How 10 TV Shows That Fell Off Redeemed Themselves

Your favorite show will almost undoubtedly go through a rough patch. It's a harsh reality that rings true for even the best, most classic shows; it's the rare series that avoids at least one whack season. Simply put, the longer a series is on the air it runs the risk of entering a creative dry spell. But that doesn't always signal the end.

For every series that entered the dead zone and stayed there (Heroes, Weeds), there are others with writers who regroup, heed audience and critics' complaints, and get their act together, even when such prospects seem impossible. A recent example is Dexter, which has been enjoying a late revival in its seventh season, arguably the first legitimately engaging batch of episodes since the second. It seemed like the show would never turn itself around, but the ways in which it did so were actually quite simple. (We'll tell you now that one of those methods was casting the sexy and talented Yvonne Strahovski to play Dexter's love interest.)

Often, if a series that once fired on all cylinders suddenly stops working, the problem can be traced to one of several common problems that regularly plague popular shows. Complex has listed those recurring ailments through the lens of 10 case studies in which a hit show lost its way, only to return triumphant. The seasoned TV viewer doesn't quit on their favorites easily. Stow your current frustrations and (re)acquaint yourself with these infamous resurrections. Read on to learn How 10 TV Shows That Fell Off Redeemed Themselves.

Written by Frazier Tharpe (@The_SummerMan)

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Best Example: Entourage

After a conceptual season that stalled Vince's (Adrian Grenier) winning streak and put him and the gang in underdog mode, the sixth season of Entourage basically took the year off. Vince and the Hollywood-insider storylines completely sit the season out in favor of an increased spotlight on the personal dramedies of E (Kevin Connolly), Turtle (Jerry Ferrara), and Drama (Kevin Dillon) and their various relationships.

The result wasn't terrible; a case can be made that it was an intentional decision worthy of being labeled a conceptual experiment the same way that season five was. And while it did spawn a classic episode or two, it was ultimately too breezy and too uneventful.

The seventh season gets back to business early on, once again balancing the fun Hollywood lifestyle with complications like Vince's burgeoning drug habit and destructive relationship with enabler Sasha Grey and a lawsuit against Ari (Jeremy Piven) that threatens both his agency and his marriage, along with the addition of Scott Caan as a rival manager and antagonist for Eric. It's just too bad the series settled back into an even less rewarding breezy pattern for its following final season.

Best Example: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The infamously bleak sixth season of Buffy isn't bad per se, but it was just a far cry from the series viewers were used to for the five preceding years. While not without drama, Buffy was always notable for its quippish heroine, peppy dialog, and warm ensemble cast amidst the demons and destruction. The sixth season, in which the slayer readjusts to life after death, finds Buffy and the rest of the characters in wayward transitional phases and thus, appropriately gloomy moods.

It was a necessary step, but the seventh season was less a breath of fresh air than a sigh of relief that the series was back to its core essentials, with each character having worked through their darkness in the interim. The theme of returning to the basics is symbolized by the return of Sunnydale High, the series' main setting in its early years, and a villain that literally paid homage to the deep rogues gallery of seasons past.

Best Example: Dexter

By its sixth season, the Showtime drama that once daringly asked us to accept a serial killer as the protagonist had gotten so boring and safe in its execution that we were forced to step in and dedicate an entire list detailing the ways it could conceivably get back on track.

In the years following an excellent second season, Dexter committed the worst sin a cable drama could: It became formulaic. Each season played out the same beats—Dex (Michael C. Hall) wrestles with Harry's (James Remar) Code and strikes up a bond with a kindred spirit who reveals themselves to be a far worse danger to society than he is, forcing him to off them—and failed to advance both plot and character development. Sensing viewer unrest, the series finally pulled the trigger on a long-awaited plot development: Debra (sexy Jennifer Carpenter) discovering her brother's secret hobby, but by then almost all goodwill had been squandered and during the hiatus most assumed they would fuck that up as well.

On the contrary, it appears the Dexter team took a few of our suggestions, because the current season is a wild improvement over the last four that preceded it. They've handled every stage of Deb and Dexter's new dynamic beautifully, and they've enlisted the beastly acting talents of Ray Stevenson and stunning Hot Complex subject Yvonne Strahovski to affect Dex in new, exciting ways that past special guest stars, however talented, ultimately did not. (What up, John Lithgow.)

