocre to awful announcers (Daniel Rosen, who had no enthusiasm at all and supposedly astro turfed a fan forum with praise for his announcing, being considered the nadir). Many fans also disliked the fact that Rich Fields was chosen to be the new announcer over Randy West or Burton Richardson, either of whom seemed far more qualified for the job (both of them had filled in for Rod in the past when he was undergoing cancer treatments; both of them had worked on several other game shows [Burton even did the short-lived 1994 nighttime version of Price]; Randy was a close friend of Rod and original announcer Johnny Olson). Of the other candidates who filled in after Rod's death, nearly all were quickly forgotten save for Jim Thornton, who became the announcer on Wheel of Fortune in 2011.
  • Season 37, the second hosted by Drew Carey. It added a lot of oddball Showcases written by Carey that often demeaned Rich (to Drew's credit, he later admitted that the sketches didn't work), Rich became incredibly over-the-top, the pricing games' difficulty spiked (though that one can be blamed on the show having to do so when one showcase was won to the exact dollar due to a predictable prize pool), pricing games vanished without a trace, bizarre prizes began showing up, several infamous special guest appearances began, and several other higher-ups disappeared for various reasons. However, the show soon got over the growing pains of a new host and, while some still don't like the Carey era, complaints about it have subsided somewhat.
• After the second series of Primeval, the reactions to the show have been very mixed. Critics appear to dislike the fourth series the most, with the fans mainly targeting their hate towards 3 and 4.
• Prison Break fans either cite the third or fourth season as the show's worst. For Season 3, the Sona prison turned out to be much less scary than the ultra-creepy penitentiary viewers spotted in the Season 2 finale, the plot suffered from the usual Padding and brave-step-forward-two-steps-back plotting that affected the other seasons, the new plotlines regarding the Company gave them a dose of Villain Decay, and Sara's death upset the fanbase tremendously. Sure, Sara came back in one piece for Season 4, but the Mission-Impossible-meets-A-Team retool sent the series' signature ridiculousness to levels beyond recovery. The fact that the convicts-turned-fugitives get captured by police so quickly to assemble a secret agent squad contradicts their mostly-successful evasion for most of Season 2. In addition, the once scary Company continues to get neutered by Villain Decay, and the side plots only get crazier and more illogical. And then there's the ending, which almost every Prison Break fan hated.
• Reba:
  • It's not really considered Seasonal Rot, but in its second season, it became noticeably lighter than the previous season and was considerably different in terms of quality.
  • Season 3 was hit with this hard, as it mostly focuses on Kyra, and the episodes are, in a word, bad.
  • Season 4 was much worse, as the problems in the past season were made much worse, as Barbara Jean is dumber, and Reba's tone is considerably darker.
  • Season 5, with Cheyenne doing drugs and Kyra being absent most of the season.
  • With Season 6, it's not really bad, but it could've been better.
• Red Dwarf gets this a lot.
  • Either the sixth, seventh, or eighth series; which one qualifies best, or rather worst, as the seasonal rot depends on who you talk to.
  • While fans differ as to where it began exactly, it's generally agreed that the period in between Series III and VI was its peak, with the rot starting depending on personal impression. However the rot became obvious after Rob Grant and Doug Naylor split, with Doug Naylor choosing to revive the series and turn it into a comedy/drama with no studio audience for Series VII and a new Kochanski and getting the backlash that followed. Despite returning to a pure comedy format and shot in front of an audience (not to mention bringing back Rimmer) for Series 8, the response was similarly poor, due to the jarring change of premise to a prison comedy with the old crew brought back to life as opposed to the more natural progression from series V through VII. Ditching Kochanski and reverting to the standard four-character ensemble in later seasons seems to have helped turn things around.
• If and how much this happened to The Red Green Show over its fifteen-season run is debatable, but writer and star Steve Smith was aware of this happening, which is why he chose to end the show on its 300th episode.
• The Restaurant, Season 3. It was clearly made on a tighter budget than the previous seasons, but what really did for it was the poor quality of the contestants and the favouritism shown toward eventual winners JJ and James.
• River Monsters:
  • After Season 3, there was a noticeable decline in quality. Jeremy started playing up supernatural legends about the animals he was investigating, whereas in previous seasons he'd focused on scientific fact. It also became apparent that the show had started to run out of actually dangerous (or potentially dangerous) animals to investigate — the episode about sea lampreys was especially bad in that regard, as Jeremy portrayed it as a serious threat to humans when the only human deaths that lampreys have ever been involved in were incidents of people who got food poisoning from eating them. He was also more prone to pushing speculation without any decent evidence to support it, such as the episode where he speculated that the Loch Ness Monster was the Greenland shark while completely failing to demonstrate that Greenland sharks ever entered Loch Ness.
  • With the introduction of the new "Mysteries of the Ocean" season, the series seems to have regained some of its old spark by diving into new material. For example, in the first episode of the season Sea Serpents, Jeremy ultimately goes blue water scuba diving at night and gets to spend a little while hanging out with two spooky-looking oarfish. (Which qualifies as a certified Moment of Awesome.) It's just enough to make viewers overlook the deviation from the original premise. (Wasn't this a show about River monsters?) Still, with this new material, the show seems to have mostly regrown the beard for now.
• If Riverdale was a normal show, it could claim that the rot set in halfway through season two. However, said rot hit so hard and so fast that the show looped around to So Bad, It's Good, and the fanbase followed. While Season 4 had some unavoidable struggles - the need to write in Fred Andrews' death due to Luke Perry's own passing at the season's beginning, and then cutting it short due to the COVID-19 pandemic - it seemed to fire all its zaniest plots in the first few episodes before settling into So Okay, It's Average territory, quite the opposite of what fans hoped for. Fortunately, season five was seen as a return to form if not doubling down on the series' now-beloved madness.
• Robin Hood: There was still time to save it even after the horror of the Season 2 finale (in which Marian was killed off), but a number of contributing factors ensured that the third season not only earned the hatred of the fans but the cancellation of the show. This included the new writers who apparently didn't bother to watch the previous two seasons, the dropping of long-term storylines from the show, the complete lack of mention of Will Scarlett and Djaq (who were abandoned in the Holy Land), the reimagining of Tuck as a Magical Negro, the introduction of the horrid Kate as a love interest for Robin, the reduction of the outlaws into bit-parts (whose only job was to babysit Kate and talk about how great she was), the abandonment of the "rob from the rich/give to the poor" premise, the painful introduction of Guy and Robin's half-brother in an attempt to set up Robin Hood as a Legacy Character for a proposed Season Four, and finally, the mass cast exodus of all but two of the original cast members (who were disposed of in some of the worst deaths conceivable), who certainly weren't shy in voicing their displeasure at the direction the show had taken.
• Around Season 6 of Roseanne, the blue-collar humor on which the series was built began to be derailed by self-referential jokes, gimmick episodes, Stunt Casting, and the Flanderization of several characters (particularly Bev). And then there's Season 9...
• Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In suffered this in the '70s after many of its notable cast members (such as Judy Carne, Jo Anne Worley, Goldie Hawn, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, and Alan Sues) left the show. Its 6th season is considered to have killed the series, especially since the original producer was no longer with the show.
• RuPaul's Drag Race: Seasons 4,5, and 6 are generally believed to be the show's "Golden Age", and almost every season past those will be accused of this, though just how poorly received it is varies from season to season.
  • At the time, Season 7 was considered by many to be the show's worst season, due to an abundance of team challenges not giving the cast room to shine as individuals, a controversial elimination order that saw fan favorites leave early while more controversial personalities remained, and an overall mean-spirited tone and lack of chemistry among its cast. Nowadays it's been Vindicated by History to an extent, with many acknowledging that it contains several of the greatest queens to ever compete on the show, and that the main issue is that it has an abundance of fashion queens and yet most of the challenges are acting and comedy-oriented.
  • Season 11 was not well received while it was airing: many felt that a cast of fifteen queens was too many and resulted in several contestants becoming filler. Those that did stand out among the cast were either seen as talented yet lacking personality (Brooke Lynn, Plastique, Nina) or boasting big personalities without the talent to match (Yvie, Silky, Vanjie), and several were accused of favoritism and lasting a lot longer than they should have. While many of the personalities clashed along the way, it seemed like the fights didn't have the same catty bite that those from the earlier seasons did.
