"Oh HELL No!": TV Moments That Make You Irate

[Blergh]

23 minutes ago, Zella said:

FWIW I never got the impression the showrunners intended for viewers to sympathize with Walt. 

Possibly. However,  a good number DID even when all the dust finally settled and Walt had long since showed his true colors. 

[Zella]

4 minutes ago, Blergh said:

Possibly. However,  a good number DID even when all the dust finally settled and Walt had long since showed his true colors. 

Oh for sure, but I think that reflects more on them than the show itself. I always find it interesting to compare notes with people on when they finally turned on Walt, and I've usually found that on a rewatch people are a lot harder on him. And I think that is pretty common with antihero shows where the main character really is the villain. I think as a society we are kind of programmed to expect to like and root for the protagonist, and it can be disorienting when that rug is pulled out from under us. 

Edited April 3, 2022 by Zella

[Ambrosefolly]

On 4/2/2022 at 9:33 PM, Blergh said:

Thanks for giving me another reason for being grateful to have NEVER spent a moment watching this series despite ALL the overhype and wild overpraise the critics.etc. had for this show in trying to concoct sympathy for a drug dealer! 

1) I don't have problem with drug dealers. I am no fan of drugs, but think the drug laws are start up stupid.

2) However, I always thought the point of Breaking Bad was to watch, to bastardize The Dark Knight, the hero live long enough to see himself become the villain. The show runners said as much. I found Jesse more problematic because they were always trying to make him sympathetic. 

Edited April 5, 2022 by Ambrosefolly

[Blergh]

7 hours ago, Ambrosefolly said:

1) I don't have problem with drug dealers. I am no fan of drugs, but think the drug laws are start up stupid.

2) However, I always thought the point of Breaking Bad was to watch, to bastardize The Dark Knight, the hero live long enough to see himself become the villain. The show runners said as much. I found Jesse more problematic because they were always trying to make him sympathetic. 

IMO, he 'became the villain' the minute he knowingly sold poison to another person for the sheer monetary profit- oblivious  to how it would contribute to the ruination of the buyer's life and loved ones (and this has nothing to do with whatever laws are on the books).  Sorry, I've seen enough decimation  these drugs have reaped in the last few generations to consider trying to conjure sympathy for fictional characters who would peddle this poison! 

[Haleth]

I finally broke down and watched Breaking Bad during the lockdown since my family kept telling me how great it is.  I know MMV, but yeah, it really is that good, such a well crafted journey of descent into darkness.  I have yet to watch an episode of Saul though.

[DearEvette]

On 4/2/2022 at 10:25 PM, Zella said:

And I think that is pretty common with antihero shows where the main character really is the villain. I think as a society we are kind of programmed to expect to like and root for the protagonist, and it can be disorienting when that rug is pulled out from under us. 

This is 100% the case with almost any show, even with non-Anti heros.  There is a conditioning we have to be part of the protagonists' journey.  That confers and instant, automatic sympathy with or for character.  It is why a main character can get away with so much and still retain some benefit of the doubt, whereas a supporting or side character will get criticized for even the smallest thing.

With BB it is further complicated by the audience's embrace of a person who is considered a 'badass.'  You can get away with a lot if you win in a bad ass fashion.  And Walter does this. 

And finally, the show often contrasts Walter with a bigger evil.  You already have some investment with Walter and he is a main character so he is already the beneficiary of Main Character-itis.  Now let's introduce a drug sniffing cartel boss who kills people in car compactors and kidnaps Jesse.  Who do you want to win there?  Walter or Tico?  Now, let's introduce a child murdering psychopath and his Nazi family.  Well who are you gonna want to triumph there?  Walter or the Nazis?  Let's introduce a money grubbing executive who has no problem supplying drugs as long as she can keep her hands clean and her head in the sand over what she is doing.  Who do you want to triumph there?  Walter or Lydia? Walter is always presented as the lesser of the two evils, so you have to want Walter to win.  On his own he is so very problematic but when contrasted with bigger bad guys he is the preference.

[Ambrosefolly]

3 hours ago, Blergh said:

IMO, he 'became the villain' the minute he knowingly sold poison to another person for the sheer monetary profit- oblivious  to how it would contribute to the ruination of the buyer's life and loved ones (and this has nothing to do with whatever laws are on the books).  Sorry, I've seen enough decimation  these drugs have reaped in the last few generations to consider trying to conjure sympathy for fictional characters who would peddle this poison! 

So that extends to alcohol too? Walt and Jesse can't sell meth but Karen the vineyard owner is fine? I have more respect for teetotalers that want all drugs and alcohol banned than the quoted half measure. Those people are fucking hypocrites and just want control. 

[proserpina65]

14 hours ago, Ambrosefolly said:

1) I don't have problem with drug dealers. I am no fan of drugs, but think the drug laws are start up stupid.

2) However, I always thought the point of Breaking Bad was to watch, to bastardize The Dark Knight, the hero live long enough to see himself become the villain. The show runners said as much. I found Jesse more problematic because they were always trying to make him sympathetic. 

I work in the court system and have a massive problem with drug dealers, especially meth dealers.  So I have no interest in ever watching Breaking Bad.  Walter and Jesse both deserved to rot in jail for cooking and selling meth.

3 hours ago, Ambrosefolly said:

So that extends to alcohol too?

Nope, because it is possible to drink alcohol in moderation and never hurt another person.  That is not possible with meth.

[Ambrosefolly]

23 minutes ago, proserpina65 said:

I work in the court system and have a massive problem with drug dealers, especially meth dealers.  So I have no interest in ever watching Breaking Bad.  Walter and Jesse both deserved to rot in jail for cooking and selling meth.

Nope, because it is possible to drink alcohol in moderation and never hurt another person.  That is not possible with meth.

Really? My uncle and cousin who nearly fucked up their families and in the case of my uncle, nearly got my MS stricken aunt killed because he drove drunk to Thanksgiving. During prohibition, the cases of liver problems plummeted. People who support drug prohibition and not alcohol are a bunch of hypocrites. 

[proserpina65]

2 minutes ago, Ambrosefolly said:

Really? My uncle and cousin who nearly fucked up their families and in the case of my uncle, nearly got my MS stricken aunt killed because he drove drunk to Thanksgiving. During prohibition, the cases of liver problems plummeted. People who support drug prohibition and not alcohol are a bunch of hypocrites. 

And millions of other people drink alcohol in moderation and never cause any problems whatsoever.  I'm sorry to hear about your family, but just because some people don't handle alcohol appropriately doesn't mean no one should ever be allowed to have it.

Meth, on the other hand, is not something which someone can do in moderation.  It always fucks up the user and causes them to damage those around them as well.

And for what it's worth, I don't necessarily think drug prohibition is a good idea for all drugs.  Had Breaking Bad been about pot dealers, for example, I'd possibly feel differently about it because that is a drug which can be used in moderation, at least as far as I've gathered from various court sources.

So no, those of us who think meth dealers are shite due to the incredibly destructive nature of what they're making and selling are NOT hypocrites.  Because what they're selling has no other purpose than to get people high and addicted, whereas alcohol CAN be used in a safe manner.

And that's my last word on the subject because it's getting a bit off topic.

[Ambrosefolly]

Correct about it moving off target, and I am not quibbling people's preferences on why they or don't watch tv shows. I don't watch a lot of Breaking Bad like I didn't watch a lot of Weeds. My issue of Breaking Bad that while the show acknowledge that Walt's morals quickly got degraded, no matter of Walt's justifications, it never made that same argument with Jesse. Jesse falls into the category of never trust the executioner with tears in their eyes.  

[Blergh]

Well, I'm no fan of minors drinking any booze or ANYone of any age getting more than a little tipsy from alcohol (and DO believe in actions/consequences for those who do harm to others while intoxicated including neglect, assaults, drunk driving).

However, alcoholic beverages start out from nature from such plants as hops, rye,corn, rice, grapes, potatoes,etc.  and one can use the leftover dregs/mash for compost and put it back into nature.

Not only is there NOTHING found in meth that's occurs in nature- but virtually every step of the production   produces  an incredible amount of toxic waste and can even corrode steel building supports (and have NO health potential health benefits whatsoever).

As a chemistry teacher, Walt had  to have known EXACTLY how deadly the production of meth  actually was to anyone who might have been unfortunate to have breathed the fumes he was producing and/or come across the tailings yet he went ahead and produced this nasty substance for profit regardless of the human wreckage he was reaping. 

Hence, IMO, he was a villain from Day One and THAT is why I'm glad I never bothered watching a second of that show (despite my liking the performer Bryan Cranston). 

[magicdog]

This time, it's not an episode of The Millionaire!

It's Sliders!

In,  "California Reich" (1998), the gang land on a world where anyone non white is forcibly removed from society and supposedly deported.  Many of the menial jobs these people used to do are now done by robots (or so it seems), who require no pay and just do what they are programmed to do like drones.  Later, we learn they were once human beings who were captured and had their personalities removed and their faces sewn with some sort of face plate over their real faces (looking rather Frankenstein - ish).  

Our heroes go to one of the deportation camps and find the mother of one of the people they met at the hotel who was being turned into one of these drones.  She had one part of her face converted and she could not speak or walk on her own (it never was made clear how or what they actually do to create these drones).  They drag her and her son out and slide to the next world (where they are slated to remain only 2 minutes before the next slide).  They arrive in a hospital where a black doctor greets them.  The gang isn't sure if this world can undo the damage done in the previous one, but take a risk.  They ask if the doctor can fix the victim and he says he's not sure, although the best plastic surgeons in the country are at that hospital.  Then the gang, minus the woman and her son slide out and we're left to wonder what the hell happened to them.

The End.

Are you kidding me?  For all you know, the technology may not be up to snuff in this particular world and the woman may remain in a vegetative state for the rest of her life!  It's not clear if the mental damage could be undone even if the physical damage is reversed.  Then there's the fact that for all we know, this world could have some of the same problems as the past world (whites trying to get rid of non whites) when it's possible the reverse could happen on that world (non whites trying to get rid of whites).  They should have allowed more time on that world (maybe a few days) to find out rather than just dumping them on the first world they slide into!!!   

Let's also go with the writers' assumption that all non whites are unskilled low wage earners!  That's not necessarily the case in reality, so I found that a tad insulting.

[Danielg342]

I could probably write a book about all the little TV moments that I found bothersome or troublesome in some way because there are many, but, for brevity purposes (as brief as I can make it...sorry), I'll just list the most significant ones that I've encountered.

• Seinfeld. Though I found it funny- which is why I stuck through it to the end- I did find that, too often, its humour relied on some character's misfortunes. Some of the real bad lowlights included Jerry stealing the rye from an old lady and the only comeuppance being that incident screwed over Jerry's dad, not him, Susan Ross dying and George being relieved about it (heck, a lot of what George did was infuriating in some way) and Kramer stupidly screwing himself out of winning the lawsuit when the show made an obvious OJ trial reference. This is before we even get to...whatever the finale was.
  • The one that takes the cake for me was one episode where one storyline was about a man and a cooking recipe. I'm going to get the details wrong because I'm going on memory and Google is failing me right now so bear with me, but the gist of it was that this guy cooked a meal while in the army but a soldier got sick eating his stuff. Years later, he cooks it again for George's dad (who was serving in the army with the cook) and he's encouraged to try out his cooking one more time. However, at a function where the new cook is re-debuting his signature dish, he sees someone coughing and gets a flashback to the soldier who got sick from his meal the first time. Panicking, the cook throws his food on the floor, exclaiming "it's no good" as the laugh track played the credits began to roll.
    
