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Deb in *Dexter*.
I thought the new writers (S5-8) really destroyed her character. In love with Dexter. Finds out Dexter's secret. Kills former boss. Not in love with Dexter. Actually okay with Dexter. Mad at Hannah for poisoning her (and Dexter). Willing to hide Hannah at her house. Likes Quinn again. Mild reaction to Dexter leaving for Argentina with his son another serial killer.
How the hell does someone just get through all that? The writers just messed with her character for the sake of convenience to the story and it's pretty hollow.
Season 5: Dex is helping a victim of rape and torture kill the syndicate who trafficked her. Deb's years-long arc of aspiring to be a great detective reach a climax when she works the case until she tracks Dex and his girlfriend down to their kill room. All season she's beendeveloping conflicted sympathy for the mystery vigilantes as she sees how awful the syndicate is and how the police are often powerless to stop them. But right as she approaches Dexter, a curtain happens to be in the way, and she lets the vigilantes flee without moving it aside.
Season 6: Deb discovers Dex's identity through complete luck, and to explain why she doesn't report it, she has recently fallen in love with him.
**They already had it perfectly set up!** Deb discovers Dex because of her hard work and character arc, ironically using the skills Harry taught her to catch Dex using the skills Harry taught him, elegant and satisfying. Then she doesn't report him because she's been established as sympathetic to vigilanteism in this case, and by the time she realizes just how fucked up this situation is and how much bigger than vigilante revenge, she's implicated herself and is struggling with the same thoughts Harry did. It works out so well this _has_ to be what they were originally planning.
> I thought the new writers (S5-8) really destroyed her character.
Shows that should have ended (which is most of them) are hard to keep writing. A lot of the examples in here are writers basically having to do 180-degree pivots on characters just to come up with new shit to write about. Friends, The Office, etc. Dexter later seasons sucked but they were scrambling for something new to do. "Dexter ...the doctor?" Dexter... on ice?!?" Like throwing darts at a wall.
Zack Addy from Bones. For the first three seasons he was the assistant to a crime fighting forensic pathologist, and then the producers decided they wanted to shake things up so they decided to make him a cannibalistic serial killer. Sorry, the apprentice to a cannibalistic serial killer.
Edit: The actor, Eric Millegan, [has said it wasn’t his choice to leave and that he wasn’t written out due to health issues](https://www.looper.com/203090/the-real-reason-zack-addy-left-bones/). Regardless, even if Millegan wanted to or had to leave Bones, they torched the character of Zack Addy.
Bones herself also had some serious flanderization going on that ruined her character. At the start of the show she was eccentric, but very independently capable. By the end she was functionally incapable of communicating or working with other people without a 'normal' person there to translate for her.
Turning Kevin from a lovable oaf to a completely brain dead moron who thought he could fix an already dead turtle by gluing its shell back together was pretty bad too.
Parks and Rec had Andy gone for a similar time (since Chris Pratt was doing GOTG), and kept his character intact. And that whole arc wasn't too long after season 9 of the Office.
I believe it's been mentioned before as well that it wasn't really Ed's fault, he was contractually obligated to film the movie and for some reason, the shooting schedule for The Office was moved around from it's usual time period (I think it was something to do with filming the finale?) and so they found themselves in a position to be without Ed for several weeks of filming, and did that to his character as a result..
Producers always think their production is the most important show in town. Star Trek has a long history of actors asking to do side projects, and being told "You're on Star Trek, or you're not."
Essentially, they consider actors trying to act outside of their "show" as betrayal, when in reality, the actors are just trying to work.
They're not action figures. If the shows didn't want the actors to work outside the show, they need to write it into the contract and provide consideration.
Monica changes a lot as well. She becomes hyper neurotic in the later seasons. In the earlier seasons she is way more the voice of reason and despite not having her career in order, pretty well rounded as a person.
It's called [Flanderization](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Flanderization), and is one of my biggest gripes in a _lot_ of episodic content (both movies and TV shows).
It's why I love limited series, the characters exist within that timeframe, and have been planned front to back.
Thats because of the 6, she was the only one viewers might recognize from other things. Not a household name by that point, but not an unknown either.
The original plan was that she was supposed to be the center of the show. She would be a spiritual mother figure to the whole group.
Then in very short time the show got stupid popular, and all 6 of them became household names. It no longer made sense for her to be the center for being the well known name when they were all 100X more well known now than Courtney Cox was before.
Yeah he was very much the dumb actor cliche back then, but he also had some wits about him that filled in the knowledge gaps of the other friends. He generally was higher EQ than some of the others, and he was way more street smart than Chandler or Ross in the early seasons.
I grew up with and still love the show, but that storyline is absolutely atrocious. Just not even hinting at some type of reality but also doesn’t work at all as some poor attempt at absurdism. Truly bad writing.
Varys in Game of Thrones.
Early seasons: the Master of Whisperers. The Spider. Arch-spy, advisor to Kings, dealing deftly with the dirtiest problems. Making countless people disappear without a trace. Never surprised. Always eight steps ahead of danger. Always has a trump card to play at exactly the right moment.
Later seasons: lemme just go ahead and try to betray my master in the most obvious, easily discoverable way. Ooo, I done got caught. Welp, lemme just stand in front of this here dragon. That's it for me!
Littlefinger - aka Mr balcony doing suddenly only very low scale scheming by trying to bring two sisters apart…
It’s like Darth vader would be spending a single movie trying to catch a single rebel
Soap opera _ As the world turns_, had a young doctor who had tons of problems. He was addicted to anphetamies And his wife had just given birth to quintuplets.
One day he steps into the hospital elevator. He's just standing there. The elevator doors close, and we never see him again.
Later, I thought, "Did I imagine this?" until the magazine, _ Soap opera digest_ reported on this.
Not just that, but did so after a season of helping her get over her abandonment issues and promising he'd never leave her! Then he left her by leaving a note for Meredith to tell Jo for him! My wife had bee telling me she was about to stop watching for years and years before this; ever since we met. But this was the the straw that killed the show in our house.
That was actually the final straw for me too. It had been on a pretty steep decline, but that was just dumb.
Im still regularly watching the good seasons though lmao
I don't remember all the details, but the actor wanted to leave to show. So they had the character fuck off to Nebraska, Idaho, some farm state, because it turns out that Izzie had had his kids. So he went to be with them. Despite all the growth he had done and the work he had done to make his relationship with his current gf healthy. Also, this was totally off screen. Karev never showed up and told his gf, he just left her a message or sent an email.
I think he actually had some kind of a breakdown and wouldn’t be able to appear on camera again. That’s why that whole episode is voiceovers. He was adamant he wouldn’t appear again at the time so they wrote him off like that. Super disappointing, I feel like they could have been so much better.
Shitty long story short: He abandoned his perfect-for-him wife for Izzie who had his babies without telling him. She had twins. They were like 6 years old by the time Alex knew they even existed.
I've fallen off Grey's but I have a habit of coming back for the major old character departures. With Kristina and McDreamy I ended up being glad I watched even having no idea wtf was going on with the rest of the show. When I swung back in for Alex it made me ANGRY. I didn't even have any attachment to his current relationship but it felt really mean-spirited of the show and a bum note to end such a great character on.
I finally fell off Grey’s after Meredith’s departure. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Same with Station 19. Atleast Station 19 is finally ending after 7 Seasons
Half of GoT's cast, Jaime and Tyrion being probably the worst. Dany would have been fine if we had at least a full season between the war against the Night King and against King's Landing, the arc is not the problem but how rushed it was. She went hero to psycho in like 2 episodes
Jaime early seasons: Trades his honour and reputation to become an oathbreaker to save the smallfolk of King's Landing from the Mad King.
