When that series premiered, i was sure it would rock. It was at the height of DS9, my favorite of the Trek series. It had been long enough since TNG rebooted the franchise that they had all the kinks out of the special effects. Janeway, Kes, and Torres were all beautiful without being slutty, so I could admire them without being embarrassed. And, most importantly, the very premise of the show show – a Federation starship that was dozens of thousands of lightyears away from anybody they knew, with half the crew made up of people teh other half had been trying to arrest – seemed tailor-made for interesting drama. It was an opportunity to show the ship slowly deteriorating, to put the crew in genuine moral dilemmas, to force the captain to walk a high-wire without a net. It was an opportunity to GET RID OF THE HOLODECK, also known as a crutch for lazy storytelling.
But, as we all know, they screwed it up royally. They just couldn’t stay the course. I can see now the moment when they doomed themselves: an early first season episode when the ship, for obvious reasons, is low on power and being forced to conserve. Kim & Torres, asked if they can use power from the holodeck grid, say it is incompatible with teh rest of the ship’s stupid. That is far from the stupidest moment in the show’s history, but it’s emblematic of Voyager’s basic problem: the refusal of its writers to accept the logical results of their basic premise. Rather than explore the new avenues of storytelling that opened up, they instead decided to be Star Trek: The Next Generation Lite.
But that’s just my opinion. What series most stick out in your mind as having most squandered their potential?
I quickly lost interest in Jericho. I had hoped it would be a true post-apocalyptic story of a small town, cut off from the support of civilization, not knowing what was to come. Instead, they seemed to quickly come upon virtually unlimited sources of food and energy and the rest of show devolved into a soap opera.
Heroes. The promise was of a few ordinary people gaining superpowers on a certain special day to save mankind. It almost immediately turned out that dozens of people had superpowers, had had them forever, that huge networks of superpowered people existed that had been warring for generations, and that the entire premise was a lie, exchanged for something with no brains at all.
It sounded like an interesting concept: Take the show back to pre-TOS days and show humanity taking baby steps out into the galaxy and eventually found the federation. No shields, no transporters, no universal translator.
Except the writers (apparently shipped over from Voyager) just couldn’t be arsed to read their own show Premise. The series pretty much incorporates a loopy Time Travel war. No shields, but they could magnetize the hull, which acted pretty much like a shield. They had Hoshi to translate new alien tounges, which fell away after about half a season when the writers go bored. Oh, and they used the teleporter quite a bit.
Did I mention the part about running into aliens which wouldn’t be seen until much later series or even at all? Yeah.
Sliders. The premise that you could travel to parallel worlds is always exciting, but this was carried off with a complete lack of imagination. Each episode was one cliche after another with routine plots and old ideas.
The first season alone showed us Robin Hood, a deadly virus where they have to come up with the cure (about ten Star Trek episodes, like “Miri”), an asteroid striking Earth (also in Star Trek, though with a different planet), a world where women rule (All that Glitters and Regiment of Women,) a world were smart people were sports heroes (the Old Switcheroo – with the contest being part athletic, to boot), Elvis is alive!, and most appallingly, a remake of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
Note that other than the premise, the worlds were exactly like ours – same city names, same technology (sometimes slightly more advanced, sometimes slightly less), same history (except for a few small references), same people, etc.
No imagination at all.
Even worse, George R. R. Martin had plans for a similar concept called Doorways at about the same time (there was even a pilot shot), finally losing out when ABC decided to go with Lois and Clark instead. Sliders took his idea, made it stupid, and ended even the remote chances a good parallel world series would be made.
I’m strecthing it a little, imo here, but I thought this when I watched all of Wonderfalls.
The idea was good and the stories were pretty good, but every episode involved a cryptic message from some anthropomorphic object that has to be deciphered and is usually not understood until everything came together at the end.
Now that being said, I liked the show a lot and from what I understand, they were going to broaden it a bit the next season, which never happened.
Lost. Many of the ads for Lost hyped the show as survival on a deserted island after a plane crash. I was honestly looking forward to this. I was picturing a TV series similar to the movie Castaway. What I got was confusing psychological drek that the writers were making up as they went along.
