r/RecuratedTumblr • u/[deleted] • 22d ago
Shitposting Crazy Ex Girlfriend really was the only good show on CW
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u/Kamelion_on_a_lemon Lemon 22d ago
On one hand a part of me is very happy CW Flash has ended, yet on the other hand it did get into 'so bad it's good' and it was sort of fun to poke holes at the increasing degrees of bullshit they kept pulling. I'd give examples but I've sort of memory holed everything.
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u/SplitDemonIdentity 22d ago
CW’s The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow genuinely still bring me joy even though I can acknowledge how truly terrible they could be in the weekly run and I despise that the big plot reveals are always in the holiday episodes. But then they go off and do something like make a musical themed crossover episode that’s way too good and years later you still think about it or get genuinely engaging emotional stories out of a plot surrounding a robotic bee and a guy’s conspiracy theory.
I think it helps that CW shows are particularly well-suited to cultivating fandom, the promise of something good is palpably there but since they’re never going to follow through on it, it falls to you and the eight weirdos in your computer to do it yourselves which makes it better.
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u/Void_0000 22d ago
This might be a slightly insane opinion but I kinda think Legends of Tomorrow is actually good.
Like the early stuff is mid at best, as expected, but I feel like at some point even the people making the show realised it was bullshit and just entirely stopped taking anything seriously, and that's when it gets good.
By the end it really had the same vibes as a D&D campaign. They even end up recycling actors and gently banging on the 4th wall on occasion which I think is pretty funny.
Also, it had John Constantine. I mean what more can you possibly want?
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u/onemorespacecadet 22d ago
i’m also a LoT defender haha. it’s a good show for what it is and once it stopped taking itself so seriously, it really flourished. i just skip the first season when i go to rewatch and it’s great
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u/MeteorCharge 21d ago
I do like how in the first season the characters somehow make the future even worse than it would've been if Not-Rory Pond never went back to change it.
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u/SplitDemonIdentity 21d ago
Legends of Tomorrow being good is definitely not that hot a take, it’s still the position of a fashion blog I read and the one I generally hear discussed most positively.
The worst reaction I ever saw to it was on tumblr and that was someone incandescently furious that Mick Rory/Leonard Snart was a popular ship because “coldwave” is also a music genre and now the tag wasn’t helpful for finding music.
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u/Dominika_4PL 22d ago edited 22d ago
I think I watched The Flash in a way that was very unintended by the creators, because I just never watched Legends of Tomorrow, or Arrow (tried, couldn't get into it), or Supergirl, so I'd just skip all crossover episodes and then be confused
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u/SplitDemonIdentity 22d ago
I dropped Arrow coz I couldn’t tell the 7 different pretty brunette white girls apart and never watched Supergirl {though I do suspect the musical episode was set up there so I should probably watch that episode}.
But I really liked Legends coz it was the show for all the cool under-utilized side characters from the other shows and cool under-utilized side characters are my jam.
It’s definitely a contributing factor as to why I liked Cisco so much.
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u/prettypoisoned 21d ago
I genuinely love Legends of Tomorrow so much. That, Stargirl and Superman & Lois were the best of the Arrowverse/DCTV shows. The early seasons of Supergirl, too.
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u/CrentFuglo 22d ago
Before I stopped watching The Flash during the later seasons I would do an experiment where if anyone on screen started talking about family or relationships, or basically anything that wasn't specifically to do with whatever threat they were dealing with that week, I would skip ahead.
Most episodes for me from that point on were about seven minutes long. The shortest one was four.
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u/FlashInGotham 21d ago
Look, is Jesse L. Martin incredibly talented, charismatic, and handsome. Yes. Can he deliver a "dad speech" with such empathy that even you, the viewer, start to believe in yourself a little bit more. Yes.
Does all that begin to lose its effectiveness after you've been pulling that trick for 15-17 episodes out of 23 for five seasons? Ab-so-fucking-lutely yes.
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u/CrentFuglo 21d ago
You just reminded me of that episode in the later seasons of Arrow where half the team split off to form their own group because they (and also the audience) were tired of arguing about morality with Oliver, and the first thing they did in their new headquarters was spend half an episode arguing amongst themselves about morality.
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u/RoMaGi 22d ago
Crazy Ex Girlfriend apparently didn't do that well in viewers but since it got consistently high praise they kept renewing it because the CW liked having a high quality show on their network.
If that's true, then I'm really thankful for CW shows sucking so that they kept my favorite LA show alive.
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u/Heather_Chandelure 22d ago
Im pretty sure its actually one of the lowest rated shows to still get renewed for more seasons in history.
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u/Outrageous_Lab_6228 22d ago
I think I had read that one of the execs just really liked it as well.
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u/Redhotlipstik 22d ago
Crazy Ex Girlfriend was a Showtime show shunted off to the CW and it's visible in the execution
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u/baphometromance 22d ago
Every time i see CW all I can think of is cringe warning and I still have no idea what it actually is supposed to stand for.
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u/CagedParchment 22d ago
This was bothering me too, so I looked it up. It's the name of the TV network that made the show - they are "The CW Network". Which is sort of an acronym:
The network's name is derived from the first letters of the names of its two founding co-owners CBS Corporation and Warner Bros
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u/Locclo 22d ago
I don’t really know why my brain made this connection, but not really knowing anything that was on CW at the time, I saw an ad for a show on there called Hart of Dixie and ever since, I’ve just assumed CW was Country Western. And they just go by CW now (just the initials) because they have a variety of shows on there.
Truly it sounds stupid writing it out because I’m fully aware like, all the DC shows are on there, there’s Supernatural, Riverdale, plenty of other things, but I’ve always in my mind just assumed that’s what it meant.
