Grey's Anatomy, The Simpsons and Mrs Brown's Boys have gone on longer than they should have.
Grey's Anatomy, The Simpsons and Mrs Brown's Boys have gone on longer than they should have.
For this week's group think, we turn our thoughts to those long-running TV shows that are well and truly past their best.
Grey's Anatomy
Meredith Grey has survived a plane crash, near-drowning, a shooting and a bomb explosion. She has seen countless friends and family die before her very eyes (half-sister Alexi died in the plane crash she survived, while her close friend George was hit by a bus in front of her). Her best friend, Christina Yang, abandoned her in favour of Switzerland and most recently, her husband died in a horrific car crash.
After more than a decade on air, Grey's has surpassed even telenovela realms of plausibility and is free-floating in a sea of ridiculousness. Enough already. This show needs a DNR order, stat.
You do know it's all bollocks, don't you? All those smooth-faced sciencey types crouching over machines that go ping to find an elusive killer via the aura of a kicked rock? Nah, doesn't happen. Just once, you'd like them to finish an episode with a "buggered if I know" shrug. And how do they get anything done with all those flirty, come-hither looks? But then all the walls are made of glass and none of them seems able to find the broom cupboard without satellite imagery. One question though, why do cops always have such crap torches?
- Alan Perrott
CSI: Who cares which version, they're all the same
Coronation Street
Dear old Corrie. She's like some poor, ancient dear, living in a home for the bewildered, a much-loved but dribbly old-timer who really should have left God's waiting room and ascended to Heaven years ago. Instead, she just keeps hanging on for dear life. We should all pray that, for her own sake, her agonies end soon. Yes the first 10,000 years of the Street were good, even great, with some terrific characters - Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner, Roy Cropper, the cat in the credits. But in recent millennia, particularly after the departure of the Duckworths, Corrie has become just another awful soap. A sad end to a wonderful life.
- Greg Dixon
Coronation Street: It's enough to drive you to drink
X Files
Let's sneak this one in before it starts shall we? Has the world gone mad? Does no one remember the last few series? Just like Twin Peaks, they were absolute, disappeared up its own back pipe, tosh. It's simple. You can never go back, even if you want to go back to being bad rubbish. So just don't. All we're going to get is the same old, same old of Mulder's incipient jowls flapping as he chases some hobgoblin with Scully trotting alongside, mumbling, "There must be a rational explanation." There, see? I've saved them the bother.
The X Files: It wasn't good then and it probably won't be good now.
Mrs Brown's Boys
Appalling blarney that, though it's only been on the box for four years, qualifies because its end cannot come soon enough. How Brendan O'Carroll managed to turn dressing up as a woman and endless, tediously unfunny sexual innuendo gags into a ratings hit in the second decade of the 21st century is beyond comprehension. Perhaps its the luck of the Irish?
- Greg Dixon
The Mentalist
This just plain got away on them. The hook was a smartarse with a knack for messing with people who got the 'ump with this bloke who murdered his family. It took a few season-ending-near-misses before he finally caught and strangled him. "End of," you'd think. Oh no, like the guest who never leaves but has nothing to say, it's dragged on and and on and on. They even broke the cardinal rule and turned some unlikely sexual tension into a relationship while spiralling into yet another crime procedural except without all the flash computers. Bring back Red John and wipe that silly grin off his face.
- Alan Perrott
Family Guy
Shameful confession: When this show first screened, I was a fan - hey, I was a teen with bad taste. Not long after it was cancelled, I was lucky enough to do a survey on TV viewing. In the survey, I lamented the loss of my favourite show Family Guy - "The psycho baby was so funny, bring it back", etc. A couple of years later, the show was brought back to life - and I hate myself deeply for it. It's definitely in the top 5 worst shows on TV today - it's offensive and not that funny.
It's now screened for 13 hellish seasons. Please make it stop. I won't go as far as wishing McFarlane was dead, but did you know he was meant to be on American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11? Imagine if he hadn't missed that flight by 10 minutes.
- Eli Orzessek
The Simpsons
You know what The Simpsons is these days? It's that fat guy in his 40s at work who dresses like he's still at university and still likes to drop words like "boom!" and "cool!" into conversations. The sad truth about The Simpsons is that it's become The Flintstones, a repetitive one-note comedy where one episode is barely distinguishable from the next. Enough of the endless, hardly ever funny celebrity cameos. Enough of the endless, hardly ever funny, pastiches of other popular films and televisions. Homer Simpson must die.
