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movies/tv The moment you knew a show was going downhill


Kyoshi Frost Wolf

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Sometimes, shows stay great for a long time. I think, while FiM has had its hardcore fumbles, it has stayed mostly good throughout the years. Some may disagree and that is fine, this topic can be for that too. Some other shows, though, clearly started out really good but somewhere had an obvious downhill spiral that occurred perhaps during a season or even a single episode. From that point we knew the obvious, it was going in a bad direction.

 

That is the question here. If a show you thought was good before but then it sorta went bleh, what was the turning point that you saw?

 

For me, a very sad case of this is Spongebob. I mean, we have a show that had 3 seasons of wonderful episodes, and looking back, it also had tons of excellent subtle humor. As most of you know, the show really started to go downhill eventually and it fell hard. When I look at the seasons in depth, the clear turning point that I see is the middle of season 4. After the first movie was made, which was going to be the big grand finale for the entire show, the original creators left when the show was renewed again. This resulted in a few good episodes during season 4, which who knows, those could have been episodes written by the creators before they left. Then we got a bunch of terrible episodes, with each season getting worse. I have heard the show is better now, but I think the damage has been done and it has lost the charm that it once had.

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I don't watch a lot of TV, so I've not seen many shows, certainly not long enough to see downward spirals start for them, but there's some.

FiM may still be mostly good, but I think it has definitely begun a downward spiral. Some might say this started at the end of S3, but for me it really began when Starlight Glimmer became a main cast member. It's understandable, really. No show that has character growth can last as long as the ones that don't need it- I see Starlight as being introduced as a main cast member to give another character we can see grow and develop, because so much character growth has happened to the other main cast members.

 

Doctor Who is an interesting case, as it doesn't have so much to worry about re characters becoming stale, thanks to the possibility of a complete overhaul of the cast (though it still can run into this- Clara). The quality of the writing also comes and goes, with the latest season being one of, if not the best, of Moffat's era as showrunner, with only two weak episodes.

 

Sherlock is another related case- the writing has also declined, although I believe this to be for an entirely different reason than for most shows- a case of exceedingly difficult writing in the first place (those adaptations are not easy to do!) and time constraints due to everyone involved being rather busy with other projects. There's yet to be a reversal (as seen with Doctor Who though that can easily go the other way again) and it's hard to see how there can be one.

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FiM when they aired Ne...fuck it, I should really probably stop

 

Family Guy when it was revived funny enough

 

Likewise, the Simpsons when Family Guy blew up and tried to mimic them

 

Fairly Odd Parents when they introduced Poof

 

And, while I wouldn't say it went downhill since I enjoyed the series through to the end, Rugrats lost some of it's luster when it was revived with the 4th season 

Edited by Reinbow Dash
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The Fairly Oddparents has been pointlessly introducing new characters instead of developing existing ones. Plus with increasing reliance on contemporary pop culture (YouTube, smartphones, duck face, selfies, even Channel Chasers is dated to 2004), FOP becomes more dated with each new episode now. As of The Big Fairy Share Scare, it's officially hit rock bottom and SpongeBob has more dignity than FOP.

Edited by The MegaBrony
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I'm not a TV enthusiast and I like the show for what it is. What really bothers me sometimes is the pessimism bronies have about the show. The quality is probably going down, but the responses are overly dramatic

 

(I'm not a TV watcher and anyone can probably explain in detail why the show's getting worse. Go ahead if you want to. I've kept enjoying the show, but maybe that's my stupid opinion)

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Probably the first one to mention is JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The 2012 series was incredible. A wild story with fun settings, characters (character names, too!), action, and a less formulaic story. When Stardust Crusader's came around, things changed significantly. The story-telling was changed entirely, it shifted from the less formulaic story of the original to an almost entirely episodic nature, while still trying to tell an overarching adventure story. This does not work for me. It works better in Diamond is Unbreakable because DiU is not an adventure story and most of its story can work okay that way... but I still don't know why this change was made.

