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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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.