Popular TV shows you didn't watch

[golden eagle]

Last night was the series finale for Mad Men. Despite being on for seven seasons, I never saw a single episode. I also never watched Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead. I tend to not watch reality shows.

I have a coworker who never watched NCIS.

[roadman65]

I have never watched American Idol.

I never watched Friends when it was on the air.

[Henry]

I can name at least three shows that I have never watched in my lifetime: How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men.

[txstateends]

Pretty much anything primetime currently or in the recent past (due to my up-to-now overnight work schedule) or cable/sat shows (since I haven't had that service in years).  One of those I made an exception for and deliberately watched was a Law & Order: SVU.  It had an actress who hadn't had a role since her days on soap operas.  I was pleasantly surprised how good the writing was in it.

[Brian556]

I don't like Law and Order, or any of those dark, sick shows about crime and evil. I do not find that stuff entertaining. Not only do I find that stuff unpleasant to watch, to me it is disturbing that others are entertained by rape, murder, blood and gore. When I watch TV, I prefer either scientific/engineering stuff about earth sciences, buildings, or transportation; or comedy that I can laugh at. This includes The Big Bang theory, as well as reality shows like Party Down South where people get drunk and act stupid.

[Big John]

I can also say most of those mentioned along with Game of Thrones

[Scott5114]

I don't like Law and Order, or any of those dark, sick shows about crime and evil. I do not find that stuff entertaining. Not only do I find that stuff unpleasant to watch, to me it is disturbing that others are entertained by rape, murder, blood and gore.

You're not supposed to be entertained by rape, murder, blood and gore. The entertainment is watching the police track down the murderer and good triumphing over evil.

If you're sitting there trying to get entertainment out of the murder then it says more about you than it does about the show.

[roadman65]

I love Law and Order, it may be grusum at times, but yeah its good to see the cops and prosecuting lawyers do their jobs over this unstoppable evil.

Yes sometimes they plea bargain and stuff and that is what makes me sick giving one a lighter sentence so to get the other one.  Then sometimes Elliot Stabler enjoyed talking about the sick crimes in his interrogate while trying to obtain a confession was scary.  Like one time he tried to get a guy to admit he was turned on by his sister and Elliot was getting horny just telling the guy "come on admit it your sister looks hot, attractive, and so attractive you just had to have some of it."   I would be sick at that, just in the same manner Steven Siegel was in The Fire Down Below when he confronted that one bad guy who had sick feelings for his sibling where he implicated him as a sick bastard.  I would not put a man in his sick twisted frame of mind by placing myself in it.

I also did not like Benjamin Bratt either and glad he left the show after a few seasons.  Other than that the show was awesome!

[SignGeek101]

I watched a bit of Walking Dead, but fell out of it later on.

Never got into Game of Thrones.

[J N Winkler]

I have watched Breaking Bad, The Wire (seasons 1-2 only), Six Feet Under (seasons 1-2 only), and Game of Thrones, but among TV shows I have not watched that are either popular or culturally important, I can count Lost, NCIS, Battlestar Galactica, Sopranos, Sex and the City, Boardwalk Empire, and many others.  Some of them, including Sopranos and Mad Men, are on my to-watch list.  Others, like Lost, don't really interest me.  I tried The Walking Dead and disliked it, so I have not gone past the first season.  Lots of other shows that have achieved critical or commercial success, like Alias, are foot-tappers for me.

I am basically a TV completist and around 2010-2013, I went through a very intense phase of watching multiple TV series end to end (at a rate of up to three episodes per night) that I think resulted from a TV drought over the previous decade.  I reached a saturation point around 2013, however, and since then I have been very picky about what I watch, since I am less willing to tie myself down for a typical episode length of 45 to 60 minutes, and tend to find genre fiction a more attractive use of my leisure time about eight to nine times out of every ten.

There are a few TV series I still keep up with, such as Person of Interest, though I typically bunch episodes and watch them together, in arrears.  I used to be a fan of Supernatural but have cooled off on it lately since I feel the writers have reached creative exhaustion.  I learned just a few days ago that it was renewed for an eleventh season and I was actually not in favor of that.

[formulanone]

I've skipped most of them, during the last 25 years. We also don't have cable anymore, which has been replaced by kids and Netflix (although I find limited time nor interest to watch it).

