CBS is picking up a pilot for a show that’s described like this
What other pairs of shows sound like the same premise, especially when you write them in one sentence?
For example:
Veronica Mars and Nancy Drew: Independent teenage girl solves mysteries with a little help from her father.
“30 Rock” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”.
Behind the scenes at a late-night live TV sketch comedy show.
Well, not only the unnamed CBS series and Angel, but Angel and Forever Knight.
The adventures of a family in suburban America:
The Brady Bunch
Leave It To Beaver
Make Room For Daddy
Ozzie and Harriet
7th Heaven
“The somewhat loopy adventures of an ordinary guy who suddenly finds himself a Superhero.”
That described Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific back in the mid-1960s, when they were simultaneously on different networks.
Then it could’ve described The Greatest American Hero in the 1980s.
Now, God help us, it might describe Heroes
A couple of totally forgotten shows about a Super-Helicopter:
Airwolf and the TV adaptation of Blue Thunder (which at least had Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith for comic relief)
The King of Queens and According to Jim (and lots of others): Fat Schlub married to good looking bitchy woman.
Doctors saving lives:
Ben Casey
Dr. Kildare
Medical Center
ER
Chicago Hope
House, MD . . . and Manny Moore.
Nancy Grace and Greta van Susteren*: Chatty bimbos who take air time that could be used to report on real news to gossip about the latest sex scandal.
[sub]* Two shows which I never watch, so forgive me if I’m mischaracterizing[/sub]
What about in the mid 70s when three Animal Houses were running at the same time? There was even talk of a sorority version but the three male versions bombed terribly. OK, Ok two bombed terribly and the third sort of petered out.
What about CSI? All nine or ten versions really have the same premise. I’m looking forward to CSI - Fargo though.
Married with Children and **Unhappily Ever After ** always struck me as eerily similar.
Angel, nothing, I remember when it was called Forever Knight. So he wasn’t a P.I., it was close enough.
Marc
A few years back, my husband and I were fond of a silly (but watchable) show called Special Unit 2. It was a rather light-hearted fantasy series in which a top secret police team battles monsters and mythological creatures. Kind of a comical take on Night Stalker. I tried to encourage a few friends to watch this show, and I found that most of them thought they’d already seen it. After a bit of questioning, I determined that what my friends had, in fact, seen was The Chronicle, whose premise was almost identical, except that the monster-fighters worked for a tabloid newspaper rather than being police officers. If these shows hadn’t appeared in the same TV season, one or both might have had a chance. As it was, they knocked each other off the air.
Nancy Drew was a book character for years before she became a television character.
Usually the obvious answers are all taken by the time I show up…
Who could forget “The Munsters” and “The Addams Family”?
How about the TV shows Ferris Bueller and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose coming out months apart in 1990?
Mysterious young man with extraordinary mental faculties appears naked and amnesiac in the Pacific Northwest. And his show was called John Doe and then Kyle XY. The creators of Kyle XY claim that they created the show years before John Doe hit the air.
Last year Surface, Threshold and Invasion all sort of blended together. Maybe that’s why none of them finished out their freshman year.
Do reality shows count? If so, Trading Spouses and Wifeswap is a pretty blatant example. And Amazing Race is a (massively) dumbed down pale imitation of the EcoChallenge.
This year’s Kidnapped and Vanished looked incredibly alike on paper.
They’re both gone.
“The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.”
And hell, there’s three CSI: Crime Scene Investigation shows, and three Law & Orders.