Not to mention it was based off of a stupid movie staring Luke Perry and Kristy Swanson.
How about M.A.S.H.? A comedy about a combat hospital during the Korean War?
Battlestar Gallactica - a remake of an incredibly cheesy, short-lived 1970s sci-fi show about a band of humans running away from a race of killer robots. This could have been a major disaster.
Well, it was based on a hit movie, based in turn on a best-selling book, so by that point it was no longer an unpromising. 
How about The West Wing? Who would have thought that a wordy, wonky show about politics would have succeeded?
Ed Begley Jr. played a TV executive in the movie Auto Focus, about Bob Crane’s sex-crazed secret life. Begley’s character, when told the premise for Hogan’s Heroes, snapped, “Oh, so it’s about the funny Nazis!”
Pitching The Mary Tyler Moore Show might’ve been hard, even given the star’s relative fame at the time: “It’s about a single woman in Minneapolis, struggling with her career. And she has some wacky friends and coworkers. People are gonna love it!” :dubious:
Northern Exposure. Spoiled Mahattan Brat pays for Med School by accepting money from Rural Alaskan town, in return for a promise to practice there for 2-3 years. (#?) Then he’s shocked to learn that his lawyer buddy can’t get him out of fulfilling his end of the deal. Go ->
What makes it work, I think, along with a few others I’ve seen, is that it is a non-judgemental society with some fringe-type personalities.
Jump-the-Shark extra: I’ll vote for the Cow-Flinging episode.
No, Joss Whedon’s premise was turned into a stupid movie staring Luke Perry and Kristy Swanson.
He sat at home for a couple of years moping about how his movie script was stupidified, then decided to try to redo his original premise as a TV series.
The Wire. Like TV needs another cop show… don’t we have enough Law & Order spinoffs?
I absolutely refused to watch until I’d been badgered into it by friends, coworkers, and various SDMB threads singing the praises of this show.
Also:
Dexter. A show where the main character is a serial killer? And he’s a good guy? Yeah, that’ll fly.
Six Feet Under. How could a show about a family-run funeral home possibly be any good?
Two series that had lousy premises, questionalble writing, and so-so supporting casts: Bosom Buddies and Perfect Strangers.
Both were made watchable by amazing comedy teams in the lead: Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, and Mark Lynn-Baker and Bronson Pinchot. You tuned in knowing that most of the show would be lame, but that there’d be at least one sequence with the two guys that was just golden. It’s a shame neither team ever did comedy together after those shows.
Well, heck, it took Siegel and Shuster six years to get somebody to buy their Superman character. You can pick just about any successful piece of entertainment and list the difficulties it faced early on.
It might be harder to find something every producer from day one was confident would actually be a hit, and actually was (as opposed to some focus-group-driven mediocrity). Who’s got the best record? Pixar?
Well, the first, certainly, but the 2nd was “a spin-off from a successful show!” and Firefly wasn’t successful.
As well as the audiences. This wasn’t really a successful show once it got rolling (IIRC, ratings continued to drop once people realized how much effort it would take to keep track of what was going on, and never recovered) although I loved it up until the last couple of episodes.
I started to make the same comment re: Firefly, but then I had to pause. AFter all, the series mentioned most frequently in the other thread was Star Trek: Voyager, which lasted SEVEN SEASONS. And yet most of us would call it a failure, by which we mean an artistic or dramatic failure. Firefly, for all its brevity, was an artistic success…
in my opinion, of course. Others may vary, and probably do.
Seems silly to say “cowboys in space” is an unpromising concept though, since the pitch line for the Original Star Trek was “Wagon Train in space”.
Smallville. Kevin Smith based a stand-up routine on how awful the premise was, based on a similar proposal for a Jon Peters film: He doesn’t wear a costume, he doesn’t fly, and he FIGHTS A GIANT SPIDER! Okay, the spider went to a different Jon Peters project. And it came in on the heels of an abysmal Superboy series and an underwhelming Lois and Clark.
How did they succeed where others had failed? By loading it up with sexy, sexy teenagers.
More accurately, it was a show about assholes. Which was still an unpromising premise, considering the “characters America wants to invite into their living rooms every week” mentality that dominated most shows at the time.
I don’t think most of the actors who played the lead roles were actually teens. Certainly they were all considerably older than the roles.
Yeah, that’s a good point. What was innovative (and dangerous, and hard to see as a success beforehand) about Seinfeld was that the stories had no moral.
It was also bold in the way it showed shallowness and selfishness as attractive qualities.
Annie-Xmas:
Is that really true? My recollection of the Simpson’s origins is that they were invented in the first place to serve as Ullman shorts, and people liked them so much that Fox, which aired Ullman to begin with, took a flyer on spinning them off into their own series. I’m not saying they’re not an improbable success story, but I don’t ever recall hearing that Groening had already created the characters and the premise and failed to find a taker until finally Fox agreed to air them as shorts.