My wife and I enjoyed the first season-and-a-half of Mad Men, but somewhere in that second season we found ourselves just not caring much for the characters and the plots...it just seemed a bit dry and repetitive.

We watched the first two seasons of Game of Thrones on DVD. I've read all five current books; though from what I hear, somewhere in the third season, there's a good bit of divergence from the books so as to almost be different stories.

Used to enjoy some of the Law & Order; you could reliably find an episode at nearly any hour of the day. Since it aped some of the recent news of the time, it was interesting because I'd follow newscasts more reliably.

I used to catch a "modern" (post-1999) episode of The Simpsons about once a month, but I stick to Seasons 1-9 and rarely watch 10-12. Is it popular enough anymore to belong here?

Watched an episode here and there of some of the above listed, usually just from flipping through channels. Never saw Lost, Breaking Bad, How I Met Your Mother, nor probably dozens of others.

Unfortunately, I have seen about a half-dozen episodes of NCIS at a friend's house...it might as well be 40 minutes of people kicking each other in the balls (after all, everyone's an idiot except the lead guy and the lab-coat gal) with some of the most predicatable scripts.

[bandit957]

TV now is garbage.

[algorerhythms]

TV has always been, is, and will always be garbage.

[briantroutman]

I grew up watching old shows on Nick at Nite, so I was already out of the mainstream of what was current and popular, and that separation has only increased with time. And now, the concept of sitting down and watching TV is all but irrelevant to me anyway. I might watch a half-hour with my wife during dinner if we're home, and if we're out or away somewhere, not even that. We're currently working our way through Mary Harman, Mary Harman, if that gives you a sense of my disdain for what's current and popular on TV.

[cpzilliacus]

Plenty!  I am dating myself with this list.

Bewitched
All in the Family
Good Times
The Jeffersons
Three's Company
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
The Bob Newhart Show
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Tonight Show (and shows that compete with same)
The Facts of Life
Diff'rent Strokes
Dark Shadows
Battlestar Galactica (any of them)

Any and all daytime soap operas.

EDIT:

Speaking of soap operas, Soap was another show I never watched.

And also Seinfeld (never seen an episode of it).

[english si]

My wife and I enjoyed the first season-and-a-half of Mad Men, but somewhere in that second season we found ourselves just not caring much for the characters and the plots...it just seemed a bit dry and repetitive.

I pushed through (binge watching the first two seasons helped. At least I think I did that) and it got good again, but it is a show that plods rather a lot. My watching of the last two episodes today was the first time I watched more than an episode in one sitting and didn't give up.

I'm not sure I'll miss Mad Men and, while I don't regret watching it (unlike Lost, which I was really involved with until about halfway through the finale when I slowly reached the point of wanting my hundred+ hours back), I don't think I'd have regretted not watching it - it had it's moments, but most of the time it was prestige window dressing.

We watched the first two seasons of Game of Thrones on DVD. I've read all five current books; though from what I hear, somewhere in the third season, there's a good bit of divergence from the books so as to almost be different stories.

It's still pretty small fry in Season 3. Several locations go a long way off-book for at least parts Season 4 and Season 5 has one plot that's nearly the same, a couple of plots that have been distilled to a couple of elements and then a load of plots that have merged meaning that book readers are as in the dark as anyone else about what's going to happen.

The Bland Snakes are the first truly intolerable change where the changes make no sense (even as digs to the book fans, like the changing of iconic lines that book fans had hype about) and the execution (writing, acting, direction) is rubbish. We've had badly-done stuff that made sense, stuff that made no sense but was done well, but never badly-done nonsense. And that's before you factor in HBO hyping them up massively and the many other plots that could have happened instead. If you want to see what 9 very minor characters look like after you stuff them into a sausage maker to produce one minor character that you then turn into three mid-level characters, then the Bland Snakes are them.

----

I haven't watched Breaking Bad, but a British mainstream TV channel has just (like last week) started airing it (I think some obscure satellite-only channel aired it roughly when the US did), so I might watch them via that. The Wire has sat on my 'to watch' list for a good 5 years.

Some more UK-specific ones (though the US has them): Broadchurch (also available in not-as-good US version), Call the Midwife, Mrs Browns Boys, Coronation Street (all the other big soaps I've typically done one episode of every now and then). The first two are on my summer 'to watch' list, though both seem like the Mad Men-style well crafted, plodding, drama where little happens.

