<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"[#gallery: /galleries/5582d08e1177d66d68d5a0d6]|||The Worst TV Taglines of the Season|||\n\n In its second season, the critically beloved high-school-football drama Friday Night Lights took a bewildering, and well-documented, pivot into madness. Landry Clarke, the show's nerdy-best-friend character and its geek-pining-for-the-princess character rolled into one, murdered the would-be rapist of his sweetheart Tyra Collette, taking a lead pipe to the back of the attacker's head and dumping the body in a nearby river. The incident was an alarming break in what had otherwise been a sweetly humane teen soap about small-town dreams and decency, as if \"Jack and Diane\" suddenly ended with the couple kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer. Viewers and critics reacted with the righteous derision that can only be supplied by a spectating mob: What the hell happened? Why had this happened? And how could the show ever get back on track?\n\n The show did eventually recover from its stumble, mostly by tying up the loose ends as hastily as possible and then pretending it all never happened. But the fiasco was an inevitable mile marker in the life cycle of the series, and a reminder that sooner or later, it happens to even your favorite show. The sense of a calm storytelling hand guiding the wheel disappears. The comfort of relaxing into a safely self-contained universe evaporates. All of a sudden, characters start shouting at each other for ill-established reasons. Fan-favorite couples break up and make up meaninglessly. New characters stroll casually onto the scene and disappear after contained one-episode plot lines. I call it Creeping Incoherence, the first time you get that sinking sensation that a beloved, previously-impeccable show is steering a slow course toward oblivion.\n\n No beloved institution is safe. Lost ran itself fundamentally and finally off the rails when Season Five sent the island skipping through time. It never once recovered. In Weeds, it was the fateful moment when Nancy Botwin set fire to her Agrestic home, setting the show adrift from its crucial anchor in the suburbs. Currently, she is marooned in Mexican-drug-cartel land. The mighty Sopranos sailed clear through to its controversial final shot without capsizing\u2014they even absorbed the early death of Nancy Marchand, Tony Soprano's mother, into their fictional universe\u2014but there were still brief patches of questionable-subplot turbulence. (Remember the \"famous rapper\" Massive Genius?) Right now, favorites like Curb Your Enthusiasm are experiencing their first bobbles: Larry without Cheryl, it turns out, is somebody almost nobody wants to spend time with. Mad Men has yet to place a single foot outside its aesthetic boundaries, but, um, when was the last Mad Men episode?\n\n Belated confession: I'm an after-the-fact TV watcher. I'm not what was once called a \"watercooler guy,\" which I think now would be have to be called the \"live-tweeting or commenting on snarky-TV-recaps guy.\" Instead, I'm the mushroom that sprouts on the husk of dead shows after they've retired to Netflix Instant, the tweet that pops up saying things like \"Really enjoying Battlestar Galactica!\" in 2011. I'm fairly certain that I'm an annoying, complacent breed to committed TV watchers, but there are more and more of me. And when you're swallowing a show in immoderate, context-free gulps, you get a unique bird's-eye view take on Creeping Incoherence as it hatches and metastasizes.\n\n For one thing, you don't get to share your outrage and derision with anyone else, check your Twitter feed for wisecracks, or stew over a missed opportunity or bungled thread for a whole week. There are no infuriating cliffhangers in Netflix-Land, just puzzling cracks in an endlessly paved sidewalk. Leigh Alexander wrote brilliantly about emotions invented by the Internet this year, but here's an emotion invented by streaming television: the vague feeling that, somewhere behind that episode from 2008, that actress must have kicked up a fuss about her contract or something, or else why would they have suddenly made her a drug mule and killed her? You make a mental note to Google it.\n\n Contract disputes, ratings panics, the loss of cast members\u2014in the Netflix Egg, these things are felt, but not known. Outside complications have always leaked into a show's framework, but the shift to Internet-based viewing has changed the experience for everyone. In the past year, I have encountered the hiccup created by the 2008 writers' strike in Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and Friday Night Lights. Each time, it has taken a moment to realize what was going on. The Landry Incident, in Friday Night Lights, was largely thought to have been a desperate grab by the show's creators to boost its ratings. Watching TV has always been an isolated experience, but when you cue up an old show, or catch up to an existing one, you are watching both literally and figuratively alone.\n\n The implied compliment in Creeping Incoherence, of course, is that there was once coherence worth preserving. As such, it's a curse that only visits dramatic shows that have shown some overarching ambition in the highly upsettable medium of television. Overreachers receive the special punishment we mete out when something lamentable begins happening to something otherwise worthwhile.\n\n This phenomena was put to the test this week when showrunner Chuck Lorre and Two And A Half Men completed the process of jettisoning Charlie Sheen's character from it's framework. As rumored, Charlie Harper was killed off\u2014in a \"mysterious train accident,\" natch\u2014and Ashton Kutcher, playing an \"Internet billionaire with a broken heart,\" strolled on. The transition was handled with cruel swiftness, and by episode's end, everyone involved seemed ready to plunge back into the cheerful nothing that is eternal sitcom existence. Oh, and the revised Two and a Half Men season premiere debuted to 28 million viewers. So much for the howl of the spectating mob.\n\n It's easy to imagine Damon Lindelhof observing numbers with a self-pitying sigh. Imagine if he'd had to swap out Matthew Fox for Patrick Dempsey midway through season four\u2014what kind of censure would he have endured? But sitcoms don't operate according to the heightened rules that Creeping Incoherence plays by. Sitcoms take place in purgatory, and we accept pretty much anything with a shrug so long as the pleasant fa&amp;amp;#xE7;ade isn't disturbed. It's the bargain we strike with low-investment sitcom fare; keep existing, and we'll keep watching you. If Two and A Half Men were to stop feeling vaguely Two and A Half Men-y, we would simply turn it off. No harm, no foul. It's the neat way that mid-level sitcoms have always perished: soundlessly.\n\n Dramatic shows, on the other hand, operate on the promise that we're hurtling toward something. Once you've captured your audience's imagination, you've made a delicate pact with them. And sooner or later, it will be put to the test. Creeping Incoherence will find you. All of which is to say: what you have right now is precious, Louie and Breaking Bad devotees. Treasure it. It won't last."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/two-and-a-half-men-tv-show-changes>