    I remember watching that and thinking, "this is supposed to be funny?" Now, I was younger then so maybe there was stuff I was missing about the episode, but I still found it rotten I was supposed to find some man's dreams and ambitions going up in smoke funny. In a series full of low blows, that was one of the lowest, for sure.
• Family Guy. You want to get into mean comedy? This is Seinfeld without the subtlety, nuance or cleverness. Just straight up...a term I can't use on these boards because it's certainly not family-friendly. I always found this show to be a poor imitation of All in the Family and for the life of me I'll never understand why it became a huge hit but...it did so I'm stuck with it. Good for the people working on it, I guess.
  
  Two episodes stuck out for me in the irate department:
  • One episode, early in the show's run, where they had a bit making fun of several different countries. The bit would see a character insult a country and then follow it up appearing in a "Did You Know?" segment which highlighted some good notes about the country they had just put on blast. They did that for every country they insulted...except the last one. Which happened to be Canada. Where I live. So I didn't take too kindly to that one.
  • The Simpsons crossover. I'll admit, for the first half hour it actually wasn't a bad show. It actually had a coherent plot and it was fun seeing the Griffins and the Simpsons interact. Then the next half hour came and...well, nonsense ensued. It just devolved into a series of sketches that were thrown in there because someone simply said "wouldn't this be funny?" No one bothered to think if it made sense in the plot or not. Oh, and this part also hit a huge low when Meg seemed to finally bond with Lisa by picking up the saxophone herself only for Peter to crush her dreams by literally crushing the saxophone. I really don't know who thought that was funny.
• House:
  • Usually I love Chi McBride, but the person who thought it was a bright idea to bring in McBride to play House's "nemesis" really didn't think it through. House's "Moriarty" were the diseases he was confronted with every day, he didn't need an Edward Vogeler who just muddied the stories as a poorly written, thinly-veiled villainous bureaucrat. Thankfully, the show realized its error and dropped the character quickly, but it was still an infuriating slog in those episodes.
  • More broadly was the tone derailment House's drug addiction storyline put on the series. I know, House is based on Sherlock and Sherlock has his predilection for drugs as well but I felt the show focused on it too much and it made the show far darker than it should have been. I get it, perhaps FOX wanted to avoid imitating Becker outright, but House would have been so much better staying on the lighter side of "drama/comedy" divide.
• The Mentalist. I've ranted and raved about Red John many times before so I won't do it again. However, there was nothing more infuriating than seeing a perfectly built up S3 finale where- we were told- we finally got to see Patrick Jane square off against his nemesis only for the show to believe it was clever by saying, one episode later, that the man we thought was Red John truly wasn't. Yeah, even at the time there were doubts Jane really did kill Red John but the missed opportunity of not at least leaving the fakeout to far later in S4 (where it would have had a much greater impact) is just too maddening to ignore.
• Elementary. The show was fun and quirky at first, but then it got a little too full of itself. The point of no return for me was mid-season in S2 where, suddenly, Sherlock was on trial for all the investigative violations that he had committed, Not that he didn't deserve adversity for what he did, but the show spent the storyline really hitting us on the head with how much contempt he has for his fellow co-workers and, worse, the show dealt with his co-workers very reasonable annoyance with his conduct with a terse, "deal with it". I get it, Sherlock Holmes in his many iterations was never meant to be nice and cuddly, but I felt this series of episodes wiped out the magic this version of Sherlock had by almost forcing me to see him as quite villainous, but just for this batch of episodes where, afterwards, he'd again play that quirky jerk I had loved before. Sorry, but once you lose the magic you never get it back.
• The Blacklist:
  • Elizabeth Keen. Do I need to say more? All I'll really say about it is that Lizzie sure felt like a character the writers were forced to include and thus they never really made any effort to make her story relevant or interesting in some way. The few times a writer seemed to care about the character Lizzie had some actually entertaining moments, but they were not enough to relieve the drag the character left on the show. I'd say Lizzie's poor narrative is the chief reason why The Blacklist failed to be the series it could have been.
  • Tom Keen. On the other side, if you really wanted to get into wasted potential, Tom is a great place to start. Here was a character who wasn't just a great con man or a great actor or even just great at undercover work- here was a character who lived as a deep undercover operative. living his life as literally a different person depending on what job he was given. As the actor who played Tom, Ryan Eggold, himself once noted, Tom was a character who literally never knew who he was and that messed him up to a large degree. Anyway, here was a character you could base an entire series around, and the show actually did try...but they failed. Failed miserably. Because the Tom Keen character never seemed to escape the concept stage and actually get to the development process before he was thrust onto our screens.
• Gotham. Where do I begin? I've already talked at length about this show's missed potential so I won't expand on it again here. I'll just expound on the moments of failure that truly stuck out for me.
  • The early subplot featuring Crispus Allen and Rene Montoya, Gotham's "Special Investigations Unit" that were tasked to investigate Jim Gordon's apparent murder of the future Penguin. The plotline was clearly only there "because drama" and it was quickly dropped after the seventh episode, with Allen never again appearing in the series.
  • The Dollmaker. Talking about "throwing something in", this was a storyline that was only there to make Jada Pinkett-Smith's Fish Mooney look like a badass but it wound up serving no purpose to the larger narrative as a whole. It made Fish's character development rather pointless because this story wound up meaning nothing, especially when, after she escaped, her character regressed just so Penguin could "kill" her in the season one finale.
  • The Ogre. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with this storyline in general but the show's characters seemed to go out of their way to say how much of a "monster" he was simply because he was a serial killer who killed women. As if murder was suddenly OK if it were men that were being offed.
  • Theo Galavan. I know what the show wanted to do- they went the pro wrestling route in that they created a character who was so loathsome and yet escaped defeat so often that when he actually finally did go down, it would be this grand cathartic moment where I would be cheering from the rooftops that- finally- he was defeated. Except that, one, the storyline only works in pro wrestling because wrestling is about simulating competition so who wins and loses matters way more than it does on a TV drama that's more about "the journey", and two, Galavan wasn't even defeated in a noble manner, murdered in cold blood by a frustrated James Gordon. I'm sure the show though Gordon pulling the trigger was supposed to be our moment of relief, but all it did was make Gordon no better than the "bad guys" he was supposedly chasing. So much for Gordon being a hero.
  • Speaking of Gordon's false heroics, it was a source of a lot of frustration in S2 and S3 because the show tried really hard to make Gordon "the hero" while his actions suggested anything but. To the show's credit, they did- finally- acknowledge what they've done in S4 where the narrative made it clear that it's only Gordon who thinks of himself as a hero, because no one else does. It was a great storyline, but it doesn't make up for the fact the build to it was horrible.
  • Kristin Kringle. Yes, that was the character's name, wonderfully played by Chelsea Spack. The problem? Kringle was merely a prop for Ed Nygma to awkwardly pursue romantically, which, to make this worse, Kringle wound up falling for Nygma despite initially- and very clearly- rejecting his advances. That's not all. Once they start dating, they inevitably have a fight, Nygma flies into a rage and chokes her to death. That's bad enough...but, Gotham can never seem to make its mistakes without compounding them further. Spack returns in S3 as a character named Isabella who looks a lot like Kringle. Isabella pursues Nygma, who falls for her despite her having a weird fascination with being choked. Anyway, the show set up this strange story where we wondered if Kringle had indeed come back with a chance to give Kringle the development as a character that she deserved but...then Penguin killed her because he had separation anxiety from Nygma. Meaning Chelsea Spack came back twice to play two pointless characters. Sigh.
  • Poison Ivy. She makes my list more for how the show treated her character than anything else. At first, Ivy was portrayed by Clare Foley as a lost little girl who was orphaned when her father was shot by Gordon in the pilot episode. Foley's Ivy didn't do much except to be someone Selina Kyle had moments of bonding with but the character didn't detract from the show at the very least. Then, in S3, someone at FOX seemed to think- because of Poison Ivy's reputation- that Gotham's Poison Ivy needed to be sexy, when she didn't. So in a convoluted series of events, in one scene Ivy went from being a child to gaining the appearance of being an adult, all while still being, mentally, a kid. If that's not icky, I don't know what is. This new version of Ivy was played by Maggie Geha who tried her best and I thought she performed Ivy better than Foley did, but getting past how the character formed was just too difficult. If that wasn't a big enough problem, Geha was replaced- without explanation- as Ivy's portrayer in S4 by Peyton List, who lived up to her last name by giving a truly listless performance. Arguably the show ruined Ivy from the outset by not having any idea of what to do with her initially, but they ruined her further- like they did with countless other characters- by trying to awkwardly shoehorn her into the character that was once in the DC Comics when they didn't need to.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. S15's "Comic Perversion", arguably one of the worst police procedural episodes I've ever seen. The story initially follows a comic whose speciality is making rape jokes, which could have been a great premise if the show didn't foul it up. In what could have been an episode that said "looks are deceiving" and maybe had some great debates about freedom of expression and its true limits, the show decided to make the comic himself a rapist and leave no doubt about his eventual fall from grace in a truly convoluted climactic scene that just beggars belief. Yeah, I get that a "rape comic" probably wouldn't get much sympathy from the audience but that doesn't mean you can forgo things like nuance and character development. This episode was just the pinnacle of lazy writing all around.
• The Orville. I generally like this show (which may surprise since I slammed Family Guy), but I find its depiction of two sets of characters- the Krill and the Moclans- to be problematic. In the first case, the Krill are depicted as one dimensionally evil, without any real explanation at all concerning their motivations or wider concerns except that they just "really hate humans". It's not, per se, a bad premise but the lack of depth is eye-rolling. As for the Moclans, they are repeatedly portrayed as backwards, uncivilized, intolerant, stuck up, rigid, hyper-traditional, etc...basically, any kind of word that fits under the hyperbole of "out of touch" could be used to describe them. It's not necessarily, like the Krill before, a bad premise for a group narrative, it's just that, like the Krill, there's no nuance, no development and no explanation for why the Moclans are the way they are. They're just there so the show can tells us just how "wrong" they are. It's purely lazy storytelling, but what makes it worse are the optics of that storytelling. Moclans are generally played by black actors, so it's more troubling that the "barbaric" species on the show gets portrayed by a group of people who were historically labelled as "barbaric" and still struggle to shed that image. I doubt the portrayal was intentional but it doesn't make it any easier to stomach.
• Criminal Minds. I've also gone at length about this show's missed potential, so I won't repeat that here. Given the show's run and the fact I was there for all of it, I'm not surprised it has a few moments on this list. Here they are:
  • The S2 finale- arguably Mandy Patinkin's last episode as Jason Gideon (since the S3 premiere was a reworked episode that was pulled from earlier in S2 and the second episode of S3 only had one scene with Gideon in it)- saw a serial killer who once previously escaped from Gideon reappear to wreck havoc on his life. To that end, he succeeded, murdering Gideon's girlfriend, ruining his professional reputation and eventually causing Gideon to question his skills as a profiler. Truth told, it wasn't a bad episode but knowing it likely led to Patinkin's exit makes it upsetting. Especially considering Gideon, as a character, is arguably one of TV's best and thus we should have had far more seasons of him than we did get.
    • To further compound matters, one of the plotlines in this episode saw the serial killer who upended Gideon's life target the people Gideon had saved during his career. Not a bad premise, but in executing this storyline, they brought a character who served as the damsel in the S1 finale to serve as the damsel again in this episode, this time to kill her off. Talk about your waste of a character. The show could have used a different character- say, someone saved prior to the series' beginnings- and it would have worked at least a bit better.
    • This damsel's death highlighted a problem CM never seemed to fix, and that's the fact that they treat their victims of the week as if they lived in a vacuum. I'm not saying we should have seen the rescued victims come back very often but we never even so much as gotten a line from a character that so much as mentions a previous victim having revived their lives and thanked the BAU for saving them. The only times a previous victim came back was to give them further troubles or to cast them as a criminal later in the series, which I think does the victims a true disservice.
  • "Zoe's Reprise". I've already talked at length about Zoe before so I won't do so again, but a character death on TV never hit me as hard as this one did. I talk a lot about wasted potential, especially for characters, but Zoe Hawkes takes the cake. We could have had a whole series dedicated to her trials and tribulations but all we got was a few scenes and anti-climatic death scene. Boo.
  • The first half of S10. I get it, CM faced a lot of heat for its tendency to overwhelmingly feature female victims. It's statistically accurate- serial killers are more likely to kill women than men- but I do understand the backlash. So, for some reason, it appeared that CM responded to it by featuring a string of episodes to open S10 with almost exclusively male victims, as if they thought making the "disposable victim" male that suddenly solves their problems. It doesn't- a "disposable victim" is still a disposable victim, regardless of their gender. Worse, the string of stories included several that were highly implausible, including one episode where a wannabe Cinderella who didn't look so strong somehow subduing men several times her size.
  • "The Forever People". The character of JJ from S7-S10 was arguably unwatchable after she was transformed into the textbook definition of Mary Sue practically overnight. This was her nadir. Ostensibly this was the episode where JJ was supposed to confront her demons from getting tortured in S9, but, there she was, playing hero without any issues, doing literally everything in the episode with her supposed PTSD not having a lick of an effect on her throughout the entire episode. In fact, JJ was so powerful that when her demons reappeared at the end of an episode, a few words was enough to obliterate them for good. There are just no words.
  • Reid's prison arc. I know the people on the CM boards disagreed with me on this but I'll still say it because I believe it- the show has "damseled" no one worse than Spencer Reid and the prison arc typified it. Everything about it was just nonsense from start to finish, but worse, poor Reid did nothing except get beaten up in every episode, maybe even worse. It was bad enough that the character was only used in this way, but what makes it worse for me is that I'm positive the show went in this direction because Reid is a man. Never mind that Reid the character has more in common with the female characters that Hollywood has cast before as "damsels in distress", the show seems to think "as long as we don't appear misogynistic, we're OK!" when they're really not.
  • Linda Barnes. You want to talk poor execution? How about this four episode arc that had so much potential only to fizzle out. The premise was great- Barnes, the ambitious administrator who wants to reform the FBI to her own vision, succeeds in meddling with the BAU so much that she actually breaks up the team. Not bad...except the show, after the team broke up, went nowhere with it, undid it in one episode, undid it in the most contrived and rushed manner and undid it with one of the worst displays of policing on TV you'll ever see, and that's saying something.
  • "Ex-Parte". This one had a subplot featuring Penelope Garcia having to speak at a parole hearing for the drunk driver that killed her parents. Now, Garcia had long been an insufferable and unbearable character by this point (somehow the show thinks having Garcia act like a literal child is cute when it's really grating, not to mention all the times she freaks out over the crime scene photos she should be accustomed to seeing by now), but this really drove home how far the character had fallen. In this episode, Garcia was joined by her brother, who asked her to read his victim impact statement because he didn't want to speak at the hearing, since the crime left that much of an impact on him. Instead of doing as she was told, after the felon's sister talks to Garcia and insists that the felon is "changed", Garcia decides to forgo the impact statement and call for the felon to be paroled. Her brother, who just saw his own sister figuratively stab him in the back, is understandably upset. Now, if Garcia had acknowledged that, this might have been an acceptable story. Instead, Garcia was painted as some kind of saintly figure who did "all the right things", and her brother "will come around" once he realizes he was "wrong". It's one thing to have to watch a character dressing and acting inappropriately at work, but it's a whole other thing to watch a character betray her own family for her own selfish reasons with the show presenting that as "the good thing".
• SWAT:
  • Basically anything Jim Street did in S1, particularly the first half. I know the show wanted to have him be the "hotshot who the team had to tame" but the amount of times the character was just downright stupid was incomprehensible. We're not talking about the occasional maverick moment where Street makes a calculated risk and defies orders and maybe is sometimes right- no, we're talking about a guy that, when you watch him, you wonder how he even graduated the police academy, let alone be someone who was seen as competent enough to be a SWAT officer. Now, I understand he, at first, didn't complete the actual SWAT training but it's a poor excuse for just how mind-numbingly stupid he was at first.
  • "Crusade". If there's a theme throughout this post, it's that I just can't stand it when shows use disposable characters for impactful deaths. Now, this episode's victim, a new SWAT recruit named Erika, was a bit more developed than other disposable characters before her but it doesn't change the fact that, essentially, her entire role on the series was to serve as a plot device for the rest of the team. Really, Hollywood, if you're just going to have characters whose only role is to die make them one episode wonders or at least build them and develop the characters properly so that the eventual death actually means something. Don't just prolong the life of an disposable character "just because you can".
  • The Rodrigo Sanchez arc. S.W.A.T.'s Theo Galavan, only this time Rodrigo Sanchez was ostensibly also one of the "good guys". He was there as a plant by the LAPD to get the show's central hero, Hondo, to quit the LAPD after Hondo embarrassed the department by going to the press about institutional racism. Again, like Galavan, the Sanchez story isn't a bad idea in theory but, again, in practice it failed miserably for many of the same reasons. What arguably made the Sanchez story worse- because Gotham was more of an ensemble and its characters far more fluid in their alignment- is that the conclusion of the Sanchez story was far more obvious, because there was absolutely zero chance Hondo was going anywhere and that the show's real good guys would find some way to come back out on top and restore order. Which made these episodes that much more of a slog to get through than the Galavan episodes. Worse, the Sanchez story didn't even conclude with an episode-long story or even a climactic scene where Sanchez royally screwed up and/or the real good guys found a way to show him up on the job and give him the boot...no, Sanchez was gone simply because another SWAT regular, Deacon, gave him a job he couldn't refuse, so in one line four episodes worth of a story was done. There's nothing worse than having to sit through a slog of episodes only for that slog to end so meekly you wondered why it was worth it.

