Great Shows Cancelled after <20 Episodes

[crowmanyclouds]

@Steve_MB

… The Prisoner was never intended to run longer than it did.

McGoohan never intended it run as long as it did, and Lew Grade wanted 26,

… There is debate as to whether the series ended by mutual agreement or cancellation.[10]

[10]In a 1977 interview McGoohan said: “I thought the concept of the thing would sustain for only seven {episodes}, but then Lew Grade wanted to make his sale to CBS, I believe, and he said he couldn’t make a deal unless he had more, and he wanted 26, and I couldn’t conceive of 26 stories, because it would be spreading it very thin, but we did manage, over a weekend, with my writers, to cook up ten more outlines, and eventually we did 17, but it should be seven…” According to The Prisoner: The Official Companion to the Classic TV Series by Robert Fairclough, the series was indeed cancelled, forcing McGoohan to write the concluding episode, “Fall Out”, in only a few days. In the 1977 interview McGoohan contradicts this: “…it got very close to the last episode and I hadn’t written it yet. And I had to sit down this terrible day and write the last episode…”[RIGHT]CITE[/RIGHT]

Also on that page, “A TV miniseries remake is slated to air on AMC in 2009”. In November, AMC will present The Prisoner miniseries, a reinterpretation of the British 1960s cult hit series starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan.
Great :rolleyes: is that #6 I hear spinning in his grave?

CMC fnord!

[infinitii]

I haven’t seen Profit mentioned yet, but I could have missed it. I love that show, and it IS available to watch on DVD now. His corporate maneuverings were brilliant, and he had a number of different almost-equally brilliant foils.

[KneadToKnow]

@billfish678

Salvage?

Please re-read the OP.

[Intergalactic_Gladiator]

@medstar

I really liked My Own Worst Enemy as well. Would’ve been neat to see the agent deal with a stopped up toilet in the middle of the Christmas holidays.

I thought it was OK. It had an interesting premise and having the fat guy from Yes Dear as an door kicking bad arse secret spy was pretty cool.

I just couldn’t quite buy the premise of the dual personality thing though. I guess that if you’re an international assasin, you might want to have the ability to turn that off and lead a normal life when you go home, but that just makes him vulnerable when some bad guy tracks him down and threatens his family.

[Folacin]

“When Things Were Rotten” - a marvelous Robin Hood spoof by Mel Brooks:

“Tell it to your maker!”

“Mel! I didn’t do it!”

Joe

[kelly5078]

If you’ll allow <= 20 episodes, I really like “Square Pegs.” IIRC, though, it ran off the rails after a while.

[Khadaji]

@missouri65

** Cupid**, with Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall, has only 15 episodes listed on IMDB. The recent remake did not fair any better, but it would be a stretch to call the remake great.

Agreed - on both accounts. Although I didn’t hate the remake, the first was much better and I was disappointed when it was canceled.

[Skywatcher]

The Highwayman: 9 episodes and a two-hour pilot.

[Claire_Beauchamp]

@Dangerosa

Max Headroom had 14 shows.

OMG how could I have forgotten Max?

sigh

[phreesh]

G vs E lasted 22, but it was a pretty sweet mix of humour and action.

Also, the Jeremy Piven show, Cupidhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168326/ was excellent. Very funny.

[tds1273]

Lots of good ones already listed, and some I even forgot about (GtB & ARCtU). Going to have to look for Lynch’s On The Air too.

I really wish they would have kept going with the American version of Life On Mars. Though it actually had a pretty decent ending, the story could have gone so much further down the rabbit hole. However its departure did make way for another show, The Unusuals(already mentioned deservingly) and made me aware for the first time of Amber Tamblyn; I miss Detective Shraeger.

Wonder Showzen and TV Funhouse; ‘kids shows’ for grownups. Some of the most offensive television I’ve seen, yet also some of the most hilarious.

Monday mornings be damned, I’ve been loving the British import airing at 1:30 in the AM on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim Sunday lineup, The Mighty Boosh. A Ford & Arthur like duo with tripped out story lines and catchy musical numbers; seems to have ended with 18 episodes in '07.

Speaking of Adult Swim, they also give semi-regular airings to Mission Hilland The Oblongs, two very underrated animated series with really great casts; only made it to 13 episodes each.

[x-ray_vision]

I don’t know about great but V was pretty good.

[tds1273]

Sorry for the double post.

Meant to say I also hope Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Daysreturns for another season; it is currently at 18 episodes. In a similar vein, but from across the pond, was Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.

Then there was Gerhard Reinke’s Wanderlust. Didn’t even made it to seven episodes, but it was hilarious.

Also hope CC brings back Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire for another season or more.

[Staale_Nordlie]

The Middleman (wiki). 12 eps. No idea why it didn’t become a huge hit.

Short sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8aUeP1SslU

[Justin_Bailey]

@phreesh

G vs E lasted 22, but it was a pretty sweet mix of humour and action.

G vs E may have made it to 22, but the last, I wanna say 6, episodes were shuffled off to Sci-Fi, which wasn’t available on very many cable systems back then.

[Shot_From_Guns]

I tip my hat to the previously mentioned Firefly, My So Called Life, On the Air (I didn’t know anyone else knew it existed!), and The Tick (live action, '00-'01).

I contribute Space: Above and Beyond (okay, it made it 24 episodes) and Drive.

[Skara_Brae]

@LurkMeister

Harper’s Island was only intended to run 13 episodes (the last two episodes were aired on the same night, sort of the reverse of some shows which run a two-hour pilot which is later split into two one-hours episodes in syndication). I never heard of any plans to try to do a secnmd season, no matter how it did in the ratings.

I believe there were plans to run a new series with different people in a different location. Harper’s Valley, Harper’s Mountain, etc. But still have a bunch of people isolated and killed off.

[TBG]

@tr0psn4j

The Middleman didn’t make it to the second season. I’m not sure the exact episode count though. I’d guess it was either 13 or 22. Fun little show.

Oh man, that show was fun. Too bad ABC Family barely gave it a chance and then started playing “shove it in a bad timeslot” when it didn’t catch on right away.

[TheVioletCreep]

John From Cincinnati ;/

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@RealityChuck

I may be the only one, but I think Space Rangers was a pretty good SF action series, canned after three episodes. It was hurt because CBS ran the episodes out of order and because it premiered a couple of weeks after ST:DS9 started. Trekkies were scornful of plot elements in it that they raved about in DS9*. And the show tried to be a little different – using bullets instead of ray guns, for instance. Still, CBS buried it and science fiction TV fans just weren’t ready to accept anything different from Star Trek.

*One complaint at the time: Space Rangers had someone hitting a device to get it running. Everyone complained that couldn’t happen. But yet, DS9 used exactly the same trick in its premiere.

Ugh. I would never ever have put SR in the ‘great’ category, not even ‘good’. It was laughable and obviously written by folks who saw fit to take elements from much better sci-fi (the guns were ridiculously sized things based on the multi-gun Ripley taped together in Aliens) without understanding the context that made them cool. All the characters were bad space opera cliches.