Hatewatching

From Urban Dictionary:

"Watching a TV show or movie that you hate because you hate it.

Usage note: hatewatching is distinct from enjoying a guilty pleasure, wherein you like something despite its obvious badness. A hatewatched show is one the viewer genuinely despises but cannot stop watching. This could be because it is so "important" they feel they have to, because it has enough promise that they hope it gets better, because it's so well-crafted in it's terribleness that the badness itself is noteworthy, or because they enjoy the adrenaline that pure revulsion can bring. Whatever the reason, the hatewatcher can't look away from the trainwreck."

As the 2013 Fall TV season has progressed and I've eliminated most of the new shows from my list, it's dawned on me that there quite a few shows that I'm watching not because I'm enjoying them but because, for whatever reason, I feel like I can't stop... shows that I'm hatewatching. And because I'm all egotistical and think that you people out there give a crap about what I think and stuff, I thought I'd post the list and the reasons why.*

Dracula
I gave my thoughts on this show in a post last week covering its first episode, and I'm here to tell you this absurd bastardization of the legend of Dracula got even worse in its second episode. Yet I'm still hanging around because it's Dracula and it's only ten episodes total and there's no way in hell this show is getting renewed past that and there's fuckall else on Friday nights so why not, right? I'll tell you why not: because gouging out my own eyes and then eating them mixed into a bowl of cut glass would be more fun.

Revolution
I enjoyed this show for a few weeks after it debuted last season, but it went downhill fast. When the season finale revealed that the American government, which had been missing since the start of the blackout apparently, was alive and well in Cuba and ready to retake the country, I dropped it like a sack of manure. Then I did something I know I'm better than and I fell for the off-season hype and hints about how there was more to the American government than it seemed and how the show's title would take on a new meaning and I tuned back into the new season. What did I see? The worst character in the whole show dying off in the first episode... only to be revived by nanites who also apparently give him the power to have visions and set people on fire with his mind and stuff. I'd drop it like a sack of manure again, except now I have to see just how ludicrous it can get.

Once Upon a Time
For two seasons, I loved this show. I loved the way it balanced fairy tales with reality, flashbacks with the present, drama with comedy, main characters with quirky supporting characters. This season, it lost the magic of that contrast with a storyline taking place entirely in Neverland with nothing but the show's main characters. Gone is the town of Storybrooke and the fun ways reality and fantasy blended. Gone are all the charming background characters like the dwarves and Red Riding Hood; all we get now is the neverending drama of the Charming family. Rumpelstiltskin is still great, but even he's gone full emo now and isn't enough to bail out this show. I should have known this would happen after the way the abysmal spinoff turned out, but still. Now I'm stuck wanting to know what happens just because it got two years of my life already and part of me is hoping for a comeback.

Homeland
A show that started out a brilliantly written character piece about crises of faith and identity has turned into nothing but another plodding spy drama full of "oh my god what a twist that no one saw coming except anybody with even half a functioning brain" moments juxtaposed with a completely boring depressed teen's suicidal dramafest. The character the show was built upon has only been in one episode out of six so far. The one saving grace of the show is Mandy Patinkin, and the closer his Saul Berensen gets to full asshole mode, the less interested I am.

And now we get to the two biggest offenders...

Supernatural
For five years, Supernatural was one of my favorite shows. The mythology and plotting was tight beyond belief, and there was a perfect balance between shows that advanced the main plot and done-in-one episodes. The stakes got upped every season as every time the Winchesters won a battle, they lost more of the war. It was a perfectly executed show... because it was planned that way from the beginning. Five seasons, starting with monsters and demons, ratcheting up the stakes until the apocalypse was pretty seriously nigh and only the death of a Winchester caught in the middle of a battle between the archangel Michael and Lucifer himself could save the world. The show ended perfectly. Except it didn't end. Now it's just a mishmash of plots we've seen endlessly about one of the brothers keeping a secret from the other one while the make a deal with a demon/angel they shouldn't have made while they're outsmarted by Crowley, the only reason to watch the damn show anymore. Every episode without him bores me to tears, and not even he could save last week's abortion of an episode involving Sam and Dean and the ultra-annoying Charlie helping Dorothy stop the Wicked Witch from returning to Oz. Yes, I just typed that sentence. Sorry, Crowley.

How I Met Your Mother
I don't even know where to begin with this one. It's clearly been drawn out much longer than anyone planned, and along the way the characters that were all so lovably real and well-rounded when the show started are all caricatures of themselves that are just about impossible to like. The mother's long overdue reveal at the end of last season was just about the most anticlimactic thing I've ever seen, and since then she's appeared in two episodes this season, a season that is just chock to the brim with filler nonsense like stunt casting and ridiculous fantasy sequences that would even be too ludicrous for Scrubs in its decline. And even though Ted hasn't met her yet, we get a flash forward to how he proposes to her, which is the first time we've seen them together and is just a total cheat to the show's main conceit. It's been a long time since I enjoyed this show on a regular basis, but I stuck around because after watching to long I have to see how he meets the mother, which apparently even though we've met her, Ted won't actually meet her until the last episode. And as if all of this isn't absurd enough, apparently there are talks of a spin-off with a whole new cast of characters, with the very original title of How I Met Your Father, that might be set up in the finale. You know, because that finale won't have enough to do and a hard enough time not sucking already.

*It's less because of that and more because I would at this point do anything to avoid working on the NaNoWriMo project I am to date failing so hard at.