[Spartan Girl]

So you guys remember the Lifetime movie Social Nightmare where a teen girl’s life becomes hell when someone hacks into her social media accounts and posts horrible things about all her friends, and nobody believes her pleas of innocence? It always annoys me that we didn’t get a scene at the end where—after the real culprit is exposed as her crazy mother—we didn’t get a scene of anybody apologizing to her for not believing her. She deserved that much.

Also what pissed me off was her boyfriend, who not only dumped her for the nasty comments he thought she made about his sister, decided to get revenge by spreading the racy photos she sent him all over the school. And at the end, when she’s off at college, he’s trying to win her back by writing her love letters.

Uh, let me get this straight: you think a couple love letters are going to make up for the fact that you publicly humiliated her with revenge porn, all because of something it turns out she never did?

 

Be grateful she didn’t press charges, asshole!

Edited April 8, 2022 by Spartan Girl

[Ambrosefolly]

1 hour ago, Spartan Girl said:

So you guys remember the Lifetime movie Social Nightmare where a teen girl’s life becomes hell when someone hacks into her social media accounts and posts horrible things about all her friends, and nobody believes her pleas of innocence? It always annoys me that we didn’t get a scene at the end where—after the real culprit is exposed as her crazy mother—we didn’t get a scene of anybody apologizing to her for not believing her. She deserved that much.

Also what pissed me off was her boyfriend, who not only dumped her for the nasty comments he thought she made about his sister, decided to get revenge by spreading the racy photos she sent him all over the school. And at the end, when she’s off at college, he’s trying to win her back by writing her love letters.

Uh, let me get this straight: you think a couple love letters are going to make up for the fact that you publicly humiliated her with revenge porn, all because of something it turns out she never did?

 

Be grateful she didn’t press charges, asshole!

She should have pressed charges: if a girl gets onto an unofficial "slut" list because of revenge porn, then the guy should officially have misdemeanor or felony charges on their record. Have some real and known consequences for them to stop guys from pulling this crap/

[merylinkid]

19 hours ago, Spartan Girl said:

decided to get revenge by spreading the racy photos she sent him all over the school.

Because THAT is so radically different than what she allegedly did.   Like you didn't like her talking smack about your sister (you believe its her) so it okay to essentially do the same thing to her?   Dude, you can take ALL the seats and STFU.

[Spartan Girl]

What really annoyed me was how in the end her friend was all, “Geez, aren’t you ever going to forgive him? I know what he did was messed up, but he was going through a lot.” And this after the crazy mother victimized the friend by posting her photos on some pedo website and framed her daughter for it. Like the friend was right in not wanting to forgive the mother for what she did, mental illness or not, but what the boyfriend did was more excusable? Ugh.

Edited April 9, 2022 by Spartan Girl

[Madding crowd]

On 4/8/2022 at 8:40 AM, Danielg342 said:

I could probably write a book about all the little TV moments that I found bothersome or troublesome in some way because there are many, but, for brevity purposes (as brief as I can make it...sorry), I'll just list the most significant ones that I've encountered.

• Seinfeld. Though I found it funny- which is why I stuck through it to the end- I did find that, too often, its humour relied on some character's misfortunes. Some of the real bad lowlights included Jerry stealing the rye from an old lady and the only comeuppance being that incident screwed over Jerry's dad, not him, Susan Ross dying and George being relieved about it (heck, a lot of what George did was infuriating in some way) and Kramer stupidly screwing himself out of winning the lawsuit when the show made an obvious OJ trial reference. This is before we even get to...whatever the finale was.
  • The one that takes the cake for me was one episode where one storyline was about a man and a cooking recipe. I'm going to get the details wrong because I'm going on memory and Google is failing me right now so bear with me, but the gist of it was that this guy cooked a meal while in the army but a soldier got sick eating his stuff. Years later, he cooks it again for George's dad (who was serving in the army with the cook) and he's encouraged to try out his cooking one more time. However, at a function where the new cook is re-debuting his signature dish, he sees someone coughing and gets a flashback to the soldier who got sick from his meal the first time. Panicking, the cook throws his food on the floor, exclaiming "it's no good" as the laugh track played the credits began to roll.
    
    I remember watching that and thinking, "this is supposed to be funny?" Now, I was younger then so maybe there was stuff I was missing about the episode, but I still found it rotten I was supposed to find some man's dreams and ambitions going up in smoke funny. In a series full of low blows, that was one of the lowest, for sure.
• Family Guy. You want to get into mean comedy? This is Seinfeld without the subtlety, nuance or cleverness. Just straight up...a term I can't use on these boards because it's certainly not family-friendly. I always found this show to be a poor imitation of All in the Family and for the life of me I'll never understand why it became a huge hit but...it did so I'm stuck with it. Good for the people working on it, I guess.
  
