I recently acquired Supernatural based on a few positive mentions here on KIA2. I quite like it, but it's a bit... off. These sorts of shows are really about the banter and camaraderie, with the monster stuff being almost incidental. Somehow the chemistry/banter is not quite working for me.
Should I persevere?
Watch Farscape instead. First season is a bit iffy, but the crew truly ends up becoming a family. The show has a heart and little tidbits of interesting science fiction ideas.
Supernatural was always more for teenage girls tbh.
Farscape is a great show. I really hope they don’t decide reboots/ruin it
Black Crichton, CGI Rygel, Aeryn's a tranny, Moya doesn't even feature because PETA got pissy...
I can see them going the nuTrek route and making it visually flashy and completely devoid of soul or personality. Basically the opposite of what Farscape was.
Meh, No Man's Sky has living ships, and it's a feature that was very much asked for in the forums.
There were also the Lexx movies and TV shows. Living ships are kind of a popular idea. Like riding around in a big pet instead of on it.
Lexx. Now there's something else they wouldn't get quite right (as bizarre and blue as it was for the time and network). Hell, they messed up Lev a little bit as it was in the original.
Exactly
Seconded. The series doesn't coalesce until the latter part of season one. That's not to say the rest of the first season isn't enjoyable. It has some hits and misses. However, once you hit the introduction of Scorpius the show is a rollercoaster ride until the end of the series.
My girlfriend and I are watching it now. We're still in the first season. This is her first time watching it since she wasn't alive yet when it air. I haven't seen it since it aired.
That also describes Star Trek TNG, to be fair. A lot of shows are pretty mediocre in the beginning. Even legendary ones.
You get lots of details on second watching.
Written by a former writer on TNG, who took some left over scripts from the show, approached the Henson company to make his sci-fi show and they said okay.
I really do kinda miss it. Some of the pacing in episodes is all over the place but ones that stand out like Different Destinations are better than even TNG could offer.
Ah Farscape.
The old woke, before woke. Had a plot and at least it wasn't RNG/TNG.
What? The show is pro family and implicitly pro life.
Don't be getting in the way of my free love. That blue whatchamacallit.
Ah, the plant? That isn't woke, it's an alien. Rather, the show implicitly admonishes the Peacekeeper's destruction of the family.
It gets much better. The brothers really grow into their roles over the course of the show. It’s a “monster of the week” dynamic at first, but the overarching plot kicks in towards the end of season 1 and concludes in season 5. It’s a steady decline thereafter.
I highly recommend you stick with it.
Indeed. There is maybe a brief rough patch after season 5, since the show's creator was off doing other things at the time, and he'd mostly planned out the overarching plot for those 5 seasons.
Definitely picks itself back up after that brief slump though. Can't quite recall how long the slump lasted. Somewhere between 1-3 seasons if I'm remembering right. The Leviathon stuff was sort of the final climax of those rougher seasons.
After looking stuff up to refresh my memory, I'm almost positive it's around season 8 that it got things going proper again.
Thanks. This is what I was wondering. If the 'chemistry' gets better, then I think it'll be a fun ride.
I can’t stress enough how bad the later seasons become. You’ll still find fun isolated episodes and even decent mini arcs here and there, but the overall decline is marked and becomes fairly intolerable in the second half of the show’s run.
Aside from one serious writing blunder, the first five season arc is some of my favorite television.
Season 1-5 is all that really matters, and was what the original creator only ever originally intended for the show. Everything after that is fanfic tier and Tumblr pandering. And while there are decent episodes, characters and plotlines after those seasons, it's not really worth it.
I partly disagree. It did end up wandering aimlessly for a few seasons after season 5, but it does pick itself back up with some pretty good plotlines.
Just did some research, and I think the improvement coincides with when Jeremy Carver was given the reins over the show's direction.
I do agree with your general thought though. Whenever I've recommended the show, I usually have include a caveat that they could always drop out after five seasons (especially if the person found the total season count an intimidating factor)
Like I said, there are decent plotlines afterwards, but I still don't necessarily think it's worth it. Metatron was probably the most interesting post S5 content, and I don't think it's worth wading through 6 and 7 all for Metatron. Then you have the Amara plotline, the British Men of Letters and then the (in my opinion) lazy Alternate Worlds crap. Jack is decent and interesting, but again, it's not worth it.
I can't recommend wading through 10 more seasons of mediocrity just so that a person can watch the 3 of those seasons that are decent. Not great seasons, but decent. I don't see the cost:reward ratio being worth it.
Yup, I agree with you about 99% there.
Like for you and I (I'm at least assuming this applies to you in the same way), we'd already invested a fair bit of time into the series and even tried to ride through the crap-tier seasons. So coming out into some decent later seasons, was... more of a (slight) net reward, maybe.
