Shows you felt went on too long, ended too soon or felt just ended at the right time

[Darth Richard II]

Heh, I always thought the Sopranos should have ended after the first season.

[DMC]

Sopranos could have ended after the first season.  That doesn't mean (most of) the subsequent five seasons weren't some of the best television ever.

[Nictarion]

Just now, DMC said:

Sure, that's why I said "in earnest," because

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while it was certainly either on the precipice or the backburner once Tony B killed Billy, they then had Phil bitching, then the proxy war, then them reconciling when Phil had a heart attack at the end of 6A.  By the time 6B rolled around I was just like "get on with it already."

 

Indeed.  I thought the Vito storyline really dragged, and was certainly not compelling enough to warrant as much attention as it did.  Johnny Sack's storyline during this period was similarly "meh," I thought - and then there's Carmella and Ro's pointless trip to Paris.

Do you think BB was as good after

Gus was killed?

To me that final season wasn’t quite as strong  as the middle seasons 2-4. Whereas I think an argument can be made The Sopranos 6B is the strongest of its entire run. 

[Nictarion]

@Mark Antony you care to weigh in on this? 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Nictarion said:

Do you think BB was as good after

Spoiler

I think if you're gonna complain about any of the later seasons, then yeah, 5A would be the weakest link.  Pretty funny coincidence we're talking about the beginning of both shows' final seasons.  But I really enjoyed watching Walt actually build this empire and become scarface - and that's integral to the show.  Was anything in Sopranos 6A integral to the show?  Johnny Sack's death could have been expedited in a sentence of dialogue.  The crap with Vito is entirely unnecessary.  The shooting and coma stretched out too long.  Even Christopher pulling away and going Hollywood - which is essential to his death - I didn't think was very interesting.

Also, the big elephant in the room - Ozymandias is the best episode of the show and an awesome climax to the series.

 

6 minutes ago, Nictarion said:

Whereas I think an argument can be made The Sopranos 6B is the strongest of its entire run. 

Disagree there, although I certainly like 6B just fine.

[Ramsay B.]

15 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Heh, I always thought the Sopranos should have ended after the first season.

Very curious to know why you think that? 

[Darth Richard II]

1 minute ago, Ramsay B. said:

Very curious to know why you think that? 

I'm not a fan of the rest of it.

[Nictarion]

24 minutes ago, DMC said:

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I think if you're gonna complain about any of the later seasons, then yeah, 5A would be the weakest link.  Pretty funny coincidence we're talking about the beginning of both shows' final seasons.  But I really enjoyed watching Walt actually build this empire and become scarface - and that's integral to the show.  Was anything in Sopranos 6A integral to the show?  Johnny Sack's death could have been expedited in a sentence of dialogue.  The crap with Vito is entirely unnecessary.  The shooting and coma stretched out too long.  Even Christopher pulling away and going Hollywood - which is essential to his death - I didn't think was very interesting.

Also, the big elephant in the room - Ozymandias is the best episode of the show and an awesome climax to the series.

 

Disagree there, although I certainly like 6B just fine.

Well, Sopranos was much more of an ensemble show, and I enjoyed seeing stuff like Silvio failing at being boss, Gene trying to leave the life, Junior dealing with dementia, etc. The show spending time with some of the side characters made it all the more impactful when we see their eventual fates. 

Also, Blue Comet is pretty great itself. 

And just for the record Sopranos 6B isn’t my personal favorite (that’s probably S2), I just think it’s as good a run of episodes as any. Chasing It is really the only weak episode imo. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Nictarion said:

Well, Sopranos was much more of an ensemble show, and I enjoyed seeing stuff like Sylvio failing at being boss, Gene trying to leave the life, Junior dealing with dementia, etc. 

Yes, I did like all three of those examples, to be clear (albeit Junior dealing with dementia was already pretty well covered).

2 minutes ago, Nictarion said:

Also, Blue Comet is pretty great itself. 

That's true, I love Blue Comet.  I especially love when

Spoiler

Tony and Sil fake slow-mo box when they decide to go to war.  I still re-enact that with a couple of my friends who know the reference every once in awhile.

 

4 minutes ago, Nictarion said:

And just for the record Sopranos 6B isn’t my personal favorite (that’s probably S2), I just think it’s as good a run of episodes as any.

I think the first season is the best season, overall.  But in general, yeah, it's hard to rate most of the seasons because there's a lot of great stuff in each.

[WarGalley]

1 hour ago, Nictarion said:

Completely disagree wrt The Sopranos. You can count on one hand the amount of weak episodes it had. 

It went out stronger than Breaking Bad, imo. I’ll take Tony vs Phil/NY over Walter vs the Nazis any day. 