  Two episodes stuck out for me in the irate department:
  • One episode, early in the show's run, where they had a bit making fun of several different countries. The bit would see a character insult a country and then follow it up appearing in a "Did You Know?" segment which highlighted some good notes about the country they had just put on blast. They did that for every country they insulted...except the last one. Which happened to be Canada. Where I live. So I didn't take too kindly to that one.
  • The Simpsons crossover. I'll admit, for the first half hour it actually wasn't a bad show. It actually had a coherent plot and it was fun seeing the Griffins and the Simpsons interact. Then the next half hour came and...well, nonsense ensued. It just devolved into a series of sketches that were thrown in there because someone simply said "wouldn't this be funny?" No one bothered to think if it made sense in the plot or not. Oh, and this part also hit a huge low when Meg seemed to finally bond with Lisa by picking up the saxophone herself only for Peter to crush her dreams by literally crushing the saxophone. I really don't know who thought that was funny.
• House:
  • Usually I love Chi McBride, but the person who thought it was a bright idea to bring in McBride to play House's "nemesis" really didn't think it through. House's "Moriarty" were the diseases he was confronted with every day, he didn't need an Edward Vogeler who just muddied the stories as a poorly written, thinly-veiled villainous bureaucrat. Thankfully, the show realized its error and dropped the character quickly, but it was still an infuriating slog in those episodes.
  • More broadly was the tone derailment House's drug addiction storyline put on the series. I know, House is based on Sherlock and Sherlock has his predilection for drugs as well but I felt the show focused on it too much and it made the show far darker than it should have been. I get it, perhaps FOX wanted to avoid imitating Becker outright, but House would have been so much better staying on the lighter side of "drama/comedy" divide.
• The Mentalist. I've ranted and raved about Red John many times before so I won't do it again. However, there was nothing more infuriating than seeing a perfectly built up S3 finale where- we were told- we finally got to see Patrick Jane square off against his nemesis only for the show to believe it was clever by saying, one episode later, that the man we thought was Red John truly wasn't. Yeah, even at the time there were doubts Jane really did kill Red John but the missed opportunity of not at least leaving the fakeout to far later in S4 (where it would have had a much greater impact) is just too maddening to ignore.
• Elementary. The show was fun and quirky at first, but then it got a little too full of itself. The point of no return for me was mid-season in S2 where, suddenly, Sherlock was on trial for all the investigative violations that he had committed, Not that he didn't deserve adversity for what he did, but the show spent the storyline really hitting us on the head with how much contempt he has for his fellow co-workers and, worse, the show dealt with his co-workers very reasonable annoyance with his conduct with a terse, "deal with it". I get it, Sherlock Holmes in his many iterations was never meant to be nice and cuddly, but I felt this series of episodes wiped out the magic this version of Sherlock had by almost forcing me to see him as quite villainous, but just for this batch of episodes where, afterwards, he'd again play that quirky jerk I had loved before. Sorry, but once you lose the magic you never get it back.
• The Blacklist:
  • Elizabeth Keen. Do I need to say more? All I'll really say about it is that Lizzie sure felt like a character the writers were forced to include and thus they never really made any effort to make her story relevant or interesting in some way. The few times a writer seemed to care about the character Lizzie had some actually entertaining moments, but they were not enough to relieve the drag the character left on the show. I'd say Lizzie's poor narrative is the chief reason why The Blacklist failed to be the series it could have been.
  • Tom Keen. On the other side, if you really wanted to get into wasted potential, Tom is a great place to start. Here was a character who wasn't just a great con man or a great actor or even just great at undercover work- here was a character who lived as a deep undercover operative. living his life as literally a different person depending on what job he was given. As the actor who played Tom, Ryan Eggold, himself once noted, Tom was a character who literally never knew who he was and that messed him up to a large degree. Anyway, here was a character you could base an entire series around, and the show actually did try...but they failed. Failed miserably. Because the Tom Keen character never seemed to escape the concept stage and actually get to the development process before he was thrust onto our screens.
• Gotham. Where do I begin? I've already talked at length about this show's missed potential so I won't expand on it again here. I'll just expound on the moments of failure that truly stuck out for me.
  • The early subplot featuring Crispus Allen and Rene Montoya, Gotham's "Special Investigations Unit" that were tasked to investigate Jim Gordon's apparent murder of the future Penguin. The plotline was clearly only there "because drama" and it was quickly dropped after the seventh episode, with Allen never again appearing in the series.
  • The Dollmaker. Talking about "throwing something in", this was a storyline that was only there to make Jada Pinkett-Smith's Fish Mooney look like a badass but it wound up serving no purpose to the larger narrative as a whole. It made Fish's character development rather pointless because this story wound up meaning nothing, especially when, after she escaped, her character regressed just so Penguin could "kill" her in the season one finale.
  • The Ogre. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with this storyline in general but the show's characters seemed to go out of their way to say how much of a "monster" he was simply because he was a serial killer who killed women. As if murder was suddenly OK if it were men that were being offed.
  • Theo Galavan. I know what the show wanted to do- they went the pro wrestling route in that they created a character who was so loathsome and yet escaped defeat so often that when he actually finally did go down, it would be this grand cathartic moment where I would be cheering from the rooftops that- finally- he was defeated. Except that, one, the storyline only works in pro wrestling because wrestling is about simulating competition so who wins and loses matters way more than it does on a TV drama that's more about "the journey", and two, Galavan wasn't even defeated in a noble manner, murdered in cold blood by a frustrated James Gordon. I'm sure the show though Gordon pulling the trigger was supposed to be our moment of relief, but all it did was make Gordon no better than the "bad guys" he was supposedly chasing. So much for Gordon being a hero.
  • Speaking of Gordon's false heroics, it was a source of a lot of frustration in S2 and S3 because the show tried really hard to make Gordon "the hero" while his actions suggested anything but. To the show's credit, they did- finally- acknowledge what they've done in S4 where the narrative made it clear that it's only Gordon who thinks of himself as a hero, because no one else does. It was a great storyline, but it doesn't make up for the fact the build to it was horrible.
  • Kristin Kringle. Yes, that was the character's name, wonderfully played by Chelsea Spack. The problem? Kringle was merely a prop for Ed Nygma to awkwardly pursue romantically, which, to make this worse, Kringle wound up falling for Nygma despite initially- and very clearly- rejecting his advances. That's not all. Once they start dating, they inevitably have a fight, Nygma flies into a rage and chokes her to death. That's bad enough...but, Gotham can never seem to make its mistakes without compounding them further. Spack returns in S3 as a character named Isabella who looks a lot like Kringle. Isabella pursues Nygma, who falls for her despite her having a weird fascination with being choked. Anyway, the show set up this strange story where we wondered if Kringle had indeed come back with a chance to give Kringle the development as a character that she deserved but...then Penguin killed her because he had separation anxiety from Nygma. Meaning Chelsea Spack came back twice to play two pointless characters. Sigh.
  • Poison Ivy. She makes my list more for how the show treated her character than anything else. At first, Ivy was portrayed by Clare Foley as a lost little girl who was orphaned when her father was shot by Gordon in the pilot episode. Foley's Ivy didn't do much except to be someone Selina Kyle had moments of bonding with but the character didn't detract from the show at the very least. Then, in S3, someone at FOX seemed to think- because of Poison Ivy's reputation- that Gotham's Poison Ivy needed to be sexy, when she didn't. So in a convoluted series of events, in one scene Ivy went from being a child to gaining the appearance of being an adult, all while still being, mentally, a kid. If that's not icky, I don't know what is. This new version of Ivy was played by Maggie Geha who tried her best and I thought she performed Ivy better than Foley did, but getting past how the character formed was just too difficult. If that wasn't a big enough problem, Geha was replaced- without explanation- as Ivy's portrayer in S4 by Peyton List, who lived up to her last name by giving a truly listless performance. Arguably the show ruined Ivy from the outset by not having any idea of what to do with her initially, but they ruined her further- like they did with countless other characters- by trying to awkwardly shoehorn her into the character that was once in the DC Comics when they didn't need to.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. S15's "Comic Perversion", arguably one of the worst police procedural episodes I've ever seen. The story initially follows a comic whose speciality is making rape jokes, which could have been a great premise if the show didn't foul it up. In what could have been an episode that said "looks are deceiving" and maybe had some great debates about freedom of expression and its true limits, the show decided to make the comic himself a rapist and leave no doubt about his eventual fall from grace in a truly convoluted climactic scene that just beggars belief. Yeah, I get that a "rape comic" probably wouldn't get much sympathy from the audience but that doesn't mean you can forgo things like nuance and character development. This episode was just the pinnacle of lazy writing all around.
• The Orville. I generally like this show (which may surprise since I slammed Family Guy), but I find its depiction of two sets of characters- the Krill and the Moclans- to be problematic. In the first case, the Krill are depicted as one dimensionally evil, without any real explanation at all concerning their motivations or wider concerns except that they just "really hate humans". It's not, per se, a bad premise but the lack of depth is eye-rolling. As for the Moclans, they are repeatedly portrayed as backwards, uncivilized, intolerant, stuck up, rigid, hyper-traditional, etc...basically, any kind of word that fits under the hyperbole of "out of touch" could be used to describe them. It's not necessarily, like the Krill before, a bad premise for a group narrative, it's just that, like the Krill, there's no nuance, no development and no explanation for why the Moclans are the way they are. They're just there so the show can tells us just how "wrong" they are. It's purely lazy storytelling, but what makes it worse are the optics of that storytelling. Moclans are generally played by black actors, so it's more troubling that the "barbaric" species on the show gets portrayed by a group of people who were historically labelled as "barbaric" and still struggle to shed that image. I doubt the portrayal was intentional but it doesn't make it any easier to stomach.
• Criminal Minds. I've also gone at length about this show's missed potential, so I won't repeat that here. Given the show's run and the fact I was there for all of it, I'm not surprised it has a few moments on this list. Here they are:
  • The S2 finale- arguably Mandy Patinkin's last episode as Jason Gideon (since the S3 premiere was a reworked episode that was pulled from earlier in S2 and the second episode of S3 only had one scene with Gideon in it)- saw a serial killer who once previously escaped from Gideon reappear to wreck havoc on his life. To that end, he succeeded, murdering Gideon's girlfriend, ruining his professional reputation and eventually causing Gideon to question his skills as a profiler. Truth told, it wasn't a bad episode but knowing it likely led to Patinkin's exit makes it upsetting. Especially considering Gideon, as a character, is arguably one of TV's best and thus we should have had far more seasons of him than we did get.
    • To further compound matters, one of the plotlines in this episode saw the serial killer who upended Gideon's life target the people Gideon had saved during his career. Not a bad premise, but in executing this storyline, they brought a character who served as the damsel in the S1 finale to serve as the damsel again in this episode, this time to kill her off. Talk about your waste of a character. The show could have used a different character- say, someone saved prior to the series' beginnings- and it would have worked at least a bit better.
    • This damsel's death highlighted a problem CM never seemed to fix, and that's the fact that they treat their victims of the week as if they lived in a vacuum. I'm not saying we should have seen the rescued victims come back very often but we never even so much as gotten a line from a character that so much as mentions a previous victim having revived their lives and thanked the BAU for saving them. The only times a previous victim came back was to give them further troubles or to cast them as a criminal later in the series, which I think does the victims a true disservice.
  • "Zoe's Reprise". I've already talked at length about Zoe before so I won't do so again, but a character death on TV never hit me as hard as this one did. I talk a lot about wasted potential, especially for characters, but Zoe Hawkes takes the cake. We could have had a whole series dedicated to her trials and tribulations but all we got was a few scenes and anti-climatic death scene. Boo.
  • The first half of S10. I get it, CM faced a lot of heat for its tendency to overwhelmingly feature female victims. It's statistically accurate- serial killers are more likely to kill women than men- but I do understand the backlash. So, for some reason, it appeared that CM responded to it by featuring a string of episodes to open S10 with almost exclusively male victims, as if they thought making the "disposable victim" male that suddenly solves their problems. It doesn't- a "disposable victim" is still a disposable victim, regardless of their gender. Worse, the string of stories included several that were highly implausible, including one episode where a wannabe Cinderella who didn't look so strong somehow subduing men several times her size.
  • "The Forever People". The character of JJ from S7-S10 was arguably unwatchable after she was transformed into the textbook definition of Mary Sue practically overnight. This was her nadir. Ostensibly this was the episode where JJ was supposed to confront her demons from getting tortured in S9, but, there she was, playing hero without any issues, doing literally everything in the episode with her supposed PTSD not having a lick of an effect on her throughout the entire episode. In fact, JJ was so powerful that when her demons reappeared at the end of an episode, a few words was enough to obliterate them for good. There are just no words.
  • Reid's prison arc. I know the people on the CM boards disagreed with me on this but I'll still say it because I believe it- the show has "damseled" no one worse than Spencer Reid and the prison arc typified it. Everything about it was just nonsense from start to finish, but worse, poor Reid did nothing except get beaten up in every episode, maybe even worse. It was bad enough that the character was only used in this way, but what makes it worse for me is that I'm positive the show went in this direction because Reid is a man. Never mind that Reid the character has more in common with the female characters that Hollywood has cast before as "damsels in distress", the show seems to think "as long as we don't appear misogynistic, we're OK!" when they're really not.
  • Linda Barnes. You want to talk poor execution? How about this four episode arc that had so much potential only to fizzle out. The premise was great- Barnes, the ambitious administrator who wants to reform the FBI to her own vision, succeeds in meddling with the BAU so much that she actually breaks up the team. Not bad...except the show, after the team broke up, went nowhere with it, undid it in one episode, undid it in the most contrived and rushed manner and undid it with one of the worst displays of policing on TV you'll ever see, and that's saying something.
  • "Ex-Parte". This one had a subplot featuring Penelope Garcia having to speak at a parole hearing for the drunk driver that killed her parents. Now, Garcia had long been an insufferable and unbearable character by this point (somehow the show thinks having Garcia act like a literal child is cute when it's really grating, not to mention all the times she freaks out over the crime scene photos she should be accustomed to seeing by now), but this really drove home how far the character had fallen. In this episode, Garcia was joined by her brother, who asked her to read his victim impact statement because he didn't want to speak at the hearing, since the crime left that much of an impact on him. Instead of doing as she was told, after the felon's sister talks to Garcia and insists that the felon is "changed", Garcia decides to forgo the impact statement and call for the felon to be paroled. Her brother, who just saw his own sister figuratively stab him in the back, is understandably upset. Now, if Garcia had acknowledged that, this might have been an acceptable story. Instead, Garcia was painted as some kind of saintly figure who did "all the right things", and her brother "will come around" once he realizes he was "wrong". It's one thing to have to watch a character dressing and acting inappropriately at work, but it's a whole other thing to watch a character betray her own family for her own selfish reasons with the show presenting that as "the good thing".
• SWAT:
  • Basically anything Jim Street did in S1, particularly the first half. I know the show wanted to have him be the "hotshot who the team had to tame" but the amount of times the character was just downright stupid was incomprehensible. We're not talking about the occasional maverick moment where Street makes a calculated risk and defies orders and maybe is sometimes right- no, we're talking about a guy that, when you watch him, you wonder how he even graduated the police academy, let alone be someone who was seen as competent enough to be a SWAT officer. Now, I understand he, at first, didn't complete the actual SWAT training but it's a poor excuse for just how mind-numbingly stupid he was at first.
  • "Crusade". If there's a theme throughout this post, it's that I just can't stand it when shows use disposable characters for impactful deaths. Now, this episode's victim, a new SWAT recruit named Erika, was a bit more developed than other disposable characters before her but it doesn't change the fact that, essentially, her entire role on the series was to serve as a plot device for the rest of the team. Really, Hollywood, if you're just going to have characters whose only role is to die make them one episode wonders or at least build them and develop the characters properly so that the eventual death actually means something. Don't just prolong the life of an disposable character "just because you can".
  • The Rodrigo Sanchez arc. S.W.A.T.'s Theo Galavan, only this time Rodrigo Sanchez was ostensibly also one of the "good guys". He was there as a plant by the LAPD to get the show's central hero, Hondo, to quit the LAPD after Hondo embarrassed the department by going to the press about institutional racism. Again, like Galavan, the Sanchez story isn't a bad idea in theory but, again, in practice it failed miserably for many of the same reasons. What arguably made the Sanchez story worse- because Gotham was more of an ensemble and its characters far more fluid in their alignment- is that the conclusion of the Sanchez story was far more obvious, because there was absolutely zero chance Hondo was going anywhere and that the show's real good guys would find some way to come back out on top and restore order. Which made these episodes that much more of a slog to get through than the Galavan episodes. Worse, the Sanchez story didn't even conclude with an episode-long story or even a climactic scene where Sanchez royally screwed up and/or the real good guys found a way to show him up on the job and give him the boot...no, Sanchez was gone simply because another SWAT regular, Deacon, gave him a job he couldn't refuse, so in one line four episodes worth of a story was done. There's nothing worse than having to sit through a slog of episodes only for that slog to end so meekly you wondered why it was worth it.

