Gone Too Soon: 5 TV Shows That Shoulda Lasted Longer

A debuting television show is a lot like a turkey in November. It has a chance of getting a pardon, but the odds are pretty crappy. Every year, “pilot season” brings every studio in Hollywood to a frenzy of activity: for a time the airwaves are positively flooded with the brainchildren of what seem like hundreds of different writers and producers, all hoping they've produced the next ten-year mega hit.

Inevitably, however, the cold mathematics of the ratings game come into play, and many of these children are taken out to the shed and put to the axe, often before they've had time to toddle along for more than a few episodes. In some cases this is absolutely as it should be. Hollywood has churned out a lot, and I mean a lot, of shit over the years, some of it so horrendously bad you wonder how the fuck it got green-lighted in the first place. I know: a few years ago I worked on the pilot for a "Wonder Woman" TV series, and despite costing $12 million to produce, it couldn't even find a buyer and has never been aired, for the simple reason that it didn't deserve to see daylight. But along with all the unwanted orphans that can't find a network buyer, and the no-hopers whose cancellation amounted to mere mercy-killing, there are a number of shows whose demise was not only premature, but arguably tragic. They represent the great “what-ifs” and “might have beens” of television history.

Whenever I look at lists of shows considered to have been wrongly cancelled before they got a second season, I always see Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, and My So-Called Life in the top ten. Briscoe County, Jr. is usually somewhere in the rankings as well, along with the highly influential Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and a few others, some dating back decades, others as recent as a year or two ago. There seems to be a rough consensus among critics which shows fall into the “gone way too soon” category, and I am neither prepared nor equipped to dispute that consensus. I do, however, have a few picks of my own that I'd like to share with you. Please note that these are not series which were merely canceled or taken off the air before their time (a separate category); they are series which were canceled either during or after the conclusion of their inaugural season, which lends them a special pathos – and a place in my heart.

Kindred: The Embraced (1996). Produced by Aaron Spelling and E. Duke Vincent, this toothly prime-time soap opera concerned the doings of five vampire clans based in San Fransisco, who were ruled over with some difficulty by a prince named Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). In addition to contending with all sorts of grief from the clans, Luna makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful female reporter who obviously can't be let in on his secret identity, while at the same time, fending off the attentions of a revenge-obsessed cop played by C. Thomas Howell, who wants to dust Julian for ordering the death of his (vampire) girlfriend in the pilot. Fans of Spelling's shows will recognize all of his trademarks here – period fashion, gallons of hair gel, extraordinarily beautiful actors who nevertheless look slightly freakish, and lots of soapy melodrama. At its worst, this show was embarrassingly bad: the writing, and therefore the acting, were all over the place, Howell was dreadfully miscast, and the vampire makeup on the “Nosferatu” clan looked like something you'd wear for Halloween...when you were twelve. Nonetheless, I mourned the cancellation of this show, for though it only lasted eight episodes, it had such a fabulous premise that it couldn't help but improve from week to week (and indeed, those eight episodes tell a nearly complete story that resolves most of the plot lines, making it satisfying to watch as a kind of unofficial mini-series). Never mind a second season: I'd have been content if this one had simply been allowed to complete its first. Unfortunately, the series' too-handsome-to-be-human star was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after its cancellation, preventing any possible reunion, and in any case “Kindred” died such a quick death that it has only a small cult following and is unlikely to be tapped for a reboot. (Interestingly, Spelling was to try another supernaturally-themed show set in San Fransisco just two years later, and scored a big hit with “Charmed.”)

Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982). On this list you will see shows which died because of low ratings, unrealistic expectations, bad network decisions or insoluble budget problems. But “Tales of the Gold Monkey” may be one of the only series in TV history whose epitaph reads, “Died of A Pissing Contest.” In the early eighties, the runaway success of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” led executives at ABC to wonder how they could cash in on the craze for old-school, fedora-and-bullwhip-style adventure. Well, it so happened that veteran producer Donald P. Bellisario had just such a script on hand, and before you could say, “Indiana Jones,” “Tales of the Gold Monkey” was born. Set on the fictional South Seas island of Bora Gora in the 1930s, the show followed the adventures of an ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) who makes a meager and very dangerous living flying cargo in his twin-engined seaplane. Jake has a sidekick with a drinking problem, a would-be girlfriend who is actually an American spy, a priest who is actually a German spy, and a sexy nemesis who works for the Japanese. Also a one-eyed dog with whom he has a running disagreement. Though similar in tone and feel to the low-budget cliffhanger adventure movies of the 30s, 40s and 50s, “Monkey” is really more similar to its stablemate “Magnum, P.I.” in terms of structure – there is narration (provided by Jake), self-depreciating humor to leaven all the action, and a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the characters. Of course, even by the standards of the 1980s this show was cheesy in the extreme and many of the plots were preposterous (I remember, as a small boy, shouting with laughter at the sight of a samurai fighting a carnivorous monkey), but it had a kind of innocent charm that made it emotionally irresistible. Indeed, “Tales” was expected to be on the airwaves for years, but Bellisario clashed with studio brass over the content and direction of the series, and ultimately the executives decided to pull the plug after the first season rather than put up with him. This grieved me as a boy of ten, and it grieves me now. Cheesy and preposterous is just my game.

