Gone Too Soon Again: 5 More TV Shows That Shoulda Lasted Longer

The time has finally come for me to write the second installment in my "Gone Too Soon" series about television shows cancelled before their time. In the last episode (June 17, 2017), I wrote about five one-season wonders which might have offered us something truly grand...if only they hadn't been axed in or immediately after their first season. This list was by no means comprehensive, and reflected only personal tastes and sense of regret. In time I will examine yet more shows of this type, but today I wish to examine the other category of "gone too soon" television: series which lasted more than one year, yet still left me feeling as if they died considerably before their time.

As before, I have tried to avoid some of the most obvious choices on the menu. It is pointless, for example, to shed tears over the cancellation of the original STAR TREK after just three seasons: given the legacy of the show, one may as well mourn the death of a phoenix. Likewise, there are some shows, like AfterM*A*S*H which, had they been handled well from the start, might have been worth a few sobs, but in practice were so horrifically botched that their cancellation (in that case, after a season and a half) was more of a mercy than a tragedy. What I am talking about are series which, whatever their flaws may have been or however long they actually ran, left us feeling cheated rather than satisfied when they went off the air. So without further ado, here they are, presented in chronological order:

WKRP IN CINCINATTI (1978 - 1982). This sit-com about a failing radio station in one of America's least glamorous cities was a staple of my childhood. The day handsome, cocky program director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy) walks into the crumbling, failing station, he's warned by burned-out deejay Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) that "this is the bottom" -- and he's right. Cellar-low ratings, a hapless boss (Gordon Jump), and dysfunctional staff make Travis' job of turning WKRP (and yes, the KRP is for "crap") around an uphill battle. And in fact WKRP was an unusual take on the sit-com, in that laughs were not always the principal objective: a certain amount of social commentary was embedded within each of its four seasons, covering such topics as the Vietnam war, feminism, inter-ractial relationships, sexual harassment, payola, punk rock, the concept of "selling out" and even concert safety -- an entire episode is devoted to the aftermath of the deadly Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinatti which killed eleven people on December 3, 1979. Truthfully, many of the show's jokes fell flat: it was not consistently hilarious or even consistently funny. But it was consistently engaging, due to excellent characters and casting: Frank Bonnar, Loni Anderson, Gordon Jump, Richard Sanders, Jan Smithers and Tim Reid all turn in the sort of performances that leave you coming back for more. (The show is worth watching just for Bonnar's hideous plaid and white leather salesman's outfits). Indeed, Rcihard Sanders, who played the neurotic middle-American cartoon Les Nessman, may own one of the most famous sequences in television history when he reports in horror on a failed WKRP attempt to deliver Thanksgiving turkeys by throwing them out of a helicopter ("I swear I thought turkeys could fly!"). The reason I placed WKRP on this list is because the fifth season was to have been the one where Travis finally realized his goal of making WKRP the No. 1 station in Cincinatti, which would have been a fitting ending. Unfortunately, it got the axe at the end of season four, and so we never got to see ole Andy get to celebrate his hard-fought victory.

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES (1987 – 1990). The name of this not-well-remembered yet extremely influential TV show has led to a great deal of confusion as to its identity. It has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees, Crystal Lake or hockey-masked killers. Instead, it is the story of two cousins by marriage, Micki Foster (Elisabeth Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John D. Le May) and their mysterious mentor Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins) who own a shop in Toronto called Curious Goods. The cousins inherited the shop without knowing its inventory contained items cursed by the devil himself, and with Marshak's help, they try to reclaim the many hundreds of objects now wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting populace. Shot in the somewhat cheesy, zero-subtlety style of 80s horror movies, FRIDAY is dark, violent, and often deeply twisted -- one episode was directed by David Cronenberg! -- and the bloody, sometimes Quixotic quest to retrieve the devil's playthings often has our heroes questioning their own resolve and courage.
The ironic nature of the curses often made the stories explorations in morals and ethics: one memorable episode featured a wheelchair which could restore mobility to its user, provided she murdered those who made her a quadreplegic. Another featured a mediocre surgeon who could perform any operation successfully, if he "fed" his cursed scalpel with innocent victims beforehand. But the format was enormously flexible and thus we encountered vampires, werewolves, serial killers, demons, and ghosts, as well as scheming or desperate mortal men and women. The show was abruptly canceled toward the end of its third season because of a threatened boycott by angry Christian evangelists, but not before it influenced a host of shows which followed, including BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, FRINGE, and SUPERNATURAL. That being said, I'd sell part of my own soul for another two seasons of this particular Friday.

