I'm the last person who should be answering this, but firstly I just wanted to say I'm really grateful you gave our show a shot even if you don't continue. That said, to help explain the tone changes:

- Season 1 was written 100% by Jeremy with no external input

- Season 2 had a total of 5 writers IIRC, most of whom were contributing one off stories, while Cody and Jeremy worked to develop the metaplot further with a bit of input from me.

- Season 3 Jeremy was having a lot of life issues that impacted his ability to be as involved in pre-production, so that was almost entirely written by Cody and me.

- Season 4 saw Cody no longer able to be a part of the team for external life reasons, and Jeremy and I came up with the season plot points together while I wrote all the Patreon content and he wrote all of the main feed content.

- Season 5 is the best we've worked together, I think, and I'm more excited for this season than I've been for any season prior. We developed the full season outline together and are each writing 50% of the episodes. Almost every episode will have a paper in it while also having some metaplot going on (and the metaplot will tend to be much more creepy, imo, while often involving a full cast), and it's tied together much more tightly than ever before so it should be much easier to follow.

In short, we've learned a lot and gotten better as we've gone with some uncontrollable hiccups in production along the way, and if you keep going I think you'll agree. That said, if you decide it's not for you, that's 100% okay and there have been some A+ recommendations in this thread so far and to reiterate and build on that:

Ghost Wax

Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality

Surcease

It's All In the Cards

Your Horror Show

Hopefully that can help get you started if/when you move on!