 

Futurama went downhill the instant they rebooted it. I didn't even enjoy the movies like I did the initial seasons. Although it's been a while since I've watched any of it, when I think about it I just remember it not being anywhere near as funny as the original seasons. Jokes like the "Susan Boil" joke in that Eyephone episode are particularly cringeworthy. With the movies they began to display a tendency toward violent shock humor that is typical of Family Guy. I am not amused by it.

 

FiM went downhill the instant it started wanting to pander to the Brony fandom. I'm not even talking Slice of Life here, although I think I've made my opinion on how much I hate that episode clear. It was before that, when the show started relying on meme characters.

 

I think that the new Doctor Who series went downhill when Smith became the Doctor. They started doing so much that didn't make sense to me, stuff that didn't have any follow-up at all. And some of the concepts introduced into the show earlier were changed, and not for the better, like the Angels.

 

To be fair, I still enjoyed it and have really liked what I've seen of the most recent Doctor.

Edited by Envy
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It just so happened that SpongeBob's fall from grace coincided with that sort of "too cool for cartoons" phase that I went through that a lot of other kids did as well; in the mid-00s, the only cartoons I watched were adult cartoons, Christmas specials, and Pixar movies. When I came back and watched it later the episodes just never seemed to have the timing and rewatch value, and of course the Flanderized characters stuck out badly.

 

I also stopped watching Family Guy after I found out about the Sarah Palin and Terri Schiavo controversies. The Sarah Palin one wasn't offensive to me, it was just a humorless cheap shot at a political opponent that I felt FG did too often, but the fact that the show would go so low as to mock a person who was in a persistent vegetative state and used as a political pawn for a decade and a half really forced me to question why I even thought this was good comedy. Granted, Family Guy has done great satire in the past, and episodes like "PTV" and some of the "Road" episodes are classics, but I can't believe how people have taken Family Guy's crew seriously through all the corner-cutting, low blows, and naked bias.

 

For The Simpsons, it was when their jokes and plots started to mirror typical Family Guy episodes.

 

For MLP, Season 6 has felt like it has slowed down from the rapid development and strong continuity of the previous seasons, and naturally I've lost interest over time as other shows have gotten better as well. It's still not a bad show, but it's becoming more average to me, both by its own volition and the way other shows are running rings around its writing and story styles.

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Season 6 of Adventure Time is when I started noticing it was going downhill.

At that point not only where the episodes getting "experimental" but really being boring, there were way too many plot lines going on, for all of them to get resolved by the end of the series.

I quit midway through the season, watched the Stakes Miniseries, and the season finale, and gave up watching Adventure Time.

Which is sad as I had been watching the show sense it first premiered.

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Season 6 of Adventure Time is when I started noticing it was going downhill.

 

Preach. I haven't watched that show in ages, but it was one of the episodes after the first Lich episode that I sensed that show was going to trip and break its face. So I dropped it like a bad habit. After looking back, it was the right move.

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While I love Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the introduction of Dawn in Season 5 was a huge WTF moment for me. Also, the potentials in Season 7 stole a lot of spotlight from the main characters.

 

I also really liked True Blood for the first 5 seasons, but it slowly went downhill afterwards, and petered out in the end.

 

Special mention goes to Pinky and The Brain when they introduced Larry and Elmyra.

Edited by Theanimationfanatic
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I have to say Teen Titans was a good show, so when Teen Titans Go first appeared, and it got more cartoonized, thats when i knew that show was gonna bomb. tbh, i like the later episodes of mlp more than the early episodes.

all the spongebob memes we see come from the early episodes, and you don't see any memes now because spongebob has become to horrible to meme. My favorite spongebob meme is he is number one!!(gonna make a thread bout that now)

Edited by DANUTERCISD
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When you make your main character a chaste hero from the very start, keep him that way for nearly 2 decades and then introduce a character that not only has an obvious crush on said main character, but said crush is 95% of her character development. Pokémon i'm lookin' at you. (God, I hate Serena.)

