10 Bad Seasons Of Otherwise Great TV Shows
8. How I Met Your Mother - Season 9
How I Met Your Mother's eight season was originally going to be its last, and you can really feel that. In Season 8, everything leads up to Barney and Robin's wedding, and then with Season 9, the entire season takes place over the one weekend.
Yes, the show spends all 22 episodes on the hours leading up to the wedding. Never has there been a better example of filler in the history of TV, and it was so painfully obvious the writers needed to stall for time until getting back to their original ending. You get pointless storylines like a debate over who makes the best eggs and a rhyming episode which was just a waste of everyone's time. It was a completely failed gimmick.
But there were some highlights, like a bunch of excellent flashforwards to Ted and the Mother's life together and a bit more of developing Barney and Robin's relationship. But as it turns out, forcing the writers to add all of this was actually a terrible mistake. If viewers hadn't been given an extra season of developing Tracy and building up Barney and Robin's wedding day, the finale might not have felt like such a betrayal, unceremoniously killing off Tracy and ending Barney and Robin's marriage like that. So Season 9 wasn't just pointless filler. It actively made an already awful finale that much worse.