FOREVER KNIGHT (1992 – 1996). Another Toronto-based horror series which influenced those who came after it starred the likeable Geraint Wyn-Davies as Nick Knight, a 800 year-old vampire who is working off an emormity of guilt by working as a police detective. Knight, who is engaged in a quest to regain his humanity and atone for his innumerable sins, works the night shift with a cynical partner named Don Shcanke (John Kapelos) who has no idea he is a vampire, while trying to manage a complex relationship with a mortal coroner named Natalie (Catherine Disher). While cheesy -- especially in the first season -- this show is extremely addictive, in part because of Knight's vampire "family" -- the evil yet strangely principled LaCroix (Nigel Bennett), and the sensual and morally ambiguous Janet (Deborah Duchene), who continually interfere, and sometimes assist, in his "mortal" life. KNIGHT was a busy series, combining buddy-cop convention with an exploration of the vampire world and both the up and the down-sides of immortality, and utilizing lavish flashbacks to various points in Knight's long life. One of its outstanding facets was its ruthlessness: even the core cast members were not safe from being killed off or written out. It not only deeply influenced HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES, but was ripped off almost idea-for-idea by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt when they crafted their BUFFY spin-off, ANGEL, in 1999. It ran three seasons, and while it completed, for all intents and purposes, its own story, there were a great many stories to tell.

MILLENNIUM (1996 - 1999). I once described this sadly half-forgotten Chris Carter TV series as a "baffling, frustrating, engrossing, charismatic prestidigitation of a show, one which defies categorization." MILLENNIUM was the story of Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), a retired FBI profiler who is hired by a mysterious consulting firm known as The Millennium Group to assist local law enforcement agencies with investigations that are beyond their expertise. Over the course of time, Frank begins to suspect the Group is much more than a mere think tank, and may in fact be a sort of cult making preparations for the end of the world. Written and shot in the same manner as his more famous series THE X-FILES, and featuring the same enormous range of storylines, MILLENNIUM will instantly appeal to fans of horror, atmosphere and the sort of stylization that Chris Carter, James Wong and Glen Morgan specialize in. Some episodes are thoughtful, others graphic and gruesome; some are hilarious, and others touching. It could be amazing, and it could also be infuriating. Never has a television show made so many changes of direction in such a brief run on the air: over the course of three seasons, it killed off or wrote out major characters on what felt like whims, shifted its central premise from forensic cop show to supernatural mystery to conspiracy theory, and in general, and went from having absolutely no sense of humor at all to turning every third episode into a comedy or a lark. And yet...damn. Besides Henriksen, who considers this his favorite role (he told me that himself), it boasts a superbly ambiguous performance by Terry O'Quinn as Peter Watts; a brief but pregnant series of appearances by Bill Smitrovich as Detective Bletcher; and fine turns by Megan Gallagher and Brittany Tiplady as Frank's strong but long-suffering wife and adorable (but not annoying) daughter. MILLENNIUM is a baffling show in many ways, and in others exasperating, but it had a charisma that is impossible to dismiss, and its cancellation -- ironically, just before the actual Millennium -- was a crushing blow. Although the series was to some small extent "resolved" by an X-FILES crossover that same year (1999), nothing was really resolved. Fans wanted more. So did the actors. And if you watch it all, so will you.

