One great thing about YouTube is that it has a lot of full runs of short lived shows and I found that it had Nightmare Cafe which only lasted like 6 episodes and debuted in 92. Kind of an anthology series where two deceased people in a diner helped recently departed souls. Loved it as an 11 year old and added it to my list to rewatch. I also liked the concept of Terra Nova (future humans moving back to the Jurassic Era due to pollution) but I think it could be better told in a book form. No Ordinary Family was another along with M.A.N.T.I.S and The Police Academy tv series (yes I’m an unashamed fan of those movies). I guess I’ll throw in the 02 Twilight Zone. Was better than the garbage that Peele did.
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My media library is filled with one season shows like this: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse, Debris, Almost Human, Counterpart, Firefly (because of course), No Ordinary Family (which you mentioned already).
So... How many of those shows had Summer Glau appear in them? 👀
For awhile she was in every tv show
3, I think? :D
Almost Human was great, and it's a dang shame there wasn't more of it.
Also, in case you don't know, Dollhouse did get a second season. Although it really suffers from being rushed and trying to force an ending after they got canceled.
I'll have to check out Debris, don't think I've watched that.
The ending to Dollhouse is way beyond rushed.
Terminator:SCC had two seasons as well.
I’ll have to put all those on my list to watch eventually but right now I have like 15 shows to go through. Saw the first episode of Dollhouse and wouldn’t mind watching the series. Need to rewatch Firefly
Back when it aired?
Firefly. And no, I mean MUCH more than the Serenity movie conclusion.
The "problem" with Firefly is that there's just enough of it to remain a good thing, sealed away forever as a dozen or so episodes, and the movie. Much like actors who remain "forever young" when they die far sooner rather than later, the lack of additional content means fewer chances to fuck things up. Look at Marilyn Monroe vs Elvis for example, Monroe will always be the picture of beauty to those who remember her, while at the end Elvis was overweight and damaging his image. Firefly may have gone the same way since by the time "season 1" ended a lot of character background has already been revealed, apart from Book and Inara. So anything season 2 might have tried to explore would run the risk of being far more harmful than beneficial to the story and characters overall. With lots more barefoot young women ofc since it was still Sensitive Joss Whedon back then who hadn't yet been outed as the footfag and adulterer he's known as now.
Honestly, Firefly continuing might have saved us all from the "timeless, unquestionable classic" status it achieved, which would have done wonders from letting Whedon destroy American culture and media through emulation and actual products he made.
Like, give it one more season and it goes to shit, like so many examples you could list, and suddenly "quippy" dialogue isn't the cool thing that gets shoved into every form of media just a few years later and the entire 2010s of American production could be far greater as a whole.
I need to rewatch it
Everyone's already said it, but Firefly, of course.
Also, I can't vouch for all of the follow; it's been years since I've seen them.
Alphas was great.
Revolution was interesting, but rather wasted potential, in some ways. Fun, but not necessarily good. Same for Aftermath. Actually, a lot of the ones I'm thinking of fall into that category, maybe because someone mentioned sort of post-apocalyptic stuff, so that's what I'm thinking of now. Salvation.
The Gifted, which was X-Men without the X-Men.
Fuck man, Alphas ending on that cliffhanger suuucked. Was unfortunately very likely doomed the second Summer Glau was cast in the first season since she went around like an angel of death at the time.
Recently watched Alphas. Cant believe they couldn’t at least do a finale movie.
My all time favorite show is "Pushing Daisies." It only got two two seasons and it's one of the most charming shows you could watch.
The Original Kolchak was pretty cool and would have been cool to watch more of.
Space: Above and Beyond is a show that gets mentioned on these types of lists
YES Pushing Daisies. Great show and very unique in terms of plot, aesthetic, characters, you name it..
I loved Pushing Daisies! They kept teasing a new season or movie but never happened. Also they said a graphic novel was planned and even showed a few pages online but nothing came of it. I wanted to know if they would ever be able to touch each other. The movie Big Fish was made by someone involved in creating Pushing Daisies so you may like that. Kolchak was great. Pre X-Files
I vaguely remember reading something about the creator posting on social media or talking in an interview about how Chuck and Ned spent a very happy life with each other and on Ned's deathbed the two finally kissed, thus having Chuck go with him.
I'm so mad that even the comic fell through, because I was super intrigued by the mystery surrounding the fathers of the main characters.