I have never (and I doubt that people here have either) seen any of the singing talent shows, save one finale of XFactor because some friends invited a load of people round to watch it. However, when it comes to other mass-market shows based on different talents, I do make time for the Great British Bake Off and Strictly Come Dancing, and feel like I could do a full season of Masterchef and The Apprentice, but can never find the time for those - just the odd episode here and there (at most two a season).

[formulanone]

Plenty!  I am dating myself with this list.

Bewitched
All in the Family
Good Times
The Jeffersons
Three's Company
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
The Bob Newhart Show
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Tonight Show (and shows that compete with same)
The Facts of Life
Diff'rent Strokes
Dark Shadows

I caught most of these on syndication throughout the Eighties. The Tonight Show and Late Show w/Letterman were usually things I'd see on Friday nights only, as a kid.

The Bland Snakes are the first truly intolerable change where the changes make no sense (even as digs to the book fans, like the changing of iconic lines that book fans had hype about) and the execution (writing, acting, direction) is rubbish.

"bland snakes", and having to explain "execution" with Game of Thrones... 

[spoiler]
To be fair, even in the book it seemed like House Martell sending a street gang off to compete on an open battlefield in the Serengeti.
[/spoiler]

[bugo]

The only TV shows I've enjoyed since I was a kid are mostly cartoons: Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Beavis and Butthead, South Park, etc. I also enjoyed Chappelle's Show and Da Ali G Show.

[Duke87]

I daresay "most of them", considering I have not had any sort of TV service in my home for more than four years, and wasn't really watching anything other than sports and news on TV for years before that.

I mean if the requirement is "have never seen a single episode" than my list gets a lot shorter, but if we simply say "never made a point of watching repeatedly"... I can count on one hand the number of shows made in the past 10 years that I've seen a decent chunk of.


Rather than rattle off an insanely long list, though, here's some shows that almost everyone my age watched that I never saw much of:

The Fresh Prince of Bel Air - I wasn't allowed to watch this since my mother thought it was garbage.
All That - Wasn't allowed to watch this either, same reason.
Power Rangers - I remember when it first came out everyone was crazy obsessed with it, and so I automatically decided I hated it since I pretty quickly got sick of constantly hearing about it
Pokemon - The show was on a channel I never watched. The games were for a system I didn't own. The cards I never sought since I was already busy collecting baseball cards. So the whole "Pokemon Fever" craze never got too much of a hold of me.

[J N Winkler]

I haven't watched Breaking Bad, but a British mainstream TV channel has just (like last week) started airing it (I think some obscure satellite-only channel aired it roughly when the US did), so I might watch them via that. The Wire has sat on my 'to watch' list for a good 5 years.

I really enjoyed Breaking Bad, but it was a bit of a sleeper hit and I did not become aware of it until Newsweek (which was then still available in print) did a major profile of it shortly before the fourth season premiere.

I am afraid the spin-off series--Better Call Saul--has proved so far to be a bit of a foot-tapper for me, but that could very well reflect just a slow start, which was a problem to an extent with the first season of Breaking Bad, which spent a fair amount of time on plot developments that never really went anywhere, such as Marie's shoplifting.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have the same showrunner, but I have learned the hard way how unreliable it is to pick shows by showrunner.  I quite liked Joss Whedon's Firefly, but really hated Dollhouse, and have never been able to get into Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

As for The Wire, I found it to be fairly compelling viewing, but a common complaint even among engaged viewers is that it is like being in social studies class.  I suspect more people will be going back to it now that Martin O'Malley (the model for the political apparatchik who becomes a Baltimore city councilman and later mayor) is running for President, and fresh episodes of unrest in Baltimore itself have reminded the nation at large that its residents do not enjoy policing by consent.

Some of the current luminaries of American crime fiction, such as Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos, wrote episodes for The Wire.  I am a fan of Lehane's Kenzie/Gennaro books (the fourth of which, Gone Baby Gone, was made into a film).  Although I rarely re-read (can't step into the same river twice and all that), I've been tempted to make an exception for these.

[cpzilliacus]

As for The Wire, I found it to be fairly compelling viewing, but a common complaint even among engaged viewers is that it is like being in social studies class.  I suspect more people will be going back to it now that Martin O'Malley (the model for the political apparatchik who becomes a Baltimore city councilman and later mayor) is running for President, and fresh episodes of unrest in Baltimore itself have reminded the nation at large that its residents do not enjoy policing by consent.