THE LOST WORLD (1999 - 2002). Okay, this one is more emotional than logical, but hey, it's my goddamned blog. THE LOST WORLD was based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle, and in essence, was kind of like THE LAND OF THE LOST for a different generation. The basic premise is that a crew of 19th century explorers end up marooned in a kind of "land that time forgot" on the edge of reality -- a place where dinosaurs roam, magic is real and all manner of witches, time-travelers, sub-human monsters and assorted weirdness stalk the land. Now, I must make several confessions here: the first is that I have always been a sucker for adventure shows of this or any other type, going back to childhood. The second is that the sheer ridiculous escapism of this show -- the concept is a mashup of TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY, TARZAN and CHARMED -- got me through a tough time 20 years ago. The third is that the series lead, Jennifer O'Dell, was a crush of mine and I later met and befriended her when I moved to Los Angeles, so yeah, there are several soft spots at work here. But the fact remains that as cartoonish as it is, THE LOST WORLD is that rarest of shows -- the no-holds-barred, no-logic-applied adventure saga, which in this cynical age is rarely exploited. Before the Internet closed the mind's-eye of the world, kids used to dream of adventures somewhere between those of Indiana Jones and Doc Savage, and THE LOST WORLD offers just such adventures. Interestingly, the show was not cancelled due to low ratings but because of an embezzelment in the holding company's finances, ending things on a cliffhanger. It's too bad. The 10 year old in me needs closure.

ANGEL (1999 – 2004). It may seem strange to include here a series that cracked the mythical 100 episode mark in a list of "shows gone too soon," but I believe if ANGEL had been allowed to run its projected 7 seasons instead of only 5, it may have finally emerged from the shadow of its progenitor, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, to establish its own firm identity in the eyes of fandom. ANGEL spun off the eponymous vampire character played by David Boreanaz and took him to Los Angeles, where combined with a crew of extremely well-drawn sidekicks played by, at various times, Charisma Carpenter, Glenn Quinn, Alexis Denisoff, Amy Acker, J. August Richards, Andy Hallett and Mercedes McNabb. The conceit of ANGEL was simple, and as I said, identical to FOREVER KNIGHT: a formerly evil vampire wants to atone for his crimes by "helping the helpless" via a supernatural detective agency. Yet ANGEL was more than the sum of its pointy parts. It was also a tongue-in-cheek take on life in Hollywood and, being darker in tone than BUFFY, a really gritty examination of the nature of good, evil, revenge, immortality, morality, and whether redemption is even possible. Though it began to stumble and become more involuted and soap-oper-ish by the fourth season, it came roaring back in the fifth, in no small part due to the choice to bring James Marsters' character of Spike into the cast, and to flip the script and make our heroes, in a sense, the bad guys, by placing them in charge of the demonic law firm which had been the bane of their existence from the pilot episode. The final season was so good that one can only imagine where David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon were going to take it in the projected final two years, and while it ends on a gory and decisive note, I can't help but wonder what else might have been.

ROME (2005 - 2007). HBO Television has done some very good work over the years, but one of its best shows was also led to one of its stupidest decisions: the one to cancel what in essence was GAME OF THRONES before GAME OF THRONES even existed. ROME, set in the last years of the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar was ushering in the age of Empire, and told primarily through the eyes of two Roman soldiers; rigid, principled Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and vulgar, brawing Pullo (Ray Stevenson). The series, however, was hardly about Roman military life, but the incredibly complex webs of political and personal intrigue that wealthy Roman families such as the Julii Clan (had to navigate to maintain and expand their power. "In the game of thrones you win or you die," and there was a lot of dying in ROME. Also a lot of torture and a lot of nudity. Intertwining with actual historical figures and events, it showed the complexity, granduer, cruelty, greed and brutality of the Romans in exacting detail, and anyone who considers the "vicious, clever, powerful female" a product of the GAME OF THRONES era might want to take in Polly Walker's terrifying performance as Atia of the Julii, a woman who will stop at absolutely nothing to protect her family's position. Actually, the acting is superb all around, with James Purefoy playing a viciously degenerate Marc Antony with relish while Ciarán Hinds' Julius Caesar is stately, predatory and full of icy grace. Max Woods, Tobias Menzies and Max Pircus are also excellent, and this is the sort of show which, despite killing its characters off with abandon, I could have watched for ten years running. Unfortunately, HBO deemed it too expensive and pulled the plug after just two short seasons, and has shown a baffling reluctance to either revive it or give its fans true closure with a feature film, the way they did with DEADWOOD. Oh well, we'll always have Pullo saying things like, "Here I come, girls! I'm gonna drink all the wine, smoke all the smoke and fuck every whore in the city!"

With that brilliant declaration, I bring the latest chapter of this series to a close. I have by no means exhausted the list of either one-season wonders or shows which simply ended before their time, but this will do for now. After all, I've gotta save something for chapter three, don't I?