“Quark” Richard Benjamin; the misadventures of an outer space garbage collector and his crew. 8 episodes. (I actually loved this one.)
“Logan’s Run” Based on the same named movie. 14 episodes.
“The Starlost” Harlan Ellison had his name taken off this; read the account in “Somehow, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas, Anymore” in Stalking The Nightmare. 16 episodes.
My immediate choice was the TV show Police Squad which has already been mentioned. Funnier than the Naked Gun films it came back as.
I also recall a whimsical Police Comedy called Bakersfield P.D. which was good.
There was a what I felt was a superb TV version of The Fugitive - I’m not being sarcastic - this came years after the Harrison Ford film versions let alone the original TV series (which I don’t think I actually watched) and it had a slow pace but I felt it was very engaging.
Then there was Danger Theatre or more specifically “The Searcher” segments with Diedrich Bader. Now that was funny.
Plus speaking of shows being cancelled on a cliffhanger there was Farscape. I know the show - with the (allegedly) sub-orgasmic warbling theme tune and Muppettastic aliens - is mocked by many round here but I liked it.
The story is the show managed to squeeze out four seasons under constant threat of cancellation. They were preparing to be cancelled after four seasons so filmed a “Happy Ending” bringing the show to an end. Then they were told there would be the fifth season they had wanted all along so they filmed a new cliffhanger ending and added a title card “To Be Continued”…
Then the cancellation after the fourth season was re-instated with just weeks before the final episode aired. The producers were so angered by all the mucking around that although they had a fitting final episode in the can they presented the broadcasters with the version ending “To Be Continued” expecting a complaint… But the broadcasters couldn’t have cared less and broadcast it as was!
Another short-lived show I liked: Legend -a show about a dime-store novelist in the old West starring Richard Dean Anderson and costarring John “Q” de Lancie as a quirky scientist and inventor in the mold of Nikola Tesla.
Yeah, I loved that show. It was from the people who did Home Movies, Dr. Katz, Lucy, Daughter of the Devil and currently Bob’s Burgers. I always thought that the whole “weirdness” gimmick was completely unnecessary and the show would have been better as just a straight dialog-driven comedy (like Home Movies).
I watched every episode of that show (can’t remember if I TiVo-ed or taped them). I think the controversy was because it portrayed the JFK clone as a shallow, high school jock womanizer who was always scheming with (and banging) the high school bitch Cleopatra clone (I loved how the Genghis Khan clone wore a “SCREW TIBET!” T-shirt!). I think a big reason it didn’t last is because it came right when MTV was getting out of adult animation. Too bad, they had a lot of great stuff back then (Daria, The Head, The Maxx, Downtown) Immeasurably better than the garbage they show now.
I saw the star Tim Reid (he played Venus Flytrap on WKRP) on the old Later with Bob Costas show. He said the problem was it was a dramedy (drama/comedy) and the network insisted it be one or the other, that people were simply confused if it was both! (Although they finally went mainstream, for decades TV network executives despised all dramedies).
I watched an episode of this show. Why anyone thought it was even remotely good, let alone superlative, is beyond me!
THANK YOU! I loved John Doe, and I always wondered how things would be resolved.
I’m still hurting over Moonlight - But at least we got an idea of what the focus of the next season would have been (the list). Oh well, Alex O’Laughlin ended up on Hawaii Five-0, though too buff there for my taste.
I enjoyed that show too, as well as another one season show that came out around the same time - New Amsterdam. It was about an immortal cop and his (physically) much older son.
“Blue Thunder” Based on the movie of the same name. An advanced prototype police helicopter and their ground support crew battle crime. James Farentino and Dana Carvey star. 11 episodes.
“Top of the Heap” Pre-“Friends” Matt LeBlanc. Spin-off from “Married with Children.” 7 episodes. Joey Lauren Adams’s baby-doll voice used to curl my toes.
“Vinnie & Bobby” LeBlanc, again. Same character as “Top of the Heap,” same results. 7 episodes.
There was a show on in the 90s, though I don’t remember exactly when or who or anything other than the guy didn’t need a job because he could go get lottery tickets (scratchers) and win a few bucks any time he needed it. Ring a bell for anyone? I really liked it, though it’s been out of my head for a long time.
PapSett, I was thinking about Surface the other day! Do you remember the scene with the person being pulled behind the speedboat on a parachute (I can’t think of what that’s called) and she looked ahead and could see the boat was about to go into a giant whirlpool? I had a weird flashback to that scene and remembered how much that image freaked me out.
There were two science fiction shows I remember from when my brother and I were kids that we both thought were awesome, but which were both cancelled before they went very far.
“Probe” was about a genius and his secretary who were tasked with investigating bizarre murders and figuring out how they happened. I think Isaac Asimov was involved in creating this show. These days, I remember two things from the show:
[ul]
[li]a victim who was killed when the elevator doors opened after the elevator arrived–but at the floor ABOVE the one it was supposed to arrive at.[/li][li]some teenagers using an audio tape (I think) that caused people to become extremely suggestible; when one of the kids told his dad to “go suck an egg,” the dad actually went and poked a hole in an egg and sucked the raw egg out of the shell.[/li][/ul]
“The Wizard” was also about an eccentric genius who fought bad guys, except in this case the genius was little person Simon McKay, played by the guy from Time Bandits, David Rappaport. I remember a very Raiders of the Lost Ark episode of this show, where Simon stopped an ancient walls-closing-in booby trap from killing them all by reflecting sunlight onto the right place on the wall. My brother and I were great fans of this show, but he hated how I always used to get the theme song mixed up with the theme song from “Airwolf” when humming it.
More recently, I miss the following shows:
“Relic Hunter”, with Tia Carrere. Very Raiders of the Lost Ark-esque show, and I actually found it quite entertaining. It lasted 3 seasons, but I wanted more. I later heard that it would have been canned earlier except for the popularity of Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider movies that were coming out around the same time.
“Now and Again”, where family man Michael Wiseman (played by John Goodman in the pilot) is killed by a subway train, and his brain is recovered by a shadowy government researcher and installed in an artificial body with enhanced speed, strength, and other powers (so the main character was really played by Eric Close from then on). The only catch, of course, is that he can’t ever contact his wife and daughter, who believe he is dead; if he does, Dennis Haysbert (the researcher) will kill him For Real, as well as his wife and daughter, to preserve the government’s “we can build artificial superbodies” secret. But of course he insists on having feelings and Big Trouble ensues. Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger, which was very annoying when the show was not renewed.
I liked Search with its rotating Probe agents back in the '70s. It was remarkably like Star Trek with its remote command center; not surprising, since it was produced by Bob Justman.
Not sure about that show, but it reminded me of another 90s show, Early Edition. The hero mysteriously receives tomorrow’s newspaper today, and uses the headlines to avert disasters and change history. I could have sworn it ran only one season but according to Wikipedia is ran for four.
