I’d like to add votes for Freaks and Geeks, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., The New Twilight Zone and Sports Night.
And how about Call to Glory? Craig T. Nelson played a military pilot in 1963. It ran for one season in '84-'85.
Eric
Yes to Sports Night, Freaks and Geeks, Due South.
A show that I really, really, really loved was Jack and Jill, which was on the WB for the last 2 seasons, but didn’t get picked back up for this season. Does anyone else out there feel me on this? I loved that show. Only TV show I have ever actually taped just to have the tapes.
Thank goodness mercutio finally had the sense to mention The Tick. I cannot wait for the new live-action series.
and
HELLO!
Sifl and Olly
!!!
‘The Paper Chase’ was a program that was on CBS for one season in the late seventies. Excellent cast, interesting stories; I don’t understand why the network cancelled it. IIRC, it was brought back on cable but it wasn’t as good.
Fear not, you can at least see all the old episodes, if you have a fast connection! Cruise around the Sifl & Olly Message Board, and you’ll find addresses for FTP servers from which you can download the episodes.
“SUCKERS!”
Bosom Buddies only lasted two years. A show that starred Wendy Jo Sperber, Donna Dixon, Thelma Hopkins, Holland Taylor, Peter Scolari and TOM HANKS! It should have run forever!
Grrrrrr. Don’t even get me started on Cupid. Like Feynn, I’m still bitter about it. ABC pissed me off so much by the way they handled it – they never even gave it a chance.
They never promoted it, they gave it a crappy slot, and then they pulled it off the air before it had a chance to find an audience. I’ll give the morons at ABC a hint: It never “found an audience” because the target audience was out on Saturday nights! Don’t give me the “never found an audience” crap, ABC. Everybody knows that the Saturday night is The Time Slot of Death. If you really wanted the show to make it, you could have helped it out a little more. Morons.
And yet they continue to run some of the stupidest shows in existence. Shows that don’t have Paula Marshall in them. It’s just not fair.
A lot of people have mentioned Brimstone, to which I wholeheartedly agree, but how come no one has mentioned the vaguely similar, yet entirely hilarious show G vs E?God establishes a squad to take out demons on earth in a rehash of seventies action shows. It aired on USA for a couple months, moved to SciFi where is was retittled Good vs Evil, and then dissapeared after three episodes. Tragic, tragic.
I’ll back up all my fellow Brimstone fans, and add a plug for Gargoyles as well. It occasionally suffered from technoitis, but overall it was a fine show–it had serious story arcs, character development, villains who weren’t one-dimensional, and serious (but not cloying) social commentary. You don’t expect that in a cartoon, much less a Disney cartoon. It deserved far better than the clumsy final season and rushed finale that it got.
The Beast and The Street… were both on last season and they were both awesome! The Beast was unique… which made it great and rare…
Add my vote for Cupid. One of the best shows in years, and one of the few that I actually made time to watch. Way too smart for its own good if you ask me.
My other votes:
Pearl: It starred Malcolm McDowell and Rhea Perlman as a brilliant, snobbish college professor and a working-class widow going back to school, respectively. The chemistry between the two of them was wonderful.
Dweebs: A sitcom about a group of nerds in a garage who had just hit it big enough to need a real office to produce their killer app. Peter Scolari was great as the Bill Gatesesque boss. I have all the eps on tape including the four that only showed in the UK.
We have a whole bunch on this list that I liked and hated to see cut short. Due South, Now and Again, Strange Luck, etc. Here’s more that I haven’t seen listed:
Nowhere Man. I was expecting some sort of explanation.
Early Edition.
And did anyone else watch the syndicated F/X: The Series? It was on for a couple of years, then disappeared.
First, let me get my “me too’s” out of the way: Frank’s Place, Police Squad and Get a Life
I would also add:
Herman’s Head
TV Nation (I don’t think this is still being made)
TV Funhouse (hilarious non-pc humor…I don’t know if it was cancelled or just in hiatus, all Comedy Central ever runs are the same few first season episodes)
I disagree with those who think this great show should have ran longer. It wrapped up it’s story, and there was a perfectly reasonable (within TV’s version of "reality, anyway) explanation given. Anything beyond this season would have been belaboring the point and superfluous.
The explanation. Spolier space, even though it’s six years old.
I don’t remember all the nuts and bolts, but essentially it is this:
Thomas Veil was Gemini.
The picture was faked, and was actually a photo of the lynching of key senators not South American guerillas.
Who faked the picture? Tom Veil.
Who caused Tom Veil to be chased all over for the negative of this photo? Gemini.
Who was Gemini? Tom Veil
Why? I can’t remember.
And yes, I do recall that they tried to leave an “out” in case there was a second season. Nonsense. It ended perfectly. Leave it alone!
Sir Rhosis
This is a bit off topic, but mentioning Freaks and Geeks brought something to mind that I wanted to mention. After the show had been canceled by NBC, it was nominated for two Emmys, for editing and for writing, and it actually won for editing.
A couple of the episodes were un-aired after the cancellation, and they eventually were shown when the show was picked up by Fox Family. It occurred to the shows creator, Paul Feig, that they were now eligible for this years Emmy Awards, and he submitted one in the writing category, and it was nominated!
Normally, the production company or network puts a major PR campaign behind a show trying to get it nominated: ads in trade publications, videotapes sent to all the voting members of the academy, etc. F&G got absolutely none of this, and yet it’s now a nominee for a best writing Emmy, a year and a half after it was canceled!
I know it’s virtually impossible, but it would be so unbelievably cool if it won… 
Eric
I don’t know if “Nightmare Cafe” is the same show as “Freddy’s Nightmares,” but the latter show was amazing for the first half season. It was effectively two half hour shows, each exploring a different interior mental persective on a single issue. For example, the first half hour migh be about the nightmares of a guy troubled by his harrassing parents, and the second half migh be about the parents’ nightmares. IIRC correctly, about halfway through the first season, they gave up on closely linked plots and used only very tenuous connections to connect the two half hours.
I forgot about this one. It was on about five years ago, I remember, and I also remember watching a few episodes (can’t remember any of the episodes, but I do know I watched it) with my mom and liking it. How can you not like snobby professors? Especially ones with British accents? The kind of character whose so obnoxious he’s neat. Kind of like Becker.
As someone who has dutifuly recorded all 100+ episodes, a collection spanning a five years and three networks, I must second the notion that “Homicide: Life on the Street” was, and remains, television’s finest dramatic product. While NBC was admirable in delaying its inevitable euthanization for as long as possible (it lasted seven seasons), it was their poor handling of The Best Show You’ve Never Heard Of that led to its sickly condition in the first place. Andre Braugher is amazing, and so was/is Kyle Secor. Together, they were magic.
Dang it, only one person has mentioned Clerks! They only showed two episodes in the worst time slot available… But it was so goddamn hilarious! (I own the DVD collection, with four episodes that never got on the air) I can’t believe it got cancelled after two episodes. I guess the humor was too high-brow for most T.V. viewers.
For those of you who watched Sliders, please explain something to me. I watch the reruns on the Sci-Fi channel. On the reruns, you see several episodes with the same cast as used in the first episode. Now I see episodes featuring a completley different cast that looks absolutely nothing like the original except for the fact that it has a black guy. And these episodes are so goddamn horrible. What went wrong?
Oh, yeah, another vote for the Tick. I really am afraid of the Live Action Series- It’s probably going to come out horrible. No live action can reproduce the cartoons(And vice versa). SPOOOON!
And while I realize that Law & Order is still playing today, it does not match old cast at all. Sam Watterson is cool, but Michael Moriarty(and Adam Hill on that note) does the role better. I hope I spelled those right.
American Gothic
I can’t believe no one mentioned the show Profit that was part of Fox’s lineup along with that abortion Kindred the Erased. I thought that show was godawful and I played Vampire at the time so I had such high hopes. I think that Profit was lumped in with the unfortunate shows that were brought up at that time. Also it was unsuitably dark for a network television show.
Profit was about a corporate raider type who’s mother made him sleep in a cardboard box when he was young and it showed how messed up he was, how he would help some people and be out to ruin others in a very Machiavellian style. I thought it was awesome. It ended every episode with him going to sleep naked in a cardboard box.
Erek