Great TV Shows With Terrible Storylines

Like a classic book series, or your favorite film franchise, no television show is completely flawless. Long form storytelling offers a lot of narrative potential, but also creates more opportunities to royally screw up that potential, and one bad plotline can be all it takes to ruin a good show. A bad story or two hasn’t kept some of the all time best programs from being just that however, and in retrospect, many stumbles that initially appeared toxic, turned out to be relatively harmless overall. That doesn’t mean those mistakes didn’t suck horribly in the moment though, and a show bouncing back from a bad turn should be remembered just as much as what caused the problem in the first place. So let’s take a pained look back at when our favorite shows were saddled with some of the very worst of story arcs, the likes of which include forced romances, agrarian vacations, and plenty of surprise murders. Friday Night Lights: Landry Clark, the Unnatural Born Killer The first season of Friday Night Lights ended with a bit of life imitating art, as the scrappy Dillon Panthers football team winning the big game against impossible odds was mirrored by the show eking out a second season from NBC, thanks to fan and critic support that offset the consistently low ratings. As heartwarming and inspiring as the show was in its portrayals of decent, relatable people overcoming adversity each week, it warmed the cockles to know a show this earnest and good wouldn’t leave us after just one year. Then the second season premiere ended with loveable loser Landry Clarke accidently killing a guy while defending his dream girl from a rape, and suddenly small town Texas looked more like Orange County. Making matters worse was the subsequent hiding of the body, which set off a cover-up arc that stretched through much of season two’s troubled run (the ’07-’08 writers strike forced the show to abort many of the year’s stories by the time season three rolled around). Conspiracy theorizing would make you think that NBC demanded the writers find a way to “sexy-up” the wholesome little football drama in a bid to improve ratings, but showrunner Jason Katims swears it was an idea that belonged to his creative team. While the incident was almost never acknowledged after season two, and wound up cementing one of the show’s more inspired pairings (even if the lesson could be read as “guy gets girl because murder”), a random act of violence seemed the absolute antithesis of a show as raw and honest as Friday Night Lights. Continue reading on the next page... Lost: Nikki and Paulo Lost was one of the most iconic shows of the last decade, in large part because it was also the most divisive. It ran as much on backlash as it did actual appreciation, capped off by an ending that will inspire more heated arguments than even The Sopranos finale. One thing everyone does tend to agree on though, was that the show at its absolute worst could be summed up in a phrase infamous among fans: Nikki and Paulo. Considering that Lost takes place in the contained space of a deserted island, it was downright jarring to have these two appear out of the ether, involving themselves with the main cast as though they had been a part of it the whole time. Worse than the conceit of forcing in new characters to fill time, was the fact that they were brutally uninteresting to boot; it speaks to the ambitious nature of the show’s first two seasons that, by season three, an island diamond caper seemed like a complete waste of time. Nikki and Paulo represented Lost wheel-spinning at its most egregious, but the near-universal hatred towards them from fans also showed how willing to respond to its viewer base the writers were. They not only truncated their original plot for the two, but also wiped out nearly any trace of the pair following their appropriately painful exit: being mistaken for dead, and buried alive. Now that’s fan service. Continue reading on the next page... The Walking Dead: Farmville It’s one thing to have a bad side plot pop in obtrusively when the backbone of a show is still great, but having a terrible narrative core as well is almost unforgivable. Fans and critics of The Walking Dead found the shortcomings of the show’s first season mostly tolerable, considering there was nothing else quite like it on TV, but season two proved just how much more the show depended on its undead cast than its living one. Shifting the setting away from the zombie-infested streets of Atlanta to a quiet little ranch out of a Andrew Wyeth painting, and then stretching the season arc over thirteen episodes instead of the previous six, slowed the once frenetic pace down to a crawl, and weeks would go by where you forgot you were watching the zombie apocalypse, not Survivor: Rural Georgia. Unsurprisingly, the best episodes took place away from the narrative quicksand that was the farm, where the characters could actually go get something done, instead of just standing around bickering all day. These daytrips didn’t happen nearly enough though, and the pressure cooker of a pasture brought out the worst in all the characters: Dale become psychic in his paranoia, Carl would wander off whenever convenient, Shane turned into a hairless, mustache twirling villain, and Lori waxed obnoxiously philosophical, when not tied up with being an all-encompassing shrew. Excuses could be made for the arc functioning as a necessary transition from abruptly fired showrunner Frank Darabont to Glen Mazarra - who’s already gotten the show back on track - but that didn’t make the