Alien Nation (1990). Turning successful movies into successful TV shows is problematic at best, and its no wonder that for every “M*A*S*H,” you get ten insta-cancels like “Gung Ho,” “Clueless,” and “My Big Fat Greek Family.” The odds of “Alien Nation” being any good were even longer, because the movie upon which it wasn't any damn good to begin with. The 1988 studio picture was a classic case of a wasted premise, to wit: a huge population of humanoid aliens, marooned on earth when their spaceship crashes in the Nevada desert, have been incorporated into American society as immigrants. These immigrants, originally bred to be slaves, are stronger and more adaptable than humans, but have all sort of weird eccentricities and emotional baggage and are often the brunt of xenophobia and racism from their human hosts. Unfortunately, instead of jumping into this amusing and fascinating world like a gleeful anthropologist, the film elected to settle for second-rate buddy-cop drama. You can therefore be forgiven for having less than zero expectations about the spinoff. And in fact the pilot episode was full of 80s-era silliness and shlock. (I found it particularly hard to get past the elongated, spotted heads of the aliens when they were delivering really dramatic dialogue.) Like “Kindred,” however, it got better as it went along. For starters, it made the main human character, an LADP detective played by Gary Graham, something of a bigot, and then forced him, as he becomes increasingly close to his “newcomer” partner, to confront his own bigotry. More broadly, however, the show tackled such very earth-like subjects as immigration, cultural assimilation, inter-racial relationships, and so forth, by using the aliens as metaphors for any minority group you care to name; and it did this without idealizing them. The newcomers are as flawed and fucked-up as humans, and therefore people we can relate to. This show was cancelled after its first season not because of ratings, but because Fox Network, then in its infancy, couldn't afford to produce a second – a cruel fate when one considers the season finale was a cliffhanger. Eventually a compromise was reached whereby a series of five two-hour TV movies (all with the original cast) continued and more or less resolved the story-lines, but I can't help but wish this cheesy but daring and likeable show had been allowed to live out its life in the manner originally intended: as a weekly episodic.

Blade: The Series (2006). Those of you who know me may be surprised by this choice, since I am hardly an unqualified fan of the “Blade” movie trilogy; but like the “Alien Nation” series, which dove head-first into the premise hinted at by its parent film, thus staying true to its roots while establishing its own identity, “Blade: The Series” was determined be its own bad self from the first frame of the pilot to the conclusion of its thirteenth and final episode. “BTS” is the story of Krista Starr, a tough-yet-sexy Iraq veteran hellbent on discovering who murdered her troubled brother Zach. Her investigation leads to a wealthy Detroit socialite named Marcus van Sciver, who just happens to also be absolute ruler of the local vampire clan. Trying to kill Sciver, she encounters Blade, a human-vampire hybrid who lives to exterminate everything with pointy teeth. The two enter into an uneasy, peril-fraught alliance to bring down Sciver, which becomes all the more perilous when the ubervamp takes a shine to Krista and “turns” her. Krista struggles to adjust to life as a bloodsucker and a double agent while simultaneously fighting unwanted romantic feelings for the charming Marcus. This series was dark, brutal and relentlessly violent, not to mention explicit almost to the point of gratuitousness with both its gore and its sex, and oftimes it was difficult to find a sympathetic character anywhere. Blade, who speaks in a growl and has three facial expressions (sneer, snarl, glare), is a borderline psychopath and not always easy to root for – he doesn't just kill vampires, he kills their human servants (“familiars”) and often does it with great deal of sadism – in one sequence, he impales a nude blonde familiar with the remark, “Be a good pet and stay,” and then proceeds to cut the eye out of a second familiar, quipping, “Don't worry, I only need one.” The truth is that Blade is more than a bit of a bully – somewhere to the right of Wolverine and only just short of The Punisher in terms of his obsessive, pitiless fanaticism. But moral flaws aside, this show was a beautiful aesthetic experience – costume and set design, lighting, cinematography, writing, and most of the acting were all executed at the level of a mid-budget feature film. Ending with a cliffhanger of sorts after thirteen episodes, a second season was regarded as a fait accompli, but the series was unexpectedly canceled, probably due more to production costs than its rather modest ratings. Too bad. The world of “Blade” was rich and complex and deserved more time and more exploration.

