5 TV Shows With Terrible Writing We Keep Watching Anyway, Ranked

Not every show needs airtight writing to be worth your time. Plenty of series coast on charm, vibe, or sheer star power. But there is a real line between simple and sloppy. When plots start spinning their wheels, rules only exist until the next episode needs them broken, and momentum comes from convenient fixes instead of good setup, you can feel the scaffolding sag. So how much does a good watch actually depend on good writing? Here are five shows that kept going anyway, even as the scripts wobbled — ranked from least bad to full-on meltdown. Lucifer On paper, this should sing: the Devil (Tom Ellis) ditches Hell for Los Angeles, charms his way into working murder cases, and juggles case-of-the-week puzzles with a messily divine love life. In practice, the investigations blur together and the character work bends to whatever a given episode needs, even when it undercuts what was set up the week before. The show aims for emotional heft in the ongoing arcs, but the scripts rarely meet the moment. It is breezy fun — Ellis can sell anything — but you can see the better version of Lucifer that never quite clicks into place. Euphoria Euphoria lives on look and performance. Zendaya is magnetic, the craft is undeniable, and the show has ideas. The problem is keeping those ideas in focus. Following Rue, a teen battling addiction while ricocheting through volatile relationships, the series often trades cohesion for impact. Individual episodes can be striking, but step back and you can feel characters and arcs getting bent around big swings rather than growing into them. Ambition wins the room; logic loses the argument. By Season 3, that gap is widest — it plays like a new show that shrugs off a lot of what came before. The Flash This one hurts because it started strong. Barry Allen (Grant Gustin), CSI turned speedster, raced into a clean, crowd-pleasing superhero groove. Then the pattern set in and never let go: a season-long Big Bad, some personal turmoil, a late-game turn, and a neat bow. Predictable can be fine; predictable plus rule-breaking is not. The show flips its own switches whenever convenient — Barry loses and regains powers as the plot demands, characters make baffling choices because the episode needs a cliffhanger, and internal logic takes a backseat to formula. Over nine seasons, that kind of inconsistency turns lively into dull. Riverdale Riverdale began as a moody, small-town murder mystery with clear Twin Peaks fingerprints and the Archie gang recast as noir archetypes. Then it morphed — and kept morphing — until 'coherent' was no longer on the mood board. Genres drop in from the ceiling. Tonal whiplash is the house style. The rules change whenever a new twist sounds fun. Characters get reinvented on the fly, and entire arcs vanish like they never happened. The show does not course-correct; it doubles down. It is a high-wire act with no net and no plan to come down. The Idol From the jump, the writing and the mission feel out of sync. The setup: Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) is a rising pop star who falls into the orbit of a nightclub owner who starts steering (and tightening) control over her career and her life. What follows can’t decide if it wants to be a sharp satire of the pop machine or a bruising drama about abuse and power. Scene to scene, connective tissue is thin, dialogue clanks, and choices land like attempts to shock rather than build meaning. The core question — are we meant to take this at face value or as a send-up? — never gets a clear answer. What’s left is a glossy shell that courts controversy first and everything else second. That’s my lineup. Disagree? Of course you do. Drop your picks and your defenses in the comments.

5 TV Shows With Terrible Writing We Keep Watching Anyway, Ranked

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