Season 4 is where it started to fall apart. Season 6 through 8 suffered terribly with the shift in writing and structure, and I'd be happy to never watch any of those episodes again.
But I agree with Lost. "Really original show but it pretty much goes off the rails."
To everyone's surprise, there isn't any payoff, and there aren't any consequences.
It was not really a surprise. As you said things went off the rails for a while already, that was a sign of a bad ending early on. When I saw how quickly they wrapped the Night King in Season 8 I knew all hopes were lost for a good ending.
That's a pretty lame sales pitch. I think you meant you wouldn't mind recommending them, but then you wrote out a quote as if it were actually a pitch
The "pitch" for catching up on GOT now is much weaker now than it was midway through the series.
An awesome show becoming an ok show and then ending as a terrible show is not worth recommending for anyone.
For me Lost, was a great show, with highs and lows, with fairly good last season, with a very disappointing and confusing last episode. Still worth the ride in my opinion.
If you feel characterization is the most important thing, and the emotional connection to characters or having highly evocative emotional moments in the narrative is what makes it worthwhile then you will probably like Lost quite a bit, but you might hate GoT (given my understanding that the last season fucked up major characters for shock value - I can't speak directly to it as I haven't watched it)
So based on that my wife still talks about how great Lost was, and if it gets brought up the first words out of my mouth will not be complimentary.
I'm not sure I would recommend your examples to a friend though. GOT started going downhill around season 5; it wasn't just the ending that was bad. I'm sure people would disagree with me here, but I think lost hasn't aged very well. it was a good show only by the mediocre standards of '00s TV.
Now the show is under a lot of pressure to maintain a level of buzz around it. But I also might not watch it if it seems like an okay show but the moment has passed.
I low-key wanted to watch GoT when it was on. Now I wouldn't bother, because all the people I could talk to about it have already watched it and are sick of it.
Procrastination is surely in the top five.
Not really. Some shows just get milked dry and pass their expiration dates. For example Walking Dead or even The Simpsons. There’s value to an artist who can tell a story in 1-2 seasons.
A challenge here for a long series though is that it's a pretty high bar to get people to retrospectively binge watch many hours of episodes. But streaming does help. (As time shifting did to some degree before.) The serial model has probably become so popular in part because it's a much better match with streaming (even if everything doesn't drop at once) than with traditional broadcast.
Lost was a watershed moment in many ways, even though JJ Abrams couldn’t stick the landing. They rushed out the DVDs of season 1 about a month before the season 2 premiere, giving people time to binge the whole show (even the pirates). As long as the streaming services keep the back catalog around, you can always catch up. I have forgotten which show, but there was a network show I stopped watching because they only had the last six episodes on their app. Once I fell seven episodes behind, I didn’t want to keep going, having missed a chunk of the story arc.
There’s a certain level of curiosity for a show that has survived, say, six seasons. They must have something there if they keep going. Maybe I should check it out? Especially if I’m out of other stuff. But is it going to have a satisfying final episode, peter out, or end ina cliff hanger? The more seasons, the higher the likelihood for a wrap up. Two season shows almost always end abruptly.