10 TV Shows That Overstayed Their Welcome

Image via Complex Original

Sometimes a premise that makes a show unique can work against it in the long run. There are few better case studies for this problem than How I Met Your Mother. Fans and critics alike began to grow impatient with the show's failure to resolve its titular problem mid-way through the run, but the show has chugged along without resolution for eight long years.

Generally, the showrunners of the great shows don't withhold plot like that. Even if it involves the central problem of the piece, if you keep your cards close to your vest, you'll likely end up with episodes of your show that act as mere place-holders, moving in slow motion toward no real plot point in particular. While the talented cast has always worked hard to keep the show buoyant, that talent can only be stretched so far.

Couldn't Scrubs learn the lesson of Saved by the Bell: The New Class? We fall in love with some shows because of the premise. Certain procedurals could plug in a new lead character every episode and we would come back for more.

We fall in love with comedies largely because of character, though, and switching up the cast rarely produces ratings or critical results. It's particularly hard to imagine a show where you're inside a character's head lasting through a wholesale cast swap. That's exactly what Scrubs did in its ninth season, which was thankfully the last. Sure, by time the show made the change, the original arcs had grown stale, but that should've given them all the more reason to send Scrubs quietly into the night well before the show went back to med school.

One challenge with a show focused around a serial killer and serial killing is that characters have to die. The challenge that Dexter's writers have always struggled with is which characters can die without mortally wounding the show.

The writers are stuck between a rock and a hard place: They can either keep a character in the dark about Dexter's true identity or they'll have to dispatch that person in some way. The show is the next in a long line of programs to fall victim to its own premise.

Every season, the writers need to introduce new serial killers for Dexter to dispatch (apparently Miami is to serial killers what Brooklyn is to bloggers), and to reveal themselves to Dexter, a season's big baddie is going to have to do some killing along the way. The cat and mouse game has left so many cat and mouse corpses scattered across Dexter's storyline, it's hard to see anything else.

How many times can you watch a toddler fall off a bicycle, a dog run into a wall, or a father get hit in the nuts?

At least six hundred times, which is the current episode count of America's Funniest Home Videos. Watching AFHV is kind of like watching COPS—it isn't a willful choice, just random rubbernecking as you flip through channels, looking for something to numb the pain of the world.

There must still be demand for the show, or it wouldn't be on, but it's hard to imagine the person who tunes in on a regular basis.

Note: That person has been found, and will be on the upcoming season of Dexter.

Who are these people? Seriously, if we turned on the television and saw these actors, we'd have no idea what show we were watching. Many procedurals work fine regardless of the characters slotted into the detective role. Which is precisely why shows like Colombo, Monk, and House are so memorable: They provide viewers with something more than square-jawed detectives who have seen it all.

Despite their stereotypical roles, there was something special about Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay, of SVU. They were the faces we wanted to see when we stumbled upon a SVU marathon and watched the hours melt away. It's strange that a show that's proven itself capable of expanding their franchise didn't call an audible when Meloni left and Hargitay asked for a reduced role, and go for another reboot. We know Law and Order: SVU and this, folks, is no Law and Order: SVU.

Though we love the colorful cast of supporting characters on The Office, the show was always built on two things: Jim and Pam's relationship, and the hapless blunders of Michael Scott. And sure, John Krasinski might enjoy a nice career after he hangs up his frumpy dress shirt, but we all know which of those stories was more interesting.

Many shows have made the mistake of thinking that goofy bit characters can fill the void of a departing lead, but it's almost never the case. The smaller roles are hilarious, but they were constructed with a limited scope. We can't really believe an exploration of the deeper emotional life for zany characters like Dwight and Andy, and the only alternative is to plug in guest stars that the audience has never seen before. Anybody would prefer zombie seasons of The Office to most of the garbage the NBC has been developing as of late, like the terrible Do No Harm, but we would have preferred to see the Dunder Mifflin gang go out on a high note.

There's always a market for male escapism. The Fast and the Furious franchise is just the next in a long line of films to prove this. The problem with escapism on television is that what we can fall into for two hours may not hold over a full season, let alone eight.

With no interesting characters save Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) and Ari Gould (Jeremy Piven), no real stakes, and no women with more personality than a wall calendar, Entourage quickly revealed its true colors. While a season of popcorn-light comic scenarios and bro blunders was fun, watching these men pathetically chance into more and more money and women while doing nothing grew stale well before HBO pulled the plug.

A taut, action-packed season of television that takes place over twenty-four hours sounds like a great idea, and it is, until you have to execute on that premise eight times. Even the most ardent fans of Jack Bauer's (Keifer Sutherland) exploits felt that after a while, there were just too many terrorists, Bauer was too good at his job, and too much was happening in one day to be even remotely credible.

Films a similar approach to time, like High Noon and Glengarry Glen Ross, work well, a television show with such a premise will ultimately wear thin, no matter how action-packed that show may be.

The problem with Weeds in the show's later seasons is superficially one of setting. Agrestic, the stereotypical suburban town that was home to the Botwin family, was so central to the show's premise that the problem was also ultimately a character issue as well.

Weeds was first presented as a tale of a suburban soccer mom forced to sell drugs to support her family after the death of her husband. After a few seasons of the show, the family was forced out of the suburb and it seemed that Nancy had made enough money that she could have gotten out of the game. At this point, the show ceased to be a commentary on suburban survival and became about what possessed Nancy to move from selling drugs out of necessity to being in the game because she wanted to.

Weeds never came up with a good answer, though they had five more long seasons to figure it out.

Developing forces that work against a character is just as important as developing that character. On Californication, the two are inextricably connected. The main force working against David Duchovny's Hank Moody is himself. Just when he gets a chance to right the perpetually sinking ship of his life, he gets too drunk, too horny, or too sarcastic, and lands himself in an even worse situation.

A couple seasons of watching Moody flounder were delightful, but at a certain point you have to ask, what's going to change? The show has always been able to find new and exciting ways for Moody to get laid, they haven't been as successful in coming up with new and exciting ways for his character to evolve.