Star Trek TNG for sure. Breaking Bad also had a slow start.
Star Trek TNG for sure. Breaking Bad also had a slow start.
I guess Doctor Who kind of counts, although it's had ups and downs, but a lot of people think the show's golden age in the classic era at least was the 70s.
Red Dwarf really started to get better when they introduced the starbug and Kryten joined the cast.
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Blake's 7. A 1970's British sci-fi show that is pretty much the anti-thesis of Star Trek, with a truly unforgettable final episode.
Probably the best sci-fi series for me, off putting start in the first couple however it takes off after episode 2 or 3 when Avon shows up. The last episode was shocking when it first aired but the series was pretty much great throughout. Good to see another fan of something a bit obscure. I even have the book Avon a Terrible Aspect written by Paul Darrow. Tragic it never came back as a cartoon with the original cast doing voices.
Friday Night Lights definitely got better with age. Season 1 wasn't bad, but because it was marketed for teens, the writers had to pack a lot of drama into 22 episodes. Season 2 dialed the teen drama up to 11 and a very unrealistic storyline for an otherwise very realistic show, plus the season ended abruptly due to the writer's strike. But Seasons 3-5, when the writers had to tighten the story to fit 13-episode seasons rather than 22, were perfection.
Racking my brains, I'd even go out on a limb and say Smallville got better with age, as I think the show peaked in Seasons 2 & 3, had a bit of a renaissance in Season 6, and then was hot garbage for the rest of its run.
I couldn't get into Breaking Bad until whatever season it was that gave us Danny Trejo's decapitated head on a turtle.
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It's really season 2 where BB really takes off, since it really expands and establishes's BB's universe with Gus, Saul, Hector, Ted and Mike all showing up for the first time.
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I have trouble with most Star Trek series after TNG because they turned into war stories rather than exploration stories. I like war stories, but Star Trek isn't the right vehicle for them.
Voyager probably held closest to the ideal, but it also seems to be the least liked in general.
To be honest that is why I like DS9 so much. It kind of had both worlds. It did have a bit of exploration in their visits to the other side of the wormhole. But it also got away from the utopia and paradise that Star Trek built. DS9 is the only one where I can watch every episode and not be upset.
TNG there are a lot of good espisodes but there are a lot that I cant watch. Voyager not many good episodes but I did like what they were trying to do.
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Deep Space 9, Babylon 5, ST:TNG all got better over time. Alot of genre shows do, Heroes being an exception.
Both Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5 I would would agree but for the last season of each, which were serious downturns, IMO.
Maybe Farscape or Killjoys? They were, IIRC, getting better right up to the end.
Season 7 of TNG, after a pretty good run of solid seasons, was also a bit of a downturn too I think.
It had some of the most awful episodes in the series-Masks, Sub Rosa, Genesis etc. and kind of had that whole weird thing about warp drive pollution. Plus the Worf/Troi romance that pretty much went nowhere once the movies came out (It's possible that working on GENERATIONS hurt the season as well).
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I'm definitely not saying SNL qualifies, but as I get older I notice sometimes two eras where SNL is a benchmark of quality:
1. the OG cast and crew of the first few seasons
2. whatever era someone first begins to watch SNL consistently
That is, when I see comments of someone saying "SNL isn't as funny as it used to be," 50% of the time they're comparing modern seasons to when they first started watching the show, and sometimes this includes seasons that other folks would consider as contenders for worst seasons of the 80s and 90s.
Again, that's not to say that SNL gets better with age, it's just that SNL seems to be a creature of perspective as time goes on.
Agreed, though my memories of the show are hazy at this point and I don't know when I started to feel that it was improving. But definitely agreed that it was very, very mundane and cookie-cutter when it started.
I'm still a bit sour of how the Inhumans were shoved into everything, but getting past that, I feel, is when I started to look upon the show more favorably.
DS9 seems to be a show that was ahead of its time -- definitely more Trekkies are fans of it these days than in the 90s.
There's something wonderful about those shows that even though they're set in a (fictional) past, that they continue to be relevant, so much so that memes and analyses keep getting made about them. I think of the cartoons that I watched at the time instead of ATLA and only recently appreciating just how far ahead of the curve ATLA ended up being in comparison.Avatar the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra. Pretty much everyone thinks season 2 is where ATLA really took off and became a masterpiece. And with Korra seasons 1 and 2 were a huge mess but the final 2 seasons were amazing.
I think there's something to be said about the show handling not just exploration, but colonialism and imperialism -- history's shown us many, and often dire consequences to exploration, war and genocide being the biggest of them all. DS9 occasionally provided commentary on the paradoxical nature of the Federation (considering themselves peaceful, but encroaching on other territories, or how indigenous peoples were at a fundamental disadvantage in being treated as pawns), but DS9 was also the first Trek show to bring up those observations, too. And DS9 had to juggle those observations in a way that called out those hypocrisies while still painting the Federation as ultimately good and utopian, and thus preserve Trek's ideals of the future -- not an easy juggling act, but that just added to the show's overall complexity. So DS9 had to try to paint the Federation as good and exploratory, but not exploratory in the vein of conquistadors or a perpetual war machine. And even in a fictional universe that is not easy to do.
Last edited by Cyke; 06-06-2021 at 10:56 AM.
I think a big problem that most sci fi shows is they have to spend so much of the first season setting up their universe and it's rules especially with searilized series. That can make the first season seem clunky and slow, but when you look back at them latter you realize they were laying the groundwork for some fantastic stuff latter. Shows like Babylon 5 and the Expanse really suffered from this, but it did pay off.
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