I forgot the exact episode, but I felt The Expanse was pretty mediocre until one of the last episodes of S1. I stuck with it because I was told prior to starting that it takes a while to get going. I’m glad I stuck with it, as it’s my favorite sci-fi show.
Expanse is a slow burn start. I personally think it was great from the start but will tell anyone to watch at least until E3 or 4 (episode called CQB). At that point if you don’t want to keep watching it’s likely not a good fit.
Yes absolutely 100%. That is my usual advice as well. If you get through episode 4 and you aren’t completely fucking hooked you might as well shut off the tv and sit in the dark and question your life choices.
Yeah, I was about halfway through S1 and I was thinking “why do people rave about this show?”
Also glad I stuck with it.
For me its’ the opposite, it started strong (complex politics, realistic space travel) and by the end it turned into just another space opera about hardy space ship crew fighting space battles.
Damn, I watched the first two seasons before moving and never got around to finishing but those things were exactly what I was into. I thought the interplanetary politics were awesome
From what I understand there’s a lot of material from the books that didn’t make it into the show. I bet the politics were more extensive too.
The authors actually have cameos in the show. They were very involved in its conception and making. The books had a lot more details, little sub-stories, etc. The show made a few substantial changes, but IMHO they all made for better TV (like making Arwin a major character in Jackson’s LotR).
Fun fact: the authors initially intended for The Expanse to be a table top game.
Farscape:
The first 4 episodes of the first season get progressively better, but it’s when you hit episode 5 “PK Tech” girl that the show hits its stride. Sure there are weak episodes after 5, but overall the show just gets better the deeper you go.
The Good Place really takes off at the end of the first season.
Personally I consider The Good Place one of the rare shows that is solid all the way through without a single bad or weak episode, however the end of season one is certainly where it goes from great to fantastic.
For me, the twist at the end of season one retroactively makes the rest of season one better
No way. Episode one was a banger.
alsimoneau figured it out? That’s a new low…
Ted Danson’s reaction to that scene is too perfect… That one hurts
American Dad is a fantastically funny show, but season 1 is basically unwatchable. Season 2 is a mixed bag. I’d recommend people just start watching from season 3 onward and only check out the earlier episodes as a curiosity.
American Dad is so underrated. Seth McFarlane is very funny, but you can tell that Fox saw Family Guy taking off and basically took it away from him, and he knew there was no sense in fighting it. But he started American Dad, and that’s where you can really see his comedy come through.
So many great episodes. In Country… Club is probably my all-time-favorite. So many others though, Irregarding Steve, The Abusive Terrestrial, The Vacation Goo, Spring Breakup, and Shallow Vows. And really anything with Roger
‘In Country… Club’ is the example episode I use to get people to try the show. It is so good and commits to hard to the premise.
We were kids, man!
I thought McFarlane had very little to do worth American dad, other than the voice, after the first few seasons?
Regardless it’s amazing. It turned from a critique of Republicans to some surrealist nonsense, it’s great.
I remember watching American Dad’s premiere and being excited for the concept but disappointed by the execution. You can tell there’s aspiration to be a good parody of the contemporary political climate in the first episode, but iirc it’s undermined by its crassness.
The Orville also struggled to get its footing in the early episodes; maybe Seth MacFarlane just does better once his series gets established?
I think they struggled early on for different reasons.
American Dad was too laser focused on being a political satire show and I just don’t think the writers were equipped to write a good political show. It just comes off as angry and with unlikable characters. Once it loosened up a little bit, having that political satire premise as a foundation gives the characters a baseline to work from and they all feel distinct because of it.
The Orville feels like Seth didn’t want to make a comedy. It feels to me like he just wanted to make Star Trek, but because he’s “a comedy guy” a lot of the humor, especially early on felt like it was put in to meet some expectation of Fox that a Seth show be a comedy.
Farscape Season 1, Episode 19, the one which introduces Scorpius. That said, you really do need to watch most of the preceding episodes or else nothing is going to make any frelling sense and you’ll think you’ve gone fahrbot.
Now I’m imagining someone tuning in to Farscape for the first time on a Harvey episode, and trying to make any sense at all out of anything they were watching.
My go-to example for this is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Season one is overall quite rough, however s01e19 (second-to-last episode of the season) is IMO the first episode that shows true glimmers of promise. In season two the series starts to find its footing, by season three it’s proven itself to be Star Trek gold, and then the series manages to maintain its quality through to its seventh and final season.
I think you mean episode 18, that one is the second-to-last of the season.
And that is exactly the episode I was thinking of, too. I didn’t know which episode number it was, I just remember when I was watching DS9, there was an episode with the filing clerk, and I thought, “Oh, this show is actually going to be great if it stays like this.” I just looked it up on IMDB, and it’s S1 E18.
