TV Shows that died too early

10 TV Shows That Died too Soon



Written by Dan Seitz | September 1, 2010 | 6:00 AM






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One thing that never fails; most TV shows never get a proper resolution.
Really, it’s just nature of the medium. But that usually means that a
show that has a chance to be pretty awesome never gets a chance to fly.
And nowhere is this more true than SF shows, which always hurt because
there’s not enough of the good stuff in the first place. Here are ten
TV shows that barely had a chance to get started, forget tell a good
story.

Day Break

“Day Break” was kinda like “Majorca’s Mask”, except with guns and
your injuries carried over to the next day, so our hero, Taye Diggs, had
to be careful not to, say, get shot or die, because then it’s game
over. This sounds like a recipe for sucking, but it actually worked
pretty well, as our hero had to solve character’s problems in an ongoing
murder investigation and people would knock him off kilter all the
time. Needless to say, it got cancelled before it could even finish
airing its episodes.
Gargoyles

Here’s one that’s a sore spot to this day. “Gargoyles” was a TV show
that didn’t automatically assume kids were idiots and actually bothered
to get a decent voice cast, including half the cast of “Star Trek: The
Next Generation”. It had ongoing plotlines, intelligent themes, and was
actually fairly popular. So the network killed it off, because parents
were complaining. This is why parents suck.
The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Is there a red-blooded American who doesn’t love Bruce Campbell? We
can understand green-blooded Americans not loving him, because they’re
all coldly logical bastards anyway, but most of us love the man who cut
his own hand off and then trapped it under “Farewell to Arms”. And when
he got a TV series, we rejoiced.
Then we realized it was on Fox, and that it wasn’t going to last.
Then we realized it had science fiction elements, in a Western, and that
meant it was going to be awesome and REALLY not going to last. At
least we got twenty-two episodes before it ended, and Bruce Campbell
went on to be awesome while Fox went on to suck harder.
Max Headroom

“Max Headroom”, in some respects, is adorably ’80s. In other
respects, this show, which always opened with “Twenty minutes into the
future”, was creepily prescient, our personal favorite moment being the
Blanks, a culture of people who reject all forms of identification and
live off the grid for the sake of privacy. Back then, of course, nobody
realized we’d have the kind of technology to broadcast a guy getting
hit in the nuts across the world in seconds. Now it’s just kind of
creepy how they nailed the basic problem, although the last time we
checked there aren’t any armed troops trying to capture people for
pirating TV broadcasts.
Maybe if we wait another twenty minutes.
Jericho

“Jericho” asked a pretty simple question; if America gets nuked, how
will normal people react? It turns out the way they always react; like
panicky idiots. It made for some pretty compelling TV…which meant it
had to be canceled for a reality show. Then it was brought back on
another network…and then cancelled for a reality show.
Drive

A close second in the “actor as a mark of doom” race is Nathan
Fillion, who was featured on “Firefly” and then went to this series,
which had an absolutely fascinating idea of an underground, illegal road
race where the drivers all have different motives. And it would have
been interesting to watch, too, if Fox had let us see more than three episodes.
Kings

We’re fairly sure that “Kings” got started because one TV writer bet
another TV writer he couldn’t pitch a show based on the Biblical story
of King David, set in the modern day, as a TV show. So he did it, went
to collect his fifty bucks, and discovered NBC had actually picked up
his show. Then the executives sobered up, saw that they had
accidentally approved some compelling, unique programming, and just
stone cold canceled the shit right out of it. But not before the single
most awesome “Son, I know you’re gay” moment ever shot for TV was
recorded, so there’s that, anyway.
Profit

“Profit” was all about Jim Profit, an ambitious young executive with
the single creepiest backstory of any protagonist in television history,
namely being forced to sleep in a box and watch TV all day before he
set his father on fire, ran away, and apparently went to business school
and got hired onto the major company that made the box. Which he still
sleeps in.
Yeah, it was a bit, how do we put this, edgy. Fox couldn’t get it off the air fast enough.
Nowhere Man

“Nowhere Man” is part of a trend we like to call “Lesser Network
Suicide”. This is where a network finds a show, has it leading in the
ratings, and then decides to murder it, thus alienating the people who
might actually watch the network in the first place. This is what
happened to “Angel”, but “Nowhere Man” beat Captain Sulky to it by being
highly rated on UPN first.
“Nowhere Man” was about a photojournalist caught up in a massive
conspiracy. So, yeah, pretty much “inspired” by “The X-Files”, but that
was par for the course. Thankfully, unlike “The X-Files”, the
conspiracy stuff was engaging and pretty strong. So much so that it was
UPN’s best rated show.
So they canceled it, because UPN had the groundbreaking “Homeboys In
Outer Space”, which actually tried to parody “Red Dwarf”. Later, UPN
would show they still made bad decisions, by picking up the last two
seasons of “Buffy”.
Space Above and Beyond

“Space: Above and Beyond” was a throwback to the days of military SF.
Unlike most media to feature space marines, it actually had compelling
characters and a serious consideration of the toll prolonged war takes
on soldiers. Being inspired by “The Forever War” probably had something
to do with that last one.
Anyway, “Space” had a problem: anybody showing up for a war show was
turned off by all the science fiction, and that was most of the
audience. Fox pretty much let it die and moved on. The creators, Glen
Morgan and James Wong, would move on to the “Final Destination” movie
series. Hey, at least they could make rent.
By Dan Seitz