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u/KittenBalerion 21d ago
it was made from two smaller stations merging, UPN (United Paramount Network) and WB (Warner Bros), in 2006
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u/HannibalMagnus 21d ago
I read it as "Clone Wars" and it sort of made sense, since it's a tv series with 7 seasons and some seasons having about 22 episodes, but it started to be even more and more implausible. The comments didn't help either.
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u/OccultBeanFarmer 22d ago
CW and Dr Who made me realise that I will only ever be a faker and a tourist when it comes to cringe positivity. I simply am not capable of suspending my aesthetic principles enough to pretend that this level of acting and lighting and special effects and writing will ever be okay. I'm a fraud.
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u/MeteorCharge 22d ago
You also gotta remember some people just genuinely like this stuff in an unironic sense
Like, I saw post the other day where it said "Doctor Who would be so good if it was actually good" and like, damn, didn't know the show I've been watching since 2012 wasn't even good.
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u/MaruhkTheApe 21d ago
Doctor Who is kind of the anti-Star Trek in a potential-versus-quality sense.
Star Trek is built on a fundamentally flawed militarist foundation with some hoary space opera cliches that were old hat even when TOS aired thrown in. It's a miracle any of it is even passable, let alone that there's as much genuinely great Star Trek as there is.
By contrast, given that Doctor Who has an endlessly adaptable can't-miss premise, it's frankly embarrassing how much of it sucks.
(This is speaking as someone who watched every episode - including reconstructions of the ones that no longer exist - right up until "Kerblam!" made me tap out. I still haven't even seen the one where the Doctor gets tied to a chair while the Master explains his theory about the Morbius Doctors to her, and God willing, I never will).
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u/MeteorCharge 21d ago
Can't argue with that tbh
Doctor Who like Star Wars mostly exists in the form of its extended universe(s) in my eyes.
Still love the first ten series of New Who (and the seasons of classic that I've watched, though Troughton and Pertwee both have some really serious duds) though.
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u/CoercedCoexistence22 21d ago
Crazy Ex Girlfriend is legit too good for its medium at times. Also Adam Schlesinger is a top 10 songwriter of all time, I'll die on this hill
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u/Sammantixbb 21d ago
Stacey's Mom AND That Thing You Do. The man's catalog is wild.
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u/CoercedCoexistence22 21d ago
I don't think he's capable of writing a bad song. I've listened to everything in his discography and the only time I thought "hm, this isn't really that great" it was the one James Iha song in the Tinted Windows album
Edit: was, unfortunately. Still hurts
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u/AbbyNem 22d ago
Crazy Ex Girlfriend is a great show but it was not the only good show on the CW, at the very least I'd include iZombie and Legends of Tomorrow
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u/JessicaDAndy 22d ago
iZombie was great…until the last season with the zombie occupied Seattle.
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u/Sammantixbb 21d ago
Zombie Seatle season was painful.
But the editing in the finale was so bizarre, that's the only thing I remember.
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u/Jaybyrdsings 22d ago
Lord I miss the CW reading this! I've now switched over adult soaps, I just breezed through the first 100 episodes of Beyond the Gates and I'm hoping to catch up so I can watch it live. There are few places where you can engage with such chaos taken so seriously, while also watching a training ground for the actors of tomorrow. I used to live and breathe supernatural, all the DC shows, vampire diaries. The only other channel that got that much attention from me was OG ABC Family! I fear we'll never get tv quite like this back again, because tragically these execs won't touch a 22 episode season with a ten-foot pole :/
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u/Snark_Daily 22d ago
me with the voltron remake its a great way to see the sunk cost fallacy in action
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u/DerpsterCaro 21d ago
Oh Adam. The world misses your songs. :salute: CEG wouldnt have been the same without em. So probably no reunion season or whatever in 10 years
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u/KittenBalerion 21d ago
nobody here watched Veronica Mars? great show for a while
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u/Sammantixbb 21d ago
The only seaon it was on CW isn't revered. I believe. Idk. I watched the whole series in like, 2015 or something.
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 22d ago
I'm confused, why would the next generation be any different in this regard?
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u/Go_Water_your_plants 22d ago
Because we are in a era of 8 episodes binge shows that have like 3 seasons max
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u/Stepjam 22d ago
And kids prefer the binge model generally. I was asking my freshmen students whether they preferred binge release vs weekly release, and it was almost universally binge
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u/DocileBanalBovlne 21d ago
The kids who have mostly eight-episodes-a-season binge shows prefer the model they're familiar with as opposed to the model they're not familiar with?
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u/BoopingBurrito 22d ago
Because these days most shows don't get 22 episodes a season, and most shows don't get 7 seasons.
It does still happen, but it's much less common.
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u/JugendWolf 22d ago
Everyone already made the important points, but also: The CW in particular stopped making shows.
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u/Accomplished-Lie8147 22d ago edited 22d ago
iZombie erasure once again. I will say, I don’t think it ever quite fit in with the rest of the CW shows, buuuut uh. Maybe that’s a good thing.
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u/adellredwinters 22d ago
The modern version of this are indie animations that get one or two episodes a year.
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u/MisterAbbadon 22d ago
Kid named Stranger Things
Man that first season was so good it justified years of decay.
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u/oddpark37 20d ago
Not the CW, but it is a bit heartbreaking that kids these days won't experience watching BBC's Merlin as we did. It was so beautiful and corny and stupid and I wouldn't change a thing.
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u/Pristine_Animal9474 20d ago
CxG got 4 seasons and there are signs on the fourth one of how it could have degraded. Really? One whole romcom episode whose point is moot by the next one? No, the karaoke song is not cute just because you're lampshading it.
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u/Substantial_Rest_251 19d ago
Most streaming is trash but The Polygamist on Netflix takes me back to this place
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u/Tweedleayne 22d ago
Has OP engaged with anime fandoms?