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These TV shows tried to make it up to fans.
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00:00Producing a TV show that's continuously satisfying is no easy feat,
00:04given that it requires showrunners and producers to deliver as many as two dozen episodes per year
00:09to insatiable audiences. It goes without saying that failures are near inevitable,
00:14and practically every TV series in existence has had episodes, or even entire seasons,
00:19that just fall a little short of the mark. Sometimes these offenses are egregious enough
00:24that those in charge actually attempt to deliver a thinly veiled on-screen apology to loyal fans.
00:29Whether course-correcting a wonky subplot, killing off a much-loathed character,
00:33or in more extreme instances, literally retconning dead characters back into existence.
00:38It's always risky when a show blatantly draws attention to its own creative failings,
00:43but it can also serve as an olive branch to fans, to remind them that yes,
00:47the people in charge are listening, and sometimes things just don't go as well as planned.
00:51Whether or not these apologies actually pulled each of these series out of the doldrums,
00:56they nevertheless tried their darndest to address creative issues,
00:59which many viewers took major umbrage with.
01:01I'm Jess from WhatCulture, these are 10 TV episodes that were blatant apologies.
01:0710. Repilot Community
01:09After enjoying three seasons under the steady hand of showrunner Dan Harmon,
01:14Community's fourth season saw Harmon relieved of his position following creative tensions with Sony Pictures Television.
01:20Despite their efforts, new showrunner team David Garascio and Moses Port couldn't disguise the colossal void left by Harmon,
01:27with season four amping up the ridiculous storylines, making the characters caricatures of themselves,
01:33and simply feeling like a creative enterprise desperately attempting to replicate Harmon's inimitable comic style.
01:39But Harmon was mercifully rehired for season five, with its first episode being titled Repilot,
01:45and effectively serving as a table-resetting, soft reboot for the series.
01:49Hilariously, and in Community's classic meta-storytelling style,
01:53Abed even makes numerous allusions to this fact,
01:56while Harmon's script more overtly apologises to fans for the previous season
02:00by having Annie mention a gas leak which occurred the prior year.
02:04The implication was that all of the bizarre and out-of-character moments in season four
02:08were caused by a gas leak on campus,
02:10and that season five would represent a gas-free return to the beloved norm.
02:14If any TV show can get away with straight-up mocking its own flaws,
02:17it's definitely Community.
02:19Number nine, Yesterday's Enterprise, Star Trek The Next Generation.
02:23The first of two seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation were wildly inconsistent,
02:28and one of its most baffling early episodes was season one Skin of Evil,
02:33where Lieutenant Tasha Yar was unceremoniously killed off by the tar monster Armus.
02:38Despite Tasha Yar being a prominent character,
02:41her death came totally out of nowhere,
02:42as a result of Crosby requesting a release from her contract
02:46for not receiving satisfactory screen time.
02:49But rather than getting a memorably dramatic demise,
02:51she ended up killed instantly by a psychokinetic blast
02:54with all the pomp of a redshirt day player.
02:57Season three's Yesterday's Enterprise attempted to make this up to both fans and Crosby
03:02by bringing the actress back to play an alternate timeline of Tasha.
03:05Amusingly, upon learning of her lousy demise in the original timeline,
03:10alt Tasha even calls the death senseless to Picard,
03:13and insists that if she needs to die, she wants it to count for something.
03:17The episode ends with Tasha embarking on a heroic suicide mission,
03:21giving the character a far more fitting end,
03:23at least until the season five premiere, Redemption,
03:26which reveals she survived the suicide mission,
03:29became a Romulan sex slave, gave birth to a daughter,
03:32also played by Crosby, and was later executed.
03:34Woof.
03:35Even so, it successfully remedied Tasha's underwhelming,
03:38flunky death in season one.
03:40Number eight, Day 4, 7pm to 8pm, 24.
03:44By 24's fourth season, the show would come under increasing scrutiny
03:47for its depiction of Muslims,
03:49particularly the Muslim-American Araz family,
03:52who turn out to be terrorists.