  • Season 13 gets a lot of flak for how long it is. The first three episodes are non-elimination, another non-elimination episode comes when there's still nine people left, and the following week's episode is a documentary about filming during the COVID Pandemic, meaning the show had been airing for two months with only four people going home. Additionally several of the challenges felt like half-baked retreads of challenges from previous seasons, and the decision to have the queens lip sync in the first episode to determine whether they would compete in the "High Team" or the "Low Team" in the next two episodes was poorly received.
  • Season 15 saw a change of format, with episodes that were only two-thirds as long as in past seasons. This might not have been so bad if the producers had been more selective in their choice of contestants, but they decided it was also a great time to bring in a cast of sixteen, one more than on season 11 (which, as previously mentioned, was criticized for having too many queens and needing to put some back). The result is a ruthlessly edited season with very few memorable moments.
• RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars has also struggled with this, mainly stemming from the fact that All Stars 2 is considered to be one of the best seasons the show has ever produced, and the next few seasons attempted to recapture this success without fully understanding what made it work in the first place.
  • The most common complaint levelled against All Stars is that once it started being produced on an annual basis (compared to the four-year gap between All Stars 1 and 2), there simply weren't enough top-tier contestants to create a true "All Stars" roster each year, and several contestants were all but cast to be Joke Characters with no true chance at winning. Starting with All Stars 4, queens from previous All Stars seasons started showing up, seemingly admitting that there were slim pickings for strong contestants who had not done All Stars already^note Though several of these returning queens were from All Stars 1, which is show does not look at fondly due to using a different format. The yearly production schedule also means that queens will return to compete only a year or two after their first season, leading fans to question whether they've grown enough to give a stronger showing than their first time around.
  • All Stars 3 gets hit hard with this. While it still has several strong points, BenDeLaCreme's decision to eliminate herself cast a shadow over the last two episodes, as many had considered her the frontrunner up until that point. The finale only makes things worse due to a twist that results in the eliminated queens choosing the show's winner for the first time, leading to the elimination of the other frontrunner and resulting in a winner who was met with controversy rather than a warm welcome.
  • All Stars 4, while more well-received than All Stars 3 due to a cast of several fan favorites and a string of strong challenges, starts to suffer near the end. The Shocking Elimination of Manila two episodes before the finale left several people unwilling to finish the series, and the decision to crown both members of the Top 2 was seen as a cop-out meant to placate fans upset with Manila's elimination.
  • All Stars 5: From the moment it began, it was a Foregone Conclusion that Shea Coulee would win the entire thing, leaving little suspense or drama for the rest of the season. Additionally, the new Lip Sync Assassin twist meant to address complaints towards the previous Lip Sync for your Legacy system was met with mixed reception, as having only one queen from the cast lip sync each episode seemed to only further sideline the All Stars 5 queens on their own season, and the addition of a group vote aspect worsened the issue of queens keeping their friends over queens that deserved to stay more.
  • All Stars 6, on the other hand, was received much more positively. The season bills itself as more of a "second chances" season for queens who didn't do well on their original season but have since shown a lot of growth. This results in a cast that seems more evenly matched rather than having a clear frontrunner. Along the way, several queens known for being The Scrappy on their original season get to show a softer side and exhibit how they've grown in confidence and talent, including A Day in the Limelight for one of its most infamous Scrappys, Silky Nutmeg Ganache, where she tears through several lip syncs in a row and proves that she is a true drag talent. Combine this with several other moments of funny and awesome, and you have a season that excels precisely because it finally managed to break out of All Stars 2's shadow.
• RuPaul's Drag Race UK: While the first two series of UK were very positively received, especially compared to the middling reception of more recent US seasons, UK Series 3 was seen as a steep decline for the show. After the second series had both its filming and airing impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic, Series 3 was meant to get the show back on track, resulting in its production being rushed and premiering only six months after the second series ended. Aside from this, the early elimination of fan favorites Victoria Scone and Veronica Green and an abundance of twists (including an episode with no winner, a double elimination, and two non-elimination episodes) left many feeling like production had too heavy of a hand in the trajectory of the series. The crowning of Creator's Pet Krystal Versace was similarly met with mixed reception, leading many to try and forget the series happened.
• Sanford and Son initially subverted this earlier in its run with Fred being Put on a Bus a few times because of Redd Foxx's contract disputes. However, the supporting characters were strong (and plentiful) enough to hold up the show alongside Lamont, with Grady in particular even filling in Fred's role as the second main character (complete with Grady picking up on some of Fred's mannerisms and hostility to Aunt Ester). While some would say Whitman Mayo's Grady —through trying his best— didn't hold a candle to Foxx's Fred, this still helped keep things along until Fred returned to the show.
  
  The real Seasonal Rot kicked in the final two seasons, marked by a change in production staff. The original writers and producers from the earlier seasons moved on to other things, and had newer staff taking their place; and it shows with the minority-focused stories replaced with more typical sitcom fare, the show's more practical tone becoming much less serious, and an odd influx of As Himself guest stars (who inexplicably showed up at the junkyard). The sixth and last season in particular truly marked the show as creatively bankrupt of ideas by that point, even in comparison to the fifth season (which is credited with still having a handful of good episodes): among other things, season six opened with a two-part Vacation Episode to Hawaii that had Fred and Lamont mixed up in a jewel heist and featured a bizarre episode about Fred entering a Redd Foxx look-alike contest. On top of that, Foxx and co-star Demond Wilson were both engaged in contract battles with the network that hurt their work on camera and ultimately caused both to leave the show thus ending it. The less said about the After Show The Sanford Arms (sans Foxx and Wilson) and the Revival Sanford (sans Wilson) that NBC tried to cash in with, the better.
• Sarabhai vs Sarabhai from 2004 is considered one of the best Indian comedy shows of all time despite having only one season for a while, and it has a cult following who were eager to see it continued. Season 2, once it finally got released in 2017, failed to live up to people's expectations; between cheaper sets, disappointing jokes, less enjoyable characterization, and forced Product Placement, the production crew really only made Season 2 to satisfy the demands of diehard fans, and it shows.
• Any season of Saturday Night Live can fall into this depending on who you ask, with the popular answers being a) that the show hasn't been good since the original cast was on it in The '70s, or b), if viewers were just watching it for one sketch or cast member, they will blame the seasonal rot on the cast member's departure. Popular cast members cited include: Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Andy Samberg, and, as of 2013, Bill Hader.
  • The sixth season (1980-1981) stands out as uniquely awful and is the season that most fans will agree is a mess in terms of quality. The entire cast and writing staff left in 1980, but the network insisted that the show continue along anyway; new producer Jean Doumanian, who had previously been in charge of booking musical guests, knew nothing about comedy. (On a special about SNL's history in the 1980s, Gilbert Gottfried, a cast member around that time, went on record in saying that Doumanian was so clueless about comedy that she would root for Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers film.) As a result, the musical guests were fantastic, but the rest of the show was barely watchable (including "Weekend Update", which Lorne Michaels invented as a way for viewers to at least find one funny moment in an episode that they didn't like because of the host or if the writing was a little flat that week). More to the point, Doumanian passed up a lot of potentially talented would-be cast members (Jim Carrey being one of them), misunderstood a lot of obvious punchlines, thought that Vulgar Humor was what made the sketches funny (as opposed to Refuge in Audacity) — which became her downfall when Charles Rocket said "I wanna know who the fuck did it" at the end of the Charlene Tilton episode — and focused more on humorless character pieces (some of which were intentionally not funny, like the one from the Karen Black/Cheap Trick episode in which Gilbert Gottfried played a stroke victim laid up in the hospital while everyone around him — except his true friend, Rachel [Denny Dillon] — mocked him). Finally NBC stepped in and fired everyone except Joe Piscopo and some kid named Eddie Murphy that was hired mid-season and was showing a lot of promise...
