8 Fan-Service TV Episodes Everyone Hated

Fan-service is, by definition, meant to be completely for the audience's benefit. It's meant to bring joy to the viewers by giving them what they've been waiting for: whether that's a long-awaited relationship or kiss, or a cheeky nod and wink toward theories and ideas fans have been sharing online.

It just so happens that sometimes it goes wrong, and what shows think will make their audience giddy with joy actually generates nothing but anger. Sometimes this is because it is poorly executed or just slightly misses the mark on audience demand. Fans are fickle things, after all, and you can't please them all no matter how hard you try.

These episodes feature some of the most disliked bits of audience-pandering in recent years, including everything from egregious queerbaiting to over-ambitious storylines without the strength to hold themselves up. Now I'm not saying that one bad episode makes for a bad show overall, but beware because sometimes it can be symptomatic of a coming downfall.

So let's take a look at some episodes made for fans that fans and critics across the board disliked. Here's 8 Fan-Service TV Episodes Everyone Hated.

Community rose to fame as a show rife with quirky, meta humour and inspired concept episodes. With a host of loveable characters and a seemingly endless supply of hilarious ideas, things were looking great for the show for the first three seasons, as fans were sure it was on a forever upward trajectory.

As with any high-flier though, you’ve got to be careful not to hit the sun- and by the time season 4 rolled around there was trouble in paradise.

With showrunner Dan Harmon gone, some critics accused writers of trying to ‘reverse-engineer’ the charming Harmon era with little success.

Community may have been loved for its ambitious concept episodes but writers cannot take that love for granted. Season 3’s Remedial Chaos Theory is one of the most-loved episodes in the whole series, but when Season 4 rolled around and tried to execute something of a similar calibre with Avdanced Introduction to Finality (interacting with the multiple timelines idea of the former episode) it flopped big time.

Though over 3 million people tuned in to watch it, it received an 18-49 rating of just 1.3 which, in regular terms, means ‘this carries on and your show is getting cancelled.’

Critics panned the episode as being a soulless recreation of previous fan-favourite concepts, one writer from The A.V. Club going so far as to claim the show was "no longer ... capable of much beyond repeating elements it thinks the audience will like over and over again."

Yikes.