When Bad Writing Happens to Good Shows

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the departure of Aaron Sorkin at the end of season four of The West Wing, midway through the Zoey Bartlett kidnapping. Although we're both diehard WW fans (he's in love with Ainsley Hayes; I heart Josh "Lemon" Lyman), we both agreed that it wasn't the show at it's best. For a show that made political action narrative action, the kidnapping plot seemed out of place: a soapy, emotionally manipulative way for the show to scoop up ratings as the show was starting to lose viewers (Rob Lowe left that season, and it dropped 5 million viewers as a result! Dear Rob Lowe, don't ever leave Parks and Recreation. Thanks).

Not that it wasn't fun to watch. It totally was! It was just...wrong for that show.

So that got me thinking about other great shows that suffered the occasional writing misstep. I'm not talking about shows that are already pretty bad, like One Tree Hill and Grey's Anatomy. Bad writing happening to good shows is a special kind of bad writing because it's only bad due to the fact that it's weirdly affecting a good show. Here are some classics:

5. "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" on Millennium, season 2. It pains me a little to include this because Millennium was such a great show, and I would venture to guess that many of you have never seen it. Let me just remind you that this post is about bad writing happening to good shows, so you really should watch it if you haven't seen Chris Carter's Millennium. It's freaking cool. That said, its second season had some bumps. I have absolutely no problem with genre shows oscillating between episodic and serial episodes to try to build an audience of geeks. In fact, I welcome it. But I really hated those Jose Chung episodes that Darin Morgan and Chris Carter felt like we needed to see on this and their other big show The X-Files. On Millennium, it halted the movement of the season by altering the ambiance in a distracting and self-indulgent way. It wasn't quite as dramatically jarring on The X-Files, where the Jose Chung episode took place during the unsteady first season of the show, but it wasn't exactly a shining moment either. If you watch Millennium, as per my sage advice, you won't miss anything if you skip over this particular episode.

4. Scrubs: The New Class, seasons 8 and 9. This was a simple case of a great show refusing to go out on a high note, and it was not entirely the fault of the showrunners. Scrubs found itself perpetually in danger of cancellation, and at the end of its seventh season, NBC finally pulled the plug. Both creator Bill Lawrence and star Zach Braff said that the seventh would be its last season. Then, through a series of weird happenings and threatened litigation, ABC ended up picking it up for an eighth season of 18 episodes, in which most of the leads would return at least on a temporary basis. The seventh season finale was pitch perfect as a finale, with JD imagining a happy ever after with Eliot, as he left the hospital. Bringing back these characters for another two seasons, along with new characters that were funny enough, but not the cast we had grown to love, felt like an unwelcome, two-year epilogue. As far as I'm concerned, Scrubs ended on NBC.

3. Lorelai and Christopher hook up and get married on Gilmore Girls, seasons 6 (finale) and 7. Okay, I get why Luke and Lorelai had to break up in season 6. They had legitimate communication problems that centered on Luke being a curmudgeon. What I didn't care for, however, was Lorelai immediately jumping into bed with Christopher the same night she and Luke broke up. Lorelai didn't always make great decisions, but it was a stretch to believe that she'd do something that self-destructive at the expense of slow-moving Luke potentially instigating a reconciliation. I just don't buy it, and I think this was the moment that the usually delightful Girls went a little off the rails. At the time it felt like a big middle finger from departing creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, and it still feels that way.

2. The Mexico foray on Big Love, season four. I'm still not sure how we got to that point on Big Love. From the first season, the elements of the show that frequently proved the most compelling centered on Bill and the wives, their relationships with one another and with the family. Whenever the show drifted too far outside of this nucleus, particularly with Bill's random business ventures and all the compound drama, it lost some of its initial zing. I think this is what happened during season four: it just seemed like Bill was juggling too many balls in the air, and while this was a recurring theme throughout the show (e.g., overworked, stressed out, power-hungry Bill), for the whole of this season, I felt like I was being overworked as a viewer. We should have known something was going to be off this season, when the premiere gave us a literally frozen Roman Grant being transported to the Henricksen's new casino. WTH?? The heights of this season's weirdness, though, came when Bill drove to Mexico to rescue his kidnapped eldest son, crazycakes mother, and SOB of a father, culminating in a bizarre standoff with one of the ruling FLDS clans, in which Lois cuts off a dude's hand. Season five was thankfully better.

