TV shows that started off good and got lousy.
Coinstartled
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Andy Griffith Show - Cannot replace Fife.
Bewitched - ditto Dick York
The Simpsons. Stuck around for way too many years.
Saturday Night Live. It was always kind of lousy when Eddie Murphy wasn't around.
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SNL is completely unwatchable these days, there was a brief revival in the Sandler/Farley/Spade era, but original cast through Murphy era were the best years.
X-Files was pretty awful the last year or two, especially whichever year they had a different producer/director for every episode with no continuity whatsoever. It was just random fanfic.
All of them.
Lost in Space probably the best example.
Sanford and Son
Terry Bradshaw was AMAZING!!
Ignore list -Basebal21
After the originals went their way, SNL just wasn't the same.
Monday Night Football, on many levels.
I loved x files until moulder left.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
really how could you top Kosell, Dandy Don and Gifford? It's almost like your poker table story, no place to go but down
The Late Show and The Tonight show. You just can't replace the personalities of Carson, Letterman, and Leno.
True Detective on HBO. The first season, starring Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson was great.
After they left it became unwatchable.
You're confusing me with Perk.
I got the craps table.
Mike and Molly
It started off funny, but then got silly.
The stars are both talented. I saw Kevin James live in Los Vegas. It was supposed to be a show staring James and Ray Romano. The tickets were sold weeks in advance based on that. Romano could not make it because of a death in the family. James had to appear alone.
It could have been ugly, but James, who is not known as an impersonator, mimicked Romano’s voice perfectly. If you closed your eyes, you would sworn Romano was there. It was an amazing.
any show where after a few years they have the main characters fall in love.
Is it a cop show? I don't need to watch them raise kids , solve a friggin murder
Someone was ragging on mash the other day , I agree . Its a comedy , I don't need the sensitive hawkeye crap.
how ever the show started , that is what the audience liked about it. If its a funny show or a drama or whatever , keep it that way or shut it down
It’s my poker table, and there have been some very good games on it since my Straight Flush! I won $900 one night and that was over a year after I got the table, opening night I only made about $400
sorry about the mixup. Guess you could draw a Royal still. As long as you wind up on the plus side more often than you don't.
Yep. The exceptions are very, very rare.
The Jeopardy answers get more bizarre with time. i will miss old Alex though.
Paul if you ever decide to go play the 10k buy-in main event at the WSOP in Vegas, and want backers, i'll take a piece of that.
Ofcourse you know I’m only bragging about winning nights. Nary a word about the bad ones 😏
It must be difficult to keep coming up with interesting or funny stories week after week.
The shows that seem to last a long time have a combination of good writers and a strong cast, or at the very least a popular lead actor/comedian.
Wide world of sports remained good as I recall.
Yea but home game poker is different from the other types of gambling games that make casinos and bookies rich, but gamblers poor. With home game poker, the best players will consistently make money in the long run.
I have a feeling that based on your outstanding background in law enforcement and numerous intelligent posts here over the years, that you are one of the long term winners in your home game.
My idea came from, i forget his name, it was maybe ten years ago, a guy finished second in the WSOP main event. He was staked by his buddies, and he stated that in his home poker game, that he was only the 4th best player. And here he wound up making millions at the WSOP. I watched his play at the final table. He was actually a very competent poker player.
So i quickly thought, stake Paul 1k, and if he makes it to the final table, minimum i've made 100k. If he goes deeper at the table, the money keeps multiplying.
Most important of all, i can fully trust Paul with paying his backers, and not even worry about it.
You need that, and you need to resist the temptation to have your characters change. With all due respect to those who didn't like Seinfeld, it was one of the greatest shows in history because it started with four self-centered snarky characters and ended with the same four self-centered snaky characters. They didn't "evolve" to become nice, and nobody contrived to write in any love interest (long-term, anyway), or a baby, or any other major change. If you've got a funny show, don't fix what isn't broken. If you run out of funny story ideas, let the show end.
Now and then, Alex gives the answer, and I still don’t know.
<<< fix what isn't broken >>>
Exactly right.
It wasn't the show's fault, but when Larry David left, i think it was the final two seasons, the show did lose it's unique comedy edge a bit. The show at times was starting to revert to sit-com formula comedy. Larry David was a pure comedy genius who couldn't be replaced because his personality was the show.
i'm glad that Jerry Seinfeld ended the show rather than have it eventually degrade into oblivion. Although the other three stars i think were making a million dollars an episode, so they would have continued to perform there no matter what the show quality.
Kardashians took rather drastic measures to keep the ratings up.
Can't stand the "it rhymes with a soft drink and ends with a prime number" type answers. How about sticking to stuff like history and swing era bandleaders.
Just saw the episode of MASH where they find an injured horse patch it up and give it to Col. Potter. The look on Potters face when he sees the horse was amazing.
DAMN GOOD!
I liked the entire run of the show. I guess it got a little less funny as it went along, but I enjoyed all the characters.
Was a terrific show!
Boom.
.
where's the rest of the clip where he turns around and slugs Frank!!!!!
So, Paul...when do we get invited to trek to the frozen north to play on this infamous table??
I assume you'll provide a mid game break and have lobstahs, clams and ample Crown Royal, or Boston's best beer for the crowd.
I played last night. Terrible cards except for a few hands. Me, with ace/queen, catch a set of aces on the flop...another guy also makes a set of aces...he rivers me for the full house, as I watch my chips go elsewhere. Guy next to me had pocket jacks...ends up with 4 jacks. My cards were dismal, like jack/3 off, 9/2 off, 2/3 suited, but just chump cards. I'm sure I'm the only one this ever happens to.