Absolutely! I remember reading a bunch of fan fiction after the show ended. I would just used deus ex machina and have Chuck stumble or something and inadvertently grab hold of Ned and they find out that the effect wears off after so many years. Granted I’d save that for the finale but I like the creators vision
Yeah, I personally would've loved something like that as well, simply because I wanted them to be able to have a normal relationship, but I always suspected they wouldn't do that. At least that described scene would've been romantic.
It really was a sweet show and funny.
That's the one I was gonna say too.
Off the top of my head, High School of the Dead but that was because the author died before he could finish it.
Respect to the man that brought us this
I ... think that's the BEST 15 seconds of anime I'll ever see! 😨
The funniest part of that clip is for that slow mo to make sense those tiddies had to be flapping around at something like kHz speed in real time
Absolutely, need more HSotD.
Very impressive
Babylon 5: Crusade.
Yeah, I'm still salty. Not only from the overall mishandling of the series by the corporation sponsoring it, but from the fact that we'll never really get to see what overall plot JMS was going to reveal as the show went on.
Though given a recent B5 retrospective I watched, I think I'm the only one who actually liked Crusades OST.
At least the music was fun. Oh, wait. 😜
Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency was well written, fun and kept exceeding my expectations. Died after the second season, I think because of accusations against Max Landis.
I have one of the books. Didn’t know it became a series. Will have to look for it
It's not an adaptation. The title is about the only thing in common. Still, it's pretty good.
The UK version with Steven Mangan is a lot more faithful, at least for the first couple of episodes.
seaQuest DSV/2032. Cancelled in the middle of season 3 on a cliffhanger. Basically 90s Star Trek but with submarines in the oceans instead of space. Campy and silly most of the time, but it has a decent cast and some pretty cool episodes, and it was dope as fuck when I was 12.
Also, Jericho, about a small town forced to basically figure out how to live entirely on their own after a series of nuclear bombs go off in big cities in the United States which collapses the entire government and fractures the country. A lot of cool story lines about finding clean water, growing food, fighting off a Blackwater-esque PMC turned bandit group, etc. Also cancelled in the middle of a season on a cliffhanger.
seaQuest was a really promising first season but S2 turned into into generic space sci-fi but with blue space. IIRC, it's why Roy Scheider quit the series. It wasn't what they sold him on. I still enjoyed it at the time for what it was, but there's a timeline where it actually went somewhere great.
Agreed, but I think by season 3 they had switched over to something else that was at least enjoyable for different reasons. Adding in Michael Ironside, the time jump, the new plotlines with wars and cyberpunk-esque megacorps with more power than nations fighting for resources underwater, etc. While different from the true exploration stories of S1, I think that sort of plot could have been entertaining as well if allowed to continue,
I remember it being on. Seems like a good show. Maybe it’s on YouTube or something
HBO's Rome.
The live-action Consantine with Matt Ryan. The Dresden Files show with Paul Blackthorne.
The original American Gothic from back in the 90s, done dirty by the network and axed after one season.
A very recent one was Tokyo Vice: it was an excellent modern noir, but Max canceled it after 2 seasons.
I'd pair Deadwood with Rome. Deadwood had 3 seasons and a movie but it deserved much more.
The Dresden Files show was so garbage compared to the books though. Paul Blackthorn as Harry was able the only good thing to come out of it. What Dresden Files really needs is to be an animated show, so they aren't held back by effects for some of the crazier shit that happens, and so we can have James Marsters voice Harry.
Rome is on my list to watch eventually. Will have to check Tokyo Vice. Saw that it was recent and assumed it would be current year
There was a bit of feminist virtue signaling, but the main focus was the relationship between the two male main characters. It was refreshingly unwoke, and surprisingly respectful of Japanese culture without any anime tropes.
Rome did a complete run though. They didn't cancel it. That was kinda the end of the story.
It was canceled. They fully intended to portray at least the rest of Augustus' reign, and possibly to keep going after that as well.
It had 5 seasons planned, and went 2. They did a lot of compression in season 2 to try to wrap it up. And HBO absolutely canceled it
Deadwood.
That was a good western. We get so few since the heyday when my dad and grandad was young
That one wasn't short lived. They finished it off and told a complete story.
Hammer!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledge_Hammer!
I recall liking the OG run of MTV's Undergrads a couple decades back and then it disappeared after one season.
Not sure how well it would've held up.
I hear there's more being brewed up by the original creator. So we'll see where that goes. Right now there's a 3D movie in pre-production being created via kickstarter campaign.
