I remember reading / hearing about this show when it briefly aired a few years ago. It was on and off the air so fast I never got a chance to see it. But my room-mate has the entire series (all 12 episodes!) on DVD. One uneventful evening, with no netflix disc in my possession, I popped it in and watched.
I was pleasantly surprised. This was a really fun show. It’s goofy ‘high concept’ premise reminded me of mid-60s shows like “Bewitched”, but the writers clearly had fun with the concept and threw a lot of interesting twists into the stories. I particularly liked the uptight lesbian sister. (And had one OMG moment when I realized the mother was the actress who played Christina in “Mommie Dearest!”) It was the first sitcom that I’d seen in a long time that I actually laughed out loud while watching.
I liked it so much that I was willing to disregard the fact that, while the show is set on the American side of the falls (and one ep. specifically deals with crossing the border into Canada), the exterior shots are clearly on the Canadian side of the gorge. (I grew up about 20 minutes away from the American falls, so I’m very familiar with them.)
I’m disappointed now that this show didn’t go anywhere. It was a hell of a lot more amusing than dreck like “Will & Grace” or “According to Jim” that stick to tired formulas and yet go on for years & years. So, I’m curious as to what other Cafe Society patrons might suggest as neglected shows that might be worth a DVD rental.
(Note: Yes I’ve seen “Firefly,” even liked it. But it’s been talked about so much in CS for so long, it hardly qualifies as a ‘neglected item’ anymore. So, let’s skip it and talk about other shows that REALLY need to be discovered!)
Max Headroom. When I first heard of this, I thought it would be an insipid attempt to cash in on the latest pop-culture inanity. Boy was I wrong; this prototype-cyberpunk series is a brilliant, satiric, and amusing look at a dystopian future, far too sophisticated for the networks airing it (and, apparently, the viewers watching it).
Watch it, and realize it predates (and predicts the problems with) the popularity of the Internet, reality TV, and media conglomeration by about 10 years.
While it’s not (I hope) short-lived, you need to know (yes NEED) that the brother in Wonderfalls is the lead in Pushing Daisies. If you haven’t seen it, you *must *catch up with us!
**Sons and Daughters**,a great show, often compared to Arrested Development, that was burned off by ABC before it even had a chance, which was weird because they promoted the hell out of it in the months leading up to it. There’s still one unaired episode that has yet to surface, and it’s looking unlikely that they’ll be a DVD release. In the day and age of capturing and uploading EVERYTHING that airs to the internet, I’m sure it’s possible, although might be difficult, to find the aired episodes online.
Best of the West. It was a really funny show about a Marshall that moves into a small town in the Old West. That guy Frog kills me. I believe that over 75% of its audience belongs to this board.
I liked Wonderfalls, and I’m happy I purchased the DVDs, but I don’t know how much longer it could’ve gone. The characters (aside from Eric, and I blame the actor) were all fantastic, and the concept had a lot of potential, but it spent too much time with the uninteresting, unrelated-to-the-main-characters Random Problem O’ The Week for my taste. (Nun lost her faith? Two annoying old ladies claiming to have gone over the Falls? Who cares?) Buffy and V Mars handled that kind of storytelling much better, IMHO. I find myself only re-watching the pilot and the last four episodes, where the Eric/Heidi plot finally gets going.
Sorry, I’m not intending to shit on the thread (I hate when people do that) but I think Wonderfalls would’ve become walking dead before too long, and I think the little we did get will be remembered fondly.
On a positive note, I still watch Undeclared regularly, and I still think it’s a fantastic show, and I really can’t understand why it wasn’t continued. Stuff like Firefly or Greg the Bunny or Veronica Mars I can understand not catching on, but Undeclared? It was hilarious, it was fairly mainstream in its setting and style, it had a talented & attractive cast, and it never really got too goofy for its own good (though Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler’s assistant came close). What the hell went wrong?
How short is short-lived? Are we talking less than a season? Because I will never forgive ABC for canceling Sports Night, CBS for giving **Joan of Arcadia ** the axe, and NBC for not letting **Studio 60 ** get its legs (and it appears I might have to hate the peacock network for letting Journeyman sail off into the distance too.
**Arrested Development ** and **Veronica Mars ** both got three seasons and hideous ratings. I loved both shows, but there’s only so much support the network can give.
**Burn Notice ** is on USA, is pretty much their highest rated original show, and is coming back for a second season, so I don’t know what you’re talking about there.
**Brisco County ** got huge, huge promotion but nobody watched, while its companion show, which everybody thought at the time was too weird to survive, was a little program called The X-Files. FOX kept Brisco on in the same time slot, had it air its entire season, and the show right after it was a hit while it wasn’t. Again, I liked the show, but FOX did what a network is supposed to do.
The OP is “unjustly short-lived series”. In my mind, every example I gave should’ve lived longer than they did. That doesn’t necessarily mean every episode was Foxed (killed maliciously, as I feel *Firefly *was), but that the show just didn’t last as long as I feel it should’ve.