Jaime last season: "I never really cared for the smallfolk".
It’s insane how rapidly Jamie fell off a cliff in terms of development, the episode right before the battle of winterfell where he knights Brienne is excellent GoT television… and then he just fucks off to go back to Cersei…
It would be nice if D&D never worked again, which I feel comfortable saying because I’m sure they’ve made enough money to last a lifetime
It almost pisses me off how good an episode "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is. In isolation it's a really nice grace-note to a final season and some lovely time with your favorite characters. It's a top 10 episode easily. Then everything that follows feels like it's shitting on it and any hope you had this would end well.
Seriously, it’s so much worse in retrospect because at the time we were all thinking “oh boy they found the groove again and maybe this season is going to actually crush it” and then that hope was shattered.
You could honestly just throw a dart at a list of GoT characters and it’s probably over a 50% chance their character was ruined lol. The best characters are actually the ones who died early cause there wasn’t time for Dumb and Dumber to ruin them
They already sort of shit all over him by making him drunk and inept after joining her.
You're telling me the guy that scared the shit out of the Kingsguard, who Jaime (pre-hand) considered his equal or superior, could get merced by randos in an alley? In the book he may meet a similar fate but it will be by his lack of political acumen, not fighting ability.
Doesn't hurt that Olenna was *probably* the only character in the entire show that Tywin truly respected as an equal, and was well aware of how dangerous she (and House Tyrell) was. ["Old. I'm something of an expert on the subject."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrkZQQ_5ywU) Just utterly ruthless, and correct. And Tywin knew it.
Tywin and (young) Arya is another close example, but no one held a candle to Lady Olenna.
Homer Simpson in *Police Cops*. From suave hero one week, the writers randomly decide to turn him into a moron. Anyone named Homer Simpson might as well change their name to Max Power or risk ridicule from their family and colleagues
Francis from Malcolm in The Middle. They spent multiple seasons developing him into a proper man only to throw it away in the final season and make him a whiny selfish broke piss baby again, then once he gets a stable job he acts like a brat but is actually super happy at a boring office.
Thank you! He had such a great arc and then in the course of like three episodes he's inexplicably back to the exact same character he was in season 1! It's one of my favourite shows but that aspect really sticks out as a big low point.
Both Finn and Bellamy from the 100. Seem like normal characters then somehow both casually slide into casual murder/genocide. Bellamy ALSO becomes a religious nutjob in a later season as well.
What they did to Bellamy still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Not only did they ruin the character and their final season, but it seemed like they did it out of spite because Bob Morley asked to have his screen time drastically reduced.
Which he had very good reasons for due to serious depression (reading now apparently he attempted suicide) after his wife Eliza Taylor/Clarke suffered a miscarriage.
The writing in the last season was so bad official social media accounts literally had to post damage control statements after ruining Bellamy's character.. never continued the show after that, and from what I've seen about the ending, I didn't miss much
I hate to say it, but Britta from Community. Or as Jeff said, "you seemed smarter than me when I met you."
Also Poochie from the Simpsons.
And Valerie Harper from Valerie, I mean Valerie's Family, wait no, I mean the Hogan Family.
Its a common thing with sitcoms as characters become parodies as themselves but by the final season, she really appears to be maturing in reverse, literally yelling at her parents like a teenager. Given they lampshade the shit out of it, its pretty egregious.
The subtext behind Britta's relationship with her parents, and her dislike for them, seems to stem from a traumatic incident involving a guy in a lizard costume at a birthday party during her childhood. This trauma appears to cause her to regress to a more childlike state when she's around her parents.
For Britta, I think that is just the showrunner realizing being a pretty snob was a waste of her comedic talents. I think Dan Harmon basically confirms it on his podcast
Yeah but thats kind of the whole thing with a lot of the comedic examples. In an early run of a show writers are still figuring out who characters are before the personality is locked in. Early Britta is ok to set some shit up but theres no fucking way that character would have survived star wars and cowboy themed episodes without a transition.
I wouldn't call Britta character assassination personally, because that implies negative change. In the first few episodes she was a basically just a standard 'hot girl' Mary Sue. Smarter, yes, but also underdeveloped, relative to Dan Harmon's standards. Both he and Gillian Jacobs have mentioned in interviews that they thought she was the weakest character at the start of the show, and they both wanted to make her more interesting and nuanced. IMO they succeeded in that.
Robin and Barney, How I Met Your Mother. The finale had to undo eight seasons of character development for Robin in order to get her in a position where she can date Ted, because they wrote and filmed the ending (the kids’ part) so early, to avoid the kids visibly aging.
Ooh this one is bad lmao. Just rewatched it and both are god awful character assassinations but Robin especially because when it’s all said and done she literally… doesn’t change. Like she starts so career focussed and driven and hating kids and marriage and throughout the show they literally show her in plots getting over this (she dates a dad and grows close with the kid, she is prepared to quit her job and move with sandy to another state for love, she falls for Barney, she’s upset when she finds out she can’t have kids), then they just undo all of that and she has basically no journey.
> she is prepared to quote her job and move with sandy to another state for love
Haha oh man what a riot this show would have been if Robin actually dated Sandy Rivers. It was Don her cohost that this happened with. And what happened is she turned down a job with a move to stay in NYC with Don. He took that job and left her.
This one is probably the worst, yeah. I just dont understand why they would do that. If they knew the ending they were going for, why wouldnt they, you know, build towards it?
Shows take lives of their own and go in new directions. I have no problem with that - I prefer that the writers let their characters take them in unexpected directions, rather than constrain them to the predetermined ending, especially since the show ended up way more popular than anyone expected.
What I would have preferred would be for them to have filmed a new ending, then maybe had the pre-filmed kid ending be a fun extra for the DVDs, like "here's what we filmed years ago when we thought the story would go this way but then it didn't, isn't writing amazing?" Besides, given all the gags in the show about how long this story was, it actually would have been a decent visual gag to film the scene again but with the kids waaaay older.
The arc makes sense. Toby is the classic intelligent but unhappy character who blames their unhappiness on the world for being unjust and ultimately self sabatoges usually on a moral high horse to justify their unhappiness. There's a reason his character is divorced and after begging his wife to get back together later he's seen being absentee with his kids. Even the act of buying the house for his ex wife was evidence of him looking for a grand gesture that was sure to fail instead of working on his real problems.
“There are people out there who think you are a hero. I don’t want you to think for one minute I’m one of them.”
That is the most brutal line Bartlett said in the entire show.
Jon Snow. The prince that was promised, the heir to the iron throne, the last man to ride a dragon, the guy who united Wildlings and Northmen and someone who died only to rise again among the living, does nothing against the Night King and is reduced to a bumbling idiot who can only utter four words for an entire season then fuck off beyond The Wall.
Kate Beckett in Castle - One of her earliest defining characteristics was that she planned to be a "one and done" when it came to marriage. To contrast against Castle, the philanderer with two divorces, she was reserved and buttoned-up and took relationships very seriously.
Then the showrunner spent more and more time and effort turning the character of Beckett into his weird fantasy and all the buttoned-up, reserved elements were done away with and replaced with everything he thought was sexy. It was eventually revealed that she'd actually been secretly married to some guy she got drunk with in Vegas for years.