I normally stay for the second game, but the crappy cards, and the incessant opening of the side door at the club, letting in ice cold air for the smokers to ruin their lungs left a little to be desired, so, I headed home.
worst that can happen is getting second best cards all night.
Bad beats don't get much worse than this.
you'll never be able to outrun a bad diet
Live, my worst was playing limit and ended up on the low end of quad v. quad where I flopped quads and they flopped a boat and rivered quads. Thankfully, there was a 'bad beat' jackpot that I still won ~$200 on from that hand. Online, I've done enough tens of thousands of hands to have seen just about everything imaginable.
Oh yea, i of course agree with ya about the "type" of bad beat you posted is definitely worse.
The one i posted though was on the very first hand of the WSOP main event.
At least the quad aces loser got some action in the tourney. The other poor guy hardly got to feel the cards and chips.
Oh well, as the old saying goes, there is no justice in poker. ♠️
I'd honestly rather go out like that on the first hand than grind for 5 days and have that happen as the bubble boy.
Well that certainly is a choice of the two poisons isn't it? LOL
60 minutes was a good show for a decade.
In my old age I'm so slow it takes me an hour and a half to watch 60 minutes.
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Ralph
Arrogant mutt!
I love SNL.
Seinfeld changed plenty; all the characters changed significantly as the show went on. I agree it’s a great show - one of my favorites and perhaps number one - but is not the exception to the rule. All four underwent significant changes; Perhaps none more dramatic than Kramer who went from a reclusive guy who ‘hadn’t left the building in ten years’ to the most popular man in NY, saying hi to dozens as he walked though the neighborhood, appearing on CK billboard in Times Square and plugging a book on Regis and Kathy Lee!!!!
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I'll grant you Kramer, but his transformation was complete before the first season was even over. As for the others, I'm not seeing it; I don't think they changed an iota. What are the "significant changes" that you saw in Jerry, George, and Elaine?
@dallasactuary
George - went from a loser who couldn’t get a date or job to steady employment and a new attractive woman each week.
Elaine - went from a single friend of Jerry’s looking for the right guy to, by series end, the village bicycle running through Today sponges by the case!
Jerry - probably changed the least of anyone but I think in the early years he served as the voice of reason and the guy shaking his head at the others and by the end he was just like the other three.
I agree that they were shallow people at the inception of the show but by the end, they were shallow to a ridiculous degree and it only increased as the series went on.
Seinfeld is not alone. Shows that are on long enough have characters that become caricatures of themselves by the series end. As an example from another huge 90s hit, Friends, it’s hard to envision intelligent, quiet, shy Ross being the same guy in later seasons in leather pants and covered in cream and powder and sliding around a bathroom like a total idiot (a true Jump the Shark moment on that show).
It’s how TV works now - give the audience what they want. The more ridiculous and outrageous, the better. So normal characters doing normal things (Kramer hooking up with a friend of Jerry’s and going to a Knick game and awkward aftermath) becomes crazy characters doing crazy things (Kramer hires a Columbia student to throw oils drums out a NYC window).
Shall I continue?
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I didn't check further, but George had three different girlfriends in the first 10 episodes of Season 1. You're just remembering that part of it wrong. And George had several jobs and intervening periods of unemployment throughout the show. He did eventually stay with the Yankees for quite a while, but my point was not that the writer's didn't change anything about the show, it was that they didn't change George. And they surely didn't. They rarely got into what George was actually doing for the Yankees, but whenever they did it was something different and George was doing it wrong. That George managed not to get fired was a big part of the joke, because he was the same George who was, deservedly, unemployed most of the time.
You're making a distinction between "looking for the right guy" and "village bicycle" that doesn't exist. The way Elaine "looked for the right guy" was by sleeping with every guy she met; throughout the entire run of the series the only boyfriend she had for more than one episode was Puddy, and he was never a candidate for "the right guy". And the series began in the immediate aftermath of Jerry and Elaine breaking up.
Jerry was always just like the other three, and he shook his head at the others from episode one to the very end.
As the show went on year after year, you got to witness them being identically shallow in more and more situations, and the perception of their shallowness got reinforced more and more. They didn't get more shallow, their shallowness just got harder to ignore.
The Friends characters all changed, so it's not a good comparison with Seinfeld.
Kramer evolved from a background ancillary character to a full cast member over the course of season 1, but even in season 1 he was filling a washing machine with cement as revenge. In Season 2 he was dancing to tribal music and injuring himself on a "table" that he had made out of a discarded windshield. Which of Kramer's antics are more "crazy" than others is just perception; I don't see it, and I don't see that the writers intended you to see what you saw.
No, I don't think you should bother. The entire point of the series finale was to point out how the characters never changed over the entire run of the show, and whatever flaws that finale may have had, they did hammer home that point.
I have very carefully read all of this about Seinfeld and I still don't think it was a very funny show, except for Kramer.
They were all shallow and annoying, I just don't find that funny. I get enough shallow and annoying in everyday living.
@dallasactuary
Elaine goes from waxing poetic about great film and literature in full length floral dresses and long hair in the first half of the show to looking like a greasy street walker while eagerly going to see Sack Lunch starring Dabney Coleman. Again, they played up her promiscuity more and more as the show went on. It was overt, not subtle. A change.
Jason Alexander, the actor, has gone on record as saying he literally changed the way he played the character - and that change was in the writing as well - as he learned just how much the character was based on Larry David. He starts out the series basically being Woody Allen and changes into being Larry David. There are certainly a few similarities in the comic styles of Allen and David but the differences are pretty stark, too.
Certainly, a change.
Many more of these types changes occurred when Larry David left the show for a time. The writing suffered big time and these seasons featured some of the more ridiculous plot lines of the series. Still very funny, but not like at the peak of the show.
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