6 Awesome TV Shows That Started Off As Sucky Garbage

And then it isn't good. The drop-off from the first to the second episode almost feels like a betrayal. "Christmas With The Joker" is the worst thing to happen to any holiday since the invention of candy corn. And it's made doubly bad by the fact that it's Mark Hamill's first appearance as the Joker. Luckily, BTAS gets its three worst Joker episodes out of the way in the first batch of ten episodes, but if you told me that the show was invented by Batman as some sort of anti-Joker propaganda, I'd believe you. Mark Hamill's Joker would become the most iconic supervillain performance in cartoon history, and it began with an hour's worth of animated dysentery.

Scattered amidst the intense disappointment are episodes wherein Batman is forced to share copious time with children. I'm not against kids showing up in comic book stories. Anyone who thinks that the presence of Robin automatically "ruins" Batman is three farts trapped in a goblin costume. But an episode in which kids steal the Batmobile and defend an unconscious Batman against the Penguin -- a villain who doesn't pose a threat to anyone tall enough to ride a roller coaster -- doesn't inspire confidence in the "greatest superhero show of all time."

Luckily, the show gets way better around the time they start introducing guys like Two-Face and Clayface and Freezeface, but that's assuming you even get that far into your Volume 1 box set. The last 90 percent of Batman: The Animated Series becomes a reward for finishing the first 10 percent. "Thank you for sitting through that without setting the DVD's, your TV, and your whole house on fire. You truly deserve the best that life (and Batman) have to offer."

And then I watched the first episode, which wasn't so much "Haha!" funny as it was "Ha? Heh?" funny. The show opens with McBride playing off of Bill Murray, and maybe I was expecting too much. Maybe I expected the laptop to erupt in my face, spilling joke demons into the world to turn our existence into pure comedy. I shouldn't have expected the apocalypse. That was my mistake. But, again, when the chessboard of actors and plots is laid out so perfectly, even vigorous mediocrity can be insufferable. When you go to Heaven and find out that it might not be serving Italian ice, Heaven kinda sucks a little bit.

Then Goggins and McBride took LSD and went to a high school football game. And the angels wept.

Now I adore the show. People ripped through the walls of my house to scream at me about the infinite intrigue and questions of Twin Peaks, but the best murder mystery of 2017 goes to Season 2 of Vice Principals. Yes, I know that Twin Peaks has David Lynch and horror and dark comedy and Kyle MacLachlan, but Vice Principals has "Busted by Lee Russell," so I think the winner is pretty goddamn clear.

It's also natural to drop Pokemon because the first 19 years are mostly bad. The animation wavers between "acceptable" and "it should be illegal to do this to children." There is no character development, and not even in a "This is a kids show, so give it some slack" kind of way. The Pokemon anime is aware of the history of the Pokemon anime. It knows what has happened in the past; it just chooses to totally forget what happened. Over 900 episodes are devoted to proving that the Pokemon world is filled with people too incompetent to survive. There isn't a character on the show who shouldn't have been devoured by their pets by now. Just monsters munching on humans because evolution hasn't done its job and kicked mankind off the face of the Poke-earth yet.

Pokemon: Sun & Moon, however, serves as a vacation from the cycle of the Pokemon shows before it -- which is fitting, because the show is literally about Ash taking a vacation from being a ten-year-old warlord. For the first time since it started, the Pokemon anime feels as refreshing and interesting as the games that it's based on. There is an actual atmosphere and sense of location instead of Ash just being placed in a generic forest or city again. Also, the ending theme song is a montage of Ash dancing with Pikachu, and I'd be lying if I said that I haven't tried to replicate it with my dog at least once.

One of the biggest strengths of Psycho is the fact that it takes place in a quiet town, and that stuff like Norman Bates' fashion sense is out of the ordinary. Bates Motel just adds it to the backdrop of continued insanity, ripping it of its power. If your focus is on the stuff that's worse than Norman Bates, how can you expect anyone to give a crap when you actually start focusing on Norman? You can't expect me to get pumped about my double quarter pounder with cheese if all of my appetizers are Big Macs.

Thankfully, the creators of Bates Motel are so talented that the last four seasons became really, really great, with some of the most fully realized characters in horror TV ever. Sadly, it had to come after a season of a show about an awful town, many awful people, and one slightly abnormal motel.

Can a show create a character that is too good? Justified is full of awesome redneck gangsters, from the domineering matriarch Mags Bennett to Sam "It's A Sam Elliot Character, Motherfucker" Elliot. But it struck gold in the first ten minutes with Walton Goggins' Boyd Crowder. A silver-tongued hillbilly Lex Luthor, Boyd is effortlessly charismatic. And then he gets shot at the end of the pilot, is hospitalized in the beginning of the second episode, and disappears from the show for a while. Huh. Well I guess that's that.

To be fair, the creators of Justified didn't even know that Boyd would be such an important addition until audiences saw him and then surrounded their offices with torches and pitchforks, demanding that Boyd be instated as our one true god and king. But it does kind of seem silly in retrospect that you'd even think of having that character be in just one episode, like making a delicious apple pie and then hurling it in front of a lawnmower. So when you watch the show for the first time, you kind of assume that the show stupidly got rid of the best thing in any show ever, and that Justified will just feature new rednecks shooting at each other each week. But when you watch it the second time, those Boyd-less episodes? They're the Dark Times.

Justified was never unwatchable. So if you haven't seen any of it, I don't want you to think that it's bookended by success, and that the middle meat of the sandwich is feces and frowns. But the section that seems to have forgotten Boyd feels like it's missing something vital, like a bicycle without wheels or a Dale Hardt without Earn. Boyd propels Justified from a mediocre show about clever Appalachian folk to the top show about clever Appalachian folk. And that's a position that it will stay in until I unveil my own show, Daniel's Good Time West Virginia Moonshine N' Thinkin' Hour.

The later seasons of Gilmore Girls work so well because the show is supernaturally incredible at building characters and relationships. The first half of Season 1 is an aching trudge because it just kind of assumes that you're going to be into the same shit that Gilmore Girls is into. You know when you get invited to the house of someone that you've never met, and your friends preface the visit with "It's gonna be so much fun! They're hilarious! You're going to love it"? And then you get to the house and the owner is like, "We're gonna do needlepoint for seven years, and all we have to eat is this one unsalted cracker." That's what being dropped into the world of Gilmore Girls is like.

You have to get to know these rabid needlepointers in order to care even remotely about them, as Gilmore Girls gives you absolutely nothing else to care about. Will Rory Gilmore do well on this one test at the beginning of the school year? Will Lorelai be polite at dinner? Will Luke pour the coffee? These are the stakes in early Gilmore Girls episodes. And while you will eventually enter the A Year In The Life Netflix series appreciating every nuanced Emily Gilmore glare and being unable to become sexually aroused unless your partner hums "Where You Lead," those first few hours will probably have you feeling tricked by the people you once trusted. "You told me this would be fun. But all they're doing is making pop culture references in the one restaurant in town. I thought we were friends."

Daniel has a Twitter that will be good in a few seasons.

If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Or sign up for our Subscription Service for exclusive content, an ad-free experience, and more.

For more, check out What NOT To Watch In 21 Famous Movies And TV Shows and 25 Disastrous Episodes In Non-Disatrous Shows.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out The Only 8 Types of TV Shows That Get Made, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook. Because you deserve the very best.