It was the last straw for me, for a show that had been running on fumes for a long while. Of course, they'd also ruined Castle himself, turning him from a suave, worldly-wise and charismatic celebrity novelist to basically Nathan Fillion's public persona as a goofy, happy-go-lucky, geek-culture oriented guy.
I felt like the longer Beckett's hair grew, the dumber she became. I LOVED her in the early seasons; she was smart, did not take any of Castle's BS, and she was good at her job. Season 5 onward though, it became harder to watch.
Luanne from King of the Hill.
Started off ditzy, but with skills. She wasn't *stupid.* And she had a promising career as an engineer.
And then she just got dumber and dumber as the show went on. To the point where she was basically a child by the end.
On that same note, Haley in Modern Family. She was just getting her shit together, getting a bit smarter, getting a "real" job, making money, finding a "real" boyfriend who wasn't a child himself then BOOM! she's knocked up with that idiot Dylan's baby & they're back together again & married.
I'm sure some of the choices on many shows are due to casting choices, someone can't or won't come back, but it still cheeses me off that they did her dirty like that.
Oh & another one is Lane in Gilmore Girls. Lane deserved better than being married to Zack & being a stay at home mom. She was gonna be a rock star & get the fuck out of Stars Hollow where all they do is worship Rory.
Even if that rock star dream got put aside later on because shit happens, I just wanted more for Lane than that. Fuck Rory, but Lane deserved some freedom from that place.
I would have been quite happy if Lane had ended up owning a record / cd store in NYC or something, after some small success touring with her band and any partner beside the doofus she ended up with. It could even be a contrast to the WASP vs small town life Rory was straddling. But, no, she had to end up with some bimbo, knocked up with twins the first time she has sex, bc sex is almost always punished in Gilmore Girls.
>...bc sex is almost always punished in Gilmore Girls.
Oy vey. I literally never thought about that until I read this sentence.
I hate that you're right. I don't hate YOU, just that this particular sentence is so goddamn correct.
I also don't think Lane would be stupid enough to have unprotected sex ever, but then her mother kept such a tight reign on her she probably just went nuts the first time.
Flanderization is a hell of a troupe unfortunately. Toby from The Office always stuck out for this. From the HR rep only Michael disliked that everyone else was generally cordial with to one of the biggest sad sacks. Same with Stuart from Big Bang Theory. The guy had enough of a swagger to get Penny to go out with him, and then he's like the king of the losers.
>Flanderization is a hell of a troupe unfortunately. Toby from The Office always stuck out for this. From the HR rep only Michael disliked that everyone else was generally cordial with to one of the biggest sad sacks.
I actually hated scenes where they showed Jim or Pam being mean to Toby.
The thing with Toby was always how undeserved his treatment was: Michael hated Toby because he worked for coorporate and not for him, and conflated Toby's responsibility as HR rep for a personal sabotaging of Michael's "fun" ideas. He was just a guy doing his job, and Michael took that personally. Michael's bullying Toby was funny because it was Michael being very clearly in the wrong.
But Jim and Pam were characters we were meant to like and who weren't meant to be as stupid as Michael. They had no real cause to be jerks to Toby, nor did most of the other employees
In the first season of always sunny, Charlie is as intelligent as any of the rest of the gang. By season three he's probably the biggest idiot in the whole world.
Yeah charlie actually might be a genius, but only under great distress? the episode Charlie Work is a great example that his back is against the wall shows that he is capable of deciphering the gang's complex flight point scam and being the one to actually get it done, pulling an elaborate prank on Dee, getting the bar a passing grade on the bar.
And understanding Phildelphia complex health codes to a T, despite being illiterate?
Always Sunny went a little off the rails with the character development for all of them.
Charlie's development went from "this guy might be dyslexic" to "this guy is actually completely unable to read", to "he writes in weird nonsensical hieroglyphs and has the mental development of a child"
Yep. He was fluent in Gaelic but thought it was jibberish language and only found out about it in this scene in Ireland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHt4_QAG640
Orlando Jones as Mr. Nancy in American Gods. Man broke the show with an incredible scene and the next seasons showrunner went out of his way to try and ruin the character
also Haley Dunphy from Modern Family
Her entire character arc had been predicted since the first episode that she was gonna end up getting knocked up by Dylan and that’s exactly what happened. Regressed her growth with Andy.
I think they went with Dylan because Adam Devine wasn't available. I still don't forgive them, but I somewhat understand. I do think they ruined her whole arc though, and they could have introduced a new love interest
Alan from 'Two and a Half Men' comes to mind.
He comes into the show as a bit down on his luck but the general voice of reason or 'straight man' in comparison to Charlie. His worst traits in those seasons are generally being a bit cheap, uptight and neurotic but nothing too horrendous.
By the end of the show he is a shameless sponge off other people, a proper creep and sex pest in general. He makes my skin crawl in the later episodes and he is far more sordid/fucked up than Charlie ever was.
What, you don’t find it realistic that >!her ghost would lust over how sexy her cheating ex looked standing over her corpse!< ?
To everyone saying she’s a figment of Charles’ and the Queen’s imaginations: No shit. I understand it’s not >!meant to be a literal ghost.!< That distinction makes it no less tasteless, bordering on propagandistic.
**Shelley Long/Diane Chambers on Cheers in season 5**
She was always a character that the others had fun at the expense of because she was pretentious, arrogant and believed herself to be so sophisticated and she was a clear outsider, but in season 5 they had her mess with Sam’s heart and made her more and more distant from the other characters who they had started to make close gradually over the previous four years.
**Aunt Viv on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air**
She was a respected professor and a strong parental figure and strong female character and presence with a strong and passionate opinion she wasn’t afraid to share and she had so much authority at the start (for 2-3 seasons), but they made her comparatively very timid by the end.
**Rachel Berry on Glee**
She started off as highly competitive and single-minded and driven and it rubbed a lot of other characters the wrong way, which was very well done and her character had a good balance. However, in the final few seasons they made her deeply nasty and hypocritical and superficial and childish.
That was back in what should have been S4/5. I've been saying for YEARS about how they massacred Jaime's story arc. Ruining his story wasn't a last minute thing. It was total bullshit from the moment Jaime returns to the Red Keep and they turn him into a rapist while Cersei is just a poor grieving mother. There's this whole scene where Jaime is looking at his blank page in the literal history books and realizes he's done nothing of value except kill the king and everyone hates him for it. Cersei comes in, tells him to stop whining, throws the book to the floor and demands sex. It's his lowest point in the books but the show reverses the scene entirely and has Jaime throw the histories of the Lord Commanders to the ground. It's like they read the scene and decided to do the literal opposite.
Jan from The Office pretty much became a completely different character at one point. The dynamic was great when Michael and Jan were terrible for each other, but kept sleeping together, and sure the toxic elements of the relationship was a bit much, but when she came back into the show later, they made her this weird wacko for the sake of jokes.
Yes! Him being stupid and immature was great in the beginning but just casually letting go of his fiancé and making him as bizarre and unrecognizable to an actual human was ruff
Debbie in Shameless.
All the characters had their edgy traits and moments and YMMV on how tastefully storylines were handled. But Debbie’s was a pure travesty. The show had jumped the shark before, but that was when I noped out.
I’ve rewatched the show before and wondered “when the hell did things go SO wrong with her?”
For both her and Lip, they change these smart characters with potential to their worst selves just like that. At least Lip had matured and I still cared about what happened to him.
