10 TV Shows That Should Have Quit While They Were Ahead
TV that stuck it out well beyond their shelf life. Always check the ‘best before’ date, kids.
A little while back I wrote an article detailing television shows that lost it by the end: the ones that fell at the final hurdle. As a companion piece, I've chosen to examine television shows that fell long before that: long running television series that had a shelf life, which expired some time before they actually ended.
These are television shows where the high concept didn't warrant the lifespan that they ended up with: shows that outlived their premise and didn't have any different stories to tell, or shows that played their hand too early and had no cards left up their sleeves.
Whether flawed from conception, poorly plotted and paced, badly executed, or just a great show with a definitive shelf life, these are the television shows that definitely outstayed their welcome.
10. Burn Notice
On the one hand, I enjoyed Burn Notice: I'm a sucker for a spy-gone-rogue story, and I've been a fan of Jeffrey Donovan's for years, since his standout turn as the psychotic chameleon Kyle in The Pretender back in the late nineties. Always witty and deftly constructed, the show co-stars the amazing Sharon Gless and Bruce !*$% Campbell. It was the gift that kept on giving.
Except it wasn't, not really: it was the gift that kept on going. The overarching story - who blacklisted superspy Michael Westen, and why - just kept going on, and on, and on. Every time Michael thinks he's found the person who 'burned' him, it transpires that they were a smokescreen for a bigger fish, who's really a red herring distracting him from a front to a facade to a fake to a phony...
Burn Notice was a basic-cable television action drama with a set formula every week. Clearly they were fully intending on rinse-and-repeating the formula until the show didn't pull in ratings any longer... and that's what happened, the axe falling on Westen and company in a series finale after seven seasons.
The finale was fine: it had callbacks aplenty, and at least two memorable moments that stuck with you long after the credits rolled. It's just that it could really have arrived a little sooner: three seasons sooner, in fact. As it stood, by the end I had no idea who burned Michael or why, and I watched every single episode, every single week. Id just forgotten. There was just too much going on, over seven years - seven years! - of twists, turns, betrayals, backstabbings, explosions and improvised booby traps.