Did "The Goldbergs" have the biggest fall from grace for a sitcom...

[TMC]

in recent times at least? By "fall from grace", I simply mean where the earliest seasons are really good and then it gets really bad. This recently came to my attention in relation to The Goldbergs:

Hot take: The Goldbergs. It was never a television masterpiece, but it was a serviceable sitcom that my wife and I watched together to unwind and de-stress. By the end, we were basically hate-watching. All broad comedies are formulaic to an extent, but it got to the point where I jokingly impersonated Patton Oswalt's narrator during every episode to say, "That day, we all learned..." Then I would improvise some shallow "lesson" they were meant to have learned.

I promise, I'm not overthinking it. I'm not making unreasonable demands of a sitcom. I was just thrown by how lifeless it all became. Once they announced it was the final season (after Jeff Garlin was dropped), I thought there were places they could go. I would've done a time jump into the future where we see Adam working to create a TV show based on his family. We could watch Barry in med school. Have the show fold back on itself as Adam tries to capture events from the earlier seasons. Have an episode where Barry doesn't like the person they cast to play him. An arc where Bev is constantly trying to influence the way the family is portrayed in the script. End it with the family attending a premiere for the pilot, with some cheesy voiceover about remembering the best years of our lives.

Instead, they just kept spinning their wheels with the same broad characterizations and loosely nostalgic vibes. The hovered in the late 80s for so long, I kept waiting for them to cross over into the 90s, but they were too tethered to the original premise of an 80s show, or too nervous to let the show evolve a little. It needed to end when it did, I think they milked the premise for way too long... but there was an opportunity to make it all culminate into something.

I think it's because of all the turmoil behind the scenes, but toward the end, it seemed like every episode was being written by AI trying to seem human. Like a Mad-lib where the writers pitched a bunch of premises, then plugged characters into the blanks. The "lessons" characters learned were nonsensical and often contradictory to the character they'd established.

But we still laughed every time Barry got upset and did his little run.

[icecream]

Besides the episode with the Cheers cast, I haven't watched The Goldbergs at all since the end of season 4. But it sounds like a giant jump the shark moment when a complete moron like Barry got accepted into med school.

Add to that the Jeff Garlin controversy when you find out how terrible he acted on set and ABC burying it.