TV Obsessive
Most Disappointing New or Returning TV Series of 2020
We’re a bit closer to a consensus on this one, though it might also cause some people to yell at us. Feel free! But of course disappointment relates to one’s expectations going in. Read on to find out what we felt let down by this year.
Andrew Grevas: Lovecraft Country
I wanted so much to like Lovecraft Country. I really did. There were moments and even episodes that I strongly liked. I thought the pilot was one of the best pilot episodes that I had seen in recent memory. It was just very inconsistent and that to me was frustrating. In full disclosure, I still haven’t even finished the season because I simply became too frustrated and in this day and age where we have more content to choose from than ever before, a string of mediocre episodes just wasn’t doing it for me. Perhaps this show was a victim of its own hype and I should revisit it after some time removed but for now, I have to classify it as a disappointment.
Photograph by Elizabeth Morris/HBOChristopher Blackmore: Space Force
Completely unfunny. I think the problem with it was just how unrelatable everything seemed. I didn’t stick with it, which is never a good sign and I had hoped for so much more.
Simon McDermott: Hanna Season 2
Being a fan of the original movie, I was apprehensive about a TV version of Hanna. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the first series with its great cast and grittier tone. Unfortunately, this meant that the second season was all the more disappointing. Having lost the main man Joel Kinnaman and the first half of the series focusing on a bizarre and dull plot centred around a school for teenage female assassins, it seems that when going off-script from the movie, creator David Farr couldn’t think of an interesting place to go next. It does get a lot better in the climax of the season but it just leaves you wondering why they didn’t just start from that point in the first place.
Brien Allen: Avenue 5
Honestly, I’ve largely relegated my memories of Avenue 5 to the trash heap of my mind, and I’m not even sure I want to dredge them up to remember what exactly was so awful about it. While our own Hawk Ripjaw seemed to really like the show, a quick check of Rotten Tomatoes tells me that I’m in decent company on the flip side, with a 52% Audience Score. OK, well, here we go.
The premise certainly has potential. A luxury spaceliner has a technical glitch that is going to force the journey home to take years instead of months. Upon learning their fate, the crew and passengers flip flop back and forth between turning on each other and coming together as a team. Kind of like the second half of Wall-E, gone bad.
Unlike Wall-E however, all of the characters are just so gosh-darned unlikeable. There’s no one to root for here, not even Hugh Laurie’s lead character. Everyone is a caricature. The leader of the passengers is literally named Karen. The crew turn out to all be vapid, brain-dead actors. The CEO of the spaceliner company is an Elon Musk type gone mad. When people get themselves ejected out of the airlock, you find yourself cheering…and wishing the inner hatch wasn’t so secure.
I know this is what passes for humor these days. The show tries to highlight all of our worst qualities as human beings and play them for laughs. Kind of the intersection of dark humor and dark mirror, I suppose you could say. This kind of thing just doesn’t appeal to me. It only makes me sad. Because let’s face it, a month later the pandemic showed us all too well that this is exactly how we would behave. All too prescient.
Runners up: Doctor Who Season 12, Lovecraft Country
Derrick Gravener: Run
Killing Eve comes to mind, mainly because I feel like they’ve run out of things for Eve (Sandra Oh) to do (which sucks because Sandra Oh still doesn’t have an Emmy after twelve nominations!). But sure give me a Villanelle (Jodie Comer) capsule episode and a bus kiss between the two leads and maybe it’ll be enough to make me forget how lack-lustre Season 3 was. The final few episodes of The Flight Attendant also really come to mind, but my overall winner for dud of the year has to go to HBO’s Run. It turned in six stunning episodes (and a delightful pairing in leads Merritt Wever and Domhnall Gleeson) only to turn in a seventh and final episode which I can safely call one of worst finales in modern history. Betrayal always feels bigger when you’re invested.
Caemeron Crain: Lovecraft Country
There are unfortunately a few contenders in my mind for the most disappointing of the year, at least one of which I wrote about, but I have chosen Lovecraft Country in large part because I feel like I have something to say about it.
I hate the fact that I was ultimately disappointed by this show. Part of it stems from how hyped I was about it not just before it premiered but shortly after. The first episode was excellent, and the second, while it felt a bit uneven to me, continued to keep me excited and had some really great elements (see: the use of “Whitey on the Moon”).
Unlike Andrew, I did watch the entire season. At its best, Lovecraft Country explored U.S. history and juxtaposed its endemic racism with horror tropes in a way that made clear who the real monsters were (spoiler alert: it’s the racists). Indeed, some of the later episodes in the season are so good that I will continue to recommend the show…but with caveats.
I think Lovecraft Country is best viewed as a series of interconnected short stories. Unfortunately, these are better the further away they get from the “main plot” that runs through the season. “Jig-a-Bobo” is, for example, an absolutely superb hour of TV, with a tight pace and felt stakes both in terms of the characters involved and socio-historical implications. I wonder what it would be like to watch that episode without context and in fact, I encourage you to do so and let me know what you think.
The latter half of the season is so good that when Andrew and others started telling me they had given up I cajoled them to keep going. But then I watched the finale and simply fell silent. All of the worries that I wasn’t sure were criticisms came to the fore: the inconsistency of the show’s pacing, the uncertainty about what the overarching plot was and whether I cared about it, etc.
As much as I hate unnecessary exposition (e.g., scenes where one character tells another what they are doing merely for the sake of the audience), it was so unclear what was happening in Lovecraft Country’s final hour that I have to say this wasn’t trusting the audience so much as it was bad storytelling. And then the show commits what to me is the cardinal sin: it asks you not to think about it too much.
Do the actions of the characters make sense? Maybe if you don’t think about it too much. Is the result that they achieve a good one to be celebrated? It feels like it if you don’t think about it too much. If you do, things begin to fall apart rather quickly, and given Lovecraft Country’s historical setting I’m not even sure whether I should be thinking about the end as a part of an alternate history or a secret history of the world we inhabit.
At the end of the day, I do recommend Lovecraft Country and hope that maybe if you’re armed with these thoughts going in you’ll do a better job of accepting the show for what it is than I did. It’s a series of short stories, some of which are better than the others and the best of which focus on characters you might otherwise be tempted to think are “minor.” It plays with genre to varied effect—I, for one, had a furrowed brow for the duration of the Indiana Jones-style episode, but maybe you’ll like it—but if you realize that’s what it’s doing perhaps you can look past that. Its overall plot is muddy, and its message a bit unclear.
And so it’s the most disappointing show of the year for me not because it was bad but because it had the elements to brush against greatness but failed. If there is a second season, the show might be best served by embracing even more of an anthology format and abjuring its attempts to make everything hang together.
