I love Netflix, my whole family loves Netflix. I recommend the service to anyone who cares to listen, and I will keep my subscription for as long as I can. Every country I’ve been to and used my Netflix account on has been a new exciting surprise treasure trove of exciting content.

That being said, there are some serious duds floating in there, being recommended to me and irremovable from my previously watched queue. Sure I could do the smart thing and trial shows on a dummy profile, but then where is the fun in that?

Here are four shows that by all accounts I should have liked, but have failed me on Netflix. For the most part (bar the first one), I’ll be talking about Netflix Originals, because I think it’s interesting that even with all the data available to them, they aren’t guaranteed hits. Creating a quality TV show doesn’t require a wholly original idea, but it does require something else to keep the viewer interested, the shows below do not.

Here be spoilers of all kinds! You have been warned!

Beyond

This gets the honour of being the only non Netflix Original on the list!

Just because a show is not good, doesn’t mean I won’t be a loyal viewer till the very end. With that thought in mind, it’s not that Beyond is a bad show, or that it’s plot is unoriginal, it’s that it’s too paint by the numbers. I’ve seen this before. Kid wakes up from a coma stronger and better than before. The world around them has changed, they don’t know who to trust and there’s a shady organisation that wants something from them, but they don’t even know what that is. Okay, cool, but like be better? Do something. The Tomorrow People had the shady organisation come from within the protagonists’ family. Hunger Games saw the protagonists fight for survival, Maze Runner a cure to save the world. Divergent a way to free people from oppression.. I mean, you have to make it clear quickly from the outset what the point is and make the threat real. Episode one, I feel like there are absolutely no stakes whatsoever, and by episode two I had lost all interest. 

Travellers

I love Sci-fi. I will buy into almost any world as long as it makes sense in the context of the show. I don’t need to know all the nitty gritty, but I need to be able to feel like the decisions the characters make are grounded in the reality that the world is. 

Travellers seems like a series of terrible decisions for reasons that don’t seem like they’re ever going to pay off. You have the technology to come back in time and inhabit the body of a person at the point of their death? Okay, cool, cool, but.. you seem to only use social media to select the candidates? What? Facebook Profile archives are still searchable in the not so distant apocalyptic future? What? Why would you inhabit the body of a teen mom, or a teenager, or a married police man.. if you need to.. look, I just didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense to me, so I couldn’t take anything they were doing seriously. It all required a degree of planning that was so precise and to the second that if anything deviated from their plan it would all go to crap? I mean, if you go back in time and change something, doesn’t your future intel then become irrelevant because you’ve changed the future? How much do you have to change?! I’m making myself annoyed all over again. 

F is for Family

Family Guy meets King of the Hill meets Married with Children but with zero charm. It’s so strange that Netflix they could make such a great subversive family show (Bojack Horseman) and then go so so wrong on this. 

Pacific Heat

If Archer wasn’t funny, it would be this show. That’s basically what’s wrong with this. It wants to be Archer so bad, but nothing lands. It didn’t even elicit a smirk, it tries, so, hard.

What shows have you tried to get into, but just couldn’t? On Netflix, Amazon.. or.. Hulu? Let me know!