Edited by ggg-2
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Fairly Odd Parents, I was ok with Poof, but that dog? That girl? Sharing fairies? A new theme song, sung incredibly unenthusiastically? That's where it went downhill.

 

Doctor Who also, once they got rid of Russell T. Davies it changed, which is no surprise because Stephen Moffat is a different director, but it felt more adult and started to use overarching plot lines. It seemed to get a lot colder too, Davies' series always seemed to have a warm golden glow whereas now it's more black and blue. I like Matt Smith's doctor but I don't like the episodes he's in, I don't like Peter Capaldi's doctor much.

 

The Powerpuff Girls, the original series never really went down hill, but the reboot failed horribly. Once you introduce meme's and twerking to children's TV you know something's gone wrong.

 

Being Human seemed to go downhill when they killed off a main character off screen between seasons for no reason. Once they replaced all the main cast it wasn't as enjoyable anymore but it didn't really ever go downhill.

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I tend to be quick when it comes to using the term "jumping the shark", perhaps much quicker than most fans of things. The reasoning behind this is because jumping the shark doesn't mean the absolute worst episode ever coming out and now the show can't possibly recover. That's what I call just becoming a bad show. After all, hitting rock bottom only means you can go uphill from then on out. I mean, just look at Sonic the Hedgehog.

That was sarcasm.

 

 

When I think of jumping the shark, I usually look at the point where the seeds are sown for the future of a show, and generally the point in time in which tonal shifts were being made for the worse. This can for many reasons:

- The budget being sliced

- New writers coming in who can't write already-established characters

- Stories that get increasingly more clichéd (clichéd plots are a show's worst nightmare IMO, because a clichéd episode would lack the originality and tone of the rest of the show)

- Characters getting flanderised

- Typically a show getting more popular could also mean the network wants to milk it for all that it's worth

Then the two big ones that can kill a show's reputation forever:

- Trying to be current and with the times

- Flat-out insulting the haters, which in turn will alienate you entire audience

The Fairly OddParents is mostly terrible with the former, and Teen Titans Go! derives pleasure from the latter, with the excuse that it's meant to be written lazilly, which keeps me from wanting to even watch the show.

 

Conversely, jumping the shark shouldn't really be the earliest possible point in which these microscopic problems can be detected by scientific instruments, but generally when these problems begin to affect the viewing experience.

 

Now for a list of 3 shows and where/why I think they jumped the shark:

SpongeBob SquarePants- Best Day Ever (Season 4, 2006): It was simply where Nickelodeon started to become too attatched to the series, which is the number one complaint that people have had with the show, regardless of it's incline in quality over the past few years. Couple this with the "Harveygate" crap that arose about a month ago (C.H. Greenblatt, the creator of fellow Nicktoon Harvey Beaks, expressed annoyance with the executive of Nickelodeon and said that SpongeBob's popularity is flat-out keeping other Nicktoons from growing and prospering), and this was definitely a bad move on Nickelodeon's part that sealed the fate of SpongeBob as a cash cow's cash cow.

 

The Simpsons- Saddlesore Galactica (Season 11, 2000): The Simpsons has always been about taking stabs at it's audience, mostly with Comic Book Guy's fanboyish nature, but this took the criticisms of the Scully era (Season 9-12; 1997-2001), and blew them out of proportion and not making sure that they were funny. When I think of The Simpsons, or at least The Simpsons of the 1990s, I think of a show that always tries to be funny. This just feels like "Look at this thing that you guys hate, now it's even worse! U mad bros?". Did the "U mad bro?" phrase even exist in 2000? I'm not jiggy enough to find out.