If you're interested, you can see updates here:
https://www.youtube.com/@undergradsthemovie
Vaguely remember but I’ll see if it’s on YouTube. MTV did have some decent animation back in the day
Stargate sg-1 and maybe a few dozen anime titles that only had a dozen episodes.
Stargate has a lot of seasons right? I’m currently watching it. Did you mean SGU?
I suspect it's a tongue in cheek way of saying he didn't like the later seasons :p
oh, the "dozen of episodes" only was refering to anime. stargate sg-1 had lots of seasons, like 10? obviously, it was like dragonball where they kept finding more superior enemies XD.
atlantis was okay. stargate universe or whatever.. didnt bother to watch.
The whole Ori plotline was kind of a waste of time. It was the same idea as the Goa'uld pretending to be gods, but more powerful and without the Jaffa.
Kind of. The difference was the Ori were actual superpowered entities that were they to win and kick out the Ancients would lresult in "sentient angry ball of fire flying around burning people alive for lols".
I always wanted to see the ascenden Asgard that was in the books, I figure it would have been living lightning since every ascended being seems to appear how they expect a being of power should. Ancients were floaty being of light, Ori were living fire, would make sense for Asgard to be lightning.
I think it would be better if they involved the other goa uld gods. Instead of going into ori arc. So many lore and settings for the other gods. Like some of them you only saw once or twice, like when all the system lords met on a station to discuss about anubis. Morrigan and bastet and etc only appear once.
Replicators were okay. But yeah. Once asgaurd gave the tauri their tech, it was kinda down hill.
The problem with going with the other Goa'uld gods was they kind of blew their load with Anubis, and everything after with Ba'al felt like an inconvenience rather than a threat. I get why they went with the Ori, I just thought they were lame.
Yeah. They did blow their load on anubis.
From my distant childhood: A live-action Saturday morning show about a ghost dog, MacDuff. The premise was ripped off straight from Mr Ed. It's now lost media, all copies were destroyed in a fire or something, apparently.
From the early 80s: The Private Benjamin tv series. It didn't have that damn Goldie Hawn in it, the girl who replaced her was MUCH more likeable, but it did have Eileen Brennan and the sgt from the movie. Can't seem to find much more clips.
Honorable Mentions: Werewolf and Manimial. The latter might work as a remake with modern CGI - they wouldn't be limited to the same three or four critters. Would love to see either come back (note: The former has nothing to do with the TTRPGs).
One I was glad to see cancelled: Kindred: The Embraced. Mr Spelling failed to read that first page describing how vampire organs necrotize ...
I'm sure there's a couple of more modern, serialized ones that didn't get to finish their damn stories, but I can't recall what they might be offhand, that's how pissed off I am at the retention of the "season" structure when they're serializing everything now.
They sound good. Will have to research.
I don't watch enough Western media to offer any valuable examples, but the anime Shimoneta was both hilarious and so politically on point when it came out that it legit was getting spammed even by the normies on KIA1.
Unfortunately, one of the main VAs died in an accident and Japan holds that kind of thing in high respect so its been quietly shelved forever.
I recommend everyone here watch it for the laugh, and see how its no less on point now than it was a decade ago about censorship and the horrors it creates.
Ah, shame. That was one of the animes I really hoped would get a continuation, because I'm not that fond of the manga.
Thanks! Will go on my ever expanding list
Even if they didn't, there was no replacing her for that role, lol.
I don't disagree, but its also unfortunate that an entire series has to just be shelved forever because of such as well.
Journeyman- Quantum Leap meets Alcatraz. Everyman begins "jumping" around in time, finds out that most of his life is a lie.
Alcatraz- Turns out that 1963 was host to multiple "events," including one where everyone at Alcatraz prison disappeared, only to appear in their same clothes and un-aged in 2012.
Now and Again- Middle aged fat dad gets pushed off subway platform, wakes up in a genetically modified 20 year old body. No turkey, no nookie, Mr. Newman.
Jericho- Nukes drop, small town America tries to survive. One Second After, the series.
Odyssey 5- Astronauts witness the Earth blow up. It was robots. The aliens help.
Forever- British guy gets cursed with immortality. This gets hard in the modern era. Gets hunted by Longinus.
The Prisoner- Needed a few more seasons to explain who the hell Number Two was.
I want to watch those shows. Recently watched the Prisoner. I was wondering if that midget was number one. After that last episode I was singing Ezekiel and the dry bones.
Best current theory I've seen is that the main character of The Prisoner is Number One, but is an amnesiac/had a breakdown.
Oh. I never considered that.