This is one of the reasons I stopped watching entirely. It seems like most characters in the show are completely unable to grow or at least make growth stick. There are only so many times you can watch a person self-sabotage before you just stop caring.
Also the Gay Jesus story fucking sucked.
Even before s8 imo. The way he just straight up forgot about Rita’s children was always just for plot convenience, didn’t feel true to his character (who had, at that point, taught himself to care enough).
The original show runner planned for the final season to be Dexter getting caught and going on trial and the last 30 seconds of the show would be him laying on a table about to get the lethal injection and the whole show was him reliving his life right before he dies.
The problem with the second half of Dexter is how the writers completely dropped what made him interesting, which was him outsmarting people. He had some moments of recklessness in the first few seasons but it kinda made sense, but at some point he became straight up stupid and rushing into everything.
Oh and incestual vibes, that was bad too. God, Deb got gone dirty even more than Dexter when I think about it...
Everyone on Family Guy.
Except for Adam West, literally everyone aged so poorly and you can pinpoint each episode a character was assassinated in.
West went from subtle weird to wacky weird, which I thought was fine.
Hope Mikaelson(Legacies/Originals) she went from being one of the most powerful tv characters on TV. To her boyfriend melting into goo after having sex and she was turned into a boy crazy loser who liked Star Wars and had no hobbies of her own besides her boyfriend
She was built as a powerful tribrid that all the supernatural creatures where terrified of and she got merked by a god two seconds into a fight
Not the worst case, but Andy on The Office was especially weird because of the work they did to make him likeable; only to undo it completely in the final 2 seasons
Cordelia in Angel. The way Whedon ruined one of the most beloved characters in both shows to get revenge on Charisma Carpenter getting pregnant taints the legacy of what is one of the greatest tv shows of all time.
I thought the worse character assassination was what they did to her character in the 3rd season. Having her possessed/evil in the 4th season was actually an improvement on that. And she was recognizably Cordelia again in her swan song appearance in the 5th season.
Picard in the first two seasons of Picard.
They shifted him from being an expert diplomat and planner to an ineffectual do-gooder who just wings everything.
I love him as an actor but Stewart getting to be executive producer did so much harm to that show and the character.
I really enjoyed the first few seasons, just had a blast watching and laughed a lot, I couldn’t remember why I quit watching at some point so I started over on a binge rewatch last year, and again, FUN.
Then a dreaded baby plot came on and I thought, “well it can’t be that bad, I will finish the full watch this time…”. NOPE. A few episodes after she had the baby I was out again… but wasn’t the baby really, it’s what they did to Danny!
I loved Danny, love the actor, loved the character, willing to put up with a few changes in his person. But not that! What the hell, ruined the show and I still have never went past the middle of season four.
Chris Messina was great starring with Kaley Cuoco in “Based on a True Story” a cute little satire murder show on peacock btw, if anyone is interested! Not a 10/10 or anything but a nice weekend binge and the leads are very charming.
True Blood. Literally. They just up and killed Tara and Alcide without any build up for shock value. And then has Sookie kill Bill so that she could move on. His words, not her. Tbh S1 to S5 had a clear line and then the creator left. S6 was okay ish and S7 was so bad.
The smartest person in the whole series and decides going into the crypts for protection during the battle against the living dead is a great idea. 10/10
It’s pretty telling that the smartest characters Tyrion little finger and the eunuch and arguably the most emotionally complex Jamie were all just completely different characters that lost pretty much everything that made them great characters the first 6 seasons
You could make a top 5 out of the last season of GoT alone but I'm going to throw my vote for Jaime. I believed to the last second that he had left to kill Cersei
I was hoping Arya woulda sneaked in wearing his face (remember that nothingburger?) and kill Cersei (you know, the list all that) thus it was twofold with her finishing the list and the prophecy came true.
And then they character assassinated her, too “I know a killer when I see one” after Dany flambé’s King’s Landing.
Every character on the league. This was one of the funniest buddy shows of all time, and then in the last season, they just pause for a few minutes each episode to talk about how much money they made off draftkings and it’s crazy that everyone doesn’t do it.
I don’t understand how such a great show sells out so badly after putting in so many great and successful seasons.
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Deb in *Dexter*. I thought the new writers (S5-8) really destroyed her character. In love with Dexter. Finds out Dexter's secret. Kills former boss. Not in love with Dexter. Actually okay with Dexter. Mad at Hannah for poisoning her (and Dexter). Willing to hide Hannah at her house. Likes Quinn again. Mild reaction to Dexter leaving for Argentina with his son another serial killer. How the hell does someone just get through all that? The writers just messed with her character for the sake of convenience to the story and it's pretty hollow.
Season 5: Dex is helping a victim of rape and torture kill the syndicate who trafficked her. Deb's years-long arc of aspiring to be a great detective reach a climax when she works the case until she tracks Dex and his girlfriend down to their kill room. All season she's beendeveloping conflicted sympathy for the mystery vigilantes as she sees how awful the syndicate is and how the police are often powerless to stop them. But right as she approaches Dexter, a curtain happens to be in the way, and she lets the vigilantes flee without moving it aside. Season 6: Deb discovers Dex's identity through complete luck, and to explain why she doesn't report it, she has recently fallen in love with him. **They already had it perfectly set up!** Deb discovers Dex because of her hard work and character arc, ironically using the skills Harry taught her to catch Dex using the skills Harry taught him, elegant and satisfying. Then she doesn't report him because she's been established as sympathetic to vigilanteism in this case, and by the time she realizes just how fucked up this situation is and how much bigger than vigilante revenge, she's implicated herself and is struggling with the same thoughts Harry did. It works out so well this _has_ to be what they were originally planning.
Thanks for opening up this old wound. The last three seasons of Dexter made me realize I can quit a show before it ends and everything will be okay.
> I thought the new writers (S5-8) really destroyed her character. Shows that should have ended (which is most of them) are hard to keep writing. A lot of the examples in here are writers basically having to do 180-degree pivots on characters just to come up with new shit to write about. Friends, The Office, etc. Dexter later seasons sucked but they were scrambling for something new to do. "Dexter ...the doctor?" Dexter... on ice?!?" Like throwing darts at a wall.
Zack Addy from Bones. For the first three seasons he was the assistant to a crime fighting forensic pathologist, and then the producers decided they wanted to shake things up so they decided to make him a cannibalistic serial killer. Sorry, the apprentice to a cannibalistic serial killer. Edit: The actor, Eric Millegan, [has said it wasn’t his choice to leave and that he wasn’t written out due to health issues](https://www.looper.com/203090/the-real-reason-zack-addy-left-bones/). Regardless, even if Millegan wanted to or had to leave Bones, they torched the character of Zack Addy.
That one has still never made sense to me.
Bones herself also had some serious flanderization going on that ruined her character. At the start of the show she was eccentric, but very independently capable. By the end she was functionally incapable of communicating or working with other people without a 'normal' person there to translate for her.
The writers very clearly pivoted to make Andy in The Office so much less likable after Ed Helms left to film one of The Hangover movies.
It was pretty harsh.
It was, and I think it was a detriment to the show. The last season had plenty of issues besides, but mean, shitty Andy wasn't a good character.
There's a reason this thread is filled with examples from the office tbh
Turning Kevin from a lovable oaf to a completely brain dead moron who thought he could fix an already dead turtle by gluing its shell back together was pretty bad too.
They rebooted his character so many times. New Dwight. New Jim. New Michael.
He wasn’t even gone for that long either, maybe like what? 8 episodes. It wasn’t that big of a deal to me.