03:54The season's early episodes sparked a significant outcry
03:57from organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations,
04:00who felt that expressing such a sentiment mere years after 9-11
04:04would only agitate prejudices and create a toxic, hateful atmosphere
04:08for Muslims living in America.
04:10Fox ended up meeting with the Council,
04:12and Starkey for Sutherland even recorded a pre-episode PSA
04:16to remind viewers that Muslims hate terrorism as much as everyone else.
04:20But Fox also made a more overt attempt to redress the balance
04:23in the season's 13th episode, 7pm to 8pm,
04:27where Jack Bauer finds himself teaming up with two Muslim-American store-owner brothers,
04:32Safa and Najee,
04:33to fend off a gang of mercenaries.
04:35With the brothers taking up arms with Jack
04:37and explaining they've been fighting racism their entire lives in America,
04:41it's a howlingly on-the-nose apology for the prior insensitivity,
04:45though actually a pretty fun set piece in its own right.
04:477. Blast from the Past, Dallas
04:50Dallas' eighth season concluded in shocking fashion
04:53with Bobby Ewing being struck by a car and killed,
04:57a moment which left many fans intensely disappointed.
05:00As the writers struggled to fill the void left by his absence,
05:03Dallas' ratings took a violent dip in season 9,
05:06losing an average of more than 3 million viewers per episode
05:09compared to the previous season.
05:11Desperately scrambling to right the ship,
05:13the producers eventually reached out to bring Bobby back,
05:16resulting in the infamous season finale cliffhanger
05:19where Pam finds him alive and well in the shower.
05:22The tenth season premiere then reveals that the entire prior season had been Pam's dream,
05:27shamelessly retconning Dallas' big creative mistakes in the process.
05:31Even so, Dallas' ratings never improved,
05:34and with many expressing frustration that an entire season's worth of storytelling
05:38had effectively been wiped out in a single scene.
05:416. Tika da Ride – Red Dwarf
05:43Red Dwarf's six-season finale, Out of Time,
05:46boasted an uncharacteristically dramatic cliffhanger ending,
05:49with Lister, Rimmer, Crichton, and Kat all being killed in an explosive battle against their future selves.
05:56Though the season ended with a to-be-continued title card,
05:59fans had to wait more than three agonizing years for the cliffhanger to be resolved,
06:04due to both personnel changes behind the scenes
06:06and Charles being falsely accused of sexual assault in 94.
06:10In order to appease fans infuriated by the lengthy wait,
06:13the season seven premiere, Tika da Ride,
06:15opened with Lister quickly explaining that they survived Starbug's destruction
06:19because it created a temporal paradox,
06:22that it would be logically impossible for their future selves to kill them.
06:26Lister quickly explains that time has reset to a point shortly before their deaths,
06:30at which point several jokes are made about the convoluted non-logic of their revival.
06:34Basically, the writers knew they'd written themselves into a corner
06:38and left fans hugely exasperated during the wait between seasons.
06:42So they essentially pressed the rewind button
06:44and restored the status quo as quickly as possible.
06:47Logic be damned.
06:495. Scylla, Prison Break
06:51Michael Schofield's lover Sarah Tancredi received a shocking and unexpected death
06:55in Prison Break's third season episode, Good Fences,
06:59when her severed head turned up in a box.
07:01This was due to Callies and Fox failing to come to terms on a new contract,
07:06resulting in Sarah being written out and otherwise depicted with stand-in actresses.
07:11Fans were furious that a relationship they were invested in
07:13had been ripped away from them so aggressively,
07:16especially as it would have made more sense for Sarah to simply be kidnapped
07:19rather than given such a concrete send-off.
07:22But with the benefit of Prison Break being as ridiculous a show as it is,
07:26the season four premiere, Scylla, revealed that Sarah was indeed alive,
07:30and the severed head actually belonged to someone else.
07:33Yay?
07:34This wasn't even the only time Prison Break retconned a major character's death due to fan outcry,
07:39as Michael himself was brought back from the dead for the hilariously absurd fifth season.
07:444. Are you?
