A finale that negated 9 seasons of storytelling.
A superhero undone by beer.
The most dramatic haircut ever seen on teen TV.
Even the most celebrated shows can miss the mark, but these disastrous episodes nearly
tanked their entire series.
After a critically acclaimed debut season, Friday Night Lights kicked off Season 2 with
an underwhelming premier.
When Landry whacks Tyra's creepy attacker with a pipe and dumps his body in a river,
a respectable show depicting an otherwise nuanced and realistic depiction of Texas life
turned into an over-the-top melodrama for two of its characters.
Actors Jesse Plemons and Adrianne Palicki do a decent enough job with the material,
but this bizarre subplot belongs in another show.
If we wanted to see this kind of death and a slowly unraveling cover-up, we would have
tuned in to a soap opera.
The killing of the random stalker guy screamed network interference and distracted viewers
from the other parts of the story.
Who cares that Coach Taylor has to end his paternity leave or that Julie feels hemmed
in by her first serious relationship when there's a dead body in the river?
Friday Night Lights would eventually resolve the subplot with relatively little consequence
and go on to earn its place in our hearts, but Season 2 opener "Last Days of Summer"
remains its low point.
In retrospect, Battlestar Galactica would have been even better if it hadn't been so
committed to the old model of the 22-episode season, as it tended to have a couple of random
filler episodes each year.
No episode is more skippable than Season 2's "Black Market," which seems like a classic
case of writers trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
The episode is about an investigation into an off-book black market that's supposedly
impossible to corral.
When Commander Fisk is found dead, Captain Apollo begins digging and discovers that Fisk
was involved in the black market.
After nearly thirty episodes of the show, we learn that Apollo has a long-lost love
from back home that he's never once mentioned and a relationship with a sex worker that
he regularly sees in the fleet, despite his tension with Starbuck.
At the end of the episode, after killing a couple of gangsters, he allows the rest of
the villains to keep doing their black market thing so long as they stop killing ship commanders
and trafficking humans.
"So you're still in business, for now."
It's a thoroughly nonsensical episode, one so bad that Battlestar Galactica had to pull
out all the stops with the brilliant, season-ending time jump on New Caprica to make us forget
it.
Stranger Things is lucky that it came out in the era of streaming.
If fans had been forced to wait an entire week after the Season 2 episode "The Lost
Sister," they might have revolted.
Every season of Stranger Things has replicated the formula of the first, with varying degrees
of success.
Co-creators Matt and Ross Duffer are pros at stretching a feature film-worthy adventure
into eight or nine hours of television.
By Episode 7, we're usually hurtling towards some big confrontation, but "The Lost Sister"
halted that momentum to follow Eleven on a standalone side quest to Chicago to reconnect
with another experimentee from her past.
"Sister."
She ends up with slightly enhanced powers and a cool new goth vibe, but not much else
of relevance happens.
It's a complete wrench in what was a well-oiled, binge-worthy machine of a show.
In a world where Stranger Things aired weekly on cable, fans would have spent seven long
days seething.
Luckily, all they had to do was take a deep breath and let Netflix play Episode 8 automatically.
NBC's ER was once the epitome of prestige network drama.
It was a serious, gripping portrayal of the passionate people saving lives in a Chicago
emergency room.
While it dabbled in the occasional ratings stunt with plotlines involving escaped convicts,
serial killers, or George Clooney rescuing a kid trapped in a storm drain, it generally
aimed for a realistic, grounded sense of what life working in a hospital would be like.
As the years went on, the cast changed and the writers needed to up the ante.
In the Season 10 episode "Freefall," Dr. Romano is crushed by a falling helicopter in an impossibly
slow scene with hilariously bad CGI, even for 2003.
This came after Dr. Romano had an arm cut off by a helicopter rotor in the previous
season.
ER would run for 15 seasons in total, so "Freefall" didn't outright ruin it.
However, the helicopter sequence did make the show much more difficult to take seriously
from that point on.
In truth, any episode from Community Season 4 would be right at home on this list.
Creator Dan Harmon got forced out by NBC after Season 3, but the show continued for an entire
season before he got reinstated.
It retained most of the writing staff, but they took the show in a lighter, safer direction,
and it was terrible.
"Intro to Felt Surrogacy," an episode that utilized puppets of the main cast, felt like
a pale imitation of the claymation episode from Season 2, "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas."
Another low point was "Heroic Origins," in which Abed discovers the group had all crossed
paths before meeting at Greendale, essentially retconning the pilot episode.
"These aren't plot holes, Abed, this is my life."
"This kind of connection only makes our origin story more compelling."
The lowest low point was "Economics of Marine Biology," the poorest-rated "Community" episode
on IMDb with a score of just 6.7.
It centers around the college getting ready to woo a potential new student with lots of
money.