It's been awhile, and I might change my mind but "You can count on one hand the amount of weak episodes it has." seems too strong in rhetoric to me. Breaking Bad's final season with the Nazis wasn't terribly compelling but the season was saved with the final Walt vs Hank vs Jesse confrontations. The Nazis were the B-line plot in comparison. The problem I have with Tony vs Phil/NY was that it was yet another iteration of a confrontation that always went nowhere when it came to war between the Jersey mob and NY. By the time the final season came along, I wasn't sure how seriously to treat it until the hits on Bobby and Silvio. 

[Nictarion]

13 minutes ago, WarGalley said:

It's been awhile, and I might change my mind but "You can count on one hand the amount of weak episodes it has." seems too strong in rhetoric to me. Breaking Bad's final season with the Nazis wasn't terribly compelling but the season was saved with the final Walt vs Hank vs Jesse confrontations. The Nazis were the B-line plot in comparison. The problem I have with Tony vs Phil/NY was that it was yet another iteration of a confrontation that always went nowhere when it came to war between the Jersey mob and NY. By the time the final season came along, I wasn't sure how seriously to treat it until the hits on Bobby and Silvio. 

I mean, Tony B was a great character, and he was a casualty of going up against NY. Benny was beaten within an inch of his life. Vito, Fat Dom...

felt like the stakes were real to me. 

And even if all that wasn’t enough, this amazing scene confirmed it

 

[Werthead]

The Walking Dead (natch)

The X-Files: probably should have finished at Season 5 or 6 with a reasonable end to the arc. It should never have reached 9 seasons with the original stars mostly absent, let alone coming back for two horrific messes of seasons.

House of Cards: should have been 2 seasons at the absolute max.

Heroes: a brilliant one-season show that killed itself by going on far, far too long (and somehow getting a reboot!).

24, Prison Break, Homeland and Dexter were all shows with very strong central premises which could have made for great one-to-three season shows but which had to be strung out way past the point of lunacy.

True Blood: Season 1 was good, Season 2 was terrible but saved by Michelle Forbes and Season 3 just went off the deep end into a maelstrom of utter insanity and weirdness. There was a really, really good subversion of the Twilight-style vampire bollocks in there somewhere, but they lost it by going Full HBO. Never go Full HBO.

Game of Thrones: a great example of when you put mediocre writers in charge of a franchise which has tons of great dialogue by a superior writer, and the second they run out of that material they fall back on hackneyed cliches. Ideally would have terminated at the end of Season 4.

Battlestar Galactica: If BSG had ended with the Season 4 mid-season cliffhanger (or, more accurately, Sometimes a Great Notion which was the last episode filmed before the 2008 Writer's Strike), it would legit be remembered now as one of the greatest TV shows of all time. That last half-season of Luddite bollocks, massively out-of-character behaviour, fucking around on pianos, Adama bawling into walls etc turned the show into a mockery of itself. It'd be a shame to lose the mutiny arc, although that would also mean we lost Zarek turning into a mass murdering lunatic because reasons.

Breaking Bad: Seasons 1-4 are uniformally brilliant. Season 5 is also kind of great, but the show took a notch down in quality when it lost Gus as the main villain. The faceless neo-Nazi non-entity bad guys in the final season are just generic and horrible. Ozymandias through the finale are genuinely great, but ideally I think the show would have been better if it had found a way of killing off Gus and then moving into a shorter 5-6 episode post-Gus arc that then ended the show. Also they could have made better use of Laura Fraser: casting an actress of her skill for the final season and then not giving her much to do remains one of the oddest decisions in the show's history.

 

Quote

 

Similar to The Wire, whose quality in the last season is considerably lacking compared to its previous four.

 

Season 5 of The Wire is almost as good as the first four with the exception of the "McNulty fakes a serial killer" plot and the "ooh, journalism sucks when corporations get involved" subplot, which were both a bit whacked out (the latter eats up surprisingly little screen time though). Everything else in that final season, like Marlo's machinations and plotting, Carcetti being in power but now completely helpless to do any of the things he'd promised for two seasons prior, Daniels realising the game is rigged but there's another way to play, and of course everything with Omar, was solid gold and the finale was perfection.

The Wire did stick its landing, but it definitely had a bit of a wobble and maybe a go-around before it did it.

2 hours ago, williamjm said:

Stargate SG-1. It was a fun show, but 10 season was excessive.

Red Dwarf should probably have ended after season 6.

I sort of agree, but Seasons 10-12 were all perfectly decent and had a few classic ideas in them. Season 8 also had a couple of decent episodes. But yeah, Seasons 7, 9 and the weaker episodes of the others do make a reasonable case for it, and we've certainly not had a season with the consistent brilliance of 2-5 ever since.

