It went downhill fast after Sam Ryan left, in my opinion.

Okay, hear me out. I just started watching this show for the first time a week or two ago, so I've been binge-watching from the very beginning.

I really liked Sam Ryan a lot. She was a brilliant forensic pathologist, and I felt like the cases centered around that.

While shows like CSI and NCIS can be entertaining, I always found it stupid how far from reality they strayed, even with simple things like sticking to one's job description. True, there is some overlap with some of the jobs, but in those types of shows, the main character, regardless of their job title, is suddenly a detective, a crime scene investigator, a forensic scientist, a psychologist, and a million others all rolled into one. If you have even a basic understanding of any of those professions in the real world, those shows are utterly ridiculous.

But I digress...

Sam Ryan did often play detective, I guess you could say, but I felt that it was always based on 1) her medical findings (i.e., what could've caused this wound pattern), 2) her compassion and/or curiosity (like a connection with a person that happened to lead to more information), and 3) being damn good at her job and not accepting things that were untrue.

She did ruffle feathers by "being difficult," but I attribute that to her actually giving a shit and taking pride in her work. She wasn't going to sign off on an autopsy just because someone told her to, or because some high-ranking official told her what to say. She wasn't trying to make things more complicated than they were; she just wasn't going to ignore significant findings just to make things simpler for the detectives. And it's a good thing, too, because if she had ignored those things, innocent people would be in prison and guilty people would be on the streets.
So any time that a detective got pissy with her for "being difficult," it just made them look like the asshole.

Anyway. I loved her.

I figured that she would leave at some point, sadly, but I didn't realize that the show (and main characters) would go to utter shit after she left.

(And, again, this is just my person opinion on the matter.)

For example, Harry seemed like a good pathologist while Ryan was still there. He didn't seem to make any costly mistakes or do anything really stupid.
However, in the episode(s) "Death by Water," I was amazed at how the writers handled his character. Suddenly he was a complete idiot, seeing a classroom of children all with respiratory distress and immediately chalking it up to "mass hysteria" instead of doing his goddamn job and looking into the matter at all. Then in that same episode, when the little baby dies, it's, "Oh, the mom had munchausen by proxy." Leo was the only character who actually did his job, all the while taking shit from everyone else for what they considered to be making a mountain out of a molehill.
There is absolutely no way that any good doctor would do what Harry did, especially facing a public health concern like they were.

That episode had me yelling at every character (besides Leo) for being a total fucking moron, diametrically opposed to what we'd seen previously.

And then it just seemed to go downhill from there.

I'm only on season 9, episode 6, but at this point it's gone from a respectable and intelligent show where the different professions were just that, different, to another crappy show where the forensic pathologist is suddenly wearing every professional hat in the criminal justice system.

For example, a few episodes ago, Harry and Leo were collecting evidence from crime scenes (which is a job for the CSI unit), lifting fingerprints from items at the crime scene, comparing those prints to those of the suspect (which is a job for a forensic scientist or forensic lab tech, except that they don't first ask the detective from whom the evidence was obtained), and working hand-in-hand with the detectives to come up with possible motives and check alibis.

It was beyond frustrating for me.

What I liked about Sam Ryan was that she never presumed to have the answers for things that weren't in her professional scope. She did whatever she could to find the answers to the questions that came up in the postmortem, but she wasn't out there pretending to be a crime scene technician or a forensic scientist or any of these other things that the current characters are doing all of a sudden (things that wouldn't fly in real life, obviously).

That's what made the show enjoyable for me, because it was a lot more true to life and accurate.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, but it's just all been building up in the past few days of watching the show.

In browsing some of the posts on here, it appears that we're stuck with Emilia Fox for the rest of the show (I cannot stand her so far), and it sounds like the show gets even worse with the game of Musical Professions. If these things bother me now, is it pointless to keep watching?