 

Doctor Who- The Twin Dilemma (Season 21, 1984): I know not many of you would be interested in the Classic Series, but hear me out. Everything about this just screams "Bad decision", particularly it's placement in the season. It's the only Post-Regernation serial to be the finale, therefore not giving the audience enough time to get accustomed to the new Doctor while also not giving the writers a good amount of time to develop the character. As such, we get the infamous scene where the new Doctor strangles his own companion in a fit of rage. Slightly justified rage, but still, it aired right after The Caves of Androzani, one of the greatest serials of all time, so it's barely excusable that writing like this should follow a classic. Sure there were still good stories until the Classic Series' rock bottom in Season 24, and the two seasons following it, but the audience reaction to this serial was sour enough to affect Doctor Who's reputation as a feasible show for the rest of the 80s and 90s.

 

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic- The Cutie Remark (Season 5, 2015): I'm pretty sure, as a brony, you'd know why this is what I consider the shark-jumping point by now. It was rushed, clichéd, barely used the Mane 6 as a group, gave Starlight a bad reputation, with most rightfully labelling her a Mary Sue, it came at a point where many of the old writers were being replaced with inexperienced ones, the time travel makes little sense compared to It's About Time, which wasted the potential of all those alternate timelines, and reforming Starlight and making her the protagonist for the next 2 two-parters makes me feel like the Mane 6 being a group that saves the day is a completely worthless concept, despite the earlier episodes showing otherwise.

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One series that I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet is Pokémon. After being on the air now in North America for almost twenty years, you'd think the series has maintained the same level of consistency since day one, but then you'd be wrong about that. Ask Ketchum has been abysmal and gets dumber and dumber every time he goes to a new region. I'm shocked that they haven't replaced him given they did that to his companions. I also despise how he keeps leaving his old Pokémon behind except for Pikachu--series mascot beginning to get tiring--in favour of using ones he finds in the new region he goes to--don't get me started with the Ash Greninja debacle otherwise I'll be here all night.

 

Team Rocket became pointless after Hoenn and while I'm glad Unova gave them a new lease on life, they went back to being idiotic and just plain unbearable for Kalos. You'd think the writers for the anime would take some risks and change the status quo of the show instead of reusing the same plot conveniences 85% of the time. I tried to watch the Sun and Moon iteration of Pokémon when they aired a sneak preview of it, but I stopped after the first fifteen minutes of the first episode. Other than making Ash look hideous compared to his previous design, they didn't give the Alola region proper justice although it is still just the beginning.

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MLP after To Where and Back Again: The Cart Before the Ponies already started the opera, but I liked all the episodes that came afterward... until the finale came out. One thing that really KILLED a production to me is ignoring past developments to make a story working: both The Cart Before the Ponies and To Where and Back Again suffered of this, ando I think it's all due to Meghan Mccarthy and Jayson Thiessen leaving to work on the Movie passing the series in the hands of Miller and Haber.... you know for a while I was convinced those guys were respectable as they were doing a pretty good job with the S6 as whole (at least for me).... and then in the finale completely screwed up everything.... you already know the rest, I don't need to repeat myself again... although the I must say... rules are changed now.

 

Others examples include SpongeBob and the original PPG shows after their own movies.

Edited by Sly
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I watch a lot less TV than I should, considering the fact that it is my life long dream to work in the industry, but the best example I can come up with right now is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When the people behind the show decided to introduce Dawn. It came out of nowhere, and if memory serves me correctly, Dawn was one of those "feel sorry for me" type characters, except written so poorly that it is impossible to feel sorry for her. I cannot help but think the addition of this character must have been the result of naive network executives messing with a show that didn't need any fixing.

 

I would also like to count the sitcom series, Community. When they wrote off Pearce and Troy, the show lost a lot of its original charm, quickly fell apart and every episode afterwards just felt so boring. I thought the show was already getting bad during season 3, but it was dead when they jumped the shark like this and, if I ever decide to rewatch this series, I don't think I'll be able to watch the post-Troy and post-Pearce episodes.

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I watch a lot less TV than I should, considering the fact that it is my life long dream to work in the industry, but the best example I can come up with right now is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When the people behind the show decided to introduce Dawn. It came out of nowhere, and if memory serves me correctly, Dawn was one of those "feel sorry for me" type characters, except written so poorly that it is impossible to feel sorry for her. I cannot help but think the addition of this character must have been the result of naive network executives messing with a show that didn't need any fixing.