Quote

 

Lost

 

I'd say almost. Six seasons, three of them relatively short, is not really a massive overload of material and it went on far shorter than almost any other network show mentioned on this list. 

It was also mostly coherent and pretty much every question the show ever asked was answered, apart from "What is the Island?" which I think either had to be answered in Season 1 or not at all, so the latter was the correct choice. Lost definitely made big mistakes along the way - a few too many filler episodes in Season 2, Season 3's lengthy trip to the bear cages, Nikki & Paulo (arggh) and the flash-sideways in the final season - but it generally course-corrected when it realised it was going down the wrong path. Seasons 4 and 5 were both exceptionally strong and I'm not sure the diversions in Season 6 merited losing the whole show (Beyond the Sea was probably the closest the show came to completely killing it, but that was like 2 episodes before the finale).

[Darth Richard II]

Oh yeah, 24. That was supposed to be only 1 season originally, if I recall.

[dooog]

Ended too soon:  Rubicon, Firefly, Deadwood

 

Ended at the right time: Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Justified, Southland, The Americans.

 

Went on too long:  Every other concluded show ever made

[DMC]

6 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Season 5 of The Wire is almost as good as the first four with the exception of the "McNulty fakes a serial killer" plot and the "ooh, journalism sucks when corporations get involved" subplot, which were both a bit whacked out (the latter eats up surprisingly little screen time though).

Yes, those were the two I had in mind.  The former was definitely a distinct "what the hell, how is this the same show" moment.  However, I'll admit I haven't rewatched the show in about a decade (I have a tough time rewatching because it's the only show that actually depresses me due to the realism), so my memory on the details is very poor and I'm just relying on the memory of my impressions.  

10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

It was also mostly coherent and pretty much every question the show ever asked was answered, apart from "What is the Island?" which I think either had to be answered in Season 1 or not at all, so the latter was the correct choice. Lost definitely made big mistakes along the way - a few too many filler episodes in Season 2, Season 3's lengthy trip to the bear cages, Nikki & Paulo (arggh) and the flash-sideways in the final season - but it generally course-corrected when it realised it was going down the wrong path. Seasons 4 and 5 were both exceptionally strong and I'm not sure the diversions in Season 6 merited losing the whole show (Beyond the Sea was probably the closest the show came to completely killing it, but that was like 2 episodes before the finale).

Whole-heartedly agree with all this.  There was never going to be a satisfactory answer to "what is the island?", so I don't blame the show for not providing the answer to that.  This is a constant argument with my brother any time the show's brought up.  And Beyond the Sea was a huge let down - which reinforces the fact they were correct to leave "what is the island" as a mystery.

3 minutes ago, dooog said:

Ended at the right time: Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Justified, Southland, The Americans.

I love Justified, but it coulda ended a couple seasons earlier.

[Nictarion]

2 minutes ago, dooog said:

Ended too soon:  Rubicon, Firefly, Deadwood

 

Ended at the right time: Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Justified, Southland, The Americans.

 

Went on too long:  Every other concluded show ever made

The Shield didn’t go on too long. It amazingly stayed great for 7 seasons. Six Feet Under was just about the right length. 

Rome ended too soon. 

[The Mother of The Others]

went on too long:  NBC (all programming except 30 Rock) ,  Grey's Anatomy,  Heroes,  Lost,  Survivor, Bachelor / ette,   Wheel of Fortune,  Knight Rider,  Voyager,   Ally McBeal,   Glee,  The View,  Dr. Oz,   Drop the Mic,  Geraldo,  Jerry Springer,   24,  Friday the 13th the Series,    Martin,   Power Rangers,  NCIS,  the Olympics,  MTV (all programming),   Hell's Kitchen, American Idol, Golden Girls dragged toward the end,  Young and Restless,  20/20,   Hoarders,  Cops,  the Brooke Shields sitcom,  How I Met Your Mother ,   Some of the televangelists died years ago but are still airing as if they're alive,  The Office,  Gotham,  Sesame Street,  Modern Family,  Webster,  Will & Grace,   The Hills,  Star Search,   Bonanza,   

 

《I don't know what red dwarf is》

[dooog]

4 minutes ago, Nictarion said:

The Shield didn’t go on too long. It amazingly stayed great for 7 seasons. Six Feet Under was just about the right length. 

Rome ended too soon. 

Each to their own but i've never seen Six Feet Under and wasn't a fan of the other two shows.

[Nictarion]

I’d probably say Twin Peaks belongs on the list. Loved S1, and parts of S2, but it definitely got bad at times. Mixed feelings on the revival. There was some good stuff, but I absolutely HATED that we had to

wait 17 fucking episodes for the return of Cooper.

Fuck Dougie!

[Ramsay B.]

Ended too soon- Deadwood, Rome, Penny Dreadful, Quarry, Carnivale