10 Great TV Shows With Awful First Seasons
7. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia
When Friends finished in 2004, there followed something of an influx of American sitcoms, with The Office, How I Met Your Mother, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia debuting just one year later in 2005. The only one of these still running, impressively is the latter.
Still going to this day, the show is barrelling towards the release of its 18th season, based around the tried and tested premise of a bunch of friends hanging out, but this time they are largely awful people.
Looking back at season one, it's amazing how far things have come. The production values throughout the seven episode season, the shortest of the show's typically already short seasons, were incredibly low, but the biggest difference is the hole left by a character who, like Roger in American Dad!, has arguably become the best since season two.
It's not that often that a single character can affect a series quite so much, but from the moment Danny DeVito joined the fray as Dee and Dennis' (Kaitlin Olson and Glenn Howerton) dad, Frank, in the opening scenes of season two, it was put onto a path with a much higher trajectory.