Part 3 of a brief list of six shows I actively decided to stop watching. Part 1 and a full intro can be found here, while part 2 can be found here.
Glee
24 is the only show on this list that I even have to think about why I stopped watching. Heroes and Glee are the two shows that I think had the least amount of actual quality content before they went off the rails. For half a season, I actually went around defending the show, even outright supporting it, saying that, yes it looks silly, and I am often ambivalent about the singing (it had its moments (4 minutes by Madonna, for example), but sometimes was just too much), but Glee was high school parody done right for a short time. There were central plots holding the show together, in particular, Will’s wife’s fake baby, and cheerleader Quinn’s real one, that anchored the show. The show kept a consistent roster of character personalities and plot strands besides merely how the Glee Club fares through the Christmas break, where characters maybe showed gradual change, but were who they were. And then it all fell apart. It was clear there was no more meticulous planning, or honestly planning at all. Instead, everything, including characters’ personalities and storylines, was at the mercy of what the writers decided they wanted for a particular episode, whether it was a message they wanted to send, or a particular musical theme. Quinn’s cheerleader character was perhaps the biggest casualty of this let’s-not-think-beyond-the-next-episode policy. She was friendly and helpful one episode, she was a total bitch in another, she was emotional and depressed in a third. Sure, people are complicated and change, but there was absolutely no coherence. Consistent plotting and characters was simply no longer something those running the show were interested in. I complained and complained throughout the end of the first season and the start of the second but the official end came when Glee took on Rocky Horror in the fifth episode of the second season to celebrate Halloween. I didn’t initially intend to just stop watching, but the episode just sat on my DV-r for weeks and then months passed before I realized the inevitable. I didn’t really like Glee at that point, and I had never much cared for Rocky Horror, and realizing I didn’t care about the show later passed on towards active dislike the more detached I was.
True Blood
I searched my google chat logs to figure out when exactly I caught up on True Blood, which I did not start watching right from the pilot. In fact, what’s ironic is that when I caught up, was just about when I thought the last good episodes were. This was in September of 2009, when the second season was finishing up, and I watched both seasons at a furious pace, desperately trying to catch up in time to watch the Season 2 finale live. I say just about because I think the beginning of Season 3 was pretty good as well. The last few episodes of Season 3, however, were both anticlimactic and terrible, and I found my first official gchat complaint about the show just after the fourth season started, in June of 2011, when I tell my friend I haven’t watched the first episode yet because I didn’t think the last season was so good. I’m not sure I ever turned on a show as quickly as True Blood. I was very into when I was marathoning. I thought the second half of the first season and the entire second season were riveting, addictive TV, and the third season built up in such a way that it seemed to have a solid chance of matching the first two. But then the show just cratered, and I didn’t even finish season4. I watched a couple episodes, and then just gradual faded out, noticing that I really didn’t want to watch anymore. Most shows I’d give at least a full season to let them back on their path, or see if it was just a bad run of episodes that the writers realized as well and had time to correct, but I didn’t give that to True Blood, and history proved me right, as whenever I caught pieces of other episodes, they were terrible, and friends who were still watching told me as much. The biggest culprits were that first, the universe just became too big too fast, and there were absolutely no natural limits. Time travel, fairies, witches, it was impossible to keep up with, and more than that, I didn’t really want to. It lost its fun trashiness quotient into just bad trashiness. Second, the careful plotting of the early seasons disappeared; where there were smaller individual plots that coalesced into a couple of big plots in time for the end of the season, now every character had his or her own plot, and some of the characters had absolutely no business with one. Jason’s werepanther plot was terrible (which was a shame because Jason was one of the best characters) as was the plot with Sam’s brother. More of the plots were bad than good, and I found it harder and harder to pick out main characters that I really liked. Recently, I’ve had friends describe for me the plots of the end of the last two seasons, and laughed and laughed at how ridiculous they sounded. It’s possible in context they don’t seem as ridiculous but I enjoyed the short narrative recitation of the plot much more than I would have watching the show and that says a lot.
Television, the Drug of the Nation 
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