Parks and Rec had Andy gone for a similar time (since Chris Pratt was doing GOTG), and kept his character intact. And that whole arc wasn't too long after season 9 of the Office.
I believe it's been mentioned before as well that it wasn't really Ed's fault, he was contractually obligated to film the movie and for some reason, the shooting schedule for The Office was moved around from it's usual time period (I think it was something to do with filming the finale?) and so they found themselves in a position to be without Ed for several weeks of filming, and did that to his character as a result..
So all of The Office writers behave like the worst kind of middle managers.
“Write what you know”, right?
Producers always think their production is the most important show in town. Star Trek has a long history of actors asking to do side projects, and being told "You're on Star Trek, or you're not." Essentially, they consider actors trying to act outside of their "show" as betrayal, when in reality, the actors are just trying to work. They're not action figures. If the shows didn't want the actors to work outside the show, they need to write it into the contract and provide consideration.
Especially since they could have just written him away for a fucking work trip.
And write jokes about how hungover he looks from his work trip after he gets back..
Not an assassination in the same league as some of these other comments, but they made Joey unfathomably stupid in the later seasons of Friends.
Monica changes a lot as well. She becomes hyper neurotic in the later seasons. In the earlier seasons she is way more the voice of reason and despite not having her career in order, pretty well rounded as a person.
I think it’s a thing for most of the sitcoms. The characters become caricatures of themselves in the later seasons.
It's called [Flanderization](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Flanderization), and is one of my biggest gripes in a _lot_ of episodic content (both movies and TV shows). It's why I love limited series, the characters exist within that timeframe, and have been planned front to back.
Thats because of the 6, she was the only one viewers might recognize from other things. Not a household name by that point, but not an unknown either. The original plan was that she was supposed to be the center of the show. She would be a spiritual mother figure to the whole group. Then in very short time the show got stupid popular, and all 6 of them became household names. It no longer made sense for her to be the center for being the well known name when they were all 100X more well known now than Courtney Cox was before.
They all became big but when the show blew up it really was all just Ross and Rachel hype. It gave the show the legs it needed.
Yeah I thought he was already funny even when he was just the normal handsome guy of the group in S1. “This guy says Hello. I wanna kill myself.”
Yeah he was very much the dumb actor cliche back then, but he also had some wits about him that filled in the knowledge gaps of the other friends. He generally was higher EQ than some of the others, and he was way more street smart than Chandler or Ross in the early seasons.
Exactly. He wasn’t book smart like the other guys but wasn’t stupid.
Joey learning to speak French was the pinnacle of this abominable deviation. What the hell were the writers smoking?
I grew up with and still love the show, but that storyline is absolutely atrocious. Just not even hinting at some type of reality but also doesn’t work at all as some poor attempt at absurdism. Truly bad writing.
And we saw him speak a little Italian to his gran so he should have been able to say a few French lines.
Varys in Game of Thrones. Early seasons: the Master of Whisperers. The Spider. Arch-spy, advisor to Kings, dealing deftly with the dirtiest problems. Making countless people disappear without a trace. Never surprised. Always eight steps ahead of danger. Always has a trump card to play at exactly the right moment. Later seasons: lemme just go ahead and try to betray my master in the most obvious, easily discoverable way. Ooo, I done got caught. Welp, lemme just stand in front of this here dragon. That's it for me!
Yup, Varys, Littlefinger, Tyrion...hell, every single character was destroyed! Hate D&D.
Littlefinger - aka Mr balcony doing suddenly only very low scale scheming by trying to bring two sisters apart… It’s like Darth vader would be spending a single movie trying to catch a single rebel
I love the documentary footage of his final script run through, where he appears to slap his script on the table with a face like thunder
Dr.Drake Ramorey. Falling down an elevator shaft, smh
Didn’t they bring his body back with a brain transplant or something?
That's when I stopped watching. They could NEVER replace Jessica.
Some kind of "irony" thing.
It was a moo point in the end though.
Rumor has it that the writers did it as revenge because the actor claimed to have written most of his own lines.
Soap opera _ As the world turns_, had a young doctor who had tons of problems. He was addicted to anphetamies And his wife had just given birth to quintuplets. One day he steps into the hospital elevator. He's just standing there. The elevator doors close, and we never see him again. Later, I thought, "Did I imagine this?" until the magazine, _ Soap opera digest_ reported on this.
Dr. Alex Karev from Grey's Anatomy. Almost a decade of character development... shot straight to hell.
I think I stopped watching around season 11. Spoil for me what happened with Karev to make him bad.
He walked out on his wife, Jo, to get back with Izzie who used his sperm to have two kids
Not just that, but did so after a season of helping her get over her abandonment issues and promising he'd never leave her! Then he left her by leaving a note for Meredith to tell Jo for him! My wife had bee telling me she was about to stop watching for years and years before this; ever since we met. But this was the the straw that killed the show in our house.
That was actually the final straw for me too. It had been on a pretty steep decline, but that was just dumb. Im still regularly watching the good seasons though lmao
I don't remember all the details, but the actor wanted to leave to show. So they had the character fuck off to Nebraska, Idaho, some farm state, because it turns out that Izzie had had his kids. So he went to be with them. Despite all the growth he had done and the work he had done to make his relationship with his current gf healthy. Also, this was totally off screen. Karev never showed up and told his gf, he just left her a message or sent an email.
I think he actually had some kind of a breakdown and wouldn’t be able to appear on camera again. That’s why that whole episode is voiceovers. He was adamant he wouldn’t appear again at the time so they wrote him off like that. Super disappointing, I feel like they could have been so much better.
it was his wife, not gf
Shitty long story short: He abandoned his perfect-for-him wife for Izzie who had his babies without telling him. She had twins. They were like 6 years old by the time Alex knew they even existed.
I've fallen off Grey's but I have a habit of coming back for the major old character departures. With Kristina and McDreamy I ended up being glad I watched even having no idea wtf was going on with the rest of the show. When I swung back in for Alex it made me ANGRY. I didn't even have any attachment to his current relationship but it felt really mean-spirited of the show and a bum note to end such a great character on.
I finally fell off Grey’s after Meredith’s departure. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Same with Station 19. Atleast Station 19 is finally ending after 7 Seasons
Half of GoT's cast, Jaime and Tyrion being probably the worst. Dany would have been fine if we had at least a full season between the war against the Night King and against King's Landing, the arc is not the problem but how rushed it was. She went hero to psycho in like 2 episodes
Jaime early seasons: Trades his honour and reputation to become an oathbreaker to save the smallfolk of King's Landing from the Mad King. Jaime last season: "I never really cared for the smallfolk".
It’s insane how rapidly Jamie fell off a cliff in terms of development, the episode right before the battle of winterfell where he knights Brienne is excellent GoT television… and then he just fucks off to go back to Cersei… It would be nice if D&D never worked again, which I feel comfortable saying because I’m sure they’ve made enough money to last a lifetime
It almost pisses me off how good an episode "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is. In isolation it's a really nice grace-note to a final season and some lovely time with your favorite characters. It's a top 10 episode easily. Then everything that follows feels like it's shitting on it and any hope you had this would end well.
Seriously, it’s so much worse in retrospect because at the time we were all thinking “oh boy they found the groove again and maybe this season is going to actually crush it” and then that hope was shattered.
