It’s easy to binge watch a show that’s going strong, like Breaking Bad, or Dexter (pre-last 3 seasons), but what about the shows that started out strong, then became excruciatingly painful to watch towards the middle and the end. Yet, because you’ve been watching since the beginning, you forced yourself to finish watching it? To put it another way, have you asked yourself “why am I still watching this?” and then you simply continue watching it…
There’s a couple of shows that came really close to making our list, luckily for them they pulled us back in and got us excited just before we asked the dreaded question. They are Dexter, Fringe, Battlestar Galactica and The Big Bang Theory.
Here’s 5 TV Shows You Forced Yourself to Watch to the End:
1. Lost
Lost started with a bang and was probably one of the most watched and talked about shows ever. The show started on September 22 2004 and lasted for a full 6 seasons up to May 23, 2010 which contained a total of 121 episodes. I can still remember how things fell apart after we simply never got any answers season after season after season. Did you finish the entire show? We sat through it… all 121 episodes.
This is how the 6 seasons performed, clearly showing the success of season 1, and season 2. The decline began with season 3 onwards, spiking each time just before the last episode of each season.
2. Smallville
Smallville was awesome! Any show about the life of Superman will be awesome, yet somehow they managed to bore the crap out of everyone, even after making serious character changes they carried on with a few more seasons. The show started on October 16, 2001 and ended its tenth and final season on May 13, 2011. All I wanted to see was Clark fly? Was this too much to ask?
Interestingly though, the concept for Smallville was created after a potential series chronicling a young Bruce Wayne’s journey toward becoming Batman failed to generate interest. After meeting with the president of Warner Bros. Television, series developers Gough and Millar pitched their “no tights, no flights” rule, which would break Superman down to the bare essentials and look at the events leading up to Clark Kent becoming Superman.
How tired and over-used was the “villain of the week” plot? We’re glad this one is over and done with.
In spite of all of this, Smallville managed to keep it’s millions of viewers every week. Here’s a handy graph via Wikipedia:
| Season | Premiered | Ended | Rank | Viewers (in millions) |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date | Premiere Viewers (in millions) |
Date | Finale Viewers (in millions) |
|||||
| Season1 | October 16, 2001 | 8.40 |
May 21, 2002 | N/A | #115 |
5.90 |
||
| Season2 | September 24, 2002 | 8.70 |
May 20, 2003 | N/A | #113 |
6.30 |
||
| Season3 | October 1, 2003 | N/A | May 19, 2004 | 5.92 |
#141 |
4.96 |
||
| Season4 | September 22, 2004 | 6.07 |
May 18, 2005 | 5.47 |
#124 |
4.40 |
||
| Season5 | September 29, 2005 | 5.90 |
May 11, 2006 | 4.85 |
#117 |
4.70 |
||
| Season6 | September 28, 2006 | 4.96 |
May 17, 2007 | 4.14 |
#125 |
4.10 |
||
| Season7 | September 27, 2007 | 5.18 |
May 15, 2008 | 3.85 |
#175 |
3.77 |
||
| Season8 | September 18, 2008 | 4.34 |
May 14, 2009 | 3.13 |
#152 |
3.74 |
||
| Season9 | September 25, 2009 | 2.58 |
May 14, 2010 | 2.45 |
#129 |
2.38 |
||
| Season10 | September 24, 2010 | 2.98 |
May 13, 2011 |
3.02 |
#131 |
3.19 |
||
3. Heroes
The one show we loved so much we could not wait for each weeks episode. Seriously, people with powers was a new thing back in 2006. Yet, the show managed to drag on forever… each season promising some “end of the world” event that needs to be stopped. Can you remember the dreaded “carnival” season? Heroes aired from September 25, 2006 through February 8, 2010. Four complete seasons. The series tells the stories of ordinary people who discover superhuman abilities, and how these abilities take effect in the characters’ lives. The series emulates the aesthetic style and storytelling of American comic books, using multi-episode story arcs that build upon a larger, more encompassing arc.
Good news, or bad news depending how you look at it, Heroes will be reborn with a mini-series planned for 2015 with creator Tim Kring’s 13-episode standalone arc entitled “Heroes: Reborn”. The studio also released a teaser which reveals absolutely nothing but i’m sure fans of the once beloved series will be making back flips by now.
4. Supernatural
Supernatural first aired on September 13, 2005, and is still going strong, striding steadily into its ninth season which will end on the 20th of May 2014. I was so in love with this series when it started. Interesting (and quite accurate) lore, an engaging storyline, and such clear direction.
Over the first five seasons, it lost some of the key elements that made it so popular. The introduction of Angels made things a little bit…odd. But, they were mostly well handled. Then, we see that all of this, the whole five seasons, has been leading to the big one: the Apocalypse. Oh, cool. Sam managed to stop that pesky apocalypse. That was a great little adve-wait. WAIT. Why is Sam back?
I originally stopped a couple of episodes into season six. The introduction of the Alphas was just strange. It seemed like they were trying to introduce a structure that didn’t make sense. Shifters are loners, why would they have an Alpha? Why does everything have an Alpha? Things which are born, things which are turned, every unnatural thing has an Alpha.
Okay, if you push through that, you get to season seven, which made no sense but had a lot of stupid jokes. But there’s no direction to the show anymore, and there hasn’t been since the apocalypse. It’s now just them running around coming up with schemes that don’t quite work out, revisiting the same old go-our-separate-ways-then-join-up-again-after-one-episode drama. There’s nothing new, but I keep on watching to stay true as a loyal fan.
5. Prison Break
Here’s another show that captivated us like few other shows have. The story was amazing, and who doesn’t like a prison break movie/series. We even mentioned this as one of our all time greatest prison break movies, even though this is a show. Yet the story seemed to be repeated over and over again after every season. Each time they had to break out of a different prison.
As captivating as this show was, it turned out to be a real drag. Did you finish it?
