K-Ville
We were really disappointed when it ended.
No, I’m thinking of Forever, the series with Ioan Gruffudd. Yes, he played a medical examiner. But the series was about how he went around solving crimes, which makes it a detective series not a medical series.
Forever and New Amsterdam were basically the same show, all the way down to having foreign leads whose most famous roles were military leaders. Both were trying to find “cures” for their conditions while solving crimes. Although New Amsterdam’s 'finding true love" arc was far inferior to Forever’s serial killer arc.
These both were good shows. Maybe someday they’ll re-do the premise again. Call it Forever New Amsterdam were we find out Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s true love is Ioan Gruffudd’s serial killer.
Does anyone remember Probe from 1988? It only lasted 7 episodes despite being created and written by Isaac Asimov.
Parker Stevenson was "an eccentric scientific prodigy"who solved mysteries with his dingbat secretary. He would have preferred to be a hermit, but got involved because of computers (AI) he created or worked on through a corporation he started/owned/worked for. I don’t recall.
I’ve thought about starting a thread of shows like this: murdered by the execs–cause of death is deliberate scheduling against an unbeatable show in the same time slot. In the case of* Probe*, the Cosby Show.
I was quite impressed by it, but as a young freshman at a state college, I couldn’t get access to a TV to watch it.
I don’t think I saw anyone mention Invasion. It came on the same night that Lost started. In many ways I enjoyed it much more than Lost. Wiliam Finchner is a good as always. It ended on a cliff hanger and I really wish I could have seen where it was going.
Hated Studio 60 from the first episode. The show within the show was terribly unfunny and that caused the rest to fall apart.
Enlisted was interesting. The pilot episode was so amazingly unrealistic as to how it depicted Army life that there was a veterans revolt on line against it. The creative team heard it and immediately jumped on the issue. The cast put out an apology and a promise to do better. They brought on veterans as consultants. The went directly to military and veterans pages and sites to court military viewers. After the first couple of episodes it turned into a pretty good show tackling some serious subject matter in a respectful manner and also maintained its humor. It wasn’t enough to get the ratings up.
Just thought of another series that didn’t last a season where the cancellation caught me totally by surprise was Alien Nation. That was a pretty good show that did a good job of translating the movie into TV.
Maybe it isn’t Time Travel I need to stay away from. Maybe I need to stay away from all Sci Fi.
I was never very much for prime-time type TV, but I liked the short lived series ‘Hyperion Bay’. not many likeable characters, but really interesting drama.
It was an interesting premise but poor in execution. Asimov developed the show which was clearly based on the concept of a modern Sherlock Holmes but he didn’t write any of the episodes and I don’t think he was directly involved in story development or production. It ended up being a murder-of-the-week procedural with the science aspect kind of tacked on, essentially like Numb3rs and math, but with typical ‘Eighties production values and an obnoxious sidekick/secretary concocted to fill the Watson role but so vapid you spent every episode hoping she would fall into a hole.
The classic example of this is Max Headroom, which technically had two (partial) seasons but because of frequent rescheduling and preempting never had a stable time slot for an audience to find and was shown out of order, probably because it went to such lengths to mock television executives and the kind of reality content that later became a production favorite. One show-within-a-show was Missile Mike, featuring the eponymous character firing guns, which is really just the American Heroes Channel. The show had unfortunately cheap production values and was filmed on low grade videotape so it looks execeptionally bad today, but it was ahead of its time in so many ways. I would love to see a modern remake of it but it would no longer be satire since so many of the trends it parodied have become mainstream television, and besides, they would probably replace Matt Frewer with a popular comedian and feature a car chase flying off of a mountain into the cargo hold of a C5 because Justin Lin would be hired to produce it.
Stranger
Funny show, won a Emmy, etc:
One that just came to mind today: The Middleman. A delightful show about Wendy Watson, who is recruited by the Middleman to join the Organization Too Secret To Know (O2STK) to fight alien and supernatural menaces. The show parodied all sorts of TV shows and movies, and also had strange alien menaces (including an evil Boy Band from another planet, flying fish, and a cursed tuba on the Titanic.
It ran, for some reason, on the Disney channel, and its tone was just plain wrong for the audience.
Emerald City