In the Seinfeld example, George’s dad was the cook, there was no other chef. This episode and some of the others was more about the irony of Frank Costanza deciding to cook again only misunderstanding when a man was choking. As for George being unaffected when Susan died, it was an odd set up but I don’t think we were supposed to think her dying was funny, we were supposed to think George’s very odd reaction was funny only that it was so expected. I agree with the marble rye one and it also seemed out of character for Jerry who was always reluctant to do things.

[Danielg342]

5 hours ago, Madding crowd said:

In the Seinfeld example, George’s dad was the cook, there was no other chef. This episode and some of the others was more about the irony of Frank Costanza deciding to cook again only misunderstanding when a man was choking.

Thanks. This episode, right? Once you clarified it was Frank then I was able to find it.

Maybe I need to watch the episode again now that I'm older and can appreciate it better but I thought laughing at Frank, who seemed so happy to be cooking again, for having failed (and, not just that, having to relive a traumatic moment) seemed especially cruel in the moment.

5 hours ago, Madding crowd said:

As for George being unaffected when Susan died, it was an odd set up but I don’t think we were supposed to think her dying was funny, we were supposed to think George’s very odd reaction was funny only that it was so expected.

I think, more in general, I liked Susan and I didn't like that she had died. I also give a bit of the side eye whenever I come across jokes about equating relationship and marriage with prison. I know where they're coming from, but, having been in that situation myself and knowing how miserable it made me feel, I just can't bring myself to find that stuff funny, even in a "relatable" sense.

6 hours ago, Madding crowd said:

I agree with the marble rye one and it also seemed out of character for Jerry who was always reluctant to do things.

I remember thinking at the time Jerry stealing in general was bad enough. That he did it from an old lady makes it worse. I know the characters were no heroes but stuff like that is too villainous to accept for characters we're watching every week.

I did appreciate that the show brought the old lady back. The execution was off. The entire episode was set up to screw over Morty and make him suffer when he did absolutely nothing wrong. I mean, it was still clever how the show made seemingly harmless acts- like Jerry picking up the tab at the restaurant- but ending it with Morty suffering and Jerry getting no comeuppance for the vile act he did just doesn't sit well with me.

[Blergh]

 Considering that George and Susan had split up before (and George had had no problems hooking up [badly] with others), and the performer (Heidi Sweberg) has said that she didn't bond well with the regulars  and the show's producers, I don't see why they didn't just permanently write Susan out via the clashing,toxic duo simply breaking up and never seeing each other again instead of killing her off then attempting to belittle her  surviving parents' grief and suspicions toward George for laughs! THAT was definitely one of the worst of many Seinfeld's 'Oh, Hell No!' moments! 

[Danielg342]

3 hours ago, Blergh said:

 Considering that George and Susan had split up before (and George had had no problems hooking up [badly] with others), and the performer (Heidi Sweberg) has said that she didn't bond well with the regulars  and the show's producers, I don't see why they didn't just permanently write Susan out via the clashing,toxic duo simply breaking up and never seeing each other again instead of killing her off then attempting to belittle her  surviving parents' grief and suspicions toward George for laughs! THAT was definitely one of the worst of many Seinfeld's 'Oh, Hell No!' moments! 

My only guess was that NBC might have thought it might have wrecked the tone of the series if George acted normally and simply called off the wedding. Farce is the name of the game on Seinfeld, plus Susan was someone we saw quite bit and got to actually know her, so my guess is that she was killed so that, we, as an audience wouldn't feel bad she wasn't getting married and it would give her story a sense of finality.

I don't know...I'm not sure what the executive decision was behind the demise of Susan. I just think, like you, that maybe this was one of those times they could have done things a bit more "normally" and it would have worked better. Heck, they could even still milk it for laughs if they had George worried his declaration would not go well only for Susan to surprise him by saying "yeah, I didn't want to get married either", perhaps with a smile on her face with George being relieved in the end.

Then you'd have a narrative symmetry where both Jerry and George ended their engagement under the same conditions, which would definitely be up the show's alley of the strange style of storytelling it likes. For all the absurdities- good and bad- the Seinfeld gang goes through, especially in the dating world, I don't think you could get any more absurd than Jerry and George so easily breaking off their marriages after dealing with the angst of entering an engagement they regret and being understandably worried about how the breakup would go.

[roamyn]

On 4/8/2022 at 9:40 AM, Danielg342 said:

Reid's prison arc. I know the people on the CM boards disagreed with me on this but I'll still say it because I believe it- the show has "damseled" no one worse than Spencer Reid and the prison arc typified it. Everything about it was just nonsense from start to finish, but worse, poor Reid did nothing except get beaten up in every episode, maybe even worse. It was bad enough that the character was only used in this way, but what makes it worse for me is that I'm positive the show went in this direction because Reid is a man. Never mind that Reid the character has more in common with the female characters that Hollywood has cast before as "damsels in distress", the show seems to think "as long as we don't appear misogynistic, we're OK!" when

I disagree w/you here.  While I do agree that they damseled Reid, the prison arc did not show that.  It showed a how someone who’d always been on the law enforcement side, might react in a tough, brutal prison life.  He didn’t get beat up every episode- and if he did, so what?  That actually happens.  Eventually he finds he grounding and plays smart and toughens up.

The chess/mind games he and Calvin play w/each other is a thing of acting beauty.