Of the top of my head, I can remember four British TV shows that were picked up by a US network, only to pull its funding part-way through season two and have it canceled. Max Headroom, Robin of Sherwood, Space Precinct and She-Wolf of London. All fucking cult classics.
Space Precinct was a show l loved as a kid. The cyborg episode was amazing when it just showed up and started wrecking shit. Very cliché in the end, but then that's what most shows do, especially for you episodes where all the plot armour suddenly stops working.
I need to check those out. Was Robin of Sherwood the one with the black Friar Tuck?
No, this one had a dual-scimitar-wielding saracen assassin as one of the diversity hire Merry Men.
Oh. Gotcha. Will have to look it up
Add Life on Mars, started out great but was jumbled together at end of season one which caused a crappy ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars_(American_TV_series)
Carnivale.
Came to post this. It was a sloppy, rushed ending because they got the cancelation notice 3 episodes from the end but it could have been an amazing third season if they'd had the chance.
"Invasion" was a great show, as was "Outcast" -- both had similar themes. And both were unfinished.
Firefly.
I used to think so, but now I'm kinda glad it ended before the entertainment industry went full retard.
Nowhere Man. About a photojournalist who takes the wrong photograph one day and some powerful secret cabal erases his whole life and even his wife claims she doesn't know him. Like most of the shows mentioned here it got cancelled way too early, and the producers had to wrap everything up in one season. The conclusion was very unsatisfying and I'm sure would have been told better if they had 2 or 3 seasons.
Thanks. Yall have given me a massive list of shows to look up
Rome and Deadwood are great shouts, but I'd also like to add Jericho. They call it post-apocalypse, but it's really peri-apocalypse as the characters have to deal with the immediate fallout of America getting nuked and going to hell.
I enjoyed Dark Matter (I think, amnesia pirates on a ship with a android) before it got canned.
Hannibal got 3 seasons but it could've gone 10. It was so much better than everything else of it's time. People just were not ready for the decadence it provided on national tv.
Tales of the Gold Monkey, a 1982 Donald P. Bellisario action-adventure series that tried to cash in on Raiders of the Lost Ark’s success. Starred Stephen Collins as 1930’s south seas aviator Jake Cutter and Roddy McDowall as seedy bar owner "Bon Chance" Louie.
I have heard about that. Been meaning to see if it’s on YouTube
Forever. A tv series starring the old fantastic four reed Richards. About an immortal who doesn’t know why he’s immortal
I fully agree with Alphas, which I enjoyed as much as a lot of you did, but while I enjoyed No Ordinary Family at the time, I don't know if I'd still enjoy it if I rewatched now. Some others I'm similarly ambivalent about:
There's a couple I would have loved:
And there's one that I'm really on the fence about:
The deadliest assassin in the world is a hundred-pound girl, capable of killing dozens of trained men by herself, protected by nothing but plot armor. We've seen this done now loads of times, and it's always horrible. But here, her plot armor is literal. The universe itself will not allow her to be hurt when she's progressing the plot; guns will misfire, locks will turn out to be rusted and break, and whoever she kills will turn out to be a terrible person who deserved to die, because that's how protagonist-centered morality works.
But the story takes this trope to the logical conclusion. When she tries going against the plot, suddenly she's just a hundred pound girl with no fighting skills, stamina, or training. She has no idea how to aim a gun, because normally she just sort of waves a gun in the general vicinity of her target and it becomes a perfect headshot by luck. When she tries to kill Dirk Gently - who has more plot armor than she does, being the title character - suddenly he miraculously dodges four bullets in a row, and when she gets hurt, she shuts down entirely in a mental breakdown, since she's never in her life felt pain before.
Plenty of other tropes are used like this. The girlboss who can fight a man toe-to-toe, takes no nonsense, and whose only flaw is not being confident in herself? She's one of the main characters...and it turns out that if you have crippling self-doubt, you don't just overcome it with a speech telling you to believe in yourself, and that self-doubt will slow down your reflexes at a critical time.. And it also turns out that being able to fight one average man still means you lose instantly if you fight three or four men, or if you fight a male soldier with the same training you have. The whole show is written like this.
But...it was Max Landis, and it was 2016. As much as I loved it, that show walked a knife's edge between quality and garbage, and there's just no way Landis would have been able to walk that edge any longer than he did, if he even wanted to.
Here's a really obscure show that I think most people here will like: Ascension - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries)
It's about a colony ship sent from Earth to another planet way back in the 1960s, but kept secret from the general public. If that sounds a little too far fetched, consider this:
(1) the technology actually existed back then! It used nuclear bombs for propulsion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion - in the '50s they were talking about building spaceships the size of aircraft carriers, because with nuclear-pulse propulsion, the larger the spacecraft, the smoother the ride.
