10 TV Shows That Aren’t Nearly As Smart As Fans Think They Are

Chris Snellgrove is an English Professor by day and a pop culture writer by night. You can read his thoughts on celebrities over on Instanthub, thoughts on games over on Gammicks, and thoughts on everything else over on Ebaum's World.

Historically, people have felt guilty about watching too much television. In fact, the original TV nickname “boob tube” relied on the fact that “boob” was an old-timey word to describe an idiot. The message was clear: watching too much TV was bound to make you stupid. 

These days, though, fans love to flock to intelligent TV shows. They maintain that these are smart shows made for smart people, but here’s the thing: most of the time, they are lying. And we’re here to break down some TV shows that aren’t nearly as smart as fans think they are. 

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Rick and Morty 

https://variety.com/video/rick-and-morty-season-4/ 

You knew this one would be on the list, right? Rick and Morty fans love to talk about how smart you have to be to understand the show. To the point that it has become the stuff of meme legend. 

However, most of what you need to be “smart” to understand is a mixture of scientific theories straight out of a B-movie mixed with the existential angst of a goth kid struggling with his Intro to Philosophy Class. In fact, if you’ve completed a freshman year of college, it’s pretty safe to say that you might actually be too smart for this show. 

Westworld 

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/westworld-season-3-less-mysteries-aaron-paul-character-details-1202158766/ 

Westworld kicks off a theme you will see a lot in this list. And the theme is this: being mysterious is not the same thing as being smart. Just go ask J.J. Abrams, a man great at building mysteries and absolutely terrible at resolving them. 

The first season of Westworld does a great job of stringing us along with various mysteries, and it ends in an explosive and satisfying finale. But it’s telling that the second and third seasons of the show struggled so much to retain that magic: once they ran out of good mysteries, they ran out of good stories. And that’s how you know the show was never that smart to begin with. 

True Detective 

https://www.amazon.com/True-Detective-Season-1/dp/B00KF7OOIW 

The first season of True Detective has some very captivating performances. And it also had some truly quotable moments, including my personal favorite: “time is a flat circle.” 

However, you could easily see the scripts struggling to add fancy dressing to a pretty basic plot of creepy rich people doing creepy rich person stuff. Bizarre detective monologues and quoting obscure old texts can only do so much to hide that the plot itself isn’t smart. In fact, it’s about as simple as it gets! 

Black Mirror 

https://collider.com/best-episodes-black-mirror-ranked/ 

Black Mirror’s whole deal is right there in the name. This show exists to show us a dark reflection of our weird hellworld, letting us see the far extremes that, say, technology and social media could eventually take our society to. 

But here’s the thing: pointing out that stuff is scary and bad isn’t the same as saying anything intelligent about it. For example, an episode about a young woman willing to do anything for social media clout may be engaging, but all it really has to say–that most social media is bad and most people are stupid–is something that you likely think to yourself a hundred times a day. And simply saying what we’re all thinking isn’t a sign a show is smart. 

Sherlock 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00m5wm7 

With the BBC’s Sherlock, the importance of intelligence is baked directly into the plot. Viewers are meant to watch with great interest and fascination how Sherlock figures everything out at a single glance before spelling out his methods to us dumb dumbs in the audience. 

But you don’t have to watch long to figure out that most of the “deductions” are insane. Shaving cream behind his ear? Dude must live alone. Scratches near the cellphone charging port? Clearly, this person is an alcoholic! Once you figure out how much the show’s resident smart guy is just making random guesses, you realize how dumb the whole show really is. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation 

https://nerdist.com/article/fancasting-potential-star-trek-the-text-generation-movie-reboot/ 

Star Trek is currently having a serious resurgence in popularity. Most credit this to the enduring popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation and its more cerebral take on the sci-fi adventures of The Original Series. 

Next Gen had good writing, but it wasn’t exactly smart. How many times did the crew solve a problem by saying a bunch of technobabble and then bouncing a bad special effect off the deflector dish? These guys could have saved some time if they stopped pulling nonsense solutions out of their butts and used the transporter to beam them out instead. 

Hannibal 

https://decider.com/2015/06/03/hannibal-season-3-guide/ 

Hannibal is the best horror television show ever made. And we would probably put it in the “elevated horror” category if the show wasn’t determined to show sickening gore in every other scene. 

But the fact that Hannibal is a smart character doesn’t mean the show itself is very smart. It’s basically putting the plots of various Hannibal-centric media into a blender and scattering it around a bloody bromance. We may be able to relate to characters that are both super hungry and super horny, but them having clever dialogue is not the same thing as the show having an intelligent plot. 

Game of Thrones 

https://ew.com/tv/2019/05/19/game-thrones-finale-interview-emilia-clarke/ 

Has any intellectual property tumbled so far down as Game of Thrones? It went from being genuine “must-see TV” to being barely discussed at all after that disastrous series finale. 

Still, in its heyday, fans loved to hold the show up for its smart writing. But most of the characters and plots stem from a simple question (“what were most of those medieval knights in history really like?”) and an equally simple answer (“horrific monsters, most likely”). And the show was based on books that also seemed smart until you realize that Martin is just throwing useless characters (Penny the dwarf, anyone?) and bizarre descriptions (do we really need to know every detail about this minor character’s lunch?) at you to cover up that he has no idea how to bring this story to a satisfying conclusion. 

The Newsroom 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1870479/

While it didn’t tumble from grace quite like Game of Thrones, The Newsroom is another show that made a big splash and then mostly faded from our memory and memes after its finale. But in its heyday, this Aaron Sorkin TV show was considered as smart as it gets. 

However, this show’s apparent intelligence was a magic trick built around the old cliche: “hindsight is always 20/20.” By setting the show in the past, Sorkin is able to write a kind of fantasy show in which media personalities reacted to various events as Sorkin wanted real media figures to respond in real life. The man basically wrote fanfiction about the evening news and everyone pretended he was smart and daring for doing so. 

South Park 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121955/ 

South Park is not a show that the creators hold up as an example of smart programming. In fact, the showrunners have turned not taking things too seriously into a kind of art form. There is just one problem: the show’s fans often cobble together their beliefs and philosophies from South Park and then treat those beliefs and philosophies way too seriously. 

This led to quirky terms like “South Park Republican” to describe fans who get their politics from this show. The irony here is that South Park’s traditional approach to politics can best be described as saying “both sides are to blame” for every issue under the sun. While nobody should ever get their politics from a TV show, the sad fact is that you will be far dumber on pretty much any given issue after watching South Park’s treatment of it than you would be if you never watched the ep at all.