10 Bad Seasons Of Otherwise Great TV Shows

Because Andy Bernard is no Michael Scott.

Scrubs Season 9
ABC

Ever find yourself binging through a series only to come across a stretch of episodes that just feels off? You suddenly wonder what the hell happened to this show, and it seems like the writers forgot everything that was great about it between seasons.

This happens quite a bit on television, with shows constantly swapping out writers, showrunners and actors to the point where the formula can be messed up beyond repair. In many examples, the missteps were clearly due to behind the scenes drama, like firing the showrunner and replacing them with a bunch of newcomers. Other times, it just seems like the writers genuinely ran out of ideas that year and were totally phoning it in. Even hardcore fans will tell you that you could probably just go ahead and skip this season.

This isn't impossible to recover from, with several shows being mostly perfect but just having this one weird season in the middle that fans acknowledge as not being up to snuff. But occasionally the stretch of episodes is so bad, it ends up being all downhill from there, with the writers never being able to recover. 

Either way, these are the seasons of your favorite shows that you always find yourself skipping on every rewatch, the ones that just feel completely out of place and not in the spirit of what you love about the series. Here are the 10 worst seasons of otherwise pretty stellar shows. 

10. Community - Season 4

Scrubs Season 9
NBC

Maybe getting rid of the main creative voice behind a show and replacing him with two newcomers isn't the best idea.

With Community Season 4, showrunner Dan Harmon was fired and replaced with David Guarascio and Moses Port, two guys who had never even worked on Community before. Harmon was notoriously hands on with Community, so this was essentially like replacing an author halfway through a book with somebody who had no say in the first half.

The result was a pretty disappointing season of television. It wasn't without its highlights, like an excellent body swapping episode written by Jim Rash, but the season often reeked of trying too hard, like the writers were so worried that viewers would miss Harmon that they spent every second of every episode trying to ape his style. "Look guys, we're doing a puppet episode! We're just like Dan Harmon!" It was like having a new stepfather come in and just constantly try really hard to act exactly like your real dad.

Harmon was rehired at the beginning of Season 5, so now this is just a strange little detour in a usually excellent show. In fact, the series has later acknowledged this mistake, referring to this period of time as the "gas leak year," explaining that everyone was acting way different because of a gas leak at Greendale. That sounds about right.

 
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Contributor

Lover of horror movies, liker of other things. Your favorite Friday the 13th says a lot about you as a person, and mine is Part IV: The Final Chapter.