Friday Five – Canceled TV Shows

Welcome to the Friday Five! Each week I help you get to know me a little better, with the help of a top five list. This week’s topic: Canceled TV Shows.

There’s nothing worse than when something you love dies. But it’s all the worse when that thing is your favorite TV show, and it’s taken away from you prematurely.

I get very passionate about my TV shows. What can I say?

1. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – Fox: January 13, 2008 – April 10, 2009, 2 Seasons, 31 episodes – The reason I to this day no longer watch Fox programming, even though it has a lot of stuff I should love, like Glee or Fringe and of course Family Guy. I understand that the show was expensive and not actually produced by Fox (it was a Warner Brothers production), so when it came down to it between it and Dollhouse for renewal, they chose Dollhouse because it was cheaper, and it benefited them more directly (Fox gets the money, not WB). This was also partially killed by the 2008 Writers Strike (which I am totally for, writers are the downtrodden heroes of entertainment in my opinion, it just had some crappy consequences), cutting Season One down to just 9 episodes. Season Two did start out awfully slow, but once it got rolling, it was great. The final episode was a cliffhanger that had great potential for future storylines and offered no closure. But of course, Summer Glau was in it, so it didn’t have too long for this world (She’s the new Ted McGinley).

 

2. Journeyman – NBC: September 24 – December 19, 2007, 1 Season, 13 Episodes – Another consequence of the 2008 Writers Strike. While the initial order of 13 episodes was in the can before the strike, the strike effectively prevented the series from a back 9 pickup, even if those odds were low of it happening, it made it impossible to do. The show was the filler hour after Heroes Season 2. It was similar to Quantum Leap in many ways, as it was the story of a man who jumped through time against his will to help people. But he always returned to his home time, so the show dealt with how his travels affected his day to day life with his wife and son. Also, he was not the only traveler, his ex-fiance was travelling forward in time to meet him. It was trippy and cerebral, therefore it had to be canceled. The mechanisms behind the how and why of his time jumps were never explained due to the non-renewal, but apparently there were big plans had it made it to Season 2. There was a fan campaign to save the show by sending NBC boxes of Rice-a-Roni (the show was based in San Francisco). I sent a whole case to then NBC President and CEO Jeff Zucker, who returned it sight unseen.

 

3. The Class – CBS: September 18, 2006 – March 5, 2007, 1 Season, 19 episodes – As I discussed in my Community Returns article, this was a sitcom by the producers of Friends. It was kinda dumb, but really sweet. Also, it was set in Philadelphia (but yet there wasn’t a single black person in the whole show). It had a bunch of awesome people in it, including Jason Ritter, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and John Bernthal. I can’t watch the Walking Dead without picturing Shane as the Dumb Jock he played on this show. It had pretty solid ratings. CBS even ran a behind the scenes webcast of a table reading late in the season. But instead of renew it, they commissioned The Big Bang Theory.

 

4. Space: Above and Beyond – Fox: September 24 1995 –  June 2 1996, 1 Season, 24 Episodes – A great little sci-fi show, from two of the best writers of The X-Files (James Wong and Glen Morgan). This show was basically what would have happened if Starship Troopers was a live action weekly TV show. It followed a group of space marines as they fight a war against a invading force in the outlying space colonies. They also expanded the universe beyond just a Starship Troopers clone by including a race of AI robots kinda like cylons, and a race of In Vitro grown soldiers as second class citizens. The show was pretty good, but as Fox tended to do a lot in the 90’s they showed no support for it, scheduling it for the non-Friday night death slot, the Sunday at 7pm slot so it frequently gets preempted by NFL football overages. Towards the end, they stopped scheduling the show all together, showing 2 episodes, then going away for 3 weeks, then airing for 3, then off for a month, etc. The two parts of the series finale were shown 5 weeks after the penultimate episode. The series was planned out as a 5 year show, but was canceled after just one. The finale had just about all the major characters killed. Talk about a downer ending.

