ONTD Original: 5 Changes That Would Have Greatly Improved TV Shows (please hire us hollywood)
Brooklyn 99 is a workplace comedy that relies on it’s charming characters and their relationships to make it successful. Thus there is absolutely zero reason for the characters to work at a police station. In the good year of our lord 2020, the last thing we need is more copaganda and having to think about police brutality during a 30 minute sitcom. So how to fix this? As many ONTD-ers have suggested, change the workplace, perhaps to somewhere like the Post Office. Swap out chasing criminals across the city for chasing rogue packages across the city. The same wacky hijinks but 100% more wholesome.
WARNING: Spoilers below
There’s a lot to change with Penny Dreadful to make it better as this show, with it’s huge budget and low viewership got well and properly fucked by Showtime. But one small change that would have helped? Give more screen time and character development to Sembene. Don’t have enough screen time to make it happen? Just cut back on Dorian Gray’s. Dorian is a character who is only as interesting as the characters around him (see: Angelique, Lily) and also just kind of sucks. Sembene is an interesting character and his relationship with both Vanessa and Sir Malcolm could have been explored further. It is an insult that the most prominent non-white character only got to have character development and a meaningful relationship with another character when he was about to die.
Veronica Mars is a tv show that had one perfect season and two subpar seasons and then some other stuff we don’t acknowledge. While also a thrilling mystery show, it was also a classic teen drama that featured Veronica’s romantic relationships with four different equally milquetoast white men (including a 25 year old cop???? Veronica is in high school y’all!!!). An easy fix to keep viewers interested in Veronica’s love life? Let Veronica and Weevil (played by Kazaam’s Francis Capra) get together. Arguably the character Veronica had the most chemistry with, rumor has it that this pairing was not allowed because the network would not approve a non-white love interest. Weevil is a character with actual dimension to him and who is morally gray while still being someone who you like and he has also never had homeless men fight each other for his own entertainment (see: Logan Echolls). It is a no brainer that these two should have gotten together and I am still angry about it.
Despite only ever holding hands once on screen (in what is literally the last shot of the entire series!), the creators of Legend of Korra have confirmed that Korra and Asami were dating and were girlfriends. And listen, before you start in on me, I KNOW this show was on Nickelodeon and was a children’s show. I get that. But you don’t get to show multiple straight couples kissing, show a woman being suffocated to death, and have a woman’s head explode but then be like “oh the network won’t let us show two women kissing”. No. I refuse. Nickelodeon can keep their gay pride tweet unless they go back and re-do seasons 3 and 4 to show me the lesbian romance I deserve. I did not suffer through two seasons of Mako wank to be disrespected like this.
Pretty Little Liars stretched 42 seasons and managed to keep the initial mystery going that whole time. How to fix it? Make it a single season long and give audience members back the countless hours they wasted on this show. The mystery could be easily contained to one single season, both as a way to keep it from running off the tracks, and then also because maybe the show would have less time to glorify a high school teacher having a relationship with his student and less time to be weirdly transphobic. This show drug on for so long, I honestly cannot remember anything from this show anymore except that Ali dresses as Lady Gaga for Halloween and refers to herself as Lady G, a name that no one has ever casually referred to Gaga as. This show actively made me dumber.
Source: my own smooth brain, ONTD comments