10 Unforgivable Mistakes That Ruined Great 2013 TV Shows

5. Low Winter Sun Was A Giant Trope

Much like S.H.I.E.L.D., AMC's Low Winter Sun, an adaptation of the British miniseries, had several ingredients for a good series: great source material; a great cast including Mark Strong, Lennie James, David Costabile, and James Ransone; fantastic cinematography; and the AMC network. This last point is what makes this one hurt the most. AMC has been seen to produce two of the best, darkest, most brooding dramas in modern TV with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Low Winter Sun could've been AMC's next hallmark prestige drama, but it has, instead, become an easily forgotten mistake. It seems that, after the successes Mad Men and Breaking Bad, AMC just wanted to throw any old antihero drama on the small screen, and in the process, the AMC executives failed to perform a quality check on the new series. The premise of a cop who kills a dirty, murderous cop for revenge is shrouded in moral ambiguity, which is good; and the original Low Winter Sun explored this moral ambiguity with aplomb. But AMC's effort was filled with tropes. The dirty cop characters lacked nuance and the city of Detroit was characteristically dirty, but perhaps the most problematic of all tropes was the dialogue. Think about all the cop shows, nay, all they cop media in general that has been produced over the past few decades. Now think about the most common lines:

"Prove you're clean!" "I can't prove anything beyond my word!" "And we know what that's worth!"

Low Winter Sun was riddled with exchanges like these, and the trying performances by Strong and company were unable to offer any nuance to the dialogue.