[Danielg342]

11 hours ago, roamyn said:

I disagree w/you here.  While I do agree that they damseled Reid, the prison arc did not show that.  It showed a how someone who’d always been on the law enforcement side, might react in a tough, brutal prison life.  He didn’t get beat up every episode- and if he did, so what?  That actually happens.  Eventually he finds he grounding and plays smart and toughens up.

The chess/mind games he and Calvin play w/each other is a thing of acting beauty.

I'm not sure how much I can say other than we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. Reid wasn't literally beaten in every scene that he was in, but he sure only seemed to be there to get beaten. Harold Perrineau had a great turn as Calvin Shaw, but Shaw also didn't seem to matter much in the grand scheme of things either.

I agree the show was going for a "fish out of water" situation, because I'm sure many of us thought that of all the things we could see happen to Reid, going to jail was the last thing we thought could happen to him but here we were. Nice idea, but the execution was off. We've seen Reid do far better handling criminals and getting himself out of tough situations by using his brain (see Chester Hardwick), but none of that was on display during the arc. Plus the whole case was resolved in 40 minutes without Reid having so much as lifted a finger, but only in the final moments of the arc after the team did little more than cry and mope for Reid.

I wonder if the arc was really meant for Hotch and it had to be rewritten after Thomas Gibson was fired. Seeing that it ended with Cat makes me think this was a Reid arc all along, but maybe it got expanded to fill for a tossed Hotch arc. That might explain why it was such a slog.

[Zahdii]

Does anyone know why they killed off Melinda's husband on 'Ghost Whisperer', only to bring him back as a ghost and eventually have him take over some other guys body, after the other guy (Sam) ascended and left his apparently healthy body on the road after a car accident?  It all seemed so random and wierd, like the story was supposed to have Jim die, which was done suddenly and seemed so unnessary, and then someone higher up decided it was a bad decision and tried to take it all back.  

The whole show was a complete mess after that and eventually succumbed to a series of bad story lines, and the inclusion of characters that were irrelevant or actively annoying.  I got the impression that the writers were frantically throwing in every trope they could think of, but they couldn't save the show.

[magicdog]

2 hours ago, Zahdii said:

Does anyone know why they killed off Melinda's husband on 'Ghost Whisperer', only to bring him back as a ghost and eventually have him take over some other guys body, after the other guy (Sam) ascended and left his apparently healthy body on the road after a car accident?  It all seemed so random and wierd, like the story was supposed to have Jim die, which was done suddenly and seemed so unnessary, and then someone higher up decided it was a bad decision and tried to take it all back.  

I do remember this, although I had begun to tune out by then.  I don't know why they did it, but at least they undid it.

I thought perhaps they wanted to recast the role and this seemed to be the way to do it.  Charmed (original version) did something similar during its final season when the main actresses wanted to spend less time on set and cast a spell to change their outward appearance to others.  That got old quick and things were changed midseason. 

[Egg McMuffin]

This is an oldie, but I hated how Pam Ewing was written off Dallas when Victoria Principal left the show. Pam was one of the central figures of the show. She is badly burned in a car accident, spends a few episodes swathed in bandages, then sneaks out of the hospital. How a woman with third degree burns can do this is not really addressed.

She leaves a note for husband Bobby telling him that she’s divorcing him and giving him custody of their son. And please don’t find her because she wants to be remembered as she was and doesn’t want to inflict her issues on the family. And Bobby, the love of her life, decides to go along with it! After telling the family the news, he declares the subject of Pam off limits and says that he won’t talk about her any more. This doesn’t bother the rest of the family because they don’t seem to care about Pam’s accident and disappearance at all.

Later on, Cliff tracks down Pam, played by a quasi-lookalike actress. She curtly tells him that she has a new life, is marrying her doctor, and to get lost because they’re never going to see each other again. Cliff is crushed, but doesn’t even try to dig beyond the surface: why does falling in love with her doctor mean that she can’t have a relationship with her brother or her son? Cliff just walks out without any questions, even though her actions are completely out of character.

After he’s gone, Pam has a conversation with said doctor, and it’s revealed that she has completely made up that story (never mind that it seems unethical for the doctor to go along with it). You see, she has some sort of fatal disease and doesn’t want to put her family through her death. Never mind that that would be preferable to her husband and especially her son thinking that she just abandoned them!

I get they were trying to leave the door open in case Victoria decided to return. But what a mess.

[Ceindreadh]

@Egg McMuffin I remember that storyline.  IMO they should have just hired the lookalike actress and blamed the accident for any changes in her appearance. 

[GHScorpiosRule]

16 hours ago, Egg McMuffin said:

This is an oldie, but I hated how Pam Ewing was written off Dallas when Victoria Principal left the show. Pam was one of the central figures of the show. She is badly burned in a car accident, spends a few episodes swathed in bandages, then sneaks out of the hospital. How a woman with third degree burns can do this is not really addressed.

She leaves a note for husband Bobby telling him that she’s divorcing him and giving him custody of their son. And please don’t find her because she wants to be remembered as she was and doesn’t want to inflict her issues on the family. And Bobby, the love of her life, decides to go along with it! After telling the family the news, he declares the subject of Pam off limits and says that he won’t talk about her any more. This doesn’t bother the rest of the family because they don’t seem to care about Pam’s accident and disappearance at all.

Later on, Cliff tracks down Pam, played by a quasi-lookalike actress. She curtly tells him that she has a new life, is marrying her doctor, and to get lost because they’re never going to see each other again. Cliff is crushed, but doesn’t even try to dig beyond the surface: why does falling in love with her doctor mean that she can’t have a relationship with her brother or her son? Cliff just walks out without any questions, even though her actions are completely out of character.

After he’s gone, Pam has a conversation with said doctor, and it’s revealed that she has completely made up that story (never mind that it seems unethical for the doctor to go along with it). You see, she has some sort of fatal disease and doesn’t want to put her family through her death. Never mind that that would be preferable to her husband and especially her son thinking that she just abandoned them!

I get they were trying to leave the door open in case Victoria decided to return. But what a mess.

[Blergh]

Gee, Pamela Barnes Ewing was supposed to have been THE polar opposite of JR. If the producers weren't able to work out whatever differences they may have had with Miss Principal, it's hard to imagine a less believable or compelling exit arc than that!  Even one having Pam having been kidnapped and presumed dead (but no body found) would have at least not trashed the integrity of the character who had   fought for Bobby against both their families' incredible pressures, been a loyal sister to Cliff (despite the flak this wrought her from the Ewings) .. .and a devoted mother to Christopher!  This made it seem as though Pam was simply too vain not to be seen as the most beautiful woman in the room even by her nearest and dearest!  Bleh! No wonder Miss Principal refused all pleas to revive the character- even decades later in the sequel series! 

And while I can understand why the producers and, yes, the other performers may have been eager to have simply moved on to other storylines not involving Pam after Miss Principal's departure, I agree that it was infuriatingly bogus that Bobby would have instantly agreed to those terms without at least at trying to make the case for Pam to stay part of their son Christopher's life even if they were no longer a couple AND that Cliff would have also just let himself get shooed away without the tiniest protest for himself and his nephew. Let's not forget that Cliff had considered Pam to be the ONLY reliable family member he'd had from early childhood onward and even the revelation that Pam was not the bio daughter of Digger Barnes didn't change that for him in the slightest. 

 

FWIW, IMO, it would have been more believable (and satisfying) had it been it turned out that SHE had been the one to have shot JR - because one could imagine that after ALL he'd put her and her every one of her loved ones through that somehow he'd pushed even HER too far.

 

P.S. One last postscript- for all the dissing of Digger Barnes as a loser, self-pitying drunk, he DID somehow manage to keep his mouth shut about Pam's actual paternity  to her and everyone else her entire childhood,teens and up to his literal deathbed (no matter how soused or bitter  he'd  gotten   down the years) so that she'd had no reason to not believe that he was her bio father before his deathbed confession.

Edited April 16, 2022 by Blergh

[magicdog]

Here's a golden oldie from the 70s: Emergency.

It's the day of a major college football game between USC and some other team I can't remember (the show used file footage of an actual game).  Roy Desoto and Johnny Gage are selected to be two paramedics to monitor the game in case there are any emergencies.

Before the game, everyone is talking how badly they want to go to the game (but is sold out) and how lucky Roy and Johnny are to be able to go even though they'll technically be on duty the entire time.

The guys are in their seats (there's supposed to be a total of 10 paramedics at the game) and it doesn't take long before they're called to an incident (an attendee choking on some food).  This continues throughout the game with minor stuff like that until one of the game commentators in the booth has a heart attack during the broadcast.  They are able to use an ambulance the coliseum provides to get him to the hospital.  They travel back to the game (still having not watched much of anything) and get pulled out of their seats to handle more small incidents.  The game ends, everyone is gone and even the ambulance isn't there to take them back to Station 51!  Roy seriously tells Johnny they may have to thumb it back to the station.  They eventually make it back and the rest of the crew is none the wiser.  Everyone else BUT Roy and Johnny saw more of the game than they did on TV.

What?  Are you trying to tell me never once did Roy or Johnny ever think that with a game crowd of that size that absolutely nothing would occur during the game or they could just comfortably sit while the other 8 paramedics did the work?  Are you trying to tell me that never once did someone from the LA Coliseum staff tell them they would have to make their own arrangements to get back from the game?  Ridiculous and slightly anger inducing!

[Blergh]

10 hours ago, magicdog said:

Here's a golden oldie from the 70s: Emergency.

It's the day of a major college football game between USC and some other team I can't remember (the show used file footage of an actual game).  Roy Desoto and Johnny Gage are selected to be two paramedics to monitor the game in case there are any emergencies.

Before the game, everyone is talking how badly they want to go to the game (but is sold out) and how lucky Roy and Johnny are to be able to go even though they'll technically be on duty the entire time.

The guys are in their seats (there's supposed to be a total of 10 paramedics at the game) and it doesn't take long before they're called to an incident (an attendee choking on some food).  This continues throughout the game with minor stuff like that until one of the game commentators in the booth has a heart attack during the broadcast.  They are able to use an ambulance the coliseum provides to get him to the hospital.  They travel back to the game (still having not watched much of anything) and get pulled out of their seats to handle more small incidents.  The game ends, everyone is gone and even the ambulance isn't there to take them back to Station 51!  Roy seriously tells Johnny they may have to thumb it back to the station.  They eventually make it back and the rest of the crew is none the wiser.  Everyone else BUT Roy and Johnny saw more of the game than they did on TV.

What?  Are you trying to tell me never once did Roy or Johnny ever think that with a game crowd of that size that absolutely nothing would occur during the game or they could just comfortably sit while the other 8 paramedics did the work?  Are you trying to tell me that never once did someone from the LA Coliseum staff tell them they would have to make their own arrangements to get back from the game?  Ridiculous and slightly anger inducing!

Oh, I TOTALLY agree with you! It's not as though the random spectators, players and emcees ALSO would not  have preferred to keep participating in watching/playing the game rather than having been injured/debilitated but the paramedics were PAID to be ready to tend to the impaired parties at a moment's notice instead of just hoping to blow them off to watch the game!  And, yes, Roy and Johnny failing to have secured their means to transport back to the firehouse WHILE ON DUTY was also completely bogus (especially for Roy the straightman voice of reason while Johnny the lazy goof was more apt to not do that). And, even Johnny was USUALLY a dedicated medical professional (despite his offtask goofying around and flubs) so that was another fail. Of course, I say all the above as someone who thought the actual medical procedures/rescues were fantastically depicted while virtually ALL the offtask stuff of the show was lame and draggy! 