complete destruction of the farm during the season finale any less cathartic. Continue reading on the next page... Dexter: Angel Batista, Ladykiller The overall quality of each season of Dexter changes about as drastically as, well, the actual seasons, but the general consensus has been that, from season two onward, the writers have had no idea what to do with all the characters who aren’t the charismatic serial killer. Granted, any storyline is going to pretty much pale in comparison to Michael C. Hall’s steely work as the title character, and all the side plots wove around his story neatly when following the original book for the first season. Once they diverged from the source material though, the writers showed they had a much better understanding of their star than just about anyone else on the show. So many narrative cul de sacs and non-starter plots have been thrown at the wall to keep the supporting cast busy, it’s hard to pick just one as the worst. The never-ending sexual escapades of Detective Angel Batista have been the most enduring and least consequential storyline, one that’s been going pretty much since season two. It started out well enough, with Bautista getting into bed with Dexter’s psychotic ex, but rather than finding a new direction to take the character, the show basically had Bautista sleep his way through every season, whether it was with a vice cop he mistook for a hooker, or his superior officer, the equally unwritten Lieutenant LaGuerta. A tenuous argument could be made that, as a morality play, the actions of those surrounding Dexter help to put his own into perspective. It’s just a shame that everyone else’s lives are always so criminally boring, and detached from the guilty bloodlust that is the show’s bread and butter. Continue reading on the next page... Breaking Bad: The Purple Bandit In addition to being the best acted, best looking, and most brutally intense drama on television, Breaking Bad has kept up its reputation as the most addictive show still airing for how brilliantly plotted each season has been. Whether going in with a meticulous schedule of events, or free-styling to see what diamonds come out of the pressure, the writers have always found a way to make nearly every element of the Breaking Bad story important to Walter White’s journey from hapless chemistry teacher, to cancer survivor with a stranglehold on New Mexico’s meth trade. Now, any tangent from a story this good is going to look like chaff, so while not empirically bad, Marie’s subplot as an uncontrollable klepto has always stuck out as unnecessary, rearing its head every season or so when it seemed like an episode was coming in under time. Granted, the forays into suburban theft have always been so brief and infrequent so as to not to be overly detracting from your enjoyment, but even the slightest slackening on a show this tightly wound can feel like a huge drag. Introducing the plotline early in the show’s run limited Betsy Brant’s performance to that of a bitter housewife with a secret passion, but she quickly outgrew the role and developed into one of Breaking Bad’s secret weapons. As the title suggests, Walter White is just a litmus test for how any seemingly normal person can stray from the path of decency when backed into a corner, but Marie’s pathological stealing habit has always felt like a vestigial element that the show never outgrew. Continue reading on the next page... Homeland: Dana and Finn’s Wild Ride Okay, I'm cheating. This is an ongoing subplot (so spoilers) that's only two episodes deep at the time of this writing, so it might be premature to call a dud out of something that could turn out to be genius. But, like Landry using a lead pipe to knock some sense into a guy, Homeland following up its sublime first season with an accidental murder (via a couple teens running over a pedestrian) seems like a twist so far out of left field, it’s coming from another channel. The show’s writers found themselves with the unique issue of having too good a cast following season one, as the terrific performance from Morgan Saylor as the daughter of a Marine turned terrorist became to rich to leave out. Considering Homeland’s delicate subject matter, this posed a problem: how can you realistically incorporate a teenage girl into a nation-threatening conspiracy in a way that’s both organic, and not a rehash of season one. Thus far, giving the supporting players random adventures separated from the core plot doesn't seem like the right solution. The writers have proven themselves exceptional at moving their main story along logical beats, and at a rip-roaring pace too, but figuring out what to do with a more open-ended plot is something else entirely. The show has certainly earned the benefit of the doubt at this point, but its future viability might depend more on how it handles all the stuff surrounding the golden story at its center, than that story itself. **Update** If you smell something funny in the air, it's probably just the rather large plate of crow I'm presently dining on. As hoped, Homeland not only found a reasonable end to this plotline, but did so by weaving it into the important threads with a directness that was simultaneously unexpected, and painfully obvious, given how consistently the writers have shown that they know what the show is really about. Now let's just hope they can do the same for the Ninja-Terrorist-S.W.A.T. team from two weeks ago. So there you have it, great shows that gave fans some really terrible plotlines. Do you have any picks of your own? Let us know in the comments below.