The Lone Gunmen (2001). The only true spinoff of “The X-Files” ("Millennium" probably doesn't count) lasted half a season and didn't leave much of a legacy, but if you follow this somewhat unlikely TV series from inception to conclusion you won't be sorry. “Gunmen” is the story of Frohike, Langley and Byers, three recurring characters on “The X-Files” whose passion for conspiracy theories and technological acumen make them useful to Mulder and Scully in their investigations of the paranormal. Well, “TLG” follows the antics of these plucky but irascible nerds as they chase down stories for their conspiracy-theorist weekly, The Lone Gunmen. It is similar to “X-Files” in its visual aesthetic and the quality of its overall production, and features a number of crossovers, including appearances by David Duchovny and Mitch Pileggi, but the nature of the characters lends itself more to farce than drama. The Gunmen are dorky, quarrelsome, prone to bumbling, and nearly always broke – the shittiness of their “surveillance vehicle” (a broken-down old van) is a running gag. What's more, they've got an “intern” named Jimmy Bond who is a disaster-prone moron, and a sexy friend-cum-nemesis named Eve Harlow, who is continously tripping them up (when not providing reluctant help, that is). All in all this show was somewhat less than the sum of its parts, for the actors who portrayed the Gunmen, while funny and likeable enough, lacked the force and charisma to really carry a series; or so it seemed until the cliffhanger ending, which left me hungering for more and wishing like hell the fucking thing hadn't been canceled after all. Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view), the story was brought to a very decisive end post cancellation, by virtue of a reappearance of the five main characters on an episode of “The X-Files.” Sometimes you have to lose a series before you realize that you wish it had gotten a longer lease on life, and “The Lone Gunmen” was such a show. Not perfect, not even great, but containing the seeds of possible near-greatness within it. Perhaps it didn't deserve a second season, but it sure as hell deserved to finish its first one.

Battlestar Galactica (1979). If you weren't a kid in the late 70s, you simply have no idea how much anticipation and excitement “Battlestar Galactica” inspired before its debut. Back in those days we only had three networks, which meant that during prime time, you had precisely three choices on your dial at any given moment: ABC, NBC and CBS. Just three shows from which to choose your next hour of scripted entertainment. That's almost unimaginable now, but it was the hard reality of TV-land back then, and “Battlestar Galactica” had more buzz behind it on than any show I can recall before or since. CBS had sunk a fortune into this concept, which was intended to cash in on both the popularity of “Star Wars” and the legacy of “Star Trek,” while retaining the glamour then associated with the television mini-series. The idea behind “Galactica” was straightforward: following a treacherous sneak-attack, the human race is driven from its many colony worlds and reduced to passenger status on a single fugitive fleet of rickety spaceships protected by a lone military craft, the Battlestar Galactica. Pursued by the evil robotic Cylons as they flee across the universe looking for their mysterious planet of origin (the Earth!), the humans, led by Commander Adama (Lorne Greene) face all kind of perils from both within and without, essentially hopping from one disaster to another, and all the while juggling romantic relationships and family melodrama. “Galactica” was the very definition of lavish, with enormous sets, beautiful costumes, a gigantic cast, much location shooting and all sorts of special effects: even the credit sequence was opulent. Unfortunately, it suffered from poor continuity, bad writing, cheesy acting, surprisingly unimaginative plots (mostly transparent ripoffs of popular Hollywood movies); and the ratings, which had been very high at the start, began to decline as the season wore on. After its conclusion, the executives at CBS crunched some numbers and decided “Galactica” hadn't returned on their huge investment, so they pulled the plug. Their decision was unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, the quality of the series had improved dramatically down the home stretch: the last four or five episodes are really quite good, and proof of Dirk (Starbuck) Benedict's assertion that the first season of any show is simply a quest to “find its spine.” Second, the decision to cancel eventually led to the abysmal spinoff “Galactica 80,” which was a rather cynical attempt to bring back the show's audience to a low-budget spinoff using mostly different actors in a different setting. The attempt failed, “Galactia 80” was quickly canceled and even more quickly forgotten, and any hope of reviving the parent series proper faded away with it. Of course, many years later, the series got a “reboot” on the SyFy network to much critical acclaim, but I cannot watch the last few episodes of the “classic Galactica's” first season without lamenting the lack of existence of a second. I truly feel that the producers had “found the spine” and were moving on to bigger and better things. I only wish they'd had the chance to showcase them.

Of course there are many television series which avoided this list by managing to gasp out a second season, or part of one, before they got the chop, and still others which managed three, four or even five seasons yet still ended prematurely. I could fill pages with shows that, however long they ran, still exited the stage before I wanted them to. But there is and always will be a special pathos about promising TV shows which die in or after their freshman seasons. A lucky series shows us what can be done; the luckless only what might have been.