07:46Dexter
07:46There's no denying that Dexter ran totally off the rails in its later seasons,
07:51and one of the most divisive subplots occurred at the tail end of season six,
07:55when Dexter's sister Deb realises, with the help of a therapist,
07:59that she's in love with her brother.
08:01Ugh.
08:02Fans were miffed not only by the needless ickiness of the plot,
08:06but how it just felt like a melodramatic distraction
08:08from the more compelling narrative and character elements.
08:11Thankfully, the widely acclaimed season seven premiere, Are You?,
08:14largely brushed the incestuous illusions under the carpet,
08:17by instead having Deb discover Dex's murderous secret,
08:21with the season generally proving to be a huge improvement over season six.
08:25Yet the less said about the eight, the better.
08:283. 20 Years to Life
08:29Roseanne
08:30Roseanne's ninth season, the last batch of episodes in its original run,
08:34was widely loathed by fans and critics alike,
08:38who felt that having the Conners win $108 million from the state lottery
08:42worked against the show's depiction of working-class life.
08:45But the season finale, Into That Good Night, arguably made things worse,
08:49by revealing that the show had actually been an exaggerated fiction
08:52written by the real Roseanne.
08:54In reality, they didn't win the lottery,
08:57and her husband Dan died from his heart attack at the end of season eight.
09:01Bummer.
09:01When Roseanne was revived for a tenth season,
09:04the premiere took a well-placed pot shot at the misguided ninth season
09:07by opening with Roseanne struggling to wake up Dan,
09:10believing him to be dead.
09:11Hilariously, when Dan wakes up, wearing a sleep apnea mask no less,
09:16he knowingly quips,
09:17Why does everyone always think I'm dead?
09:19The episode also passingly throws out season nine's grim final monologue,
09:24reinstating the first eight seasons as canon,
09:26and basically course-correcting the beloved sitcom in the process.
09:30Given that the show continues to thrive in its sans-Roseanne form, The Conners,
09:34where Roseanne is revealed to have died from an opiate overdose
09:37after the actress made racist comments online,
09:40it's fair to say that the apology went down swimmingly with fans.
09:432. Exposé.
09:45Lost.
09:46The characters of Nikki and Paolo were introduced early in Lost's third season,
09:50amid complaints that the series didn't show enough of Oceanic Flight 815's other survivors.
09:55Nikki and Paolo appeared in 14 of the season's episodes,
09:58and were near universally loathed by fans,
10:02who generally found their antics annoying and their presence excessive,
10:06as if the writers were compensating for the absence of peripheral survivors in the first two seasons.
10:11And so, once showrunner Damon Lindelof caught wind of the online sentiment,
10:15he set about killing the pair off,
10:17as finally happened in the legendarily divisive episode Exposé.
10:21Rather than quickly killing them, though,
10:23Lindelof had an entire episode devoted to their backstories
10:26before they were given the hilariously cruel
10:28and undeniably satisfying fate of being inadvertently buried alive.
10:34As far as apologies go,
10:35it was both needlessly elaborate and uncommonly self-deprecating
10:39of a showrunner to jettison disliked characters quite so aggressively.
10:42By the time South Park's 15th season kicked off,
10:49it's fair to say the show had settled into a fairly complacent groove,
10:52dispensing a more comfortable and predictable brand of satire,
10:55which some fans and critics felt had lost its razor-sharp edge.
10:59In an interview published on the eve of season 14's premiere,
11:02creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker called working on the show a nightmare,
11:07which many fans interpreted as the duo being creatively burned out,
11:11hence the lukewarm quality of the last few seasons.
11:14This was confronted head-on in season 15's unforgettable episode,
11:18You're Getting Old,
11:19where Stan turns 10 years old
11:20and develops an overpowering sense of cynicism,
11:24viewing the world around him as though it's made of literal s***.
11:27The episode was widely interpreted as an expression
11:30of Stone and Parker's own creative dissatisfaction,
11:33effectively an animated mea culpa,
11:35which also remains one of the show's best-regarded episodes to date.
11:39Though South Park's quality has remained wildly inconsistent ever since,
11:43it nevertheless must have been cathartic for the pair to spill their guts
11:47in such a disarming and unique way.
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