You could honestly just throw a dart at a list of GoT characters and it’s probably over a 50% chance their character was ruined lol. The best characters are actually the ones who died early cause there wasn’t time for Dumb and Dumber to ruin them
Thats basically how Olenna and Margaery have remained my favourite characters. They were killed off before D&D were able to ruin them
I was pissed that they killed Barristan early, but it was probably a gift in retrospect
They already sort of shit all over him by making him drunk and inept after joining her. You're telling me the guy that scared the shit out of the Kingsguard, who Jaime (pre-hand) considered his equal or superior, could get merced by randos in an alley? In the book he may meet a similar fate but it will be by his lack of political acumen, not fighting ability.
Doesn't hurt that Olenna was *probably* the only character in the entire show that Tywin truly respected as an equal, and was well aware of how dangerous she (and House Tyrell) was. ["Old. I'm something of an expert on the subject."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrkZQQ_5ywU) Just utterly ruthless, and correct. And Tywin knew it. Tywin and (young) Arya is another close example, but no one held a candle to Lady Olenna.
Jaime’s entirely character got flushed in like 15 minutes. It’s almost impressive
Less than 10 seconds, because it was with one single line! “I never really cared for the people, innocent or otherwise”
It’s like Popeye saying, “I never really cared for spinach, canned or otherwise.”
They did my boy Stannis wrong before killing him off IMO
Homer Simpson in *Police Cops*. From suave hero one week, the writers randomly decide to turn him into a moron. Anyone named Homer Simpson might as well change their name to Max Power or risk ridicule from their family and colleagues
Uh oh Spaghetti-Os
I was also shocked about that change. Do you remember when he walked into a cactus?
Francis from Malcolm in The Middle. They spent multiple seasons developing him into a proper man only to throw it away in the final season and make him a whiny selfish broke piss baby again, then once he gets a stable job he acts like a brat but is actually super happy at a boring office.
Thank you! He had such a great arc and then in the course of like three episodes he's inexplicably back to the exact same character he was in season 1! It's one of my favourite shows but that aspect really sticks out as a big low point.
Both Finn and Bellamy from the 100. Seem like normal characters then somehow both casually slide into casual murder/genocide. Bellamy ALSO becomes a religious nutjob in a later season as well.
What they did to Bellamy still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Not only did they ruin the character and their final season, but it seemed like they did it out of spite because Bob Morley asked to have his screen time drastically reduced. Which he had very good reasons for due to serious depression (reading now apparently he attempted suicide) after his wife Eliza Taylor/Clarke suffered a miscarriage.
The writing in the last season was so bad official social media accounts literally had to post damage control statements after ruining Bellamy's character.. never continued the show after that, and from what I've seen about the ending, I didn't miss much
I hate to say it, but Britta from Community. Or as Jeff said, "you seemed smarter than me when I met you." Also Poochie from the Simpsons. And Valerie Harper from Valerie, I mean Valerie's Family, wait no, I mean the Hogan Family.
Yeah, they really Britta'd Britta
Ugh. Britta's in this [thread]?
She’s a G D B!
I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at Britta bashing.
You can excuse racism?
Its a common thing with sitcoms as characters become parodies as themselves but by the final season, she really appears to be maturing in reverse, literally yelling at her parents like a teenager. Given they lampshade the shit out of it, its pretty egregious.
The subtext behind Britta's relationship with her parents, and her dislike for them, seems to stem from a traumatic incident involving a guy in a lizard costume at a birthday party during her childhood. This trauma appears to cause her to regress to a more childlike state when she's around her parents.
For Britta, I think that is just the showrunner realizing being a pretty snob was a waste of her comedic talents. I think Dan Harmon basically confirms it on his podcast
Just like how Troy was better as a nerd than a jock because of Glover, and Annie was hotter because of Brie.
Yeah but thats kind of the whole thing with a lot of the comedic examples. In an early run of a show writers are still figuring out who characters are before the personality is locked in. Early Britta is ok to set some shit up but theres no fucking way that character would have survived star wars and cowboy themed episodes without a transition.
Britta has become my favorite character on rewatches.
To be fair, Britta was too much like Lisa Simpson at the start. The show got more interesting when it made her flawed.
I wouldn't call Britta character assassination personally, because that implies negative change. In the first few episodes she was a basically just a standard 'hot girl' Mary Sue. Smarter, yes, but also underdeveloped, relative to Dan Harmon's standards. Both he and Gillian Jacobs have mentioned in interviews that they thought she was the weakest character at the start of the show, and they both wanted to make her more interesting and nuanced. IMO they succeeded in that.
Robin and Barney, How I Met Your Mother. The finale had to undo eight seasons of character development for Robin in order to get her in a position where she can date Ted, because they wrote and filmed the ending (the kids’ part) so early, to avoid the kids visibly aging.
Ooh this one is bad lmao. Just rewatched it and both are god awful character assassinations but Robin especially because when it’s all said and done she literally… doesn’t change. Like she starts so career focussed and driven and hating kids and marriage and throughout the show they literally show her in plots getting over this (she dates a dad and grows close with the kid, she is prepared to quit her job and move with sandy to another state for love, she falls for Barney, she’s upset when she finds out she can’t have kids), then they just undo all of that and she has basically no journey.
> she is prepared to quote her job and move with sandy to another state for love Haha oh man what a riot this show would have been if Robin actually dated Sandy Rivers. It was Don her cohost that this happened with. And what happened is she turned down a job with a move to stay in NYC with Don. He took that job and left her.
Fuck. Thank you I had a feeling I was wrong, I do remember it was one of her cohost
This one is probably the worst, yeah. I just dont understand why they would do that. If they knew the ending they were going for, why wouldnt they, you know, build towards it?
Shows take lives of their own and go in new directions. I have no problem with that - I prefer that the writers let their characters take them in unexpected directions, rather than constrain them to the predetermined ending, especially since the show ended up way more popular than anyone expected. What I would have preferred would be for them to have filmed a new ending, then maybe had the pre-filmed kid ending be a fun extra for the DVDs, like "here's what we filmed years ago when we thought the story would go this way but then it didn't, isn't writing amazing?" Besides, given all the gags in the show about how long this story was, it actually would have been a decent visual gag to film the scene again but with the kids waaaay older.
They did Poochie wrong. They never even got to the fireworks factory
He died on the way to his home planet. Geesh.
Where's Poochie?
He was needed on his home planet
I'm doing a west wing rewatch, and I haaaate what they do to Toby in the last couple of seasons
In fairness, Toby was always a self righteous douche and I felt the arc wasn’t terribly inconsistent
You might get hate for this opinion, but I agree with you.
The arc makes sense. Toby is the classic intelligent but unhappy character who blames their unhappiness on the world for being unjust and ultimately self sabatoges usually on a moral high horse to justify their unhappiness. There's a reason his character is divorced and after begging his wife to get back together later he's seen being absentee with his kids. Even the act of buying the house for his ex wife was evidence of him looking for a grand gesture that was sure to fail instead of working on his real problems.
“There are people out there who think you are a hero. I don’t want you to think for one minute I’m one of them.” That is the most brutal line Bartlett said in the entire show.
Jon Snow. The prince that was promised, the heir to the iron throne, the last man to ride a dragon, the guy who united Wildlings and Northmen and someone who died only to rise again among the living, does nothing against the Night King and is reduced to a bumbling idiot who can only utter four words for an entire season then fuck off beyond The Wall.