Den of Geek observed that this episode's plotline was incredibly formulaic, which "makes for
very bland television."
Even by the standards of Lost's notoriously convoluted Season 3, "Stranger in a Strange
Land" might be the most inconsequential, pointless episode of the show.
Some mildly gripping nonsense with the Others happens on the island, while the flashbacks
clue viewers in on a mystery nobody was wondering about: What is the meaning behind Jack's terrible
tattoos?
In a painfully pointless series of events, Jack has a brief fling with a mysterious tattoo
artist in Thailand and then gets beaten up.
In the present, we learn what his ink translates to:
"He walks amongst us, but he is not one of us.
Your tattoos — that's what they say."
This wording is parallel to how the Bible describes Jesus as "in the world, but not
of the world."
However, the writers leave it unclear as to whether the tattoo has a similarly spiritual
meaning, or if the tattoo artist just marked Jack as a tourist.
Either way, "Stranger in a Strange Land" is an hour that even the biggest Lost fans wanted
back.
After nine years, How I Met Your Mother delivered a polarizing finale.
While it was clear that future Ted telling a rambling story to his children was just
a fun framework for the show, it didn't mean that fans weren't invested in the resolution
of Ted and Tracy's relationship.
The showrunners underestimated how much ire the finale would generate by killing off the
mother minutes after she and Ted finally meet, only to pawn future Ted off on the still magically
single Robin.
"The point of the story is that—"
"Is that you totally, totally, totally have the hots for Aunt Robin."
Whether or not it was planned all along, it turned what should have been a perfect landing
from a beloved show into a bewildering re-framing of the entire story.
How I Met Your Mother hasn't enjoyed the resurgence in popularity that other staples like Friends
and The Office have on streaming services, but the Hulu spinoff How I Met Your Father
proves that its legacy nonetheless survived the hit.
Even the most beloved shows have episodes that fans always tend to skip, and "The Great
Divide" is the ultimate proof of that.
This much-derided episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender suffers from being an entirely parenthetical
entry with no relevance to any serial plot, as two bickering clans argue about how to
cross a vast canyon.
These tribes were never featured in the main story before this episode, and they were never
seen again, making the whole plotline a waste of time for both the showrunners and viewers.
As if to try and justify the episode's existence, our heroes get caught up in this petty drama
and start acting out of character in ways that shoehorn moral lessons into a show that's
otherwise known for restraint and subtlety.
Aang resorts to deception, while Katara and Sokka each sympathize with a separate tribe.
"The Great Divide" seems like it was written by someone that hadn't seen the rest of the
show, and fans continue to unite in critiquing it.
Beloved as it is, Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn't a show famed for its consistency.
It often relied on monster-of-the-week style episodes that were self-contained and not
connected to each season's Big Bad, meaning it would usually have a few duds per year.
Season 4's "Beer Bad" comes across more like an after school special about the dangers
of alcohol than a fun installment for the classic urban fantasy series.
An enchanted beer causes Buffy to devolve into a primal, urge-based version of herself.
"Want more singing.
Want more beer."
In her enchantedly drunken state, Buffy starts to draw cave paintings on her dorm room wall.
This is all supposedly meant to illustrate how upset Buffy is about being dumped by some
jerk.
The story ends abruptly, without any consequences for the bartender that drugged a bunch of
teenagers with magic beer.
"Beer Bad" is bad TV, pure and simple.
The first season of Parks and Recreation is nothing like the rest of the show.
The main character, Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope, was essentially an even more boorish and awkward
version of Michael Scott from The Office, which it was clearly trying to imitate.
The show had only a distant echo of the earnestness it would come to be known for, and if it had
been canceled before Season 2, nobody would have batted an eyelid.
"Rock Show," the final episode of Season 1, veered into slapstick territory.
Mark gets rejected by a very angry Ann then makes a drunken attempt to kiss Leslie before
falling into a pit.
It's a weird and cringe-worthy end to a season that hit all the wrong notes, and could easily
have been the last straw for the series.
NBC, of course, gave it another shot, and the subsequent six seasons will live in the
hearts of viewers forever.
Most millennials remember Felicity, a show about the college life of Keri Russell's curly-haired
eponymous character.
They also likely remember that in the Season 2 episode "The List," Felicity cut her famous
hair on a whim, causing shock and outrage in equal measure.
Felicity's famous locks were part of her character, and when she said goodbye to them, some fans
said goodbye to the show, seeing it as the end of a chapter.
What got lost in the reaction to Felicity's pixie cut is that a sudden, dramatic haircut
is a pretty reasonable reaction to a breakup like the one she has with Ben in the same
episode.
Thankfully, Felicity survived the dramatic haircut and went on to detail all four years
of our heroine's college experience.
The final season would end with a multi-episode time travel arc that's far more unique and
memorable than the close-up snipping of some scissors.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Looper videos about your favorite shows are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.