10 Great TV Shows That Lost It By The End

4. True Blood

HBO

HBO€™s sex and blood obsessed Deep South melodrama True Blood was never exactly backward about coming forward. Stuffed to the nines with nakedness, violence, creative swearing and inventive, arch dialogue, the show quickly became a hit, the plots becoming more and more outlandish year by year to up the ante from previous seasons.

So where did it all go so wrong? Somewhere around season four, True Blood stopped being a hilarious guilty pleasure. There was just far too much: too much overacting, too much oversexed carnage, too much casual murder of the supporting cast€ and without a solid underpinning of plot and character to fall back upon, the whole thing began to collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

When HBO announced in September 2013 that season seven would be the final outing for the show, the response was oddly muted€ curious, considering that viewing figures were still strong. Where were all the True Blood fanatics, demanding that their show be kept on the air?

It turned out that the fandom wasn€™t reflected in the viewing figures. Quite simply, people were still watching despite themselves. Reading online reviews, recaps and blog posts, you can see a common thread emerging: people were only hanging in there to see exactly how screwed up the show could get. HBO should take a few notes here €“ they€™re beginning to have the same problem with Game Of Thrones.

Season seven was a mess of badly-conceived storylines that no one cared about, random deaths of major characters that insulted the intelligence of the few genuine fans that were left, and the usual overheated gumbo of bad sex, awful violence and worse decisions. To cap it all off, the time jumps in the narrative were just lazy storytelling€ they literally couldn€™t be bothered to show us important events happening to characters we'd followed for years, so they skipped forward a few years and told us they€™d already happened. What a car crash.

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Contributor

Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.