5 Worst Fantasy Shows Ever Made (#1 Ran For 7 Seasons!

There are plenty of fantasy shows across different corners of the genre that genuinely find success. But making a good fantasy series is much harder than it looks: it’s not enough to have magic, strange new worlds, or wild ideas if the writing doesn’t know where it’s going. When it works, you get addictive universes and characters that keep audiences invested for multiple seasons. When it doesn’t, it turns into a mess of random decisions, constant inconsistency, and plotlines that exist purely for shock value. What’s especially wild is that some of these shows had everything they needed to be great — and still failed, badly.

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Below are 5 fantasy series often considered among the worst of the genre. They may have grabbed attention at first, but as the episodes went on, it became clear they had lost sight of what they were supposed to be. The result? Shows that ended up becoming lessons in what not to do when making fantasy TV.

5) Heroes

Many shows start off strong, only to completely lose their way halfway through. That was exactly the case with Heroes, one of the first fantasy (and superhero) series to premiere with massive ratings and overwhelmingly positive buzz, only to end as a disaster no one saw coming. The premise centers on ordinary people around the world who discover they have superpowers and must learn how to live with them as a global catastrophe begins to take shape. For its time, it was a genuinely compelling concept. The first season worked because it treated these powers as a real burden, something capable of changing lives and relationships in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, that seems to be where the planning stopped.

As the show went on, Heroes appeared to have no clear sense of direction, turning into a loop of bad creative decisions: characters died and came back with no emotional impact, powers changed depending on what the plot needed, and villains appeared without any clear purpose beyond causing chaos. At that point, the fantasy elements stopped serving the story and existed solely as an excuse to manufacture random twists. The entire show gradually became shallow and aimless. Heroes had everything it needed to be one of the best on TV, but instead turned into a mess that eventually exhausted even the most patient viewers hoping it would get better again.

4) Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

The biggest issue with Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is its tone. Overall, the show wasn’t exactly bad, but without balance across all its elements, decline becomes almost inevitable. The story follows Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka), a half-witch, half-human teenager, trying to balance a normal life with an occult world full of rules, entities, and demons. To stand out, the series leaned into a darker atmosphere, which does make sense (especially visually, since the aesthetic is one of its strongest points). The problem is that the show often mistakes being dark for being disorganized, struggling to sustain everything it wants to be at the same time.

What ends up happening is that the writing constantly loses its footing because the series never fully commits to what kind of fantasy it actually wants to be: truly dark or still fundamentally teen-oriented. The rules of magic change all the time, major conflicts are resolved far too quickly, and important characters are reduced to little more than narrative tools. In short, instead of deepening its universe, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina stacks idea after idea until none of them really matter. There was plenty of material to explore and make the show intense and engaging (and at times, it is), but overall, it can’t sustain itself and ends up feeling hollow. With a clearer creative direction from the start, this drop-off could have been avoided.

3) The Shannara Chronicles

This is a case where the mistakes pile up so badly that it’s hard to defend the end result. The Shannara Chronicles feels like a show engineered in a lab to chase trends and not much else — especially since it couldn’t even stay faithful to the books it was based on. The story is set in a future where the world has been rebuilt with elves, humans, and magic after the collapse of civilization, following a group of chosen young heroes tasked with stopping an ancient threat. On paper, that’s classic epic fantasy. But when you aim that high, execution matters, and in practice, nearly every episode ends up feeling too generic to deliver on the promise of its premise. For fans of the original material, it was a major letdown.

The show struggles with bland characters, weak dialogue for a fantasy series, and conflicts that are either painfully predictable or needlessly cliché. It lacks a clear identity, borrowing familiar genre tropes without doing anything interesting with them. Even when it tries to feel epic, there’s no real sense of urgency or purpose. The world is introduced, but never truly explored, making the fantasy feel like little more than a nice-looking backdrop for stories we’ve already seen countless times. The Shannara Chronicles is extremely easy to forget.

2) Emerald City

The Wizard of Oz is one of the most adapted stories, so it was only a matter of time before it made its way to TV with a bold new take. Emerald City reimagines the classic tale, leaning heavily toward a Wicked-style approach. It takes the world of Oz and shifts the focus to politics, violence, and moral ambiguity, presenting a place where magic is forbidden, and power rules everything. On paper, that sounds intriguing. In execution, though, the show never manages to turn that idea into something really engaging. Instead, it delivers an overly confusing narrative that constantly works against its own idea. Plus, it takes itself very seriously, despite never quite earning that tone.

Going dark with fantasy can absolutely work, but Emerald City never seems sure of what it actually wants to be. The pacing is slow, seemingly on purpose, as if the show believes that dragging things out will automatically add depth — and it clearly wants to position itself as the next Game of Thrones. And the ambition is understandable, but it doesn’t work since it chases the HBO show’s style without having compelling material to back it up. Everything feels forced and sluggish, the characters are poorly developed, and the tone shifts from episode to episode with no consistency. The result is something so awkward that it’s hard to even analyze properly. In short, it wants to be sophisticated and adult, but it never gets past the desire to be.

1) Riverdale

Let’s be blunt, because everyone already knows this: Riverdale is one of the most extreme examples of fantasy completely spiraling out of narrative control in recent TV history (and that’s not an exaggeration). In its first season, the show presents itself as a teen mystery drama set in a small town, clearly inspired by Twin Peaks. It was a strong hook and quickly gained traction with early episodes. At that point, it had everything going for it and could have easily become a gateway mystery series for a new generation. But without warning, the cracks start to show, with increasingly incoherent writing choices that signal things are going to derail fast. Before long, the show abandons its original premise entirely and switches gears for no reason.

As the seasons go on, Riverdale dives headfirst into cults, parallel universes, superpowers, and wild concepts that appear out of nowhere. The show doesn’t gradually evolve into fantasy — it crashes into it, with zero concern for anything it previously established. It occasionally tries to explain its chaos, but it never really succeeds. Rules change every time, characters survive absurd situations, and ideas pile up without any real connection, all in the name of being shocking and bold. In the end, there’s no story left to tell, just a series that completely lost control of its own universe.

Have you watched any of these shows? What did you think of them? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!