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Six Once Beloved TV Shows and Celebrities 2015 Gave Up On

By Dustin Rowles | Lists | December 11, 2015 |

By Dustin Rowles | Lists | December 11, 2015 |


Girls — Lena Dunham used to generate 100,000 million Internet page views by sneezing, and there was nary a web writer on the planet who hadn’t written a Girls think piece. However, Girls was never a highly rated show — it got by on buzz — but even the buzz began to fade in 2015. The audience continued to disappear as Dunham burn-out gained momentum. Moreover, after being paid $3.5 million to write a memoir, Not That Kind of Girl entered the New York Times bestseller list in late 2014 at number two and quickly petered out, along with our interest.

Here’s the season 5 trailer. It’s been out for over a week. I must have missed it.

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Nic Pizzolatto — Between the first and second season of True Detective, there was as much speculation about who would be cast as there has been about the fate of Jon Snow over on Game of Thrones this year. It was wall-to-wall True Detective coverage, from casting to plot speculation, to numerous think pieces on Nic Pizzolatto.

After the second season of True Detective? Crickets. Pizzolatto gave no post-mortems, and never came to the defense of his series. I’ve actually read more about the fact that Cary Fukanaga hasn’t watched the second season than I’ve read about Pizzolatto writing it. However, he eventually did sign a deal with HBO that may or may not bring back a third season of TD, but no one’s talking about it, because no one really cares. Maybe Pizzolatto eventually rebounds, but he’s going to have to prove himself again before we can get excited about his work.

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Community — The sixth and final season of Community moved over to Yahoo this year, and the Internet stopped talking about what was once the most talked-about comedy on the Internet. Yahoo took a bath in losses, and speculation about a possible movie died down quickly, mostly because the interest wasn’t there. It’s too bad, though, because the sixth season was phenomenal, and Paget Brewster and Keith David were perfect additions to the cast. (Parks and Recreation, sadly, almost fell into this category as well, but that was more of a function of NBC, which burned off episodes two at a time during January).

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HannibalHannibal was another show the Internet was big on for two seasons, and nothing creatively in the third season triggered our apathy. Honestly, it was NBC that killed the buzz by pushing the series back to the summer and giving it little promotion. It was too slow and dark for a summer series, the ratings bottomed out, NBC cancelled it, and the ratings fell even further as it limped to a finale that’s still sitting on many a DVR.

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The Good WifeThe Good Wife was never a huge Internet show, except among critics, who often extolled its elegant virtues. It was considered by some the best drama on network television, and it usually represented the networks come awards time. Unfortunately, after Josh Charles left the series, the only thing keeping the show in the Internet conversations was the feud between Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies. Now, we don’t even have that, and worse, the storylines are fractured and inert, as the series seems to be heading toward a finishing point. The NYPost just yesterday called for the series to end.

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Hannibal Buress — Buress was almost single-handedly responsible for the downfall of Bill Cosby’s career after joking about Cosby’s history of rape allegations. It steamrolled from there and flat-out ruined Cosby. Buress’ stand-up career took off, he brought even more notice to Broad City, and then he landed his own Comedy Central show, which wasn’t very good. Only a half million overnight viewers turned out for the premiere, and by the end of the eight-episode run, less than 300,000 viewers were watching. Buress’ star quickly dimmed after that.