 

5. Star Trek Enterprise (UPN: September 26, 2001 – May 13, 2005, 4 Seasons, 98 Episodes) Ughh, don’t get me started on this. I could (and have) go on about the failures involved here for hours. The (relatively) short version is that UPN had no idea what it was trying to be, or how to handle such a show. It couldn’t tell if it was an “urban” network, with shows like Moesha, Girlfriends, Half & Half, The Parkers, et al., or of it was a “genre” network, with the Star Treks, Buffy and Angel, Seven Days, Nowhere Man, The (new) Twilight Zone, Roswell, Veronica Mars, Jake 2.0, et al. There was almost no overlap between these two separate and pretty mutually exclusive demographics, so any advertising they did on the other nights of the week were pointless. No viewer of Girlfriends was like “Oh, that commercial looked interesting, I’ll check that out”. Also, UPN wasn’t carried nationwide, even though it was considered one of the “Big Six” networks. In 2003, UPN was only in ~85% of households. But just because it was available doesn’t mean they followed schedule. There were many affiliates who aired the UPN feed at off hours (Enterprise at 2:15 AM Saturdays anyone?). I’ve meet a few fans who weren’t even aware this show ever existed because they didn’t have UPN, or their affiliate never gave them any notice of it. You should have seen the shouting match I got into with the head of IT at my college when the local cable company renumbered several channels, meaning we lost UPN on the college cable (all the cable went through the school so they could add their own PA channels, they just needed to make some adjustment to their “router”), and told me “Baltimore/DC doesn’t have a UPN”, I almost burned the building to the ground. That’s the issues on the network side. Behind the scenes, to put it bluntly, Brannon Braga is a douchebag. He’d been with the franchise since the late days of Next Gen, and by the time Enterprise came around, he was in charge of the whole Trek empire. He was good at setting up overall ideas, but horrible with execution. There’s a reason every show he’s done since has failed (Threshold, Flash Forward, Terra Nova). When he started, he was fairly good, he did write the first two Next Gen movies afterall (I’m willing to bet Ron D. Moore of the the new Battlestar Galactica did most of the work on those). He has the most episodes written/co-written in all of Trek (a contributing factor to his suckiness). But by the time of Enterprise, he just ran out of ideas or stopped caring. Episodes kept being rehashes of old Next Gen and Voyager plots we had seen before. They pretty much forgot what the whole premise of the prequel was, and weren’t trying to make the show feel “Star Trek“-y at all for the first two seasons. Instead they did a bunch of stupid time travel crap that didn’t make any sense (Braga loves time travel crap). After Season Two, Braga realized how much he sucked, and brought in some new blood, namely one Manny Coto. It was at this time that the show started to turn around, as Season 3 became a season long serialized arc of the Xindi War, and made the time travel stuff about as good as it could get while largely abandoning it. Braga then realized how much passion Coto had for the franchise, and put Coto in charge of the show. He then actively set about making this prequel series connect to all the series before, by linking stories to things we’ve seen before, or addressing things we knew of but never saw (What started the Romulan War, How did the Federation form, What’s up with Klingon foreheads). While it was on it was great, and the plans for Season 5 were gonna be awesome. But another thing was happening at the same time. American Idol. Idol was in the same timeslot for seasons 1-3, and just destroyed it in the ratings, which lead to Season 4 getting moved to the Friday Death Slot, where no matter how much change was going on behind the scenes leading to great episodes, it was just too much to overcome. They made fantastic episodes, but no one, and I mean, no one was watching it. Out of 156 network shows that year, it was ranked 144. It only beat some pretty weak shows on UPN (Grounded for Life #146, Veronica Mars #151, What I Like About You # 152) and the WB (Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show #145, All of Us #147, High School Reunion #148, Steve Harvey’s Big Time #149, Jack and Bobby #153, The Starlet #154, The Mountain #155, Big Man on Campus #156) and one god awful Fox show (The Complex: Malibu #150), all shows that unless you are a huge TV nerd like me, you barely even remember.

 
Special Mention – Beat the Geeks, because if it was still on I could kick the Trek Geeks ass (obviously), and stand up pretty well against the TV and Movie Geek.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook