Saturday Six – Shows You Never Gave A Chance

Welcome to the Saturday Six, where each week I let you get to know me a bit better with the help of a list. Any idiot can do a Top 5 list, which is why I kicked it up a notch to a Top 6. This week’s topic: Shows you never gave a chance.

Continuing the pattern of shows that you had this issues with, this week we get to shows that you didn’t even get as far as watching. This list could basically just be called “I have no confidence that NBC or Fox knows how to make a decent show.” I mean, seriously, have you seen their track records for shows cancelled? Generally, I’m right in my initial impressions of a show being dumb, but sometimes, I get surprised.

1. Terra Nova – In theory, this sounded like it could be great. Time travel, dinosaurs, Steven Spielberg attached. That’s all good in theory, but I’ll tell you why I never watched the show. Brannon “Enterprise Killer” Braga was involved. It was a time travel show, so of course he was. That’s his fetish. Braga alone wasn’t enough to kill the show, try as he might. Fox did almost everything possible to make the show unprofitable. It went straight to series because they invested so much building sets for the pilot. It was filmed in Australia for the tax breaks, but even so each episode cost an extra million dollars compared to an average hour long drama. Because of all the CGI, it took 6 weeks of post production each episode, rather than 2 to 3. So Fox invested in this massive thing without ever seeing a final product until after all the money was spent. That’s not a great business model to “Just throw money at it an hope it works out” because it usually doesn’t.

 



2. Heroes – The thought that anyone could effectively pull off superheroes on TV, let alone NBC, was a foreign concept at the time. We all know ABC has done it now, but they have the MCU to fall back on. At the time, NBC had nothing, and every other attempt prior had failed (Generation X TV movie anyone?”). What does “Save the Cheerleader, save the world” even mean? Once I heard it was actually good, and was ready to go back and watch it, the writers strike had happened, and while the first season was supposed to be great, everything after kind of went off the rails. While Hayden Panettiere is hot, I’m not gonna watch four seasons of garbage just because she’s on a show.

 



3. Fringe – I’m sorry, but Josh Jackson will always be Pacey to me, so I could never take him seriously here. When it started, it seemed like a fairly ordinary X-Files rip off, and frankly, you’re not gonna do X-Files better than X-Files did. It wasn’t until later seasons that all the crazy parallel universes and alternate timeline jazz started, but by that time it had moved to the friday night death slot, and it seemed cancellation was always imminent, so why bother getting invested now? And yes, I know that there was a major character named John Scott, but it just wasn’t enough to get me to watch.

 



4. Revolution – I was intrigued by the physics of the premise, but figured with how badly NBC botched Heroes, this would never make a full season, so I was gonna wait it out and see. How can all sources of power just stop working? You’re telling me there isn’t a battery, or a sack of potatoes, or hell a dude with a bike, that you can use to make electricity? Sure, a large EMP may damage generating equipment, but you can still repair it or build a new one. How do you just stop the movement of electrons? No one’s got a windmill or a waterwheel to make electricity? Making electricity is pretty damn easy. Just turn a wire in a magnetic field. So what was the answer? Intelligent nanites or some such. I dunno. It was on against RAW, and I had them on my DVR, but as soon as I heard that the answer was nanites, I just deleted them all and never looked back.

 



5. Glee – Look, I love Jane Lynch as much as the next guy. And yes, that cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” was pretty good, but for the life of me, I never understood this show. Like, what was the story potential? Where was all the drama gonna come from? There was the built in story of the race to regionals, but just how to you make singing dramatic and propel a story over an entire season of television? And what happens after regionals? It just seemed really boring, like it would just be watching people sing for a hour. Well, I don’t know how, but they somehow managed to make it interesting and it’s been on for six seasons now, and even though the ratings have decreased each season, at it’s height it was the #4 most profitable show on TV, what with all the album sales and whatnot.

 


6. Lost – I knew from the moment I saw the first promo how the show ended. “Oh, there’s a plane crash and everyone wakes up on an island? It’s purgatory, and they’re all dead. Has to be.” And I was right. Somehow that got stretched out over 6 seasons. Never once during those 6 years would they admit it, holding staunch until the very last episode. They always claimed “Oh no, theres this awesome answer that totally isn’t they’ve been dead the whole time” and they were full of shit and just making it up as they went along. It’s not as disappointing an ending as How I Met Your Mother, but I’m glad I didn’t waste my time on it.

 

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