He posited that in a strictly numbers sense, there are more bad Trek episodes than there are great Trek episodes. After some teeth-gritting, I think I agree with him with the stipulation that a great episode isn’t necessarily canceled out by a really bad episode when you look at the work as a whole.
But that got me thinking: From a purely numbers standpoint, what TV series out there can make the claim to have more Good/Great episodes than bad/terrible shows? I’m having a hard time coming up with too many IF you go by the following constraints:
Must fall at least mostly into the “Drama” category (comedies don’t have to take the same risks and thus rarely have “terrible” eps).
Must have aired on a commonly-accessible network (i.e., no web-only shows).
Must have aired at least 25 episodes (too easy to cite stuff like Firefly or a mini-series otherwise).
I can’t come up with too many. Game of Thrones, probably. The Sopranos. I’ve never seen The Wire, but maybe that fits? Homeland?
I’ve got one that may seem odd, but you’ll have to trust me that it fits.
Star Wars Rebels. There is at least 4-5 episodes every season that are as good as the best of the movies. If you haven’t seen it, hit up your library and rent it (not available to legally stream anywhere I’ve seen). The Great to Bad ratio is at least 3 or 4:1.
To put in context. I have 5-7 hours every week that I can spread between games and shows/ movies. I finished both seasons in the span of a month and a half. Which is typically close to 8-10 months of TV viewing for me.
I may try and put the first 4 seasons of Babylon 5 there, but I’ve not gone through and cataloged the episodes like that, so perhaps it wouldn’t quite make the cut. But it does improve on Trek’s ratio almost certainly.
I’ll toss in a few shows I feel deserve to be in this category.
Longmire
Penny Dreadful
Chuck
Breaking Bad
Supernatural
House of Cards
Luther
The Flash (I think that barely qualifies with number of episodes, but still, I think it’s 25 or more)
Veep
And though it had a rocky first half of season 1, I feel it very much qualifies with everything past the half way mark and going forward:
Agents of SHIELD
That’s what I got off the top of my head, and because I’ve watched most of that within the last year or so. Lots of great drama these days, imo.
I didn’t mention them myself, but I did so want to put them both. Chuck is, I’d argue, both of better, and more consistent quality. Shield is more prone to having clunkers. And whether it ever reaches great is a matter of opinion. I think, especially the latest season, it does. Seasons 1 & first half of 2 I’m not sure would be of sufficient Great: Bad.
I think this is a more interesting question if applied primarily to broadcast network shows rather than prestige cable dramas. Those have tighter seasons and tend to be more consistent in overall quality. I would struggle to think of an episode I would consider bad in most of the cable dramas I watch, unless I am unconvinced by the series as a whole in which case it tends to be bad to mediocre at its best and I stop watching quickly. I guess The Magicians was pretty uneven so far, but that’s the only one off the top of my head.
Yeah, I considered that but the line is so blurry that I figured it would be tough to do, especially for cases that start off on one network and then end their run on basic cable somewhere.
I’d also hate to exclude interesting discussions on stuff like “The Walking Dead”, which I think would be an interesting case.
Maybe we could simply exclude shows that are not supported by commercials during their run? That would take HBO and Stars stuff off the table.
I remember the last couple seasons of Buffy as being kind of “meh”, myself, but it’s been a long time.
But remember the spirit of the thread - it’s not enough to be a good show overall, you have to show that it had more really great episodes than stinkers.
Let’s stipulate that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the great TV series of all time. But the question on the table is whether or not it had more truly excellent episodes than shudderingly bad ones.
Yes, Hush and The Body are fantastic, there are a huge number of really excellent Buffy episodes. But do they outnumber, say, Where the Wild Things Are (Buffy and the guy everyone hated have sex while everyone else fights off the ghosts of abused kids), or the episode where everyone is infected by hyena magic and eat a principal, or the episode where Buffy gets drunk and turns into a grunting Neanderthal?
One of the advantages of older-style TV series in which each episode is self-contained is that the good remains and the bad can be ignored. Spock’s Brain in no way harms Mirror, Mirror or The Doomsday Machine. If only a third of Trek is worth watching, heck, that’s 25 hours of quality entertainment. Can’t be bad!
