The artistic temperament is a fragile one, so it's no surprise that sometimes – just sometimes – the creative minds behind television series throw a wobbly. Particularly if outside forces have interfered with their vision.
Here are just some of the writers who ended up dissing or disowning their own shows.
1. Neil Jordan – Riviera
Having a stellar-name filmmaker linked with any small-screen project is obviously going to help it seize column inches, so Sky was cock-a-hoop when The Crying Game director Neil Jordan signed on to its sun-kissed Euro thriller Riviera.
Jordan is credited as the show's creator and co-writer, alongside the Irish novelist John Banville, but the filmmaker claimed, just as the show debuted on Sky Atlantic, that their episodes were almost completely rewritten and bore little resemblance to what he and Banville had originally put on paper.
"The first two episodes that myself and John wrote were very dark and complex, and that's what got everybody attracted to the project in the first place," Jordan said.
"Sky Atlantic got involved because of these scripts. But then the producers decided to go in a different direction. I can't claim it's mine. If I had been in control of the thing it would have been quite different."
Still, the bad press didn't do Riviera too much harm – the Julia Stiles series ended up setting a new record for Sky in terms of audience figures.
2. David Lynch – Twin Peaks (season two)
When Showtime boss David Nevins was getting us geared up for its revival of Twin Peaks, he promised a "pure heroin vision of David Lynch".
Sure enough, Lynch has been all over this new season, having co-written and directed every one of the 18 episodes – unlike season two of the show, when he was mostly off directing Wild at Heart, leaving the day-to-day running of Twin Peaks to lesser talents.
But while Lynch remains proud of certain aspects of the original, he's no fan of the second season, when the show scrabbled around for new stories after the murderer of Laura Palmer was unmasked.
"The pilot is the only thing I am particularly, extremely proud of," he said early this year. "There were great moments along the way [but] the second season sucked."
3. George Lucas – The Star Wars Holiday Special
If you thought The Phantom Menace was Star Wars' nadir, you've obviously never encountered the famously calamitous Star Wars Holiday Special.
So bizarre you'll be convinced it's a fever dream, this shabby looking Star Wars-themed variety show aired on CBS in November 1978 and features most of the first film's stars – Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels – all looking visibly uncomfortable in this batty story about Han Solo and Chewbacca's attempts to get home to Chewie's family to celebrate Life Day (seriously, don't ask).
Despite cooking up the story and okaying the sorry project, George Lucas has since wrenched the Special from circulation and it currently only exists as a taped-off-the-telly YouTube video. "If I had the time and a sledgehammer," Lucas said years later, "I would track down every copy of that show and smash it."
4. Matt Groening – The Simpsons, 'A Star Is Burns'
Although Matt Groening remains proud of the series he created in 1989, there's one episode that he refuses to acknowledge and which he took his name off before it was broadcast in 1995 – 'A Star Is Burns'.
The Critic was a rival cartoon series at the time, created by The Simpsons' Al Jean and Mike Reiss and produced by Simpsons main man Albert R Brooks. When Brooks cooked up an idea to do a crossover episode with The Simpsons, in which New York film critic Jay Sherman would visit Springfield, Groening was apoplectic and tried to get the episode pulled.
Fox, who wanted to cross-promote their new Simpsons rival, didn't cave, but they did allow him to take his name off the episode – the only time that's happened in the show's 28-year history.
5. Dan Harmon – Community (season 4)
After Community creator Dan Harmon's very public spat with Chevy Chase, NBC decided one of them had to go. Crazily, they decided that Community had a better future with Chase and not its own creator and head writer, and so Harmon was replaced for the show's fourth season by Aliens in America (no, we've not heard of it either) scribes David Guarascio and Moses Port.
Fans lambasted the season and Harmon himself called it "an impression, and an unflattering one", later likening it to "'flipping through Instagram just watching your girlfriend blow everyone".
But then when Chase himself walked off the show, NBC went back to Harmon, inviting him back to the series he was fired from a year earlier. In fittingly meta style, the previous season's crapness was excused as being down to a "gas leak", leading to Community fans referring to season four as the "gas leak year".