[Blergh]

Here's an oldie but baddie from 1968:

How they mishandled the fatal illness and death of Bea Benederet on Petticoat Junction and the Beverly Hillbillies.

 Long-short is that longtime character actress Bea Benederet had been second bananas on radio and television for quite some time (and, in fact, had been Lucy's first choice to play Ethel on I Love Lucy) and the original voice of Betty Rubble on The Flintstones! However, having worked with her before on The George Burns Gracie Allen Show and having her play Cousin Pearl on The Beverly Hillbillies for a year, producer Paul Henning decided that her talents deserved a chance to shine on their own so he cast her as the protagonist matriarch and hotel owner Kate Bradley when he created Petticoat Junction in 1963! Oh, true, it was corny and Kate was the straight woman who was the smartest character in the room who had to deal with having to outwit the railroad exec Homer Bedloe who wanted to rid the community of the trainline which was the lifeblood of her hotel, deal with her lazy, scheming but well-intended Uncle Joe while having to provide for her three pretty young daughters who got into romantic scrapes. Although it was a bit more staid than either BH or it's sister Hooterville show Green Acres, it was a fairly entertaining cute comedy. Alas, Miss Benederet had a ticking time bomb within due to having lung cancer and had to miss quite a few episodes in the last two years of her time on the show for treatment and recovery.  This got explained away as Kate visiting relatives while her sister played by Rosemary DeCamp came by to help out. The worst though was when her youngest married daughter Betty Jo was due to give birth. By this point Miss Benederet was in such poor health that she couldn't make any oncamera appearance for this episode but they DID have her read Kate's lines while a lookalike seen only from the back zoomed into town via a railroad handcar then zoomed away right after her granddaughter Kathy Jo's birth with Kate NEVER to be seen again! Sadly, Miss Benederet had DIED at age 62  thirteen days before this episode aired but they absurdly never acknowledged Kate's death on the show. They just said she was 'away' visiting relatives and only vaguely was it acknowledged that she would be missed. Then, they had June Lockhart come in to play a doctor who opened her office in the hotel (and the lines of the opening song got changed to 'Here's a lady MD/She's as pretty as can be/ at the junction/ Petticoat Junction')  Worst still, shortly after this they had a crossover episode in which Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies came to Hooterville to try to meet Kate since she supposedly was a dead-ringer for Cousin Pearl! Arrgh!  In the first place, Petticoat Junction HAD acknowledged the death of  the train engineer Floyd Smooth (Charley Pratt) whose performer had also died so why couldn't they have paid tribute to Kate who was the main character? Secondly, since Miss Benederet had already died, it wasn't funny to have Granny show up trying to look for the Cousin Pearl lookalike.  Very poorly done all around. 

Edited April 19, 2022 by Blergh

[magicdog]

16 hours ago, Blergh said:

Here's an oldie but baddie from 1968:

How they mishandled the fatal illness and death of Bea Benederet on Petticoat Junction and the Beverly Hillbillies.

ITA with all of this!  Sadly, people die and there wouldn't have been a fuss had TPTB been willing to acknowledge Kate's passing before her grandchild was born but the rest of the cast celebrate the life that came into it shortly after.   The baby was named "Kathy Jo" so I guess she was named after her grandmother (since Kathy and Kate are a diminutive form of Katherine).

 

The joke about Kate being a "dead ringer" for Cousin Pearl was in bad taste and should have been used while she was alive.

[Egg McMuffin]

The show should have ended after Bea Benaderet died. But they wanted to get five seasons of color episodes for syndication. The syndicator thought a color-only package would make a modest hit like PJ more appealing in the 70s. But I think it wound up hurting the show’s longevity, because the strongest two seasons (in black and white) weren’t included in the syndication package, yet those weak last two seasons were.

There’s one episode in the sixth or seventh season where the Shady Rest is threatened, and Uncle Joe refers to the possibility of “the girls” losing the hotel. Not Kate, but her daughters. That’s the only confirmation we get that Kate is no longer the owner of the hotel, presumably because she has passed away.

June Lockhart was a complete misfit on this show. I get that they didn’t want a Kate Bradley clone, which is likely why they didn’t ask Rosemary DeCamp to permanently step in as the girls’ aunt, as she did when Bea was sick. And Billie Joe had already become the responsible eldest sister with Meredith MacRae playing her, so you didn’t really need another person like that. But they could have brought back Shirley Mitchell as Cousin Mae, who had great comic sensibilities.

[JustHereForFood]

It was Easter, so The Thorn Birds were on TV and I could hear my mother watching it for XYth time. For all its faults, I loved the book, probably because I read it as a teenager when I had different opinions on romance than I do now. Still, the adaptation was not bad, as far as adaptations of long books go, but to get to my point, why on Earth does the midquel The Missing Years exist? It was a shitshow that not only was completely unnecessary, it managed to ruin every single character that appeared in it. Why do they always insist on showing it after the main series, as if it were a canon story? Wouldn't we all be better off pretending it never happened? (That was a rhetoric question, of course the answer is yes.) 

[Blergh]

9 hours ago, Egg McMuffin said:

The show should have ended after Bea Benaderet died. But they wanted to get five seasons of color episodes for syndication. The syndicator thought a color-only package would make a modest hit like PJ more appealing in the 70s. But I think it wound up hurting the show’s longevity, because the strongest two seasons (in black and white) weren’t included in the syndication package, yet those weak last two seasons were.

There’s one episode in the sixth or seventh season where the Shady Rest is threatened, and Uncle Joe refers to the possibility of “the girls” losing the hotel. Not Kate, but her daughters. That’s the only confirmation we get that Kate is no longer the owner of the hotel, presumably because she has passed away.

June Lockhart was a complete misfit on this show. I get that they didn’t want a Kate Bradley clone, which is likely why they didn’t ask Rosemary DeCamp to permanently step in as the girls’ aunt, as she did when Bea was sick. And Billie Joe had already become the responsible eldest sister with Meredith MacRae playing her, so you didn’t really need another person like that. But they could have brought back Shirley Mitchell as Cousin Mae, who had great comic sensibilities.

Of course, another thing that was rather infuriating about PJ's postmortem years was that, the new theme song said that the Shady Rest was now 'RUN' by [Uncle]Joe despite that fact that he'd been a lazy, addlebrained schemer who Kate had been providing for.  Why would Kate have allowed Joe to manage her pride and joy that was supposed to provide for her family? Billie Jo(Kate's eldest daughter)  could have EASILY done it (at least via Meredith MacRae's portrayal of the character but Miss MacRae was MUCH more intelligent than the scripts).  And, for that matter, as per the pilot episode Kate's grandfather had founded the hotel  and built it on the spot after the train spilled the lumber going around the bend. Hence, it seems that Kate's grandfather (or maybe it was her father) had trusted HER to keep the family enterprise afloat- and NOT Uncle Joe (though he might have been from the other side of the family).  And, with Billie Jo seeming to be starting a singing career and Betty Jo having gotten married (not so happily but still. .) and having had a daughter of her own, was this hotel now just supposed to be supporting the dim bulb middle daughter Bobbie Jo?  

Agree that June Lockhart was 'a complete misfit' on the show- especially since Miss Lockhart was also MUCH more intelligent than the scripts.  Oh, and while they gave some lip service to equal opportunity via having her play a physician, even back THEN they seemed to demean her character's intelligence via that awful lines of 'here's a lady MD/ She's as pretty as can be ..' More importantly, a live-in doctor just CAN'T have the same chemistry as a family's matriarch or mother! And wouldn't have all the tongues in the Valley been wagging a mile a minute with this single non-related barely middle aged woman moving under the same roof as an old bachelor hotel. .. ..[cough]manager? 

I wasn't all that keen on Miss Mitchell as Cousin Mae but then again, being from the Southeast US, I cringe when I hear a non-Southern performer   PARODY a Southeast US accent.  Sorry, but her 'accent' was nails on chalkboard,IMO, (and BTW, Miss Benederet virtually matched her Looney Toons and Flintstones colleague Mel Blanc's ability at believably voicing countless accents and characters). 

All-in-all, I agree that they should have just had a Series Finale paying tribute to Kate (and Miss Benederet) then let the audience use the imagination of how life might have played out (and whether anyone would have kept skinny dipping in the water tower). 

[Spartan Girl]

The SVU episode “Part 33” was Liv at her most insufferable, but the part that really made me want to slap her was how dismissive she was of Rollins when she related her own memories of her parents’ toxic marriage and how her mother never left because she was the kind of person that milked her victimhood. Liv, who had met Rollin’s mom when she abandoned Rollins—when she was pregnant—and sided with her sociopath of a sister, basically defends Rollin’s mother because in her book, being a battered woman trumps being a shitty mother.

Honestly, who died and made Liv the patron saint of all battered women?! It is perfectly possible for a person to be and victim and play the victim at the same time. Not all domestic situations are in black and white, but Liv is obviously too narrow-minded to recognize nuance when it’s staring her in the face.

[Danielg342]

Since I'm too young to have watched Petticoat Junction live, I looked it up on Wiki. Wiki tells me that main characters dying on TV- especially in a comedy- was unheard of at the time, so that may be why the show botched Kate Bradley's ultimate exit. I don't know enough about '60s TV to know if even an off-screen death would have been a faux pas, but, even still, it does make me wonder why it wasn't even attempted. I know we didn't have the Internet or even 50 different TV channels in the '60s, but I'm sure even then Bea Benaderet's death would not have been a secret. I mean, fans were sending her get well letters when she was fighting lung cancer so I'm sure when news broke of Benaderet's death at least a few fans knew about it.

Why they couldn't do a proper tribute to the star of the show and the one who arguably made Petticoat Junction what it was I don't understand. The producers already rebooted the show after Benaderet's death, so I don't see how a tribute episode would have changed anything that we did get.

[Egg McMuffin]

It’s weird because they killed off Gramps on “Lassie” when the actor died. The mother on “Make Room for Daddy” was killed off when the actress left. And on PJ,  they had no problem saying train engineer Charley died when the actor portraying him died in real life. I dunno - perhaps they felt it was more sensitive since Bea Benaderet was the star of the show and wasn’t playing a supporting character.

It may just have been a matter of who was in charge. Ten years later, the actress playing the mother on “Eight is Enough” passed away, and the show’s producer said the head of ABC resisted the idea of the dad becoming a widower (he wanted to recast).

[Blergh]

18 hours ago, Egg McMuffin said:

It’s weird because they killed off Gramps on “Lassie” when the actor died. The mother on “Make Room for Daddy” was killed off when the actress left. And on PJ,  they had no problem saying train engineer Charley died when the actor portraying him died in real life. I dunno - perhaps they felt it was more sensitive since Bea Benaderet was the star of the show and wasn’t playing a supporting character.

 

But the thing is that Miss Benaderet's death was widely known at the time while Mr. Burnette's (who'd played Charley) wasn't as much! Despite the fact that the virtually the entire audience watching KNEW that Kate was never going to return, the scripts kept saying she was 'away' until they eventually had someone say she'd be 'missed' but NEVER spelled out that the character had died.  Oh, and this was  in spite of the fact that Linda Henning (who'd played her youngest daughter Betty Jo AND was producer Paul Hennings own Real Life daughter) has since said that it was all she could do to keep from crying when they'd read one of Kate's 'letters' on the show after Miss Benaderet's passing. IOW, doing this wasn't just avoiding the room elephant with the home audience but it was needlessly upsetting their own performers (including the producer's daughter). 

