But you'd be surprised by how close some great TV shows came to destroying themselves with equally awful storylines. Maybe it's the pressure to try to stay fresh and interesting, or maybe it's the fact that Hollywood is 70 percent cocaine. Whatever the cause, only last-minute interventions from sanity and sobriety saved us from the following disasters.

Remember the time the Brady Bunch threw a huge kegger and then had to rush to get Jan's stomach pumped? Or that time Fred Flintstone beat his bird record player to death because it kept skipping? Of course you don't, because those are terrible, terrible ideas that we just made up.

5 Breaking Bad -- The First Season Almost Ended Like a Saw Movie

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Walter White's moral descent from milquetoast high school chemistry teacher to full-fledged villain slowly played out over Breaking Bad's five-year run, or roughly two days of calling in sick and watching Netflix in your underwear. And while Bryan Cranston's living room now resembles an IKEA ball pit filled with Emmys, it's hard to imagine the show succeeding if it had followed the original storyline, where Walter goes from sad sack cancer patient to deranged psycho killer over the course of, like, a long weekend.

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"That's not even enough time for me to grow evil facial hair."

Fans of the show have known for a while that Walt's partner in crime, Jesse Pinkman, was originally slated to die at the end of the first season. While this would have surprised viewers and drastically lowered the show's final "bitch" count, it's the aftermath of Jesse's death that would have been a twist equal parts shocking and unbelievably idiotic.

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So kind of like Season 2's twist ending.

According to series creator Vince Gilligan, Jesse was to be knocked off by a rival drug dealer. An enraged Walter in turn kidnaps this dealer and locks him in his basement, and then presumably tells his wife and son that it's infested with raccoons or something. Makes sense so far, but what happens next would have blown the show's crazy load for good.

First, Walter rigs up a shotgun on a tripwire so the dealer could kill himself whenever he wanted. Walt then turns into the Jigsaw Killer by lopping off a toe, a finger, or some other body part every day before cauterizing each wound with a blowtorch. Which, holy shit, even by the standards of the monster Walter became in the later seasons, or by the standards of any human being with even a remote shred of sanity left in them, is pretty cruel.