1. Dallas (CBS, 1978 1991)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvinAPPfyAQ&feature=player_embedded What Was The Show? A prime-time soap opera about a family of Texan oil barons. What Was The Stupid Decision? Writing off all of Season Nine as a dream. How Did It Kill The Show? After Season Eight of Dallas, leading actor Patrick Duffy decided to leave the show and his character Bobby Ewing died onscreen in a car accident. This set up the decision that ultimately led to the shows death. Season Nine showed that a recent change in producers and writers as well as a lack of Patrick Duffy didnt go down too well with the viewers, with the shows viewing figures for the whole season dropping to sixth place in the Nielson Ratings list after five consecutive seasons alternating between first and second place. Faced with these declining ratings throughout the season, the producers had the decision to either make the best of a bad situation and carry on with what they were doing, or fall back on what they knew worked and bring back Patrick Duffy. They did the latter. Terribly. In television, especially soaps, there are lots of contrived ways to retcon a characters death. It was a lookalike who died. They never found the body. The death was faked. The list goes on. But choices like those were far too rational for the Dallas writers. Instead, they finished Season Nine with the reveal that Bobby Ewing was alive and opened Season Ten by establishing that it was all a dream. Not just Bobbys death. The entire season. Thirty-one episodes with a collective runtime of just under fourteen hours were annulled with the It was all a dream trope. The plot device that English teachers tell us not to use when were in primary school. There is no greater way to alienate your audience than to tell them that the past fourteen hours theyve spent watching your show are all meaningless because youve just decided to wave a magic wand and declare it non-canon. And since its a serial drama with a linear story progression, theres no way to isolate the retconned material into its own little bubble and enjoy it for what it is because its been explicitly declared as having not happened by the characters within the story. After this colossal middle finger to the audience, ratings began to fall even further with Season Ten dropping to eleventh place in the Nielson ratings, and with the last three seasons seeing even greater drops with the final season occupying the forty-fourth slot. The producers could have made do with Patrick Duffy leaving and settled for a mild decline in viewers but instead made a ridiculous attempt to restore the status quo that eventually sent the show to its grave. Which TV shows do you think were killed by stupid decisions? Leave a comment...-
JG Moore
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JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
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