 

[magicdog]

On 4/21/2022 at 4:58 AM, Danielg342 said:

that main characters dying on TV- especially in a comedy- was unheard of at the time, so that may be why the show botched Kate Bradley's ultimate exit. I don't know enough about '60s TV to know if even an off-screen death would have been a faux pas, but, even still, it does make me wonder why it wasn't even attempted.

Personally I think it's related to two things:

1) It was a lighthearted sitcom and things like death in any form were generally avoided due to tone.

2) Hollywood executives (just like today) underestimate viewers' intelligence or ability to process things.

On occasion, there's a third thing that sometimes comes into play:

3) How a cast member exits a show often depends on how well they got along with TPTB.

Other TV shows of the era are guilty of 1 and 2 when you consider other sitcom actors who died during the run of the shows they appeared on.  Marion Lorne (Aunt Clara from "Bewitched") just never showed up again and was essentially replaced with Esmerelda (Alice Ghostly) with no further mention of her in any way!  

I personally wouldn't think of it as a faux pas if it had been acknowledged because as you mentioned, the public was well aware of Bea Benederet's death and I'm sure there were viewers who felt insulted that the character wasn't seen as having died with her.  It's not like death of a loved one was not unknown to them.

[Blergh]

OK, here's another one from Girl Meets World (2014-2017) which I hate bringing up because I overall liked the character. However,  I hated how Maya bullied Lucas by calling him 'Hee Haw!', making fun of his accent (which wasn't the different from her own Arkansas raised mother's) , screaming very loudly in his face- and, worse jumping on his back! Now I know he was dishwater dull personified but even that didn't justify her doing the above . Worse still was that when he FINALLY made his objections known to her (instead of weirdly smiling at these stunts), she attempted to justify it by fessing she 'teased' him and jumped on him. .. because she LIKED him! UGH!

First of all, imagine had it been Lucas or some other guy character who constantly did all the above to Maya or another girl character. Wouldn't that have been called out as bullying? YEP! But NO ONE  attempted to call her out on this! Moreover, the message that 'teasing' and jumping on one's back perfectly justified if one claims to like the victim is a rather toxic one. WAY too many preteens, teens. .and for that matter, technical adults have been guilt tripped down the ages  to accept others' bullying rather than attempt to end it  just because they claim to like them!  What's more, not every boy or girl is going to ONLY (and barely) verbally object to that kind of bullying- instead of attempting to physically retaliate for it (as wrong as that is to do so).  

Oh, and neither the supposed crush Riley nor their homeroom teacher Cory made the slightest objections to Maya's behavior towards Lucas. But, of course, Lucas  held all the above in the highest  regard to the end despite none of them them  deserving it!

[magicdog]

That whole show was just plain wrong!  It couldn't hold a candle to its predecessor!

6 hours ago, Blergh said:

First of all, imagine had it been Lucas or some other guy character who constantly did all the above to Maya or another girl character. Wouldn't that have been called out as bullying? YEP! But NO ONE  attempted to call her out on this!

Agreed!  I noticed this in a few shows (including animated ones) in which the female character abuses a male character (in the name of being "funny") but if the genders were reversed, I'm sure women's groups would howl at it for the abusive behavior it is!  

[Mabinogia]

10 hours ago, Blergh said:

Moreover, the message that 'teasing' and jumping on one's back perfectly justified if one claims to like the victim is a rather toxic one.

I loathe and despise the whole idea of "I tease/bully you because I like you". Just....NO. If you like someone you don't want to hurt or upset them or make them feel less than or uncomfortable no matter how hard it might be for you to share your feelings. I don't know where it started but GMW is not the only show/movie/book guilty of this. It is a toxic mindset that really, really needs to go extinct. 

It's up there with "they make fun of you because they are jealous of you". Some people are actually just horrible people who prey on those they see as weak. It could be weak physically, it could be because the target doesn't have a strong support system who will stand up for them, it could be because others have targeted this person. 

Bullying in media needs to be corrected, not excused. I don't care why someone is teasing, taunting or bulling someone else, they just need to be told their behaviour, regardless of the reason for it, is wrong. 

I generally liked Maya but yeah, her treatment of Lucas should have been shown as being wrong. Sadly, kids (and even some adults if the internet is any indication) are very influenced by the characters they see on tv. I am fine with depicting this trope, as it does happen, but it should have been shown as a flaw that she needed to amend for rather than just handwaved as "awe, she has a crush".

[Blergh]

On 4/29/2022 at 4:50 PM, Mabinogia said:

I loathe and despise the whole idea of "I tease/bully you because I like you". Just....NO. If you like someone you don't want to hurt or upset them or make them feel less than or uncomfortable no matter how hard it might be for you to share your feelings. I don't know where it started but GMW is not the only show/movie/book guilty of this. It is a toxic mindset that really, really needs to go extinct. 

It's up there with "they make fun of you because they are jealous of you". Some people are actually just horrible people who prey on those they see as weak. It could be weak physically, it could be because the target doesn't have a strong support system who will stand up for them, it could be because others have targeted this person. 

Bullying in media needs to be corrected, not excused. I don't care why someone is teasing, taunting or bulling someone else, they just need to be told their behaviour, regardless of the reason for it, is wrong. 

I generally liked Maya but yeah, her treatment of Lucas should have been shown as being wrong. Sadly, kids (and even some adults if the internet is any indication) are very influenced by the characters they see on tv. I am fine with depicting this trope, as it does happen, but it should have been shown as a flaw that she needed to amend for rather than just handwaved as "awe, she has a crush".

EXACTLY! If it at some point SOME character (even the annoying Riley) had spelled out to Maya that her treatment of Lucas was bullying which she needed to own & atone for -and not in any way cute or excusable, that would have been one thing (and fitting for a show that was supposed to constantly show 'life lessons') but this got handwaved away with 'awe, she has a crush'. 

Of course, the one big argument between Riley and Maya that got depicted(instead of actually addressing that Riley could possibly have any faults) was when Maya got upset because Lucas had FINALLY called her 'a short stack of pancakes' one time after years of her bullying him- and Riley had not told Lucas that he was wrong to have called Maya that! Even then the entire focus was in having everyone including Eric guilt   Riley and Maya to make up since their friendship was supposedly ALL that mattered instead of actually attempting to taking this opportunity to have someone point out to Maya that she ALSO was wrong to have bullied him for so long (and that HIS feelings also mattered) AND that Riley was wrong to have not have ever objected to Maya having done that- since she was supposed to have also been Lucas's friend.  

Yes, I know that this show wasn't the first (and likely not the last) to do endorse that toxic mindset of greenlighting bullying due to the bully allegedly liking/crushing on the victim which the victim was supposed to be grateful for (without anyone calling out the bully for what it actually was) but it sure was infuriating! 

Edited April 30, 2022 by Blergh

[magicdog]

12 hours ago, Mabinogia said:

I loathe and despise the whole idea of "I tease/bully you because I like you". Just....NO. If you like someone you don't want to hurt or upset them or make them feel less than or uncomfortable no matter how hard it might be for you to share your feelings. I don't know where it started but GMW is not the only show/movie/book guilty of this. It is a toxic mindset that really, really needs to go extinct. 

It's up there with "they make fun of you because they are jealous of you". Some people are actually just horrible people who prey on those they see as weak. It could be weak physically, it could be because the target doesn't have a strong support system who will stand up for them, it could be because others have targeted this person. 

 

My mother was guilty of the "He acts that way because he likes you".  I think it came from thinking that's how prepubescent boys express themselves since girls are still "icky" to them at that age.  The film, "He's Just Not That Into You" calls this out when Jennifer Aniston's character has a flashback to that moment in her life and realized how many women including herself spend their lives thinking men that treat you badly really like you and this is how they show it.

Quote

 

Bullying in media needs to be corrected, not excused. I don't care why someone is teasing, taunting or bulling someone else, they just need to be told their behaviour, regardless of the reason for it, is wrong. 

 

Unfortunately, as someone who works in media, the bullies are the ones in charge.

 

[legaleagle53]

23 hours ago, Mabinogia said:

It's up there with "they make fun of you because they are jealous of you". Some people are actually just horrible people who prey on those they see as weak. It could be weak physically, it could be because the target doesn't have a strong support system who will stand up for them, it could be because others have targeted this person. 

 

And that's why I have a problem with the saying, "Living well is the best revenge." These are people who seriously couldn't care less about how well you're living because they don't even care that you're still alive. The only thing they really care about is themselves. Period.

[Blergh]

1 hour ago, legaleagle53 said:

And that's why I have a problem with the saying, "Living well is the best revenge." These are people who seriously couldn't care less about how well you're living because they don't even care that you're still alive. The only thing they really care about is themselves. Period.

True- and that needs to be stressed instead of having bullies depicted as somehow victims who can't help themselves! 

While I understand that the odds may be stacked due to the probability of bullies seeming to prevail at this time in the media,etc., that does not mean that the paying viewing public should throw up our hands and do nothing but  accept toxic portrayals of bullies' MOs or attempts  to  conjure sympathy for bullies instead of their actual victims! On the contrary, this is where PATRON POWER can come into play to start the ball rolling for positive change not just in how bullies and victims get portrayed but in other media depictions! Of course, it won't happen instantly or without struggles but that doesn't mean we shouldn't start taking those first steps of the thousand mile journeys! 

 

To bring all this back on topic, alas Maya bullying Lucas for years on end  wasn't the only  instance of that on the show. It seems that show had lots of incidents of the protagonists and even parents bullying others who had done nothing to them but be their victims yet not only was that supposed to be humorous but most often there were no  apologies much less acknowledgments that bullying had happened instead of it supposedly being clever and funny solely due to it having been perpetrated by  the  protagonists and/or parents! 

Edited April 30, 2022 by Blergh

[Danielg342]

I don't know if I know that particular storyline in Girl Meets World (it wasn't on my viewing list much), but, true story, in sixth grade I did have a cute girl who apparently liked me but only expressed it through bullying. She especially liked taking her pencil and poking me on the butt, just to watch my reaction. I remember complaining about it- I forget to whom- only to get told, "she likes you". Being 12, I felt pretty confident in the moment...but I never summed up the courage to ask her out and she never asked me out either.

Which is one reason why I can never tolerate bullying on screen, no matter how "sympathetic" it may be portrayed. Not just because Hollywood glosses over the effects bullying can have on the one who is bullied, but also because you hardly ever get an honest examination about why bullies do what they do in the first place, especially when they're that young. Teens and tweens are in that funny phase where, in the process of becoming an adult, their maturity processes get all out of whack which can make their behaviour very volatile. Bullying, since it's still very much a "childish" process, is very much a manifestation of that, and often the targets of the bullies are those who may have 'matured" more than they have. There was another girl in my later elementary school days who did pick on me a lot (not the same one who poked me with a pencil). I see her years later as an adult and she's an apologetic mess to me. She explains to me that she picked on me a lot because she truly was jealous that I did a lot better in school than she did and she didn't know how to rectify that in her mind. I accepted her apology simply because I understood youth is a funny time.

Which is something I wish Hollywood would better understand.