Some fantasy shows take a minute to hit their stride, then level up like crazy. Avatar: The Last Airbender did exactly that, stacking richer themes and bigger mythology every book until a killer finale. On the live-action side, The Wheel of Time has been quietly grinding forward; its third season pulled better reviews than its first. Others hold steady for years and then botch the landing. Game of Thrones spent eight seasons as the center of pop culture and then hit the gas in its final stretch, splitting its own audience. The BBC's Merlin rode five seasons of goodwill before a finale that left a lot of fans feeling shortchanged.
Then there are the heartbreakers: the shows that roar out of the gate with real ambition and a ready-made audience, only to spend the rest of their run trying (and failing) to recapture that first-season spark. Sometimes the creatives get pushed out. Sometimes the network meddles. Sometimes the source material gets twisted until it snaps. And sometimes the concept just works best as an opening salvo and cracks under the grind of serialized TV.
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5) Shadow and Bone
Netflix dropped Shadow and Bone in 2021 and it blew up fast, logging 230 million hours in its first 28 days — one of the platform's biggest English-language starts at the time. The adaptation of Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse kept the spotlight on Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li), a soldier who discovers a rare power in a world literally split by a dark supernatural barrier. The slick Season 1 trick: folding in the Six of Crows crew without muddying the central story. Critics landed at 89% on Rotten Tomatoes, which tracks.
Season 2 (2023) tried to adapt storylines from six separate books at once. You can guess how that went. The pace rushed, the focus scattered, and after a brief second-week bump, viewership fell off hard. A few months later, Netflix axed the show and simultaneously killed the already-scripted Six of Crows spinoff. The Grishaverse on Netflix ends on a cliffhanger that is never getting resolved. Brutal.
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4) Avatar: The Legend of Korra
'Book One: Air' (2012) premiered as the most-watched animated series launch in the U.S. that year, averaging 3.8 million viewers per episode on Nickelodeon. The new setting — a slick, 1920s-styled Republic City — and the anti-bender revolt led by the masked Amon gave Korra a first-season villain with rare ideological bite for American TV animation.
Then 'Book Two: Spirits' (2013) faceplanted. Behind the scenes, Studio Mir initially opted out after animating Season 1, so episodes were split between Pierrot (early) and Mir (later). You could see the seams — visual consistency wobbled across the season. Storywise, the new big bad, Unalaq, lacked the moral complexity that made Amon so sticky, and the expanded Avatar lore introduced contradictions that bent the show's own rules. Critics cooled, ratings dipped, and Nickelodeon eventually yanked the series off its main broadcast channel. The last two books recovered somewhat, but they never touched the high of that first run.
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3) Once Upon a Time
ABC's fairy-tale mashup arrived in 2011 as the top-rated new drama of the season. Season 1 had a clean hook: storybook characters trapped in Storybrooke, Maine, living normal lives with no memory of who they really are. Flashbacks to their enchanted pasts stitched together a shared mythology that cleverly connected different corners of children's literature. It worked because the show had a singular mystery to solve.
When the core curse broke in the Season 1 finale, the show never found that clarity again. Over the next six seasons, it kept trying to recreate the original tension with fresh curses, fresh villains, and a steady stream of new Disney IP. The more it added, the less the core characters mattered. By Season 7, ABC went almost full reboot with a near-total cast swap, and the brand collapsed. Once Upon a Time ran 155 episodes, and the consensus is the best 22 were the first 22.
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2) American Gods
Starz launched American Gods in 2017 with a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score and Bryan Fuller's unmistakable visual flair all over it (Hannibal fans know). Fuller and Michael Green stretched the first five chapters of Neil Gaiman's novel into eight moody, ambitious episodes anchored by Ricky Whittle's Shadow Moon and Ian McShane's enigmatic Mr. Wednesday.
Then came the chaos. The production company, Fremantle, fired Fuller and Green before Season 2 over budget fights — Season 1 had run significantly over — and replacement showrunner Jesse Alexander could not maintain the original tone. Across three seasons, the show burned through four showrunners. Gillian Anderson and Kristin Chenoweth exited with the original team. Ahead of Season 3, the firing of Orlando Jones turned into a PR mess heading into a year that almost no one watched. By Season 3, viewership was down 65% from Season 1. Starz canceled the series in 2021, leaving Gaiman's story only partly adapted and definitively unfinished.
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1) The Witcher
Netflix positioned The Witcher as its Thrones-sized fantasy pillar. Early on, it looked the part: Andrzej Sapkowski's monster-hunting saga, a non-linear Season 1 that rewarded attention, and Henry Cavill doing full-contact cosplay as Geralt of Rivia. Word of mouth did the rest.
Season 2 swerved sharply away from Sapkowski's text. Critics gave it a sky-high 95%, but audiences hit back at 45%, and that critic/fan disconnect set the tone for everything after. Cavill bailed ahead of Season 4 — reportedly tied to how far the show had drifted from the books — and Liam Hemsworth stepped in. When Hemsworth debuted, the audience was down 52% compared to Season 3. Meanwhile, every spinoff took heat for choppy scripts and baffling creative calls, which only dragged the flagship down further. Netflix has already said Season 5 — now in post-production — will be the last. Wild to think this once looked like the streaming era's definitive fantasy epic.
Which fantasy show do you think torched the most goodwill after a killer first season? Drop your pick — I promise to nod solemnly in agreement or start a polite argument.