  • Season 11 (1985-1986) counts as Seasonal Rot and is particularly embarrassing in the eyes of NBC, Al Franken, and The Simpsons writer George Meyer. One would think that a season in which one of the original producers (Lorne Michaels) returns to try and rebuild the show to its former glory would be welcomed with open arms by fans, right? Not really. The writing was okay (a little weird for its time, but critics didn't complain about the writing), but the cast was filled with semi-famous people (among them Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Joan Cusack, Randy Quaid, and Damon Wayans) who may have given good performances, but really didn't gel into that ensemble cast that SNL had in its early days. This, coupled with the mediocre season premiere hosted by Madonna and the fact that critics and fans alike were getting sick of SNL, and you had all the ingredients needed for Brandon Tartikoff to plan SNL's cancellation. (At the very least, unlike Season 6, Season 11's "Weekend Update" was somewhat enjoyable, thanks to the hiring of Dennis Miller, whose snarky delivery brought back memories of Chevy Chase as the show's very first "Weekend Update" anchor.) (Un)Fortunately, this didn't happen, as Lorne Michaels fired most of his Season 11 cast (leaving behind Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn, and Dennis Miller) and hired a new crew of up-and-coming cast members (Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Kevin Nealon, and Victoria Jackson). Those who weren't completely turned off by SNL in its 11th season rejoiced.
  • The 20th season (1994-1995) also stands out as poor. Between Phil Hartman's departure^note The first season after Hartman left (and two seasons after Dana Carvey left), the cast was now led by the likes of Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and David Spade, who weren't versatile enough to lead the show., the popularity of the O. J. Simpson murder trial (which SNL repeatedly wrote sketches about during this time — when it didn't write sketches laden with Ho Yay or Overly Long Gags disguised as sketches with some semblance of a plot^note Sketches often had very thin premises, many centering around the O.J. Simpson trial, and levels of sophomoric humor reached critical mass, resulting in lambasting by critics.), and cast and crew tensions backstage (particularly with Janeane Garofalo, who hated the juvenile humor of the show and left mid-season^note More than half the cast was replaced after the season, and a new group led by Will Ferrell helped create another resurgence.), it's really not hard to see why some critics and fans have compared Season 20 with Season 6 in terms of sheer unwatchability. (That said, like Season 11, "Weekend Update" was considered a bright spot in an otherwise messy season — this time, with Norm MacDonald as the anchor, though even "Weekend Update" suffered from being weak and repetitive just like the rest of Season 20.)
  • The first half of Season 39 (2013-14) has been criticised fairly harshly for a number of reasons, the most common complaint being that six new cast members is just too many for one season to add. ^note While Kyle Mooney, Beck Bennett, Sasheer Zamata, and Noël Wells have been acclaimed for their performances (John Milhiser is getting there), Colin Jost, Mike O'Brien, and Brooks Wheelan seem to still be finding their voices. Pre-taped sketches are also usually now the best parts of the episodes.
  • Seasons 42 through 46 (2016-2020) have also come in for plenty of flack. These years have, due to the controversial presidency of Donald Trump, relied heavily on political satire. Trump supporters tend to be unamused by the show's frequent pokes at him and his supporters, while his critics tend to find the attacks rather lame, toothless, and unfunny. About the only thing both sides agree on is that if the show can't satirise the issues of the day effectively they might as well not bother, especially with so much more biting competition out there (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee...) making the "Weekend Update" segments look especially weak.
    • Also notable about this period is the heavy reliance on celebrity cameos for political impressions. While Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump and Melissa McCarthy's Sean Spicer were initially well received, many critics agreed they began to drag past a certain point. Even Alec Baldwin admitted he had become tired of constantly guest-starring as Trump. By the time the Democratic primaries came around in 2019, nearly every major politician was being played by a celebrity, and viewers questioned if the show was underutilizing its cast in favor of these cameos. Of note was the show hiring three different celebrities to portray Joe Biden, none of whom were on the cast. The impression was finally handed off to a cast member after the 2020 election, though this was as the show began to turn away from focusing so heavily on political humor.
  • Some other seasons are usually seen as of low quality as well, such as seasons 28 (due to Jimmy Fallon's constant cracking up and the absence of Will Ferrell), 30 (had very mediocre political sketches during the 2004 election, the Ashlee Simpson lip-synching fiasco had people asking if the show was even live anymore, and everything just seemed kinda slow and dull. The upside of season 30 was that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler did a good job on "Weekend Update"), 33 (but only because the Writers Guild strike caused a lot of potentially good episodes to go unwritten), 35 (well-regarded at the time, but rewatches deem it very unusual and geared towards certain cast members, usually Fred Armisen and Kristen Wiig), and 38 (the Justin Bieber Valentine's Day Episode, too much reliance on Bill Hader and Fred Armisen). Basically, if a fan-favorite cast member leaves, then the show will go through what's called a "rebuilding season," which means that the show's humor quality will either be mixed to in the toilet.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch:
  • Season 4 made the strange season to put both fan-favorite characters Valerie and Libby on a bus never to return, and introduce Replacement Scrappys in Dreama and Brad. Both characters had potential (Dreama as an Inept Mage, and Brad as a witch hunter) but not a lot was done with them, and the high school setting ending with this season made both of them very pointless. While the writing was still very good, it was the start of a decline.
  • Season 5 was when the series moved to The WB and was accompanied by a Retool for Sabrina going to college. As a result, the fun sitcom feel of the first four seasons was replaced with a Teen Drama vibe - with much less magic and more relationship drama between Sabrina and the incredibly unpopular new love interest Josh. Harvey was also Put on a Bus when he and Sabrina break up offscreen between seasons. Season 6 did get a little better but...
  • Season 7 axed both of the aunts who had been part of the series since the beginning (though their hands were partly forced when Beth Broderick decided to quit the show). Josh's departure too required creating yet another love interest in Aaron to have a Love Triangle with Harvey (though thankfully Aaron was better received than Josh). While the season was not without its good moments, the show was clearly recycling ideas from its previous episodes and had run out of steam.
• Scrubs:
  • When Seasonal Rot completely set in is a matter of polite disagreement. Seasons 1-2 are considered the golden age, and despite Flanderization and Characterization Marches On, as well as the frustrating love triangle — not to mention Tara Reid — Season 3 contains the highest-rated episode of the series. Seasons 4 and 5 both contain universally acclaimed episodes, but whether the rot began and took over then is not a question you want to ask. Seasons 6 onward, however, are definitively this trope, with 7 (when the show was Un-Canceled) more or less ignored by what remained of the fandom. Executive Meddling with episode ordering and the 2007 WGA Strike. Season 8 was a return to form, but the series finale left a bunch of unanswered questions, mostly surrounding JD's relationship with Kim and his resignation from Sacred Heart.
  • The second Un-Canceled last season, Season 9, borders on Fanon Discontinuity due to low quality: Many of the original cast were Demoted to Extra or just written off the show in favor of all-new characters, and Turk was suddenly re-cast as a med school lecturer. The new cast could have been good, but the first part of the season focused on JD tying up loose ends at Sacred Heart, so there was no time to develop them in the half-season that remained.
• SeaQuest DSV stopped playing to its strengths in Season 2; the writers introduced a lot of weird sci-fi elements that were out of place on a submarine show. The Season 3 Retool did a lot to fix this, but it came too late to avert cancellation.
• Seinfeld:
  • Although still popular, seasons 8 and 9 were notably different from the former ones. This is because the showrunner Larry David left the show after season 7, leaving Jerry Seinfeld as the new Executive Producer. With the remaining writing staff left to its own devices, these seasons featured faster-paced, "wackier" episodes with many references to previous episodes, and attempts at running gags. Characters also slightly de-evolved, especially George, and Kramer's stunts became ever-increasing. Still, the series continued to enjoy ratings success and a tenth season was proposed until Seinfeld declined.
  • The first and second seasons (mind you, these two had about 15 episodes total) were very bland, slow, and generically sitcom-y. The only thing that saved it from being cancelled was the opinion of a few execs that the scripts were funny, if not good, and that the characters showed promise. The Growing the Beard episode is accepted as Season 2's "The Chinese Restaurant", where the characters do nothing but stand around in a restaurant waiting for a table for 23 minutes (in Real Time, no less), an unusal move for a sitcom (though Hancock's Half Hour did a similar real-time 'nothing happens' episode thirty years previously, consisting entirely of Tony sitting around on a boring Sunday afteroon. But of course, almost no-one in the US saw Hancock...)