Now don’t get me wrong, most of the first season was absolutely phenomenal. There were episodes where the survivors had to forage for food, water, and shelter. They were attacked by a bear, which was neat. There was the possibility of savage natives (the Others hadn’t been introduced yet) and even a mysteries creature we hadn’t seen that could eat people from trees (turned out to be a cloud of black smoke).
It had a great premise. Then they opened the hatch, and things went from ‘survival’ to ‘made up woo-woo magic stuff’. I stopped watching the end of Season 2.
Boston Legal totally wasted James Spader’s character. In the last season of The Practice he was totally amoral and committed only to winning. In Boston Legal he was a shell of his former self, just another do gooder lawyer who occasionally made a snarky aside. After the second use of Al Sharpton as designated closing arguer, I sadly stopped watching.
Well, that was a joke. Al Sharpton comes in and gives the really bombastic closing argument to a case. Then a few episodes later, in another case, they call him back in, and he gives the exact same closing argument, verbatim, just replacing the words “black Annie” with “gay Santa Claus”.
The recent Battlestar Galactica series. The cylons went from fearsome, mysterious, unrelenting, cold & calculating ("…and they have a plan") to whiny, squabbling, petulant losers that seem to make it up as they go along.
Kyle XY actually started out pretty good. Then it turned into yet another Family Channel kiddie crap show with characters changing motivations as the plot required, sometimes within the same scene, and horrific soap opera problems that were never resolved and went nowhere. Then they added pointless mysteries that they built up over several episodes, then either resolved in one sentence or simply never referred to again.
I thought Wonderfalls could’ve been a lot better than it was. I had two big problems with it.
First, I thought there were too many episodes where Jaye would have to go help some random fucko that I, the audience, had no reason to care about, and they wouldn’t make up for it by moving the story arc along at all. Veronica Mars would similarly have a Mystery of the Week, but they could mix a standalone plot with the larger arc especially well.
Also, Tyron Leitso (Eric) was such a horrid actor that I couldn’t even get myself to care about the Jaye/Eric arc. I mean really, all his character really had to do was pour drinks and fawn over this woman and he couldn’t even do that?
Beyond that, the show had a good quirkiness, a great cast, and a solid premise that would allow for a lot of creativity (and a staff headed by Tim Minear that could actually be that creative).
Hrm. I like the series, but damned if you’re not 100% correct on this sentence.
I thought the premise was great – genetuically-engineered alien slave ship ends up on Earth, and they’re effectively freed. For the first time, they’re able to make up their own culture, as well as adapting what Earth has to offer. (And, if you thought about it at all, the threat of their Owners showing up always stood as a Threat in the background).
Only – then it turns out that the Newcomers already have a culture, even though they said that they didn’t. And they never really did do a “developing a culture” thing. Or seriously look into the Owners threat. It coulda been a thoughtful series, spinning ideas based on culture clashes and the like, treating contemporary issues like immigration under an SF veneer. But it didn’t really do those things.
Pepper Mill loved the series and the TV movies, but I thought it was a massively wasted opportunity.
Dark Angel. Jessica Alba. Supersoldier. Da future. So I’m thinking “hot costumes, ass kicking, cool tech.” Instead we get Alba in dumpy clothes wandering through sets that look like abandoned industrial plants and office complexes, not doing anything particularly super-soldiery or hawt. Pathetic. I’m surprised it lasted longer than a single season.
What was that show where the teenage daughter could talk to god? It was interesting for the first four or five episodes and then nosedived into a sea of angst.
Go ahead and call me names, but I actually thought the idea for Cavemen had promise. I always loved the Geico commercials, and thought the series would have plenty of potential as a satire of political correctness run amok. I was actually looking forward to it and thought that people were to quick to malign the concept without actually having seen it.
Boy, was I wrong.
The writing was abysmal, the characters were broad caricatures cobbled together from various racial stereotypes and even the production values were amateurish. All that hair just looked awful, like something from a college freshman film project.
Oh, and did I mention that the writing was abysmal. I don’t think I laughed once during the few episodes that I managed to watch.