I still like Seasons 5,6, and 7, but Dawn definitely held the latter two seasons back.

The Fairly Oddparents has been pointlessly introducing new characters instead of developing existing ones. Plus with increasing reliance on contemporary pop culture (YouTube, smartphones, duck face, selfies, even Channel Chasers is dated to 2004), FOP becomes more dated with each new episode now. As of The Big Fairy Share Scare, it's officially hit rock bottom and SpongeBob has more dignity than FOP.

If there was an award for a show with the most Jumping The Shark moments, it would easily go to Fairly Oddparents.

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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic- The Cutie Remark (Season 5, 2015): I'm pretty sure, as a brony, you'd know why this is what I consider the shark-jumping point by now. It was rushed, clichéd, barely used the Mane 6 as a group, gave Starlight a bad reputation, with most rightfully labelling her a Mary Sue, it came at a point where many of the old writers were being replaced with inexperienced ones, the time travel makes little sense compared to It's About Time, which wasted the potential of all those alternate timelines, and reforming Starlight and making her the protagonist for the next 2 two-parters makes me feel like the Mane 6 being a group that saves the day is a completely worthless concept, despite the earlier episodes showing otherwise.

 

This is why we need to bring back the leviathan God-tier writer known as Merriwether Williams.

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While I love Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the introduction of Dawn in Season 5 was a huge WTF moment for me.

 

 

This was the first thing I thought of in this title. It never completely recovered, though the Dark Willow and redemption of Spike storylines sure as hell did a lot to make me not feel like it was a lost cause. Those two moments were epic.  

 

Heroes when they started with Season 2 and the constant back and forth on Skylar, and way too many time travel plots. 

 

Battlestar Galactica (reboot) went from "whoa fuck this is awesome" to ... "oh hell this is not as good", when Starbuck went through whatever the hell that last season was about. 

 

Grey's Anatomy fell off a cliff when Derek Sheppard died, but the truth is that I noticed the "uh oh" moment when Mark Sloan and Lexie died. 

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  • 3 months later...

Friendship is Magic for The Cutie Remark. The time-travel element was pointless and nothing to the show. Starlight's motive was incredulously petty and her reformation was forced.

Family Guy when they went overboard with the lowbrow humor. The show was all right after the return but it went really downhill around the time of the writer's strike in 2007.

South Park when the show started intentionally dating itself with current event-related plots.

On 12/6/2016 at 11:44 AM, Theanimationfanatic said:

Special mention goes to Pinky and The Brain when they introduced Larry and Elmyra.

Larry was there for one episode. Elmyra was permanently added.

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Well, I could say FiM could have gotten a bit downhill in first half of S6, as the good episodes were too few, while most of the others were..... OK at best, but there were notably bad episodes. The reason I don't consider it to have reached that point yet, is that, in my opinion, it got back on track the second half. doing the inverse of it's first half. 

 

I hardly watch TV these days, I'm not too informed about shows and when they went downhill, but I can name some examples:

-Fairly Odd Parents: After Poof was introduced, I think the creativity behind the show went downhill. Flanderizing the characters, aesop amnesia, and idiot balls here and there

-Spongebob Squarepants: I had low expectations with this show back then, but the fact that I quickly changed my mind is testament that the show HAD smart and well done humor. It hit the jump the shark harder than the above because it came earlier, and harder, while the above was more gradually.

