10 TV Shows That Died too Soon

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.