The series is still burdened with what is quite possibly the most useless supporting cast in television history, but we're not asking for miracles. Instead, we'll gladly accept an engaging A-story that actually has us anticipating the next episode instead of contemplating dropping it from the DVR queue.

Best Example: 24

Sometimes location is key. After five near-flawless seasons, Counter-Terrorism agent Jack Bauer's (Kiefer Sutherland) sixth bad day was the most hotly anticipated yet, and it ultimately couldn't handle the pressure. After a solid premiere it crashed and burned quickly thanks to lame villains, tired execution of well-worn twists and tropes (how many times can CTU be invaded?!), and weird, jarring family melodrama, culminating with a depressingly non-suspenseful finale. The innovative thriller had fallen off, just one year after winning an Emmy for best series.

Then the infamous writer's strike happened, and the creative team that was used to drafting plots on the fly suddenly had time to sit back and think. The result was the first 24 season to be fully conceived before production, which meant no annoying filler episodes to stretch things out, nor absurd, nonsensical twists to keep things going. Everything makes sense for the most part, and Day 7 is on par with the quality offered in the earlier years of the series.

A key reason why it works so well? It's fresh. After six straight seasons of L.A. attracting more terrorists than aspiring actresses, the action shifts to the much more probable setting of D.C., where Bauer is standing trial for his controversial methods. CTU is gone, save for key members the show could not do without (Chloe), and Jack is called on to liaise with the FBI when a threat specific to his past arises. Of course, plenty of other elements went in to making the season a success, but the inciting decision to uproot Jack was the kick the writers needed to free themselves of the familiarity that was threatening to suffocate their series.

Best Example: Saturday Night Live

The creative rut that SNL has labored in for the past several years is nothing compared to the troubles the beloved sketch comedy series faced in 1981 during Lorne Michaels' brief absence. Under new executive producer Jean Doumanian, SNL floundered and very nearly got the axe. Network exec Brandon Tartikoff, whose campaign is largely credited with NBC's dominance during the '80s, eventually stepped in on the show's behalf.

With new exec producer Dick Ebersol, SNL found its way back with a cast that relied heavily on eventual breakout star but then-unknown Eddie Murphy. The most acclaimed years of Ebersol's tenure featured heavy-hitters like Billy Crystal and Martin Short, his bold decision to put the show on Eddie Murphy's back is what helped the show regain cultural relevance, with winning characters like an adult version of Buckwheat and Mr. Robinson, a hood version of Mr. Rogers.

Best Example: LOST

Three seasons in, it was painfully clear that the flashback technique that LOST mastered and popularized in its early days was beginning to suffocate the series. Creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were straining to deliver character-centric flashbacks that resonated and enriched the castaways' backstories. Flat tales like the story nobody really wanted to know about Jack's (Matthew Fox) tattoos, Locke (Terry O'Quinn) being a gullible fool for the 47th time, and Sayid (Naveen Andrews) facing a personification of his shady past yet again left the once rapturous audience bored, while others were saddled with increasingly ridiculous additions to their bios (Kate was once married? Desmond was a monk?).

So how did Lindelof and Cuse restore the hype? By abandoning their bread-and-butter format for a bolder one, and setting an end date for the series that would effectively kill all wheel-spinning in favor of renewed momentum and the promise that all of the island shenanigans would build to an actual, straightforward conclusion. The declaration that LOST was back in the game would be summed up with one game-changing scene: a Jack flashback that ended with a mysterious meet-up with a woman who would turn out to be...Kate?!

The intrigue didn't stop there, as the flash-forward(!) ends with a future, despondent, alcoholic Jack screaming that they "have to go back." For three seasons we figured the series' end-game would center on the castaways finally getting off the island; the reveal that there was much, much more at stake was simply ingenious, and increased the show's relevance, and significance in the greater TV conversation, tenfold.

Best Example: The Office

Although TV has now resorted to casting established A-listers, usually stars are born on the tube first. Sitcoms especially find themselves with a lead eager to leave the homestead and cash in their newfound stardom on the big screen. That's good and well for them, but their departure usually leaves a gaping hole that can't be filled. Case and point: the final season of That '70s Show, which tried and failed at carrying on without Topher Grace and Ashton Kutcher.