• For many fans, Sherlock seems to have peaked in series 2. Series 3 is seen as a (slight) let down compared to what came before it, due mostly to an increase in meta jokes and interpersonal drama (to the point where the mysteries almost seemed like afterthoughts), while the Christmas Special, "The Abominable Bride", is split among the fandom. Series 4 had broken the base even further, particularly the final episode, "The Final Problem." Weaker plotlines and writing, the introduction of the extremely divisive Eurus, increasingly unbelievable one-upping plot twists, and a controversial potential final episode made it fail to live up to its beloved predecessors, which even some supporters of the season admit.
• The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the sixth and seventh series from the Granada Sherlock Holmes adaptations were marked by increasing deviations from the Canon. This was mostly due to Jeremy Brett's worsening health, and the planned filming of the entire Canon was cut short by his death.
• Six Feet Under:
  • Most fans agree that the fourth season is the worst one, and the creators themselves tend to agree. Character arcs tended to become redundant, out-of-place, irrelevant, or overly gratuitous in their content; it was at that time that the scenarists understood they could not keep using the same characters forever and decided the next season would be the last. Nevertheless, it's still top-quality television, but watching it you really do feel the writers were starting to get a bit confused. It's also compensated by the fact both the beginning and the end are top-notch; the fifth season also did a good job explaining the relevance of more controversial plotlines introduced during season four.
  • Season 3 got complaints for being a season-long "When is Nate going to break up with his Romantic False Lead?" build-up that swallowed up most of the screentime at the expense of other characters.
• Skins:
  • Series 4 is considered by nearly all fans and critics to be the worst series so far — the debate is over whether it was wholly bad or whether there were some good episodes in the middle to make up for the way the series started and (especially) ended.
  • Series 6 had even bigger complaints. There was a change in head writers, and it's clear that the concept for most of the characters completely changed as a result. In particular, there seemed to be a desire to bring back older plots — the Teen Pregnancy from Series 2, or similarities between Frankie's Series 6 Character Development and Effy — that alienated viewers.
• Sliders:
  • Universally, season three, during which Maggie was introduced, Professor Arturo had a bridge dropped on him, Quinn Mallory ceased being the genius he once had been, and almost all plots were movie ripoffs. The debate is how much the show recovered, if at all.
  • Depending on who you ask, the real decline was either season three, four, or five. Three was definitely a decline compares to one and two, but still mostly kept the original format. Season four was damaged by focusing far too much on the Kromaggs arc, at the expense of the show's original concept. Finally, season five saw the departure of both Jerry and Colin O'Connell, adding two new main cast members who weren't that interesting, and completely changing Rembrandt's personality.
• Smallville:
  • While the fourth season brought us Impulse and Chloe learning Clark's secret, its primary plot was magic stones and reincarnated witches. The writers clearly didn't know where they were going and way too many conspiracies made it hard to keep track of where it had been, especially with Jason and his mother, whom the writers couldn't decide if they were working together or apart, or if they wanted Lana alive or dead. It also had a butchering of Mxyzptlk preventing a more traditional (i.e. having any qualities even remotely resembling Mxyzptlk) version from showing up in the future.
  • Most fans complain about season 8. Mostly due to the increasingly poor plots (Clark always rushes in at the last minute to save the day and it's starting to bug everyone), bringing Lana back again, dialogue filled with needless Purple Prose, and not moving forward at all with the plot.
    • Lana returning easily derailed the entire season, putting all the established plotlines (which were well-liked) on hold in favor of milking the guest star, who was already the most hated character on the show thanks to previous seasons. The butchering of Doomsday didn't help either, especially since unlike Mxyzptlk he was a regular. The sad thing is, the first half of Season 8 was universally beloved and halfway into the season, fans and critics were already praising it as one of the best seasons yet, and it successfully breathed enough life back into the show to allow it to last a few more seasons. Then the Lana plot arrived mid-season and all the momentum was thrown off course. It seems that a LOT of the fans never completely forgave the showrunners.
    • And the Season 8 finale "Doomsday", was derided. And Season 9 is also base breaking, with its bigger Recurring Character cast and desire to use more canonical characters.
    • There were also plenty of fans who felt the show started steadily downhill after Season 5 since after that it stopped being about Clark growing up in Smallville and started being about him being Superman without the name and costume.
• Sons of Anarchy's first two seasons are both well-liked by the fandom with no complaint, after that it gets tricky:
  • Season 3 has a slow pace and glaring examples of Oireland and The Mountains of Illinois during the gang's trip to Ireland, though the season finale is considered one of the best episodes of the series and redeems the season for some.
  • Season 4 is the opposite. It is generally considered an improvement over the previous seasons and takes the characters in interesting directions. Unfortunately, the season finale involves pretty egregious examples of Deus ex Machina, Ass Pull, and Plot Armor that negate a subplot that had been building much of the season, and was thus seen as one of the weakest episodes of the series.
  • Season 5 has a very mixed perception. The death of Opie early in the season was seen as a brave move by writers by some fans and as a slap in the face to others. On top of that, the season ends up ignoring the setup Big Bad for much of the time in favor of focusing on familiar conflicts. The season finale isn't as ill-received as the previous season's but is still seen as going to absurd lengths to avoid killing off no fewer than three characters that were in the line of fire.
  • Season 6 has been giving Season 3 a run for its money on just how much the fans loathe it. The season started off with a controversial scene of a school shooting that many critics felt went nowhere and was used mostly as just another obstacle for the protagonists. Nearly every episode was over an hour and a half of what many felt was needless padding. The storylines got more outlandish and repetitive. It all culminated in a finale that has created a MAJOR broken base for the fandom for its idiocy that led up to the death of Tara and left many viewers with a bad taste in their mouth.
  • Season 7 is usually considered an improvement over Season 6, but still not one of the show's better ones. The unrelentingly grim tone, the Anyone Can Die nature of the show, and Jax completing his transformation into a Villain Protagonist caused many accusations of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring to be thrown around. Furthermore, nothing was done to cut back on the extended running times introduced in Season 6, causing more unnecessary Padding. However, the cast's performance was continuously praised, and the season's pacing began to improve towards the end as the show moved towards its conclusion, resulting in a finale that is generally considered a worthy ending to the series.
• This is debated heavily in the fandom of The Sopranos. The general consensus is that seasons 1, 2, and 5 are the strongest while the opinion on the other three is more mixed.
  • Season 3 is seen by some as suffering because of the writers having to greatly restructure the season after the death of actress Nancy Marchand, though there are still several episodes in the season that are loved by the fandom and some don't even think there was a drop in quality.
  • Season 4 is perhaps the most debated season. Some fans didn't like the season's lessened focus on Mafia concerns (the season has the least people "whacked" of any season) and the turns Carmela's storyline took but others found the way the season explored Tony and Carmella very compelling.
  • Season 6 suffers from the two-year break after the fifth season as well as annoyance from fans over the season being split in two. While the earlier episodes are lauded people generally disliked the way that Vito's storyline dragged in the middle of the season. Season 6 part 2 (the last 9 episodes of the series) is more well-liked though there's a decent amount of broken base concerning Christopher's death and the Grand Finale having No Ending.
• Although some may have disliked the Ori arc in later seasons of Stargate SG-1, it's the sixth season which is generally considered the worst. It's telling that the three episodes of that season that are considered the best are the ones that guest-starred Michael Shanks.
• Stargate Atlantis also suffered from this in Seasons 4 and 5, mostly due to the deaths of Elizabeth and Carson, two well-liked and beloved characters. Their replacements were not well-received; Carter was popular but it was felt she'd already had her run in 10 seasons of SG-1, especially compared to the underused Elizabeth. Keller was generally seen as a Creator's Pet and centre of an unnecessary love triangle. (She got better though.)
• Starsky & Hutch: The general agreement is that each season is worse than the last, with the most dramatic dip in quality between the third and fourth seasons.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: The hastily Un-Canceled third season. The slashed budget did not help matters.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season Seven is the most popular candidate for worst later season. The plots were getting stale and repetitive, the writers had decided to pair Troi and Worf, and much of the A-team was working on other projects: Deep Space Nine was well underway, and Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: Voyager were in pre-production.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • Season 3 is distinctly weak, due to two factors: the departure of Peter Allan Fields (who was responsible for the first two seasons' best writing), and an increasing reliance on Ferengi-centered comedy episodes. It was back on its feet by Season 4, though.
