I gave it up because the stories just got sillier and sillier - the same as they did in the Hercules show. Genre-jumping from slapstick through soap opera to Lovecraftian horror can be done if your writers are up to it. Doctor Who does it a lot, but the Doctor has usually had competent writers at his/her back, not so poor Xena or Herc!

If they'd left the Xena/Gabrielle dynamic as a Holmes/Watson one, it might have worked.