Oh, and Under Cover basically ended when John Erik Hexum was accidentally shot and killed on set (I think he was the guy who shot himself in the head with “blanks”).
I thought the older start of the show “Voyagers” that, IIRC, had something to do with a magic stopwatch?
Straight Dope on this, anyone?
I suppose the rumors coming out in this thread was inevitable.
-Joe
[emphasis added]
So that’s what the casting director meant by “Tina Louise is leaving, so we need another nice pair on the island”?
Didn’t puberty end Leave to Beaver, Pete and Pete and Land of the Lost?
John Eric Hexum IS the older star of Voyagers. After Voyagers ended, he was signed to Under Cover.
Meeno Peluce, however, went back to being Soleil Moon Frye’s lesser-known older brother. I’d be bitter, too.
The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. was cancelled for exactly the same reason. It was popular, got good ratings, but still cost more to make than it was bringing in. I heard (but can’t swear that this part is true) that the network wanted to keep it on but that the producers refused to compromise the quality of the show by going with a smaller budget.
Leave it to Beaver is kind of interesting, because it only lasted a year on CBS, and then was picked up by ABC for another 5 years. It’s ratings started to drop in the 6th season, so ABC said, “We’ll pick it up for another season, but only if you colorize it and agree to expand it to an hour”. The producers didn’t have the money to do that. Meanwhile, Hugh Beaumont, who played Beaver’s father, was sick of the role. So, the show ended.
The Dick Van Dyke show went off the air because Van Dyke wanted to go into movies, and they felt they wanted to go out on top, before the show declined.
Same with The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
**ST: TNG ** ended after seven seasons because that was the end of the principal actor’s contracts (most TV shows sign their stars to seven years). The actors and production team wanted to go on, but Paramount preferred movies and not having to negotiate new contracts for everyone (plus they had more than enough episodes to syndicate it forever). Same with DS9.
The Fugitive went off the air because David Janssen tired of the role. They were the first TV series to have a series finale.
IIRC The Original Series of Star Trek ended because by the time it was realised the show was popular to the right audiences, Shatner and Nimoy at least had signed contracts for other shows and couldn’t come back.
Nope. Peter Duel killed himself in 1971; the show continued till 1973.
Nope. My Sister Sam was cancelled in 1988; Rebecca Schaefer was killed in 1989.
The show Maude was cancelled because ratings plummeted when Maude had an abortion. (It was really a stupid idea for a show because in addition to being extremely controversial Maude had a teenaged grandchild and had made jokes in previous episodes about her menopause [in the past tense].)
Diff’rent Strokes and Golden Girls were both cancelled but picked up by another network immediately. In both cases, the new network version folded after a season. (Golden Girls actually had a new name- Golden Palace and some cockamamie plot about the girls [minus Bea Arthur] sinking all their money into a beachfront motel, which [along with no Bea Arthur] helped euthanize it; Strokes had just over-run its course.)
Webster was cancelled when it was revealed that star Emmanuel Lewis had eaten human flesh. (Oh sorry… I’m thinking about the Billy Moyers program.)
I realize that we’re not in GD and this isn’t the most important issue in the world, but do you know where I can find out more about this (in other words, but in the nicest way possible…“cite?”)? I’d always heard it was the other writers who let it get out of control, and the stars didn’t like it…Roseanne tried wrapping it all up in the end with the last few shows.
TVtome (now tv.com) gives Roseanne the writing credit to just the Halloween episode in season 8, and only a few (the more reasonable ones, IMO: halloween, the Christmas episode, Darlene’s baby’s birth, and the final episode) in the ninth season.
No. the abortion episode was in Novermber, 1972, during the first season. The show ran until 1978.
Hmm. I stand corrected. (Thanks and apologies.)
Researching Maude to see why I thought that: the show was dropped from about 30 markets due to the abortion (due to protests); somewhere a wire crossed.
Whether the show Ellen sank in the ratings (and thus got axed) due to controversy or simply because it wasn’t very good has proponents on both sides. I think it was a combination.
An interesting reason why a show didn’t get cancelled is St. Elsewhere. The show was never huge in the ratings (respectable, middle-of-the-road at best), but advertisers loved it because of the viewers it did pull in: it was a major favorite among college educated 30-somethings, the exact people that many auto, alcohol and tourism (among other) folks were trying to reach.
Queer as Folk was cancelled because most of the cast had contracts up for renewal and they wanted to move on. (Ratings are still good.)
Cagney & Lacy (another Sharon Gless show) was cancelled due to very low ratings but was one of several shows to be returned due to a massive write-in campaign (especially by women who were glad to see women crimefighters who didn’t look like Cheryl Tiegs) and thus made the networks question the Nielsens. A similar thing happened with Mama’s Family- ratings were terrible and the plug was pulled, but so many people wrote in that its creators/producers elected to syndicate it and it ran for several more years.
The Jeffersons was cancelled completely unexpectedly while still drawing in strong ratings. The cast was very irked that there was no “goodbye” episode (though Archie Bunker in various incarnations ran even longer and had better ratings and didn’t have one either).
Didn’t Sarah Michelle Gellar ambush the producers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by revealing in an interview that she was quitting at the end of the seventh season unbeknownst to them?
While you’re correct for TNG, I’m pretty sure DS9 ended after seven years just because TNG had. Same for VGR and, if it hadn’t tanked in the ratings and had the President of Programming prejudiced against it, ENT.
Star Trek had already been renewed for a third season because of a massive letter campaign organized by Bjo Trimble and Gene Roddenberry and there was a similar (but smaller? Sir Rhosis, you out there?) campaign to have a fourth but NBC most emphatically did not care. They set it up to fail and it did so spectacularly… it wasn’t until years later, in the early to mid-seventies, that it became a hit in syndication that NBC gave it a second shot with The Animated Adventures which failed again, getting cancelled after 1.5 seasons.
Not according to Bruce Campbell’s bio, If Chins Could Kill. He said the show’s big budget was indeed a strike against it, but ultimately it was low ratings that killed Brisco. The producers did everything they could to promote the series, the critics loved it, and it did catch on with a small but loyal fan base, but in the end it wasn’t enough. I even recall TV Guide including it one of their Intelligent Shows That Most of You Mindless Sheep Aren’t Watching articles.
Oddly enough, just about everyone I knew watched the show and loved it, and to this day whenever I mention it someone will inevitably say, “That show was great! I was so mad when they cancelled it!” Evidently even a too-small fan base is still pretty large.
Clerks: The Animated Series. 6 Episodes were made, but only 2 were aired, out of order and againest extremely popular shows(Apparently the first season of Survivor and a famou football game).
AKA Network programmers have pointy hair.