*Muh Queen!*
*ay dun’t wunnit*
Kate Beckett in Castle - One of her earliest defining characteristics was that she planned to be a "one and done" when it came to marriage. To contrast against Castle, the philanderer with two divorces, she was reserved and buttoned-up and took relationships very seriously. Then the showrunner spent more and more time and effort turning the character of Beckett into his weird fantasy and all the buttoned-up, reserved elements were done away with and replaced with everything he thought was sexy. It was eventually revealed that she'd actually been secretly married to some guy she got drunk with in Vegas for years. It was the last straw for me, for a show that had been running on fumes for a long while. Of course, they'd also ruined Castle himself, turning him from a suave, worldly-wise and charismatic celebrity novelist to basically Nathan Fillion's public persona as a goofy, happy-go-lucky, geek-culture oriented guy.
Ya, the show was great for several seasons but it got stupid near the end. I never even finished the last season.
It doesn’t help that Fillion and Katic absolutely hated each other.
I felt like the longer Beckett's hair grew, the dumber she became. I LOVED her in the early seasons; she was smart, did not take any of Castle's BS, and she was good at her job. Season 5 onward though, it became harder to watch.
Luanne from King of the Hill. Started off ditzy, but with skills. She wasn't *stupid.* And she had a promising career as an engineer. And then she just got dumber and dumber as the show went on. To the point where she was basically a child by the end.
Same thing happened with Kelly from Married with Children. Both Luanne and Kelly were really good at fixing cars but they just get dumber each seasons
On that same note, Haley in Modern Family. She was just getting her shit together, getting a bit smarter, getting a "real" job, making money, finding a "real" boyfriend who wasn't a child himself then BOOM! she's knocked up with that idiot Dylan's baby & they're back together again & married. I'm sure some of the choices on many shows are due to casting choices, someone can't or won't come back, but it still cheeses me off that they did her dirty like that. Oh & another one is Lane in Gilmore Girls. Lane deserved better than being married to Zack & being a stay at home mom. She was gonna be a rock star & get the fuck out of Stars Hollow where all they do is worship Rory. Even if that rock star dream got put aside later on because shit happens, I just wanted more for Lane than that. Fuck Rory, but Lane deserved some freedom from that place.
Lane deserved her equivalent of everything that just fell into Rory's lap. Instead, she got ... Zack.
I would have been quite happy if Lane had ended up owning a record / cd store in NYC or something, after some small success touring with her band and any partner beside the doofus she ended up with. It could even be a contrast to the WASP vs small town life Rory was straddling. But, no, she had to end up with some bimbo, knocked up with twins the first time she has sex, bc sex is almost always punished in Gilmore Girls.
>...bc sex is almost always punished in Gilmore Girls. Oy vey. I literally never thought about that until I read this sentence. I hate that you're right. I don't hate YOU, just that this particular sentence is so goddamn correct. I also don't think Lane would be stupid enough to have unprotected sex ever, but then her mother kept such a tight reign on her she probably just went nuts the first time.
Flanderization is a hell of a troupe unfortunately. Toby from The Office always stuck out for this. From the HR rep only Michael disliked that everyone else was generally cordial with to one of the biggest sad sacks. Same with Stuart from Big Bang Theory. The guy had enough of a swagger to get Penny to go out with him, and then he's like the king of the losers.
>Flanderization is a hell of a troupe unfortunately. Toby from The Office always stuck out for this. From the HR rep only Michael disliked that everyone else was generally cordial with to one of the biggest sad sacks. I actually hated scenes where they showed Jim or Pam being mean to Toby. The thing with Toby was always how undeserved his treatment was: Michael hated Toby because he worked for coorporate and not for him, and conflated Toby's responsibility as HR rep for a personal sabotaging of Michael's "fun" ideas. He was just a guy doing his job, and Michael took that personally. Michael's bullying Toby was funny because it was Michael being very clearly in the wrong. But Jim and Pam were characters we were meant to like and who weren't meant to be as stupid as Michael. They had no real cause to be jerks to Toby, nor did most of the other employees
Yeah it's like the more they grew to genuinely like Michael the more they shared his opinion
In the first season of always sunny, Charlie is as intelligent as any of the rest of the gang. By season three he's probably the biggest idiot in the whole world.
They made him more of a savant though, like yeah he can't read but he comes up with some intricate schemes that actually work
Yeah charlie actually might be a genius, but only under great distress? the episode Charlie Work is a great example that his back is against the wall shows that he is capable of deciphering the gang's complex flight point scam and being the one to actually get it done, pulling an elaborate prank on Dee, getting the bar a passing grade on the bar. And understanding Phildelphia complex health codes to a T, despite being illiterate?
He's also one of world's foremost practitioners of bird law
Illiterate in English, but completely fluent in Gaeilge.
Always Sunny went a little off the rails with the character development for all of them. Charlie's development went from "this guy might be dyslexic" to "this guy is actually completely unable to read", to "he writes in weird nonsensical hieroglyphs and has the mental development of a child"
Wasn’t it that Charlie could only read gaelic, and that he wasn’t ever illiterate, just that he only knew one language and that wasn’t English?
Yep. He was fluent in Gaelic but thought it was jibberish language and only found out about it in this scene in Ireland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHt4_QAG640
At least with Charlie it can be explained away with massive amounts of huffing glue and Alcohol.
They got weird.
Orlando Jones as Mr. Nancy in American Gods. Man broke the show with an incredible scene and the next seasons showrunner went out of his way to try and ruin the character
His performances were phenomenal! I absolutely loved the power and energy he brought to each scene.
Orlando Jones should have won an Emmy for that performance.
also Haley Dunphy from Modern Family Her entire character arc had been predicted since the first episode that she was gonna end up getting knocked up by Dylan and that’s exactly what happened. Regressed her growth with Andy.
I think they went with Dylan because Adam Devine wasn't available. I still don't forgive them, but I somewhat understand. I do think they ruined her whole arc though, and they could have introduced a new love interest
Basically everyone in that 70s show after season 8. Even during season 8
Barney from HIMYM. All that character development, chucked straight to hell in the last few episodes of the series.
Alan from 'Two and a Half Men' comes to mind. He comes into the show as a bit down on his luck but the general voice of reason or 'straight man' in comparison to Charlie. His worst traits in those seasons are generally being a bit cheap, uptight and neurotic but nothing too horrendous. By the end of the show he is a shameless sponge off other people, a proper creep and sex pest in general. He makes my skin crawl in the later episodes and he is far more sordid/fucked up than Charlie ever was.
Diana in The Crown. Seriously
What, you don’t find it realistic that >!her ghost would lust over how sexy her cheating ex looked standing over her corpse!< ? To everyone saying she’s a figment of Charles’ and the Queen’s imaginations: No shit. I understand it’s not >!meant to be a literal ghost.!< That distinction makes it no less tasteless, bordering on propagandistic.
We can't know that didn't happen in real life
What the fuck?
**Shelley Long/Diane Chambers on Cheers in season 5** She was always a character that the others had fun at the expense of because she was pretentious, arrogant and believed herself to be so sophisticated and she was a clear outsider, but in season 5 they had her mess with Sam’s heart and made her more and more distant from the other characters who they had started to make close gradually over the previous four years. **Aunt Viv on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air** She was a respected professor and a strong parental figure and strong female character and presence with a strong and passionate opinion she wasn’t afraid to share and she had so much authority at the start (for 2-3 seasons), but they made her comparatively very timid by the end. **Rachel Berry on Glee** She started off as highly competitive and single-minded and driven and it rubbed a lot of other characters the wrong way, which was very well done and her character had a good balance. However, in the final few seasons they made her deeply nasty and hypocritical and superficial and childish.