1. The Landry-Tyra murder plot on Friday Night Lights, season 2. Ah, season two, the season otherwise known as the season that FNL fans warn their FNL-virgin friends about before they start watching. For the most part, the season was just...off, and the murder plot was a microcosm of where it went wrong. FNL was at the height of its creative powers when characters were allowed to develop through everyday situations. The forced intensity of a murder was too sensational, too unreal to happen to our characters in Dillon. It remains the quintessential example of bad writing happening to a good, nay, great show.

Honorable Mention: Mr. Eko on LOST; the "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" episode of The X-Files (see above); the will they or won't they ridiculata with Joey and Rachel on Friends.

The End of "Big Love"

This is a short note to commemorate the ending of one of my favorite shows on TV, Big Love, which airs its series finale tonight on HBO. On one hand I'm glad that the showrunners decided to leave the show on its own terms, during what seems to be one of its best seasons (seriously, if you haven't watched last week's episode "Exorcism", you only have yourself to blame), but I'm of course disappointed not to see a continuation of the Henricksens' fascinating story, which to me feels by no means finished (in the TV sense, that is).

I’m also really disappointed that this brilliant show is ending with no Emmys and only one major acting award (Chloe Sevigny rightfully upset Jane Lynch at the Golden Globes in 2010), but maybe it’s a testament to the complexity of the drama that it didn’t appeal to everyone. For me, the most fascinating thing about this show is the way it managed to take an “icky” topic like polygamy and turn it into a catalyst for the kind of anti-hero family drama that makes BL so gripping. The show was never about polygamy. In the broader sense it's about the First Amendment, but perhaps more compellingly, it focused the relationships at the center of the drama and on the wonderfully multifaceted characters at the heart of the show. Last week's episode "Exorcism" demonstrated this as well as any episode we've seen, in that in the midst of the Henricksen's social and political isolation, the show focused on the personal struggles of each main character. I don't know about you, but the more I learn about these characters, the more I feel like there's more to learn.

I'll probably post something about the finale later this week, when I get past my BL-is-ending-oh-no! depression. It feels like a TV conspiracy that we're losing Friday Night Lights, LOST, and Big Love in the span of a year. If Fringe or Southland gets canceled, I'm gonna freaking lose it, y'all!

"Big Love" Announces Final Season; Cat Angrily Shakes Fist in Air

According to EW, HBO announced today that the upcoming season of Big Love will be its last. This sucks for me mainly because it has, for about three years now, been one of my top five favorite TV shows currently on air. I think the character development has always been great, the troupe of very talented actors do interesting and subtle things with their respective characters, and the fact that the showrunners could take such an out-there concept like polygamy in the suburbs and turn it into something more compelling than creepy gives this show a fascination quality that a lot of shows (even HBO shows) don't have.

Let me get real with you for a second, though: I am aware that season four was a little rocky. During its run, I defended the sheer madness of Bill running for public office as something that egomaniac Bill would do. I also sucked it up and suffered through the creepy foray into the Mexican polygamist compound. Even the crazy Weekend at Bernie's-style high-jinks with Roman's dead body was painful, but moderately endurable on its own. When taken as a whole, though, I will admit that season four may have jumped the shark a little bit. That said, the show never lost me, and I still love the characters. Chloe Sevigny, in particular, distinguished herself over the last couple of seasons with some seriously great acting. I'm very sad to see this show bow out after five seasons, even though it's probably the best thing for the show creatively.

Its cancellation is hitting me in a sore spot, as this last May marked the end of one of my other favorites LOST, and next spring will signal the end of my favorite show on TV bar none Friday Night Lights. Dude, three out of five favorites leaving with no legitimate contenders for a new favorite on the horizon? That totally sucks! My other two favorites, Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock, are brilliant comedies, but I need a drama to anchor my TV schedule in something serious. The only one I can think of is NBC's Parenthood, but it's still no Friday Night Lights. What's a gal to do? I'll keep you updated on my search. In the meantime, at least we've got one more season each of both Big Love and FNL to enjoy!