11 Beloved TV Shows With More Bad Seasons Than Good

Back when procedural crime shows were all the rage, Dexter attempted to stand out from the crowd by making its main detective a serial killer. Excelling in both its case-of-the-week investigations as well its wider mythology, the early seasons of Showtime's series were a breath of fresh air in an ailing genre, led by the always excellent Michael C. Hall.

However, you could argue that Dexter was doomed from the start, as casting your lead protagonist as a serial killer leads to some problems the longer a programme like this continues. The more you watch Dexter, the more you empathise with the character, and the more his rough edges come to be smoothed out. Likewise, a show with a premise like this only has one logical conclusion: one way or another, Dexter's got to pay for his actions.

The creators wrestled with these big issues as the series wore on, which were compounded by increasingly silly plots that were nowhere near as risky or as daring as some of the show's most memorable episodes. It was an undeniably great start, but after somehow becoming both more convoluted yet more rote year after year, Dexter declined in quality right up until its inevitable anticlimactic end.