    • Seasons 5 and 7, while not exactly regarded as bad, are considered noticeable steps down in quality from Seasons 4 and 6. Season 5 features a number of universally despised episodes (most notably "Let He Who Is Without Sin...") and spends a lot of time spinning its wheels and resetting the Klingon War and Maquis arcs in order to make way for the eventual Dominion War storyline. Season 7 suffers a combination of the show's religious symbolism becoming overwhelming, Gul Dukat being turned from a complex villain into a straightforward Omnicidal Maniac, and Ezri Dax... just being Ezri Dax. It doesn't help that the Prophets/Pah-Wraiths plot is resolved almost as quickly as it starts, almost as if they were planning for a season 8 with which to resolve it, and found themselves forced to do it within the latter half of the 7th season instead.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Depends on who you ask, but Season 2 is frequently chosen. It contained some of the show's least popular storylines (with fans and eventually writers) and famously led longtime Trek reviewer Tim Lynch to stop watching. The show improved steadily from here, beginning by finally giving up on trying to interest the audience in the Kazons, probably the least popular recurring alien culture in Trek history.
    • Alternatively, some people would say that the first four seasons are the best, and the rot began to set in around Season 5 when a change in showrunner saw Janeway undergo an abrupt personality change from a Team Mom to a Depending on the Writer Designated Hero, and the Status Quo Is God kicked in to such an extent that every character developed Aesop Amnesia (especially Spotlight-Stealing Squad Seven of Nine) and learned the same lessons over and over again. Thing got worse in Season 6 as a new staff writer brought over from Deep Space Nine quit after three episodes over how directionless the show was. Ideas, such as Voyager reviving a race of ancient conquerors, were raised and promptly dropped, two whole episodes were devoted to a holodeck village full of Irish stereotypes, and the long-awaited return of popular character Kes turned into a kick-in-the-teeth as she underwent a Face–Heel Turn for no real reason in a Timey Wimey plot that ended up not happening. Things got a bit better in Season 7, as long-unresolved plot threads were picked up and there was actual character development, but there was still a high proportion of dull episodes, with a poor lead-in to a rather divisive finale.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise: Season 2, which lacked both the novelty of the first season and ambition of the third and fourth seasons. What is widely regarded as the show's worst episode ("A Night In Sickbay") was produced that season, along with a rather desperate and ill-advised appearance by the Borg, which gets around their canon implications by simply having no-one mention their name. This is despite "We are the Borg" actually being part of the Borg's standard opening hail. One they do (nearly) every time!
• Survivor:
  • Season 5 ("Thailand") was for a long time considered by most fans to be the worst season, an opinion also shared by host Jeff Probst, who referred to it as "mean-spirited" and "ugly" and called the final four contestants of the season the least likable ever.
  • Season 14 ("Fiji") isn't highly regarded, either, due to a poorly thought out "Haves Vs. Have-Nots" twist where one tribe was initially given a much superior camp, then, predictably, rolled off a string of victories up until the merge.
  • Seasons 21-24 are widely considered to be the nadir of the entire series. Season 21 ("Nicaragua") is usually referred to by fans as the absolute worst season, replacing Thailand. It featured an atrocious cast, boring gimmicks, and had two players quit the game abruptly with only 11 days left, forcing production to later change the rules for how the jury handled quitting players. Seasons 22 ("Redemption Island") and 23 ("South Pacific") also have a mixed reaction, with the underwhelming Redemption Island twist (where a voted-out player could return to the game... often to be immediately voted out again), and bringing back two Creator's Pet characters apiece and giving them the majority of screen-time. It didn't help that both seasons featured an extended Pagong-ing of one tribe over the other in the middle of the season, or how the rest of the cast (in Redemption Island) was probably the stupidest cast to have ever played the show. Season 24 ("One World") gives it a run for its money though, with a likewise moronic cast that at one point collectively gave up immunity for their entire tribe. It also introduced two notably scrappies in Colton Cumbie and Alicia Rosa. Season 24's winner however is very well-liked. Luckily the seasons surrounding this period, 20 ("Heroes vs. Villains") and 25 ("Philippines"), are seen as excellent, with 20 being a common pick for greatest season of the entire series.
• The original 1976 version of the post-apocalyptic series Survivors is an interesting case. It was only on the air three years, but there was a great deal of cast and crew turnover and the three seasons are all very different from each other: 1. The protagonists gather at a manor-house and squabble in the wake of a pandemic 2. They spend a season trying to make a subsistence-level farm work and 3. Fruitlessly chase each other around the countryside, and fall into a plan to revive the electrical grid. Fandom has long been divided about to which of them, if any, this trope should be applied.
• For the fourth season of The Sweeney, there were several changes, including a different title sequence and DCI Haskins being absent from a number of episodes. The final season has been criticised as the weakest and this decline in quality led John Thaw and Dennis Waterman to the realisation that the show was in danger of running out of steam and to take the decision to end it while it was still at the peak of its popularity.

T-Z

• Teachers (2001):
  • The fourth series. The surrealism that had always bubbled under in the earlier series before coming to the fore in the third series got a little too out of hand, the dramatic elements almost entirely vanished, as did most of the better characters, to be replaced by pale imitations. One of the standout characters in the previous series had been Bob, a lovable loser, but for the fourth series, he was Flanderized into a Butt-Monkey with a cheating Thai bride completely unaware of his status as the Butt-Monkey.
  • Series 3 is also a good pick. Few shows can survive the loss of their three most developed characters without taking a nosedive, and series 3 demonstrated why; Brian and Kurt were great background characters, but in no way were they capable of leading a series, and as a result, the writing took a massive drop in quality.
• Teen Wolf:
  • This was downplayed in Season 3a but suffered issues largely due to casting. Erica (Gage Golightly) and Jackson (Colton Haynes) left in the break between Seasons 2 and 3, forcing the writers to hastily rewrite the storylines they had planned, while Boyd was abruptly killed off without much explanation. Erica's role was largely shifted to Cora, who didn't resonate with the fans and the writers Put Her On a Bus at the end of 3a. Twin werewolves Ethan and Aiden in the Alpha Pack were hated, seemingly existing purely for Fanservice. There were also complaints that the resolution suffered from plotholes, rushed writing, and was a retread of Season 2. However that said, there were some popular aspects, such as Lydia discovering her banshee powers, a more united core of True Companions rather than them being at odds with each other, greater focus on fan-favorites Danny and Isaac, "Motel California" which is generally considered one of the best episodes in the whole series, Scott's mom — and later Stiles's Dad — knowing the truth about the supernatural, and Allison being more level-headed after her break down in Season 2. The show also got back on its feet in 3b, with better storytelling and the much-liked Evil Stiles plotline.
  • However, in Season 4 the show hits this trope hard. Again, the casting made it an uphill battle from the start with Crystal Reed's quitting the show leading to Allison being Killed Off for Real in the penultimate episode of 3b and another four major characters, Danny, Ethan, Aiden, and Isaac — the last being especially painful since he had been an Ensemble Dark Horse — were Put on a Bus when their actors declined to return for Season 4. In the season itself, the traumatic events of 3b with Allison's death and Stiles's possession are brushed over and barely mentioned which angered a lot of fans, Malia was abruptly added to the cast, which caused a myriad of issues, including a poor explanation of how she could adapt to being human after living as a coyote for years, the fact 3b left it ambiguous of whether she was a villain or not, a Strangled by the Red String romance with Stiles, and meant older characters Derek and Lydia got less focus than previous seasons, while another newcomer Kira was largely defined by her romance with Scott. The overall arc lacked a consistent plotline and was filled with Filler Episodes and Scott's incompetent mentoring of Liam, while the secret villain team-up between Peter and Kate was established early on in the season leaving next to no mystery apart from the horribly lackluster and illogical revelation that Meredith was involved as well. The sharp plummet in overall ratings and viewership for Season 4 was terminal - Season 5 barely cracked a million viewers, and the sixth and final season didn't even reach half that.
