Television

I'll cop shit for this, but The Bear.

Observe that people want beef subs, that beef subs are good, and what needs to improve is the restaurant management and staff stability. You can still innovate with sandwiches and pastries, you don't need to convert to a fancy restaurant and charge stupid prices for a different daily menu.

What they did in The Bear by converting to a fancy restaurant and alienating their customers was the most boneheaded business move one could possibly conceive of and I despise Lip for squandering mikeys money like that.

Happy Days when the Fonz jumped the shark

Weeds

The Walking Dead. It just became a generic human vs human thing after a while. Then Negan, and then back to boring TV

Agents of Shield.

S1 and 2 Sort of a normal seasons - agents dealing with powered people, the fall of Shield S3 Space travel for a bit, more Inhumans S4 Ghost Rider, ghosts and stuck in a computer dystopian nightmare S5 Time travel S6 Space travel S7 More time travel

Reboot definitely ended up that way. Went from a simple defeat the enemy every week and beat the user in the game cube storyline to a much more serious storyline. Ended up with part of a final season where a man with a gun tries to get back home as an angelic looking super virus tries infecting every system by spreading the word ( mass sprite control ). Only to end on a cliffhanger after the super virus was taken care of.

I say this regretfully: Westworld.

Look, honestly I was into it up until the last episode. I knew the story was twisting and turning a bit too much but I kept watching and very much enjoyed the last season.

I say that it lost sight of its original premise because yes, technically it did. But that doesn’t mean the content wasn’t still great — this is a perfect example of losing your audience by not following the original narrative. I sometimes think the show would’ve been more financially successful had they dragged out the first season into several but I wouldn’t have wanted them to actually do that.

Prison Break.

Season one is breaking out of prison. So far so good.

Season two is a manhunt. That's fair, it's the aftermath.

Season three is breaking out of prison.. again! But this time in Panama. Technically that is the show, so alright.

Season four is a secret shadow organization who can cure all diseases but don't.

Also there is a post-show film that adds another prison break for some reason. Also I'm learning the show was revived for a fifth season, I can't say what that's about.

Dr. Who.

When started, it was a show to teach kids about history.

Lost.

iZombie

Original premise: Liv is a doctor is accidentally turned into a zombie. She becomes a medical examiner in order to have access to brains. After discovering eating the brains of murder victims gives her flashbacks and moments leading up to the victim's death, she helps a detective to solve crimes by pretending to be psychic. A side effect of the brain eating is that she may temporarily acquire skills or idiosyncrasies of the victim. Meanwhile, Blaine, another zombie, is turning rich people into zombies to extort them in return for brains of people he's killing.

How it went: Pretty much everyone in the main cast is a zombie (or were-zombie), there's an evil corporation, an entire city full of zombies, a good guy private military contractor that turns into a bad guy private military contractor, and etc. that I won't spoil any further. And eating a brain pretty much makes you take on that person's entire personality wholesale.

The thing is, it was great! It ended pretty strong without wearing out its welcome or getting too absurd plot-wise. Meanwhile everyone in the cast is clearly having fun with the over-the-top, flanderised personality mechanics, and it's just fun to watch.

There is a phrase for that, it's called "Jumping the Shark".

Lost

Battlestar Galactica, the potential cancellation made some whacky shit happen

Sherlock unfortunately. S1-2 are some of the best TV I've ever watched. 3 was okay, and then 4 was completely off the rails, with each episode being about some zany conspiracy. Granted it can't take all the credit, Doyle did the same.

Rosanne, the 90's sitcom starring Rosanne Barr and John Goodman. One of the many "living room set with a couch in the middle" family sitcoms, this one about an Illinois blue collar family, the Connors, and their life and times trying to make ends meet. Eight seasons of this premise making acclaimed TV, and then in the ninth season, they win the lottery, go on all these outlandish adventures, Dan cheats on Rosanne, etc. The series finale reveals the whole show is a story being told by Rosanne Barr, and that the last season was mostly bullshit, they hadn't won the lottery, Dan had died of his heart attack in the previous season, and the show ended on a "wtf was all that?" kind of note.

I think I'll also mention Lassie, which is just kinda weird. Non-Americans might not even know what I'm talking about. It's a show about an unusually intelligent rough collie named Lassie. Most folks who are familiar with it know it by its first incarnation, where Lassie is a farm dog who spends her days with the farm boy named Little Timmy. Little Timmy goes on precocious little adventures and often gets into trouble, and Lassie has to help, sometimes by fetching objects but often by fetching the adults to help. And everyone pretends that they can understand Lassie's barking. Here is a stereotypical exchange from the show:

MOM is in kitchen. LASSIE enters

Lassie: Bark. Bark. Woof.

Mom: What is it girl?

Lassie: Bark. Bark.

Mom: Timmy fell down a well?! Where?"

Lassie: Woof. Bark bark.

Mom: On Old Mister Knickerficker's ranch? Well let's go!

Note: You know how Darth Vader didn't say "Luke, I am your father" or Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty?" Yeah, Timmy never fell down a well. He fell off cliffs, into rivers and lakes, down mine shafts and into quicksand, but never into a well.

The thing is, after several seasons, Lassie just...became a forest ranger's dog. And other than "show about a smart, fluffy dog" it had basically nothing in common with it's original run. And then for it's last few seasons, it became an anthology series where Lassie roamed around on her own having random adventures of the week.

I stopped watching american gods with season 2. season 1 was amazing and season two was like. is anything related to the story even going on half the time.

Simpsons. They were really against celebrityism and pop culture in the beginning, then they went in the complete opposite and started worshiping celebrities. Ugh. New simpsons is dead to me.

Family Matters

Show went from a wholesome sitcom about a family in Chicago to whacky borderline scifi. It was a spin-off of Perfect Strangers and just started going off the rails like around the 4th season when they retconned the existance of the one daughter Judy. Then by the end it just became the Steve Urkel show.

Happy Days when the Fonz jumped a shark on waterskis.