As in, poor first season or even first seasons but then huge improvement later on.
Parks and Recs. They tried to be the office early on, but abandoned that later and the show was infinitely better.
Parks and Recreation would be an obvious one here. It seems fairly common advice to skip S1 altogether.
Star Trek: The Next Generation started out pretty bad, but eventually turned rad.
After having watched TNG multiple times I really do enjoy the first three seasons a lot. I think the only real stinker is Code of Honor, the racist episode. I love The Naked Now, though having it as the first episode after the pilot is of course more than crazy. If the silliness of that episode didn’t make people quit guess what the next episode was? Right, Code of Honor…
Also Tasha’s multiple mentions of rape gangs in the first season isn’t very wholesome. On the other hand, not wholesome but amazing is exploding heads in my Trek. Don’t know what they were thinking but it’s always a highlight on a re-watch.
So, it was clearly a phenomenon even in its early form, and its lumbering husk maybe alters our view of early seasons, but the first season or two of the Simpsons is really crude (not in the clutching pearls way, but in the quality and production values way). It really took until about Season 3 to zero in on the art, the voicework, the tone, and the writing. S1 and S2 are maybe more Groening-like but I’m not sure that was to the show’s overall benefit, though classic scenes like the therapy electroshocks are indeed hilarious.