• That '70s Show suffered this after the departure of Eric (the main character) and Kelso. The show brought in a new character, Randy, and tried to make him a combination of Eric and Kelso, even though the two characters were vastly different. Randy was universally loathed, although luckily the executives caught onto this and he was barely in the series finale (plus Eric and Kelso both showed up for one last time), allowing the show to end on a pretty good note. Randy is also hated because everyone (in-universe) absolutely adored him, even Red, to the point where it broke a lot of people's Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
• Season 5 of Three's Company is when Suzanne Somers' infamous salary dispute took place, which put the show through hell that year. The show effectively became "Two's Company" for a while when Suzanne refused to show up on several tape days and had to be hurriedly written out. Chrissy was eventually replaced in the apartment for the rest of the season with her cousin Cindy (a character that many fans seem to dislike) and was only seen herself over the phone in the one-minute tag scene at the end of each episode, before disappearing completely without explanation the next season.
• Top Gear:
  • Series 14 is generally considered one of the weakest seasons of the Clarkson/Hammond/May era of the show, with an over-reliance on scripted gags, rehashed jokes/challenges, and focusing more on the caricatures of the presenters (Clarkson being a ham-fisted oaf, et cetera) instead of their actual personalities. Thankfully, the quality of later seasons (especially 17) saw a return to form.
  • Series 23 is an even bigger one. The show's popular-yet-controversial host Jeremy Clarkson finally crossed the line with The BBC in 2015 when he got into a physical altercation with one of the show's producers, leading to his sacking; co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May both followed him out the door voluntarily. Following a hiatus, Top Gear returned the following year to a mixed reception, with new host Chris Evans (no relation to the Captain America actor) in particular coming in for heavy criticism due to his lack of chemistry with his co-hosts (especially Matt LeBlanc, who was his primary co-host and met a fairly good reception). Evans departed at the end of the season; time will tell how well the show recovers.
• Torchwood: Children of Earth was a hard act to follow and was seen as Growing the Beard for the show. However, Torchwood: Miracle Day was thought to have too much Padding (while Children of Earth was five episodes based around a single premise, this was ten), there were too many Idiot Balls going around, severe pacing issues, and a paedophile and child murderer becoming a main character after getting released in a massive case of Artistic License – Law. Then there was a disappointing finale that still left a lot of questions.
• True Blood suffered a slow, gradual rot throughout its run. The rot has been argued to start as early as Season 2, but had set in by Season 3 as the initially grounded plot become increasingly outlandish and subject to Padding, the protagonists less sympathetic, and the Fanservice grew to Porn with Plot levels - which drew anger for callously handling sensitive subject matter. While Season 6 was a noted improvement and left fans optimistic for Season 7, Season 7 went back to rotting thanks to poor pacing and a bad case of Romantic Plot Tumor, and proved to be the final season for the series.
• Twin Peaks:
  • The first season and the beginning of the second were a cultural phenomenon, considered by critics to be some of the best television ever created. Then, creator David Lynch succumbed to Executive Meddling and revealed Laura Palmer's killer, who until that had been the major driving force of the plot, and in so doing left the show directionless. To make things worse, Lynch suffered some serious Artist Disillusionment after this and left the show, leaving it in the hands of writers who really didn't know what to do with it. The episodes post-Lynch were pure filler, and ratings plummeted, leading to its cancellation at the end of the second season. Luckily, there was a brief upswing in quality once the replacement writers got their game together, and Lynch came back to direct the (awesome) series finale.
  • The Laura Palmer reveal would not have led to the cancellation of the show only half a season later under most circumstances. Unfortunately, the development of the most viable remaining storyline on the show, Audrey and Cooper's romance, was forbidden by Kyle MacLachlan when the writers were preparing to do just that, leaving them scrambling for new storylines. Kyle did so because he didn't think Cooper would date a high school girl and this was given as the explanation in-universe. Cooper then proceeded to date a woman exactly two years older than Audrey. Eventually, Cooper's motivation was changed to his wanting to protect Audrey.
  • This ends up being a Zig-Zagging Trope by the follow-up movie and the third season. The movie received poor reviews and flopped in North America upon initial release, but critical acclaim grew over the years and it has become to be regarded as one of Lynch's best works by many. In 2017, the series received a third season that is widely regarded as not only the best season of the series but one of the best seasons of television ever made.
• Two and a Half Men:
  • Season 4: Alan Harper was a flawed character who relied on living with Charlie because he lost everything to his ex-wife, but in the older seasons he actually was the voice of reason. In Season 4, however, he suddenly out of nowhere becomes a complete cheapskate who tries to get money out of everyone he knows, while it's even implied that he isn't even poor broke and just too greedy to pay for the most mundane stuff, something that was never even alluded to in previous seasons. This season also added more mean-spirited characterization, or moments in general, like when Alan got depressed after his divorce, no one except for his mother helped him to get over his depression, and even then she said that it would be illegal for a mother not to love her son, soon after she gave him some confidence.
    • The last episode of Season 4 showed how Evelyn Harper didn't even bother to call an ambulance for her dead lover. She said that he was already dead, but did she really want the corpse to lie inside her room the whole time?!
  • Season 9: It starts with Walden (Ashton Kutcher); he doesn't fit into the show well at all, as he's too much like Alan (only rich and even more of a Manchild) so he's not very interesting and his interactions with other characters feel very awkward. The writing has taken a sharp drop in quality from the last season, and Flanderization has hit the characters hard: Alan is still a mooch and even more immature, Jake is even dumber and doesn't seem to do much of anything except smoke pot, Rose is more of a bitch, Lindsay is crazier, etc. The entire tone of the show has also changed: there's a much greater emphasis on Toilet Humour which is more gross than funny (like the episode "Not In My Mouth" which was overloaded with vomit gags) and the character interactions mostly feel unnatural, and with the entire premise of the show changed, it's really tough to care about any of the characters.
  • It's also one of the rare cases of Seasonal Rot to have a noticeable enough impact on ratings to cause a full-on schedule change: Season 10 saw the show moving from its top-dog 9 PM Monday slot (being taken over by surprise hit 2 Broke Girls) into 8:30 PM Thursday, now playing second-fiddle to The Big Bang Theory. What's more, Season 10 saw a Retool with the show taking clear inspiration from The Big Bang Theory's nerd-culture humor, which at least was seen as an improvement on Season 9's focus on toilet humor, and also a better fit for Walden's character, but left the show feeling like an inferior copy of The Big Bang Theory rather than its own series.
  • Season 11 introduced Charlie's long-lost daughter. While the fact that she was Charlie's daughter was reason enough for her to start living at the house, she was mostly only involved in plot lines concerning Walden, and in Season 12 she made very few appearances.
• The Vampire Diaries: Many fans felt that seasons 4 and 5 were the weakest, with changing villains, strange and underdeveloped storylines, and too much focus on the love triangle.
• Veronica Mars:
  • Season 2: Not merely content to have an underwhelming Red Herring-laden season-spanning mystery, it dragged several of Season 1's plot elements down with it (most notably Retconning the resolution to Veronica's rape storyline), not to mention having Aaron Echols' hamfisted Karma Houdini-turned-Karmic Death.
  • Season 3 went downhill even further with the overall story arc being reduced to several mini-arcs and the Flanderization of important characters, along with their new network, The CW forcing them to add Product Placement, which didn't fit the show's mood at all.
• Victorious:
  • Most fans have claimed Season 2 to be inferior to Season 1, due to the Flanderization of Jade's character as well as the dumbing down of Cat, and the excessive focus on Tori (yes, she is the main character, but the show is supposed to be an ensemble piece).
  • Season 3 is either the Growing the Beard season that's made the show better than ever with things such as more serious character development and funnier plots, or even worse due to exaggerated character depths and over-the-top plotting.
• Vikings:
  • Fans and critics felt the series went downhill from season 4. Ragnar's subplot with Yidu left many cold and his motive decay made the character lose much of his appeal. Perhaps this was intentional, given Ragnar's in-story fall from grace. Björn turning from a loving son and husband to a constantly angry Ragnar-clone along with his love interest Thorunn being replaced by Torvi (who is played by the creator's daughter) left some fans with a bad taste in their mouth. This already happened at the end of season 3, but the death of Thorunn's and Björn's child and the lack of reaction from Björn, as well as Thorunn's disappearance in season 4, made it worse. Many once-important characters became relegated to plots that went nowhere. The decision to extend the season to 20 episodes instead of 10 seemed to coincide with the dip in quality and left many people puzzled as History Channel still released 10 episodes for 10 weeks and then had a hiatus for almost a year, making no difference to the viewers. Essentially, the halves of season 4 felt like two separate seasons. The series managed to make a turnaround and went home much better with the fans with the coming of age of Ragnar's sons (Ivar, in particular, becoming a break-out character and fan-favorite), actually giving the new villain Harald Finehair some actual depth and the emotionally resonate Ragnar death arc.
