10 Great TV Shows With Awful First Seasons
2. The Office
Remakes of classic movies can be tricky, and the last thing that anybody wants is a boring retelling of the same story, which is why the likes of Psycho (1998), The Lion King (2019), and Moana (2026) just weren't that good. It's rarer in the world of TV, but The Office has proven that it can happen.
Season one of the US Office featured six episodes that were basically as close to the UK Office as possible. It was soulless, drab, completely devoid of its own personality or voice, and absolutely nobody would have watched nine seasons of it.
In fairness, there wasn't yet time to truly develop the characters into what they would become, with the likes of Dwight, Michael, and Kelly (Rainn Wilson, Steve Carell, and Mindy Kaling) in particular becoming vastly different and layered as the show went on, but season one didn't put any effort into that, only the recreation of exactly what Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant had already done.
Luckily, things got brighter (quite literally) starting with season two, as the show became more its own entity. This allowed for better stories, better characters, and a sitcom that would arguably surpass Friends as the most beloved and iconic of all time.