Apparently it depends on whether you consider the series premiere as one episode or two; Wikipedia (which I used for reference) lists it as two separate episodes, providing a total s1 episode count of 20, vs imdb which lists it as one single episode, providing a total s1 episode count of 19. Memory Alpha lists the episode as s1e19, and I’m inclined to trust those nerds. At any rate I edited my comment to include the episode title for clarity.
Regardless, yeah, I think it’s probably a turning point episode for a lot of folks, and it’s the first of many war introspection episodes that help make the series timeless.
Oh, interesting. I’d go with Memory Alpha too, then. But yeah, definitely a pivot point in the series, and the first one that really took the post-war setting seriously.
Season 1 of DS9 was rough? Cries in TNG… 🤣
It is rough compared to the later stuff but, man, it got off to a WAY better start than TNG did… I mean, Riker had to grow a beard for the show to get good!
IMO DS9’s s1 is way worse than TNG’s, but that might be because TNG has a nostalgia factor for me from watching random episodes as a kid, and so by the time I did a full start-to-finish watch-thru I already knew the characters well and understood that the series would get better, whereas I was an adult when I first watched DS9 and went into it completely blind (after watching the first two-parter episode I nearly cried, because I was on a mission to watch all of the 20th century Star Treks, and there were seven seasons of this to slog through!? And now it’s my favorite Star Trek series of all time.)
Sisko’s beard also improved DS9
Very true!
He also had reverse Samson syndrome, had to lose his hair to gain power.
Invincible. Halfway through S1 it’s like they fired all the original writers
If it doesn’t happen by the third or fourth episode I’m out.
Season 1 of the wire is definitely this. I tried to get a friend to watch it and we started with the pilot and I could tell he was like “this is so boring”. It’s definitely a slower show but when shit pops off it pops hard.
DragonBallZ Abridged used a lot, and I mean a lot of referencial humor in their earliest season, only really starting to make characters come into their own towards the end of season 1.
By the start of season 2 with the Namek saga, they’d largely nailed their characters personalities and ditched most of the references, and as a result, seasons 2 and 3 are much more fun to watch
Not TV, but I’ve told people to skip the first two books in the Discworld series, Sir Terry doesn’t really get into his stride till a little later, but book three is where his talent starts to shine.
Yeah, though even then there’s a lot of growth. Comparing The Theif of Time, Thud, or I Shall Wear Midnight to Sourcery just feels unfair to the latter.
Or start with Small Gods, everyone who likes discworld likes Small Gods. It stands alone, it’s clever, but has some of the early book style, and it’s regularly referenced by the fans.
Technically a streaming series rather than a TV series, but the second campaign of Critical Role (Mighty Nein). I started watching the series after seeing how popular Critical Role was online and that Mighty Nein was recommended for CR beginners, but I really didn’t get it at first; it seemed so boring and slow. Still I stuck with it (listening to it in the background while I did other stuff), and I remember there were two specific moments where I finally understood its popularity:
spoiler
episode 7 “Hush” when Nott kills the manticore baby (which was my first “holy shit they did what” moment), and episode 12 “Midnight Espionage” during the hospital heist (I could not stop laughing at the debacle and completely lost it at Nott’s negative charisma roll). In other words, thanks Sam Riegel for making me a fan!
It didn’t help that the first campaign was already underway when the show started, and for a long time their audio was pretty terrible
I haven’t seen campaign one (since I started with two), but I’ve heard it has a rough start. I’d be curious what episode people think campaign one started turning around on, since obviously Vox Machina became quite popular in its own right, even if Might Nein is the campaign that cinched CR’s mainstream fame.
It is really good once they kicked that douchebag Orion out of the campaign. So start at episode 28 to avoid him, he made the show worse and was an asshole to everyone and makes the other players feel uncomfortable with his sexual remarks so you probably don’t want to watch anything with him in it. I think at one point Laura/Vex does something in game and he literally said his character gets hard from it, Travis looked like he was ready to throw hands.
Campaign one is probably the funniest campaign and also the one I cried the most in. The ending is amazing and heart wrenching.
Sam Riegel is a national treasure and he must be protected at all costs.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had to vamp for too long before “Turn, Turn, Turn” but it got better and better the loopier it got, and the farther from the canon universe. And yet it’s worth watching the early eps because things are set in place that the show runners fulfill later. In some cases much much later, and in some very satisfying ways.
I loved the second half of season 1 of that show, but then I hated season 2 so much that I refused to watch any more of it.
You should try Season 3, see if you still hate it
Perhaps someday, I will introspect to find that the name Daisy Johnson no longer makes me break out in hives.
Letterkenny, I think it gets good around the end of season 1 or beginning of 2. You still have to watch the first episodes to get an idea of who everyone is and their relationships though. Might have to do with just how strange the characters are in this random small town in Canada. It’s pretty tough at first, but once you get to the end of the first season, something clicks and the show becomes pretty hilarious.
I was hooked from the first episode
Of course it’s The Office season 2. So, episode 7. Although Basketball (episode 6) is also pretty good, it’s definitely more part of the more dreary realistic season 1 feeling.