The Office faced the exact same problem during the awfully unfunny eight season, which installed James Spader as the enigmatic Robert California in the wake of Steve Carell/Michael Scott's departure from Dunder Mifflin. It took a year, but the currently ongoing ninth season seems to have finally settled into a rhythm that trusts the supporting cast—which was always funny in its own right even when Carell was there—to steer the ship on its own without a forced foreign element.

Best Example: The O.C.

Sometimes the source of a series' woes is a single character, a main cast member who has become dead weight personified. By its third season, The O.C. had gone from being the "it" show to a shit show, trading in the fun soapy universe provided by the affluent California setting for pure, gloomy melodrama.

The entire cast was saddled with lame plots, but the epicenter of it all was without a doubt Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton), whose misfortune and woes were increasing at a weekly rate. To recap: She gets kicked out of school, her dad leaves town and blows the family up on his way out (again), strikes up a friendship with possibly the lamest recurring characters the series has ever seen at her new school, and shacks up with Volchok, a dirty surfer guy who exposes her to assorted drugs.

That's to say nothing of her tepid on-off relationship with Ryan, and the half-hearted love triangle between the two of them and another, less dirty surfer guy who gets drunk and falls off of a cliff to his death when she ultimately rejects him. The worst part is, we probably left something out.

At some point during the season, the writers identified Marissa's rock-bottom misadventures as the problem, and set her up to leave town in the finale after the gang graduates from high school. Only, to make sure she could never come back and overdose on pills in Tijuana or attract the attention of some crazy simp again, they took it a step further and knocked her off on her way out of town, by way of vehicular manslaughter by Volchok.

Mischa Barton didn't take the firing well, but her death ended up being the cleanse the show needed to rejuvenate itself, leaving her far more interesting younger sister in her wake and bumping Autumn Reeser's neurotic, sexy Taylor up to main cast member and Ryan's new love interest. Lo and behold, after a few necessary episodes of dealing with her death, The O.C. was fun again. Too bad by then most viewers had jumped ship, making the fourth season the final as well.

Best example: The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead's debut season was truncated for production and scheduling purposes, so the sophomore season was set to be the first real look at Frank Darabont and company's execution of an actual season of television. The result was a snail-paced, often stagnant arc, the last problem anyone expected a series set during a nihilistic zombie apocalypse would face.

Sure, one kid took a bullet while another one died, but those events were a whopping six episodes apart. In between next-to nothing happened, and everything felt way too...safe. When Dead returned from its mid-season break, it did so with a renewed energy, that took slow but certain steps to raising the stakes, and making us actually believe these people were living in, you know, the end of days.

The current third season has taken things a step further, upping the urgency, violence (it is a zombie show, after all) and most importantly nuance and character development, under the guidance of new showrunner Glen Mazzara, formerly of The Shield (arguably the master-class of urgency and suspense). Hell, they even made us kind of warm up to Carl, and feel for Lori. All of those pieces came together wonderfully in the series peak "Killer Within," and after this week's sure-to-be insane mid-season finale, Walking Dead will finally, officially be a series worthy of its monster ratings and buzz.

Best Example: Sons of Anarchy

Remember how excited we all were after SoA's season two finale, which implied that the gun-toting biker club would take the action to Ireland, for a face-off with the IRA? Well, they went there, but in a cruel twist of irony, the Ireland-set episodes instantly became the weakest arc of the series. Instead of the soul-searching and baby-hunting trip we imagined, most of the arc (save the excellent episode "Bainne") was dedicated to a schism within the IRA that, while bloody and violent, was far from engaging, mostly because we knew nothing about these new characters and conflicts and were given zero incentives to give one single fuck about them.

The fourth season is an improvement, but upon rewatch the club's involvement with a Mexican cartel, and subsequent, unwitting participation in a war with a rival operation, was just as distracting as the IRA. It wasn't until the currently airing fifth season that the show fully found the footing that was so firm during its first two years, by showrunner Kurt Sutter simply refocusing all of the narrative stakes back on the characters we'd come to know and love.

Sure, there are new characters like Jimmy Smits' pimp with a heart of gold or Harold Perrineau as ruthless boardroom gangster Damon Pope, but every conflict or threat posed is only significant in the ways that it affects the increasing erosion of Jax's (Charlie Hunnam) soul and his relationships with his family and his biker brothers (R.I.P. Opie). The drama has returned to the Reaper table, where it rightly belongs.