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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,
00:42but 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,
00:55they nevertheless tried their darndest to address creative issues which many viewers took major
01:01umbrage with. I'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
01:18Sony Pictures Television. Despite their efforts, new showrunner team David Garascio and Moses Port
01:24couldn't disguise the colossal void left by Harmon, with season four amping up the ridiculous
01:29storylines, making the characters caricatures of themselves, and simply feeling like a creative
01:34enterprise desperately attempting to replicate Harmon's inimitable comic style. But Harmon was
01:40mercifully rehired for season five, with its first episode being titled Repilot, and effectively
01:46serving as a table-resetting, soft reboot for the series.
01:49Hilariously, and in Community's classic meta-storytelling style, Abed even makes numerous
01:54allusions to this fact, while 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. The implication was that all of the
02:05bizarre and out-of-character moments in season four were caused by a gas leak on campus, and that
02:10season five would represent a gas-free return to the beloved norm. If any TV show can get away with
02:16straight-up mocking its own flaws, it's definitely community.
02:19Number nine, Yesterday's Enterprise, Star Trek The Next Generation. The first of two seasons of
02:25Star Trek The Next Generation were wildly inconsistent, and one of its most baffling early episodes was
02:31season one Skin of Evil, where Lieutenant Tasha Yar was unceremoniously killed off by the tar monster
02:37Armus. Despite Tasha Yar being a prominent character, her death came totally out of nowhere as a result of
02:43Crosby requesting a release from her contract for not receiving satisfactory screen time. But rather
02:49than getting a memorably dramatic demise, she ended up killed instantly by a psychokinetic blast with
02:55all the pomp of a redshirt day player. Season three's Yesterday's Enterprise attempted to make this up to
03:00both fans and Crosby by bringing the actress back to play an alternate timeline of Tasha. Amusingly,
03:06upon learning of her lousy demise in the original timeline, Alt Tasha even calls the death senseless
03:12to Picard, and insists that if she needs to die, she wants it to count for something. The episode ends
03:18with Tasha embarking on a heroic suicide mission, giving the character a far more fitting end, at least
03:24until the season five premiere, Redemption, which reveals she survived the suicide mission, became a
03:29Romulan sex slave, gave birth to a daughter, also played by Crosby, and was later executed. Woof.
03:35Even so, it successfully remedied Tasha's underwhelming, flunky death in season one.
03:40Number eight, Day Four, 7pm to 8pm, 24.
03:44By 24's fourth season, the show would come under increasing scrutiny for its depiction of Muslims,
03:49particularly the Muslim-American Aras family, who turn out to be terrorists.
03:53The season's early episode sparked a significant outcry from organizations such as the Council on
03:59American-Islamic Relations, who felt that expressing such a sentiment mere years after 9-11
04:04would only agitate prejudices and create a toxic, hateful atmosphere for Muslims living in America.
04:10Fox ended up meeting with the council, and 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 in the season's 13th episode,
04:257pm to 8pm, where Jack Bauer finds himself teaming up with two Muslim-American store-owner
04:31brothers, Safa and Najee, to fend off a gang of mercenaries. With the brothers taking up arms
04:36with Jack and explaining they've been fighting racism their entire lives in America, it's a
04:41howlingly on-the-nose apology for the prior insensitivity, though actually a pretty fun set
04:46piece in its own right.
04:477. Blast from the Past, Dallas
04:50Dallas' eighth season concluded in shocking fashion, with Bobby Ewing being struck by a
04:55car and killed, a moment which left many fans intensely disappointed.
05:00As the writers struggled to fill the void left by his absence, Dallas' ratings took a
05:04violent dip in season 9, losing an average of more than 3 million viewers per episode
05:09compared to the previous season. Desperately scrambling to right the ship, the producers
05:14eventually reached out to bring Bobby back, resulting in the infamous season finale cliffhanger
05:19where Pam finds him alive and well in the shower. The tenth season premiere then reveals that
05:24the entire prior season had been Pam's dream, shamelessly retconning Dallas' big creative
05:29mistakes in the process. Even so, Dallas' ratings never improved, and with many expressing frustration
05:35that an entire season's worth of storytelling had effectively been wiped out in a single scene.
05:416. Tigger to Ride, Red Dwarf
05:43Red Dwarf's sixth-season finale, Out of Time, boasted an uncharacteristically dramatic cliffhanger
05:49ending, with Lister, Rimmer, Crichton, and Kat all being killed in an explosive battle against
05:54their future selves. Though the season ended with a to-be-continued title card, fans had to wait more
06:00than three agonizing years for the cliffhanger to be resolved, due to both personnel changes behind
06:05the scenes and Charles being falsely accused of sexual assault in 94. In order to appease fans
06:11infuriated by the lengthy wait, the season 7 premiere Tigger to Ride opened with Lister quickly
06:17explaining that they survived Starbug's destruction because it created a temporal paradox, that it would
06:22be logically impossible for their future selves to kill them. Lister quickly explains that time has
06:27reset to a point shortly before their deaths, at which point several jokes are made about the
06:32convoluted non-logic of their revival. Basically, the writers knew they'd written themselves into a
06:37corner and left fans hugely exasperated during the wait between seasons. So they essentially pressed
06:43the rewind button and restored the status quo as quickly as possible, logic be damned.
06:485. Scylla, Prison Break
06:51Michael Schofield's lover Sarah Tancredi received a shocking and unexpected death in Prison Break's
06:56third season episode, Good Fences, when her severed head turned up in a box. This was due to
07:02Callies and Fox failing to come to terms on a new contract, resulting in Sarah being written
07:07out and otherwise depicted with stand-in actresses. Fans were furious that a relationship they were
07:13invested in had been ripped away from them so aggressively, especially as it would have made
07:17more sense for Sarah to simply be kidnapped rather than given such a concrete send-off.
07:22But with the benefit of Prison Break being as ridiculous a show as it is, the season 4 premiere
07:27Scylla revealed that Sarah was indeed alive, and the severed head actually belonged to someone
07:32else. Yay?
07:34This wasn't even the only time Prison Break retconned a major character's death due to fan
07:38outcry, as 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, and one of
07:51the most divisive subplots occurred at the tail end of season 6, when Dexter's sister
07:56Deb realises, with the help of a therapist, that she's in love with her brother.
08:01Ugh.
08:02Fans were miffed not only by the needless ickiness of the plot, but how it just felt like a
08:07melodramatic distraction from the more compelling narrative and character elements.
08:11Thankfully, the widely acclaimed season 7 premiere, Are You?, largely brushed the incestuous
08:16illusions under the carpet, by instead having Deb discover Dexter's murderous secret with
08:21the season generally proving to be a huge improvement over season 6.
08:25Yet the less said about the 8, the better.
08:283. 20 Years to Life
08:29Roseanne
08:30Roseanne's ninth season, the last batch of episodes in its original run, was widely loathed
08:36by fans and critics alike, who felt that having the Conners win $108 million from the state
08:41lottery worked against the show's depiction of working class life.
08:45But the season finale, Into That Good Night, arguably made things worse, by revealing that
08:50the show had actually been an exaggerated fiction written by the real Roseanne.
08:54In reality, they didn't win the lottery, and her husband Dan died from his heart attack
08:59at the end of season 8.
09:00Bummer.
09:01When Roseanne was revived for a tenth season, the premiere took a well-placed pot shot at
09:06the misguided ninth season, by opening with Roseanne struggling to wake up Dan, believing
09:11him to be dead.
09:11Hilariously, when Dan wakes up, wearing a sleep apnea mask no less, he knowingly quips,
09:17why does everyone always think I'm dead?
09:19The episode also passingly throws out season 9's grim final monologue, reinstating the first
09:25eight seasons as canon and basically course-correcting the beloved sitcom in the process.
09:30Given that the show continues to thrive in its sans-Roseanne form, The Conners, where Roseanne
09:35is revealed to have died from an opiate overdose after the actress made racist comments online,
09:40it's fair to say that the apology went down swimmingly with fans.
09:432.
09:44Exposé.
09:45Lost.
09:46The characters of Nikki and Paolo were introduced early in Lost's third season, amid complaints
09:51that 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, and were near universally loathed
10:01by fans, who generally found their antics annoying and their presence excessive, as if
10:06the 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, he set about
10:16killing the pair off, as finally happened in the legendarily divisive episode Exposé.
10:21Rather than quickly killing them, though, Lindelof had an entire episode devoted to their backstories
10:26before they were given the hilariously cruel and undeniably satisfying fate of being inadvertently
10:32buried alive.
10:33As far as apologies go, it was both needlessly elaborate and uncommonly self-deprecating
10:39of a showrunner to jettison disliked characters quite so aggressively.
10:431.
10:44You're Getting Old.
10:45South Park.
10:46By the time South Park's 15th season kicked off, it's fair to say the show had settled into
10:50a fairly complacent groove, dispensing 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, creators Matt Stone and Trey
11:04Parker called working on the show a nightmare, which many fans interpreted as the duo being
11:09creatively burned out, hence the lukewarm quality of the last few seasons.
11:13This was confronted head-on in season 15's unforgettable episode, You're Getting Old,
11:19where Stan turns 10 years old and develops an overpowering sense of cynicism, viewing the
11:24world around him as though it's made of literal sh**.
11:27The episode was widely interpreted as an expression of Stone and Parker's own creative dissatisfaction,
11:33effectively an animated mea culpa, which also remains one of the show's best-regarded episodes
11:38to date.
11:39Though South Park's quality has remained wildly inconsistent ever since, it nevertheless must
11:44have been cathartic for the pair to spill their guts in such a disarming and unique way.
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