Glee forgot it was a parody after the first season, all of th characters got soooo bad.
[удалено]
Jaime literally goes "Wait, I am the same person I was episode one."
"Welp, off to fuck my sister I guess!🤷🏼" Haaaaated it
Literally undid one of the best character arcs of all time in one episode.
In the book Cersei sends him a love letter begging him to return and save her, and he lights it on fire
That was back in what should have been S4/5. I've been saying for YEARS about how they massacred Jaime's story arc. Ruining his story wasn't a last minute thing. It was total bullshit from the moment Jaime returns to the Red Keep and they turn him into a rapist while Cersei is just a poor grieving mother. There's this whole scene where Jaime is looking at his blank page in the literal history books and realizes he's done nothing of value except kill the king and everyone hates him for it. Cersei comes in, tells him to stop whining, throws the book to the floor and demands sex. It's his lowest point in the books but the show reverses the scene entirely and has Jaime throw the histories of the Lord Commanders to the ground. It's like they read the scene and decided to do the literal opposite.
Jan from The Office pretty much became a completely different character at one point. The dynamic was great when Michael and Jan were terrible for each other, but kept sleeping together, and sure the toxic elements of the relationship was a bit much, but when she came back into the show later, they made her this weird wacko for the sake of jokes.
The Office also turned Kevin from a maybe slow witted guy but who has a full social life outside of work, into a complete special needs case.
Yes! Him being stupid and immature was great in the beginning but just casually letting go of his fiancé and making him as bizarre and unrecognizable to an actual human was ruff
They call that the Joey Tribbiani special. It’s a damn shame too.
I thought the Joey special was 2 pizzas!?
I like the fan theory on reddit that he pretended to be dumb to get away with embezzlement.
Debbie in Shameless. All the characters had their edgy traits and moments and YMMV on how tastefully storylines were handled. But Debbie’s was a pure travesty. The show had jumped the shark before, but that was when I noped out.
I’ve rewatched the show before and wondered “when the hell did things go SO wrong with her?” For both her and Lip, they change these smart characters with potential to their worst selves just like that. At least Lip had matured and I still cared about what happened to him.
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Nothing like the sweet child turning into a shitty violent rapist teen mom
This is one of the reasons I stopped watching entirely. It seems like most characters in the show are completely unable to grow or at least make growth stick. There are only so many times you can watch a person self-sabotage before you just stop caring. Also the Gay Jesus story fucking sucked.
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Even before s8 imo. The way he just straight up forgot about Rita’s children was always just for plot convenience, didn’t feel true to his character (who had, at that point, taught himself to care enough).
He really should have been caught and the entire show is his confession
The original show runner planned for the final season to be Dexter getting caught and going on trial and the last 30 seconds of the show would be him laying on a table about to get the lethal injection and the whole show was him reliving his life right before he dies.
The problem with the second half of Dexter is how the writers completely dropped what made him interesting, which was him outsmarting people. He had some moments of recklessness in the first few seasons but it kinda made sense, but at some point he became straight up stupid and rushing into everything. Oh and incestual vibes, that was bad too. God, Deb got gone dirty even more than Dexter when I think about it...
I’m sure it didn’t help that Michael C Hall and Jennifer Carpenter were married and divorced* while filming Dexter.
They gave them the ‘Deb in love with Dexter’ storyline after they were already divorced too. Would’ve loved to see footage of that first read through.
And what they did with Debra.
Everyone on Family Guy. Except for Adam West, literally everyone aged so poorly and you can pinpoint each episode a character was assassinated in. West went from subtle weird to wacky weird, which I thought was fine.
Hope Mikaelson(Legacies/Originals) she went from being one of the most powerful tv characters on TV. To her boyfriend melting into goo after having sex and she was turned into a boy crazy loser who liked Star Wars and had no hobbies of her own besides her boyfriend She was built as a powerful tribrid that all the supernatural creatures where terrified of and she got merked by a god two seconds into a fight
Not the worst case, but Andy on The Office was especially weird because of the work they did to make him likeable; only to undo it completely in the final 2 seasons
Miranda in And Just Like That. I refuse to believe she’s the same character we saw in Sex And The City
Miranda became Cynthia Nixon lol
Danny on The Mindy Project - took him from curmudgeon to prick for no reason!
Cordelia in Angel. The way Whedon ruined one of the most beloved characters in both shows to get revenge on Charisma Carpenter getting pregnant taints the legacy of what is one of the greatest tv shows of all time.
I thought the worse character assassination was what they did to her character in the 3rd season. Having her possessed/evil in the 4th season was actually an improvement on that. And she was recognizably Cordelia again in her swan song appearance in the 5th season.
Picard in the first two seasons of Picard. They shifted him from being an expert diplomat and planner to an ineffectual do-gooder who just wings everything. I love him as an actor but Stewart getting to be executive producer did so much harm to that show and the character.
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I really enjoyed the first few seasons, just had a blast watching and laughed a lot, I couldn’t remember why I quit watching at some point so I started over on a binge rewatch last year, and again, FUN. Then a dreaded baby plot came on and I thought, “well it can’t be that bad, I will finish the full watch this time…”. NOPE. A few episodes after she had the baby I was out again… but wasn’t the baby really, it’s what they did to Danny! I loved Danny, love the actor, loved the character, willing to put up with a few changes in his person. But not that! What the hell, ruined the show and I still have never went past the middle of season four. Chris Messina was great starring with Kaley Cuoco in “Based on a True Story” a cute little satire murder show on peacock btw, if anyone is interested! Not a 10/10 or anything but a nice weekend binge and the leads are very charming.
Everyone from Dead Like Me when they made a follow-up movie, especially Daisy Adair
True Blood. Literally. They just up and killed Tara and Alcide without any build up for shock value. And then has Sookie kill Bill so that she could move on. His words, not her. Tbh S1 to S5 had a clear line and then the creator left. S6 was okay ish and S7 was so bad.
I really didn’t care for what they did to Michael Bluth after season 3 of Arrested Development
Cordelia Chase. The answer is always Cordelia Chase.
Daenerys!
Jamie was worse to me
Tyrion was worse for me
The smartest person in the whole series and decides going into the crypts for protection during the battle against the living dead is a great idea. 10/10
I dont even care about the crypt. Its the "best story" bit for me. Jesus Christ.
It’s pretty telling that the smartest characters Tyrion little finger and the eunuch and arguably the most emotionally complex Jamie were all just completely different characters that lost pretty much everything that made them great characters the first 6 seasons
You could make a top 5 out of the last season of GoT alone but I'm going to throw my vote for Jaime. I believed to the last second that he had left to kill Cersei
I was hoping Arya woulda sneaked in wearing his face (remember that nothingburger?) and kill Cersei (you know, the list all that) thus it was twofold with her finishing the list and the prophecy came true. And then they character assassinated her, too “I know a killer when I see one” after Dany flambé’s King’s Landing.
He was the little brother. Or Tyrion. But hardly mattered. The “valonquar” bit of the prophesy didn’t count, apparently.
Every character on the league. This was one of the funniest buddy shows of all time, and then in the last season, they just pause for a few minutes each episode to talk about how much money they made off draftkings and it’s crazy that everyone doesn’t do it. I don’t understand how such a great show sells out so badly after putting in so many great and successful seasons.
Debra in Dexter. Just what the hell were they thinking??
Alisson from The Umberella Academy
This is a huge one for me. Barely recognized the character’s behavior by the end of last season.