(2) the british interplanetary society specced out a design that used this engine and could reach barnard's star in just 50 years (it was a flyby, but still) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus
(3) in the 1950s, the public's perception of nuclear weapons wasn't "catastrophized" like it is today. It was the atomic age and they viewed nukes as just another tool, not the agent of armageddon. So, it kind of makes sense that a government project of this type might get going, then decades later realize there was zero public support for it.
Do not read too much about this series - if you find my description at all compelling, just watch an episode or two. If you read too much about the series' plot, it will spoil it for you. There is a major hidden twist that you want to experience in the show, if you like the show.
One final thing: the orion engine is also used in the novel, Footfall, which is also excellent.
I couldn’t believe Sci Fi didn’t give Ascension a series. Especially with how it ended
Yeah, same here. Someone definitely fucked up. It was a really unique concept and didn’t require any expensive special effects or locations - can’t have been too expensive to make.
SyFy Channel was a commercialized trash heap that pandered to the beer guzzling wrestling crowd while injecting woke-slop into every science fiction show it made. 'Progress' and 'future world building' was just a pretext for them to create a world where woke-slop was the norm.
Even back then there was a scene in Ascension that surprised me where this reporter who was a lesbian asked the head of the group a why he excluded gays and he said if they are trying to start a colony they can’t have people who choose not to reproduce. In 2014 I was surprised to see that even though it makes sense.
Rofl, weird scene.
Sounds interesting but the 'SyFy' channel was well on its way into becoming a woke-slop incubator at 2014.
Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun - Anime comedy about a highschool boy writing a romance shojo manga, despite being the densest motherfucker, when it comes to his own matters of love. All the characters are a riot. My favourite are the "couple" that does the typical "insensitive guy says something insensitive and the tsundere beats him up for it"-routine, except gender-flipped. The manga is a 4-koma, which is a format I do not enjoy, so I'm doubly sad this never got a season 2.
Other than that, I'd also like to add to the previous mentions of Firefly, Pushing Daisies and Forever.
I’ll look for that manga. I really enjoyed Oh My Goddess
Brisco County Jr
Life on Mars, a remade show about a cop that wakes up in the 70s. Season two never made is so they tried to end it after season one but failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars_(American_TV_series)
I’ve seen some episodes of the British series but haven’t seen the remake
One that comes to mind is Avenue 5. Which is one of the few comedies that actually made me laugh because it was smart and subtle and not laugh track bludgeoned obviousness. Expanse is another one where it was cancelled and then picked up again but the extension 3 seasons didn't come close to the quality of the first 3. And I know it isn't GOOD but I still have a soft spot for Krypton because the actors were working their asses off. Yes I know they made the Zod's black but the guy playing the general was so good at chewing scenery that they are forgiven.
I can think of many more series that died to wokeness poisoning before they were cancelled, sometimes long before and the crappy corpse kept riding along until someone at the network realized they were still paying for it.
Dark Matter, Killjoys had a GREAT start and then went full message by season 3 becoming unwatchable. Pretty much the whole Arrowverse went that way with strong season 1 or 1 and 2 and then here comes the stronk wamen. Netflix Castlevania had a great season 1 and then 2 was all about clowning on the White male characters. The First didn't even make it past season 1 until it became all about women and darkies. Agents of Shield is another one, so was Ozark.
I used to watch a lot of TV and I guess I have wokeness to thank for the fact that I watch much less tv now.
Netflix is notorious for having a great first season only to ruin it in the second season
I remember liking John Doe. One season, decent procedural with a background mystery. Guy wakes up with no memories of himself, but with all other knowledge - to the point of being a human Wikipedia (but accurate). Then solves crimes while looking for answers about himself with a secret society buzzing around. Halfway between The Pretender and a generic Sherlock show.
Ended on a cliffhanger, but the creators did an interview and gave up the bigger reveals that would have happened eventually.
Did you know Dominic Purcell used to have hair?
I saw the first episode of that and meant to watch more but got caught up with other stuff. I need to see if I can find it
Kings (2009, 1 season) Carnivale (HBO, 2003) Caprica (Syfi 2010) RWBY
I thought Wendell and Vinnie was hilarious. They really did the cast dirty by moving the airing away from their prime time slot then using the low ratings that resulted as pretext to cancel the show.