The Wire was good, but IMO Homicide: Life on the Streets was better.

[Molandfreak]

I stopped watching Dexter midway through about season 3. People keep saying the first four are the ones to watch, but I really wasn't feeling it after the dynamite-perfect season 1. If they didn't continue it after that, it would have been the best series of all time in my opinion.

[thenetwork]

I tend to shy away from the modern-day "sitcoms" who use single camera scenes and no audience/laugh tracks.  For whatever reason, I really don't see them as funny as the "filmed live in front of a studio audience" shows using multiple cameras simultaneously. 

Even M*A*S*H did not seem to have the spark in the later years that the earlier "laugh-tracked" seasons had.

And when it comes to syndication, it seems that the audience/laugh tracked sitcoms (Big Bang, How I Met Your Mother, Seinfeld,...) seem to have a much longer shelf life in reruns than these supposedly successful single-camera/no audience sitcoms.  Scrubs and 30-Rock, for example didn't last too long in local syndication --- at least in my TV market -- and even Modern Family could not survive a season after our local early-evening news.  It was replaced by Inside Edition.  Most of those non-laughing shows are the first to get moved to the late-night/overnight slots -- probably good snooze enhancers. 

I had read somewhere that one actor on a former sitcom (I forget who) said that they love doing shows in front of an audience and that it takes them to the next level.  I can believe that, as again, I don't see the closed-studio sitcom performers being as good or better than their live audience counterparts.

[english si]

I also enjoyed Chappelle's Show and Da Ali G Show.

There's an extra layer on Da Ali G Show. It was a almost perfect send up (there wasn't much of the desperate loneliness - there was as much as the nature of the show could allow, but...) of a very specific subculture - it wasn't "wannabe gangstas" but "wannabe wannabe gangstas". It's a cleverness that Sascha Baron Cohen's later work lacks - sure I don't know any Kazakh TV presenters, but why is crappy racist Borat the character that people imitate (still 7 or 8 years on), rather than Ali G, who faded into obscurity as a cultural reference about 5 years after it started.

Being the right age at the time and in the right geographical location (OK, about 5-10 miles too far north), it specifically skewered a very specific type of person. Sure, in the shrapnel the generic "wannabe gangsta" types were all skewered too, but Ali G (at least originally - later he became a parody of himself) was sending up something that existed on the fringes of West London and I doubt anywhere else. There's the uniquely English class dynamics there (lower-middle vs upper-middle), there's the suburban fringe dynamics (Outer London vs Inner Home Counties) and there's ethnicity issues (South Asian vs English). Ali G is not a suburban white guy pretending to be a black member of an urban gang - he's someone who lives just beyond the surburbs and is trying to ape his cooler Asian schoolmates who live in the suburbs and pretend to be black gang members (but do it for a laugh rather than try to be cool) and, in trying to fit in, goes too far.

He's pretty much this guy (whom I went to school with from 15-16 between two expulsions for drugs offences and could find a picture of online easily as he's an acquitted terror plot suspect. Hopefully his deeply sad story has a happy ending):

Power Rangers - I remember when it first came out everyone was crazy obsessed with it, and so I automatically decided I hated it since I pretty quickly got sick of constantly hearing about it

Goodness me, that was terrible. And some how still ticking on. It was soo repetitive. I saw several episodes, but they were all the same.

Pokemon - The show was on a channel I never watched. The games were for a system I didn't own. The cards I never sought since I was already busy collecting baseball cards. So the whole "Pokemon Fever" craze never got too much of a hold of me.

The game was good*, the cards and TV show nonsense. Maybe I was too old - my brother was well into the cards and TV show because he was 10-11 when they came out, rather than 14-15.

*and cool enough that white just-beyond-the-commuter-belt wannabe gangstas who could pull it off and be cool (unlike those Ali G was making fun of) loved playing it.

[vdeane]

I don't watch much TV these days, so my list would probably be very long.  I really only bought the antenna for the local news, though there are a couple of shows that I have started following.  I don't really seek out new shows to watch; if something intrigues me, I might end up watching it, but since I never actively look for anything, the number of shows I follow or have followed is relatively low.