  • Come Season 5 the rot took hold again and went even further, cementing the series' Audience-Alienating Era. The plot started to derail and the motive decay (or flat-out derailment) of many of the characters infuriated the fans and outshone eventual bright spots in the seasons. The fan-favorite going from a somewhat sympathetic anti-hero to a full-fledged villain turned out to be a mistake as he was clearly the most defined Ragnarsson, with the others not making that much of an impression. Likewise, the new Saxon protagonists Heahmund & Alfred came off as flat and unappealing, especially in contrast to Aethelwulf and Ecbert. The Romantic Plot Tumor between Lagertha and Heahmund baffled both fans and critics. The character of Heahmund was a big failure for the showrunners as he was clearly intended to be a break-out character like Ivar, but most fans simply responded with a "meh". Creator Micheal Hirst once again threw out an established love interest so he could pair Torvi with another of Ragnar's sons. The season also introduced the much-maligned Iceland-arc, banishing one of the show's most beloved characters Floki to a plotline crowded by underdeveloped characters. When the series dropped the big twist(s) at the end of the arc, it was mostly received positively, but most felt it was too little, too late. Speaking of which, most fans did not regard the season entirely without merit: the romance between Ivar and his former slave Freydis was well received by fans and got hyped even before the release of the second part of the season.
• The Walking Dead has had this accusation leveled against it during several seasons:
  • Season 2 was the first to receive significant criticism for its storytelling, backed by a contentious set of production problems that saw Frank Darabont fired by AMC after allegedly resisting attempts to streamline the cost of each episode (which eventually manifested itself in a years-long settlement that Darabont won). A significant amount of Padding meant that large chunks of the first half of each second-season episode consisted of characters repeating the same information to each other Once per Episode, while the pacing significantly slowed down to focus on moments that attracted criticism (i.e. Lori Grimes randomly deciding to drive around to look for a missing search party, crashing it and being threatened by a walker). Others contend that the show didn't come into its own until midway through Season 2's production (the point at which Darabont was fired).
  • Season 6 is ultimately seen as a step down from the previous season. The biggest complaints stem from an overindulgence in cliffhangers and fakeouts, stupid decisions and character choices on par with Season 2, and many of the main cast being Out of Focus for half a season. Unlike Season 2, which was well-received by critics but not so much by fans, Season 6 is notable for having almost half of its episodes at a ranking of "Rotten" on the rating site Rotten Tomatoes. Season 6 also has the dubious honor of having perhaps the most reviled moment of the entire show, which many called cheap and manipulative: the cliffhanger that forced viewers to wait another seven months to find out who Negan killed.
  • Season 7 was not well received by fans, and notably features the lowest average viewership since Season 3, despite a massive upswing in interest for the season premiere. The most common complaint was that it has a lack of plot progression, and is mostly about the Saviors humiliating the group and torturing them into submission again and again (even reviewers who concede this is the point of the first half of the season admit the show goes too far). Other complaints include the level of violence and torture in the season premiere; odd character choices like a Bottle Episode devoted solely to secondary character Tara, Dwight's Heel–Face Revolving Door, and Negan himself coming across as too silly or talky; and fan-favorites Carol and Ezekiel being Out of Focus. To note, this is an opinion shared by some AMC executives — a 2022 interview with AMC President Sarah Barnett tied the show's dwindling ratings squarely to the Negan arc, which "became a little too hopeless for audiences."
  • Season 8, despite finally reaching the end of the All Out War arc, was marred with heavy criticism of uneven plotting and poor character decisions (not helped by several production problems and controversial character deaths). Ratings dropped to lows unseen since the second season while gaining only a meager critical edge on the preceding season, which has the lowest RT score in the series' history.
• Warehouse 13's fifth and final season is almost universally hated by the fans. Given only six episodes to wrap everything up, the show on top of its final season brevity forced Platonic Life-Partners Pete and Myka into a sudden, out-of-nowhere romance plot.
• Weeds: Seasons 4, 6, and 8 generally rank low among the fanbase. Seasons 1-3 set the tone for Weeds as a funny satire of suburban parents who make irresponsible, often hypocritical choices to perpetuate a fragile existence. This changed after Season 4, which moved the cast to a beach town and introduced the unpopular Uncle Lenny, a rather Anvilicious nod to illegal immigration, and a mostly passive role by Nancy throughout the season. Season 5 was better-received since Nancy connived to fight Esteban's desire to get rid of her, but Season 6 featured the cast on the run, which made for uneven storytelling. Season 7 was a return to the show's roots since it featured Nancy's desire to once again become a drug dealer out of her league. But Season 8 generally became slow-paced and ended the show rather abruptly.
• The West Wing: Everything post-Aaron Sorkin, but mainly the fifth season.
  • The third season isn't exactly beloved:
    • It introduced a handful of Base Breaking Characters (carrying a Romantic Plot Tumor) and suffered from Executive Meddling, all of which would be standard Sorkin if not for the lack of an overarching plot and Values Dissonance. The first six episodes were written before 9/11 and a direct continuation of the major plotline started in the second half of season two, but several instances of Intended Audience Reaction later, that plot was dispensed with and the show lost its centre. Was it a personal drama about the president and his Deputy Chief of Staff? Were the activities of the administration primarily political or was the show merely a vehicle to discuss Islamic terrorism? It doesn't help that the finale involves a fictional Shakespeare mash-up... with song and dance. The deliberately non-canon season opener, broadcast in response to 9/11, has aged poorly.
    • When Season 3 does address contemporary issues, it typically does so in strident and often Anvilicious fashion, unlike the show's relatively balanced appraisals up to then. Republican politicians went from generally Worthy Opponent-style characters to fire-breathing caricatures, especially (though more understandably) during the reelection storyline, where the antagonist is a stand-in for George W. Bush, with likeable figures like Ainsley Hayes and Cliff Calley either Demoted to Extra or Put on a Bus. This was somewhat corrected in subsequent seasons.
  • Attitudes to seasons 6 and 7 are generally split pretty evenly down the middle; on one hand, the actual West Wing was sidelined, but at the same time the plot tried something new and focused on the presidential election. The main problem with Season 5 was that it tried too hard to top the previous series by introducing too many new constitutional challenges (the 25th amendment invocation, the federal government shut-down, etc.). Other common criticisms were focused on the impossibility of imitating Sorkin's unique dialogue, the show's shift toward an ER sensibility (the creation of the last producer standing after the departure of Sorkin and Schlamme), the breaks from form (which were often seen as Very Special Episode in tone), and the retrofitting of characters to create drama. While the sixth and seventh seasons were markedly better, they can fall into Fanon Discontinuity territory even among fans who enjoyed them, as they seem to stand alone from the original show.
• Westworld:
  • Season 2 set a lot of expectations after the unanimous praise that Season 1 received. However, it suffered several problems which many reviews described as putting too much faith in the puzzles and timelines, at the cost of developing several characters. As a result, many viewers find the storylines very confusing and care little about the characters. Consequently Season 2's viewer ratings slowly dropped by 24% and its finale received the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of 74% compared to the Season 1 finale's RT score of 94%.
  • Season 3 is very linear with more action scenes which downplays much of the philosophical discussions, and sidelines several of the original cast; particularly with Bernard and William, who both ended up Out of Focus. It doesn't help this season only has eight episodes instead of the usual ten, which explains the rushed pace that hampers the story and character development. Furthermore, viewers' ratings continuously dropped and the two last episodes earned the show's first "rotten" scores from Rotten Tomatoes.
• Wheel of Fortune:
  • Some fans criticize Season 14 for a large number of changes: most prominently, using only one Wheel template for the entire game as opposed to each round having its own set of dollar figures; adding several new categories, which some feel make the game too easy; and changing from a mechanical puzzle board (admittedly dated) to an electronic one halfway through the season, thus making Vanna White's job a lot less necessary for anything other than eye candy.