-Well, few named it, but I've been beaten to it: Pokemon. Yeah yeah, I can see why Ash is still a 10 year old who'll never reach his dreams nor win a game-canon league, they want to attract new young viewers each generation (after all, Ash is an easy childhood hero material :dash:). Sadly, that doesn't excuse the fact that the show was better back in the day. Had better plot, Ash was developing as a character, each new episode was an excitement to see because you couldn't guess what would happen, and the characters of the day were as interesting as the pokemon introduced there. Now, plot is "Help this generic character with a pre-school type problem easily solved in a second at the end of the episode", Ash gets the idiot ball and doesn't develop, and either deus or diabolous ex machina because they can no longer think of valid reasons for the plot going :dry: (i'M LOOKING AT YOU DUDE WITH THE DARKRAI AND LATIOS  :angry:

-Ben 10 Ultimate Alien for the whole franchise: Forcing a character derailment is NEVER a good move. Yeah, it was shown a bit since S3 of Alien Force, but I think it hit harder since Ultimate Alien. 

-Ruoning Kenshin: I think the series was agonizing since the end of Shishio's arc. The one immediately after was mildly interesting at least, but the following ones were trash :maud: 

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(edited)

A thought on MLP- I actually never really noticed a dip in quality in FiM... Unless you want to count in Season 3 (Season 3 was freaking terrible compared to what I expect out of the series!). I thought there were really only 3 bad episodes of the whole of season 6. (Though I'll admit, I think Season 1 only had 2 of those.) I can say though, it's a GOOD thing Polsky's off the show. Seems like he needs to go to a rehab clinic or something... 

Fairly OddParents- When they introduced Poof, the show started going downhill, and I stopped watching after that point. It developed a lack of creativity, and there was no real humor or substance after that... Also Cosmo got REALLY annoying after this point, as somebody decided raising the pitch of his voice would be a good idea. It wasn't... All it did was made a mediocre cartoon (unlike it's former self) even worse

SpongeBob Squarepants- After the first movie, I felt like there was a massive scale character massacre. Seriously, EVERY character in SpongeBob lost at least some of their charm and became shadows of their former selves. Almost all of them either became psychopathic morons or they became the subjects of repeated torture porn. I would cite examples, but I'd probably scar myself with PTSD from all of it...

The Simpsons- I think it started slow at the beginning of Season 9, but the show started going downhill a little faster after "Boys of Bummer", and now they've finally hit the point of unwatchable for me after Season 28's premiere episode. Totally plotless cash grab that is devoid of any humor at all... There was literally NOTHING funny in the whole episode. I had serious trouble even watching it to be honest...

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Nerdy Luigi
I had more space :3
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This seems fun:

I noticed Spogebob's seasonal rot around season 6, when there started to be more of what fans like to call "Squidward torture porns." And unpopular opinion: I wasn't too big on many of the annoy Squidward plots in the early seasons already but these episodes were ten times worse. It's been said many times before, but they punish Squidward without giving a justified reasons. This and the many lackluster specials were pretty much what made me quit (though I've been hearing the recent episodes have shown improvement)

 

Fairly Oddparents was when they added Poof. At first I was okay with these changes due to just being happy about new episodes but as I continued watching, I noticed the episodes weren't as good and the jokes weren't as funny.

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I remember when I finished first two seasons back in the mid of 2012, when Canterlot wedding was a big thing and everyone couldn't wait for it, including me. After that, I rewatched the first two seasons couple of times and I was so impressed how good the show was. 

Season 3 wasn't that bad, I liked everything but the finale.(Even though I didn't mind Twilight becoming an alicorn, something just didn't feel right.)

And definitelly, season 4 is where it started to go downhill, in my opinion. That is the least satisfying season I watched. Season 5 has improved the flaws of season 4 BUT they added many, many new characters and that annoyed the heck of me. Although Season 5 wasn't as bad as season 4, adding too much new characters was a big no to me, but remember, they all do it for fans(many fans wanted many new characters, as far as I remember). (And I liked how they added some moments from previous seasons, like a little reminder, nostalgia)

Season 6 was improved a lot, in my opinion. I didn't like few episodes and that is all. 

As for the next season, who knows? 

 

As I was always saying, a show is really good if you can come back to it and still enjoy it as you used to, which in this case FiM did it really well. Props to producers and Lauren Faust for creating this magical adventure. 

Very well written show gets 9/10 from me. 

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