Dexter
Veronica Mars
Twin Peaks

I'd add Handmaid's Tale, or at least the last couple of episodes. Oh and most of Simpsons and X-Files.

Can I also add Dexter another six times.

I tried to go through series 4 and that's when I threw up my hands in a gesture of "I give up." Rarely do I decide to try watching a series in hopes that it returns to some sort of quality it had in earlier seasons. Series 4, however, suffered from among other things the writers' addiction to meaningless, onanistic complexity and pandering to the fanfic-writing catlady demographic (note: not all of these people write fanfiction or are catladies, except maybe in a spiritual sense). This show has disappeared up its own backside.

Even in the lamest comic books and soap operas three of the most grating, poorly-executed clichés known to man are

1) time travel/parallel universes

2) contrivances to allow unambiguously dead characters to come back to life

3) long-lost siblings popping out of nowhere.

In just 12 episodes Sherlock managed to fully embrace all three of these, some of them multiple times. I can only image how gruesome series 5 would be. Our heroes can do anything they want, flawlessly, whenever it's convenient for the plot, no matter how silly or pointless or needlessly complicated it is, because the Holmeses have taken the "characters who can perfectly guess everything that everyone does with 0% error except when the plot requires it" cliché up to MAXIMUM POWER LEVELS and they make skin-crawlingly unfunny quips and bitchy insults all along the way.

It feels like they got trapped in the Mycroft as John le Carre character and refused to deviate from that. While, yes, in the stories, Mycroft is a powerful bureaucrat, it's very much stated verbatim that he is of very niche capability due to his sedentary preferences. He isn't running the government, he is merely a one man think tank on very specific situations. The mistake was casting Gatiss in the role, because he kept writing himself more Mary Sue moments. The jumping of the shark was way back in season one when he had a plane full of dead people to fake a terrorist attack. That is so far from the likely role of the original Mycroft, which was probably an economist of some sort.

Time travel is cool, BHWW.

It's really too bad they went that direction with the characters. Mycroft is one of my favorite parts in the stories. Taking away the majority of his bizarre, self-indulgent, reclusive behavior totally ruins him for me. In the stories, he's basically an obese, ambition-less, anti-social oracle, whose intellectual powers exceed those of his brother. Mycroft basically lives in his mind and only wants to solve complex problems, he isn't interested in altruism like Sherlock. Also, Sherlock has far more empathy than Mycroft, which I didn't really get from the show. Do they even get into the purpose of the Diogenes Club in the show other than it being quiet in there? I always thought it was awesome that Mycroft formed an anti-social club, where members just want to read silently in comfortable chairs, and everyone ignores one another.

I knew when they got to the Reichenbach Falls incident so early on in the show (end of season 2?) that there would be trouble later on. They really burned through the best content way too early. Doyle was so bored by Sherlock by that point that he killed him off and his stories after that just aren't as compelling. I remember reading that he only brought him back for more stories because he was sick of being hounded to write more Sherlock, so his heart just wasn't in it. The series of stories that lead up to the finale by the waterfall are just so, so fun.

Oh, and I can't STAND Moriarty on the show. That might be the worst part. What they did with him is just... terrible. Terrible. His monologues are POE-worthy. GOOD DAY, MR CUE-BRICK level material.

Also, Basil Rathbone is my Sherlock.

It's clear that Gatiss wanted to play George Smiley but didn't get past the first audition.

My feelings exactly. Despite enjoying the show, it's always felt slightly off to me; I would love to hear theories as to what's wrong with it. But an hour and a half? Fuck that. This guy is no Mr. Plinkett.

This and the catlady pandering is exactly what happened to Dexter.

Also, can we call out the Christmas special as The End? It was appalling.

Honestly he fanservice was what kept me watching through season 3 (never bothered with 4). It was kind of fun seeing how obvious it was that by the everyone involved knew their core audience was people who were imagining Holmes and Watson fucking the whole time and they had to play to them.

In Dexter's defense, the final season was less "functional storytelling weighed down by fanservice" and more of a "horrible pumpkin song that murders children by making snakes shoot out their eyeballs ala Halloween III: Season of the Witch".