  • Others point to Season 26, which had an increase in contrived puzzles (particularly in the form of too-specific Prize Puzzles and Fake Difficulty in the Bonus Round), less energy in the studio, a general decline in contestant quality, sloppier production, and the addition of a $1,000,000 cash prize in the Bonus Round.
  • Different fans have criticized the following season. This was when the iconic Free Spin tokens, which had been associated with the show since the Shopper's Bazaar pilot, were ousted in favor of the Free Play wedge. In addition, the second Bankrupt became permanent starting with this season (before this point, the second Bankrupt generally appeared only in Rounds 2 and 3 and never in Round 1).
  • Season 28 had several reasons, most egregiously the decision made following the death of longtime announcer Charlie O'Donnell. While it was expected that other announcers would take over the role until a successor was chosen, it was not expected that those other announcers would be dubbed over Charlie on a string of episodes that were taped prior to his death but had yet to air. The show stated that it had been a tough decision, but better to do this than have the sadness of hearing his voice so close to his death. (Even worse, the reruns the following summer dubbed over the guest announcers, live or pre-recorded, with Charlie's replacement, Jim Thornton.)
  • Season 33 which has seen an increase in overall cheapness in the show, even more so than in previous seasons. Perhaps the most glaring was that it was the first since Season 8 to not have any road shows. In addition, they did away with the cash bonus with cars won in the Bonus Round, decreased a few dollar amounts on the Wheel, and removed the ½ Car tags in the first round. The same cheapness bled into Seasons 34, 35, and 36, with a greater increase in Bonus Round difficulty (even with Season 35 offering a new rule that allows contestants to pick from one of three categories, instead of having the category predetermined). The cheapness also continued in those seasons, as nearly every bonus round win seemed to be for either the lowest prize (which, since Season 32, has been the current season number multiplied by $1,000) or for a car valued at less than that. The announcement that executive producer Harry Friedman would retire after Season 37 was applauded by many.
  • Season 38 was much better received than the previous seasons, with the arrival of Friedman's replacement Mike Richards, who departed The Price Is Right and Let's Make a Deal in 2019; the season took small steps to modernize the puzzles, as well as several $100,000 wins, and the celebrity specials on ABC garnering high ratings.
  • Unfortunately, this didn't last long, as Season 39 more or less reverted to the staleness of prior seasons, notably more questionable puzzles and an infamous bonus round ruling in a December 2021 episode that caused Audi to give a contestant the car she lost, though this season has set the most record for $100,000 wins at seven as of May 2022.
• Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? changed formats in the 2008-09 season, adding a timer to the questions — and stupidly, the timer counted down while host Meredith Vieira read the question instead of after she finished, thus whittling down the seconds. Any banked time was saved up for the million-dollar question, and the Lifelines changed. It changed again in the 2010-11 season to a "shuffle" format which has also been heavily criticized as straying even further from original Millionaire format. Some would go as far as to say 2002, when the show moved from ABC to syndication, while also replacing original host Regis Philbin with Meredith, and nixing Fastest Finger First.
• The Wire's fifth season. The side plots of the previous seasons were fascinating and expanded the strong ensemble cast, to the point that they could practically carry the show by themselves when the main cast was absent from an episode. In Season 5, though, the newspaper side plot feels extremely superfluous. Seen as a severe Writer on Board moment on the part of David Simon, it didn't introduce any memorable or compelling new characters, and the whole "serial killer" plotline came across as implausible, getting away from the "true to life" feel of the show. It may also have been sinking under the weight of the sheer number of characters and plotlines of the first four seasons (in fact, the fifth season is saturated with cameos by characters from past seasons, and they don't serve much purpose). Reducing the episode count to 10 (as opposed to the normal 12-13 per season) did not help matters either.
• The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss: After having a decent first season, the show underwent a more preschool-friendly shift in the second season. The Cat in the Hat's personality changed as well.
• The X-Files:
  • Some fans loathe Season 7, due to questionable twists in the Mythology (especially the Samantha reveal in Closure), a perceived excess of humorous episodes, and the assorted twists in "Requiem." In fairness to Chris Carter and Co., Fox was planning to cancel the series and only renewed it at the last minute, causing the show to prematurely wrap up loose ends. Still, even X-Philes who dislike Seasons 8-9 sometimes rate them above the 7th. However, a lot of fans still view it as a great season, with some even calling it the last good season.
  • Season 9. There's some disagreement as to exactly when the show took a wrong turn and started going downhill, but many agree that by Season 9, at least, major problems had set in. Although the replacement of Mulder with John Doggett in Season 8 at least had a mixed reception, the same can't be said of Season 9, where Scully was phased out in favor of Monica Reyes, and the conspiracy arc was dragged out for far too long, leading to a series finale that offered very little resolution.
    • The finale was intended to be a set-up for a series of feature films that would finally start resolving the Myth Arc, but that ultimately didn't come to pass.
  • The 2016 mini-series isn't exactly beloved by fans either. The nature of the Government Conspiracy shifted in quite a radical way which heavily contradicted much of what came before (even accounting for the fact that the show's Myth Arc had never exactly been consistent), and a certain amount of Values Dissonance in the way conspiracy theorists were depicted in the 1990s (as heroic crusaders for truth) compared to how they are widely viewed in 2016 (as deluded and potentially even dangerous followers of fringe and extremist political movements) meant that the premise hadn't aged very well in several ways.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Despite being more popular than its parent series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which for reference got better as it went along, Xena seems to have peaked in season 3. Four is considered a letdown compared to the previous season and season 5, to put it bluntly, was not liked, due to a lack of action^note Lucy Lawless was pregnant at the time season 5 was filmed (which was worked into the show), which greatly limited the actions she could perform and the infamous "Twilight of The Gods" arc, which is considered by some to be one of the worst storylines in TV history. Season 6 is seen as a modest improvement, although fans are split on how the series ends.
• G4TV's number one video game show, even after it was no longer a video game channel, X-Play. The show became popular because of its honest yet comedic themes and reviews of video games. Themes like fake harassing of the interns and special comedy segments like Sensitive Sess and the Apple I-Box special were considered some of the show's funniest moments. Then came 2008, and the people at G4 decided to get rid of the comedy theme and make X-Play a more serious video game show. Many fans felt the show got away from what made it worth watching in the first place. It wasn't a surprise to anyone that the show got cancelled soon after Adam Sessler left in 2012. But at least they were able to record over 1,000 episodes over the decades it's been on the air.
• You Can't Do That on Television: Fans tend to point to Season 8 (1987) as the true beginning of the end. Christine McGlade, who was generally considered to be the face of the show had already departed five episodes into the previous season. Alasdair Gillis, who succeeded Christine full-time as host, unfortunately also left at the end of Season 7. By the time Season 8^note Which with only five episodes produced, was the shortest season in You Can't Do That on Television's history. rolled around, everybody from the original cast^note By 1987, many of the "veteran" cast members such as Matt Godfrey, Doug Ptolemy, Vanessa Lindores, and Adam Reid had grown too old for the show. (as well as most second wave cast members) sans Les Lye was gone. Meanwhile, executive producer Geoffrey Darby had left to work on other projects for Nickelodeon. Most significantly, Season 8 featured the only banned episode in You Can't Do That on Television's history, which was the "Adoption" episode. It was also around this time that the show was pulling back from being an open dialogue which manifested in the "kids on the street" segments^note These segments concerned young people being asked about the specific subject of the respective episode. So what was left was a bunch of bathroom humor and fat and "this is girl ugly" jokes. Consequentially, after Season 8, no episodes of YCDTOT would be produced for 1988 before it would be brought back for two more years. However, those two years featured an entirely new cast and an increase in gross-out humor, so many fans believe the rot continued or even accelerated.
• Youve Been Framed: The five years from 1998 to 2003 after original host Jeremy Beadle left the show are generally seen as a weak point. Neither of the replacement hosts, Lisa Riley and then Jonathan Wilkes, bought the level of energy to the show that Beadle did, with additional problems including Riley's run tending to focus on toddlers doing cutesy things rather than the accidents and bizzare incidents that the show was known for, and then Wilkes' run including needless gimmicks such as having the studio audience vote on the best clip of the week. Fortunately, the show recovered when Harry Hill took over as an off-camera host and restored the format to something more akin to the Beadle era, keeping it going all the way until 2022, by which point the show had been rendered largely irrelevent by YouTube and social media.

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