10 TV Shows That RECOVERED From Jumping The Shark
9. True Detective
True Detective's first season is one of the greatest TV volumes of the entire decade, a deliciously taut, intelligent and provocative procedural elevated by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's outstanding performances.
Season two sensibly opted to tell a totally different story, but in a classic case of a creator taking the wrong lesson away from their own success, showrunner Nic Pizzolatto decided to dial up the pretentious philosophising and quasi-Shakespearean dialogue to 12 for the Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams-starring second season.
It wasn't terrible, but it felt more like a parody of True Detective than an actual second batch of episodes, with its self-conscious grimness and abundance of cringe-worthy dialogue ("Your compensatory projection of menace is a guarantor of its lack").
Thankfully the recent third season, co-starring Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff, was one of the most impressive reversals of fortune that any prestige show has seen in years.
Back to the pulpy-yet-meditative tone of the first season, it perhaps wasn't a terribly ambitious gear-shift from what came before, but between its strong character work and entrancing mystery, was back to what fans loved so much about the debut season.