10 TV Episodes That Were Blatant Apologies

The characters of Nikki and Paulo (Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro) were introduced early in Lost's third season amid complaints that the series didn't show enough of Oceanic Flight 815's other survivors.

Nikki and Paulo appeared in fourteen of the season's episodes and were near-universally loathed by fans, who generally found their antics annoying and their presence excessive, as if the writers were compensating for the absence of peripheral survivors in the first two seasons.

And so, once showrunner Damon Lindelof caught wind of the online sentiment, he set about killing the pair off, as finally happened in the legendarily divisive episode "Exposé."

Rather than quickly kill them, though, Lindelof had an entire episode devoted to their backstories before they were given the hilariously cruel - and undeniably satisfying - fate of being inadvertently buried alive.

As far as apologies go, it was both needlessly elaborate and uncommonly self-deprecating of a showrunner to jettison disliked characters quite so aggressively.