It was also a little different I think because it took a while to get used to being jaded about it, since we were riding out after 5 glorious seasons and didn't know how the quality was going to play out until we'd been mired in it for a year or two.
But for someone new to the show, they have both fair warning after the fact AND... they haven't even started investing anything into watching it at all, so there's "generally" not a lot of good reason for them to go past season 5 unless they just really want to anyway.
Each of the later plotlines you brought up were pretty interesting imo. Save for the British Men of Letters. The Steins were short but interesting, and some of Lucifer's antics were pretty hilarious. Didn't like the alternate world stuff but I did like Jack as a character. Amara was interesting, but also sort of fell a little short in some ways.
I did like the whole thing with the Mark of Cain though. I know in a lot of ways, it's a little bit of a rehash of Dean's experiences in previous seasons, but I liked the internal conflict element that it played up. Especially since Dean's character tends to shy away from self reflection. And that situation sort of forced him to try and confront himself in a way he couldn't ignore or dodge away from.
That's fair. I think their biggest problem was a lack of really utilising the villains they made. The Styne's were an amazingly interesting idea, and for them to have lasted a grand total of 3 episodes (over a grand total of a 5 episode span) did them dirty as a concept. It had potential, and then it was gone before it could be used.
That's probably the biggest issue with later Supernatural, a weird choice of which villains they chose to focus on. They had the Styne's and chose to focus on Rowena. They had Dagon, and chose to focus on the British Men of Letters. They had Asmodeus, and chose to focus on the Alternate World. It just felt like weird priorities.
I know it sounds like I'm downplaying a lot of it, because I liked Jack and there was a lot of potential with so many other characters or concepts, but then it's no explored and it's more annoying because now it feels wasted. Everyone who I know liked Supernatural and kept watching loved the idea of the Styne's, but they only last 3 episodes. It was beyond wasted, and it's not the only concept that was wasted. And I think that's what annoys me most, was just how much was wasted in favour of lesser ideas.
My girlfriend has watched all of it, and I absorbed some by osmosis. I can tell you the banter gets better as the seasons progress and the actors become more comfortable in their roles, the soundtrack's pretty badass, the plots become exponentially more ridiculous and the show drags on for maybe 10 seasons longer than it needed to.
The only good thing about it is the chemistry between the brothers. It actually depicts a wholesome brotherly relationship, unlike most shows these days.
But I stopped watching at season 4 maybe. Without spoiling there's a point where they defeat the big bad... but then the show continues anyway?! If you keep watching you'll know when to stop.
That would be season 5.
The first season is the best of the series, it has that horror element. The second one is good, you can make a case for season 3 and maybe 4 and then it has a very steep drop in quality. They had a success and wanted to milk it all the way. In the last seasons is incredibly bad, the story, the dialogue, everything. It still had a couple of good episodes but overall incredibly bad.
If the first season is not to your liking then there is no point in watching it. The banter gets a bit better and the relationship between the 2 evolves but it is just a bit better of the same.
It's really a "monster of the week" show - it's not designed for watching like a whole season in 1 sitting.
Later seasons start to have arcs that span more than 1 episode, I'd try jumping to season 5 or something. If you need a plot that doesn't completely disappear after the episode my recollection is it got somewhat better about halfway through it's run.
P.S. Like a season after castiel shows up it was far more watchable, in my opinion. It never turns a Firefly or Trek level of interest or anything, but I enjoyed the later episodes when they were on tv, whereas the early ones with just the 2 guys were trying trying a bit to hard and failing to be interesting in my opinion.
I liked the show but definitely not for everyone.
No it does not.
Hang on, it depends where he's up to. It gets better until the end of season 5. Then it turns into fanfic and Tumblr pandering.
Fair enough, I quit long before that point.
It does get better along season 2 or so as the actors became more comfortable but the rest of the show definitely goes completely bonkers and off the rails.
If you do persevere, I highly recommend stopping after season 5. It tells a complete story, was the original 5 season plan of the director and after that he left and everyone they filled in drove the plot into ground and made the show go way way to long on.
3-5 is what I watched regularly and enjoyed. The first 2 were more miss. Everything after that is just 'make the fat rainbow-haired fans squirm in their own moist undies and while we just throw random shit around.' Because those hogs were their bread and butter for 15 years.
I watched the first season and while it was okay, it had clear CW writing and production all over it, so it probably doesn't get better.
It's like network TV used to be where it usually took the first season to really get the formula worked out, had a good five season run, then they kept it going for another decade and the series finale was comically written around Chinese virus restrictions keeping everybody off set.