User blog comment:Gilgameshkun/Watched 2K12 season 2 with a group of other people/@comment-28672978-20160613171602/@comment-995426-20160615164522

I understand your points.

I just like to think really good TMNT is that which evolves into something with greater literary depth. Mirage TMNT #1 may have been wholly experimental, but by What Goes Around... ...Comes Around!, Silent Partner and True Stories, it had really matured into something both serious and really good. It reached its pinnable in City at War. I know even Mirage TMNT has its good and its not-so-good, but it maintained that thought-out adult appeal (and I mean mental adult, not R-18 "adult") more often than not. I didn't come to truly love TMNT until I came to love it as a decent drama with developed characters.

The 2012 TV series started out balancing different interests at once, which was okay. What mattered to me is that its characters were highly nuanced and fleshed out, and from their development and their banter and their scene-to-scene moments, they came across as reasonably deep characters. Even Mikey had plenty of surprisingly profound moments, showing he wasn't a complete idiot but actually very heart-wise. You didn't have to be a child or an adult childhood nostalgic to appreciate it.

But season 3 and 4 are like watching a train wreck of bad writing. The characters are so one-dimensional, so much more caricaturized, their dialogue so wooden, as if all the effort went into the special effects and everything else was a lazy afterthought. The deep moments they still have are few and far between, and all that well-written witty banter is just plain gone. Even the consistencies of character personalities seem to crumble away. It becomes harder to care about what happens to characters when they have no soul. The show not only became boring, but painful and tedious to watch. My joke is, "Splinter was murdered, but everyone else died on screen." I found myself wishing Splinter wouldn't come back to a family that had even less of a soul than when he left them.