There are a lot of favorites of mine on this thread, but a few are still missing.
Time Trax - A cop from the future vs. criminals escaped from the future. Kung Fu: The Legend Continues - A cop show crossed with cheesy martial arts flick. Misfits of Science - Which was a way better show then it gets credit for. Very experiemental at time - for instance, they had one episode that was told backwards. Brilliant. Early Edition - Which is currently in reruns on Pax. A nice guy whose life it is the toilet suddenly starts having tomorrow’s paper delivered to him every morning. Eerie, Indiana - Two boys live in a town where all of those wacky urban legends are true. (Elvis lives down the street, Bigfoot raids their garbage cans, etc.)
What happened was quite simple. You had a few original shows that were successful: X-Files, Buffy, Xena. Then you had several dozen imitations, most of which were cancelled when viewers realized they were hackwork. Then some succesful original shows came along in a new genre and the hacks moved on.
I think you’re thinking of “Now And Again.” Good show, I hated that it ended with such a cliffhanger.
Add:
“Strange Luck.” All I really remember what that in the first show, the lead character should have died, but didn’t. And that caused all these other things to happen. I think that’s right - anyone else remember?
The pilot had a lot of great stuff in it – the way he would pay for meals at the diner by purchasing a lottery ticket, knowing that his strange luck would result in a winner, for instance – but the subsequent episodes didn’t maintain the first episode’s quality. It became a pretty pedestrian show about weird things.
I remember Desi Arnez Jr. I remember Cursor. I remember planes evaporating. I remember a program named HERO. I do not remember the TRON ripoff turning into a car.
Back To The OP
Sentinel- Soldier in the Amazon somehow ends up with heightened senses which he uses to fight crime as a cop. ‘A man who can use all five senses like weapons’
Earth Final Conflict- I liked it until the last seaon. It not only jumped the shark, it engaged the shark in a threesome with Paris Hilton. It went from inteligent and wellwritten to ‘The Atavis Show’. The Atavis didn’t even conform to the Atavis discussed in earlier seasons and seen when D’han was cut off from the Commonality.
Andromeda- IMHO Jumped in the episode where Tyr convinces the DragoKatzov that he is the Genetic Reincarnation of Drago Musevny. Starts fine, then methodical, deliberate Tyr leaves a massive part of his plan up to Dylan Hunt. And the plan requires Hunt to kill innocent people. Then, a bunch of alien ships come out of nowhere to destroy the Commonwealth fleet for no apparent reason.
Man. I have seen, like, none of these shows. I think I failed to notice that 90% of them eiven existed.
Of course, about the last time I pondered a similar question was when they cancelled Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica was going all to Hell, or something like that…
He was a computer generated man, and Cursor could make a car or a cool helicopter to drive in, that drove without turning curved corners. Sometimes the car turned into the chopper mid-drive. Very funky.
Desi Arnaz Jr was an awful actor, but Automan himself was pretty good.
Eerie, Indiana was great. They brought it back a few years after its cancellation, but it wasn’t as good.
More or less. The bad guys completely and utterly win.
Notable for being the first time I noticed the lovely and talented Jewel Staite (she played the girl in the rainbow wig for the first season who got replaced by the other girl with rainbow hair in the second season).
I think that explains some things but not others. Frex, I don’t think there’s every been a successful series with a cyberpunk theme, but several have been tried: VR5, Lone Gunmen and a couple others (I think the one about government anti-hackers was called Level 9 or something like that).
Also, some of the shows were very original: Cleopatra 2525, fluff though it was in many respects, had a very original series concept: the human race had lost a war with aliens, and was hiding out underground, where the aliens, for some reason unknown to any logical person, couldn’t or wouldn’t go, in a series of artificial caves that were aparently quite roomy and extensive. You travelled downlevel by leaping down open airshafts and somehow bouncing to the level you wanted to get to. A VERY bizarre series.
Lost World pretty much completely left Arthur Conan Doyle territory and got into a weirdly compelling series of adventures. I think the thing about it was, the writers DELIVERED the CHEESE. They knew they were writing fantasy, so they went with the leather bikini clad wild woman, the lost dirigibles, the doorways to other worlds, etc., and DID A GOOD JOB with them, instead of treating them like kiddie fodder and putting their brains on auto-pilot.
Special Unit 2 was good for similar reasons. The writers delivered the cheese. It was on network and was not given a chance to grow an audience, but I think it could have.
Lone Gunmen appeared to have been deliberately sabotaged as a way of putting Chris Carter in his place. Same with Firefly. Both were pet projects of successful “auteur” series creators which got dumped into the Friday night ratings graveyard and axed in short order. Both were good series.
I’ll grant you a lot of the shows were hackwork and I suspect that several good series got sluiced down the drain with the dreck, without finding an audience, because there was so much stuff out there. I pretty much missed Briscoe County, Jr. (partly because it was a Western and Westerns bore me.)
awwwWWWW In the year 2525! There are women with the will to survive!
Anyhoo, they weren’t aliens. The Baileys were robots. It was eventually revealed that they had been built by a human being to protect the environment. IIRC the series finale was a cliffhanger with the Baileys finally entering the underground to wipe out the human race. You stopped by firing a rope from your bracers (Which they insisted on calling gauntlets on the series), or by firing a big bungee web thing to block the shaft.
Guy in a wheelchair whose hi-tech exoskeleton allowed him mobility for crime-fighting purposes. Paralysed his foes with something (darts? gas?), and would leave a small statue of a praying mantis as a “calling card.”
MANTIS was another Sam Raimi show, starring Carl Lumbly as the armored superhero. He now does a lot of voice work, including the Martian Manhunter in the Justice League cartoon.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned The Flash, the short-lived CBS show from around 1991. It starred John Wesley Shipp as the Flash, and he had a red rubber suit, similar to the Batman costume from the Tim Burton films… it even had a Danny Elfman theme song like Batman! Some of the episodes were really cool, like the ones with Mark Hamill as the Trickster, and an older superhero called Nightshade (back from retirement and clad in a black trench coat, fedora, and gas mask, obviously based on DC’s Golden Age Sandman). Of course, it died an early death when the network scheduled it against The Cosby Show AND The Simpsons.
I loved Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. like crazy, and would buy the DVD set in a heartbeat!
:smack: I can’t believe I forgot Mantis. I loved that show.
It was darts. He would then leave the statue hanging off the criminal’s lips. The cops were unable to discover how the paralyzing chemical worked or who manufactured it because the scientist they asked for help was secretly the Mantis.
He had a flying car called the Chrysalis. His lair was a cave beneath his mansion. He called it the Seapod. He fought the Yakuza, a remote controlled robot soldier, Men In Black from another dimension and more.
The actor who played Mantis is currently the voice of the Martian Manhunter on JLA (And presumably JLU as well).
There was a fantasy series on a network, quite briefly, with your standard hunky prince, nice looking witch, and an even hotter looking spirit that popped up every so often. Some of it was funny. I thought it was called swords and sorcery, but a quick Google search turned up nothing of use.
Now, to go back really far, there was Rocky Jones Space Ranger, which had ships being hit falling down, and the good old Science Fiction Theater, made on a budget of $10 an episode, and using np props you couldn’t buy in a Five and Ten Cent store. Those were cheesy.
One show that I felt was underrated was the TV series of Honey I Shrunk The Kids with Peter Scolari. The comedy in it was self referential at just the right level, as well as it having the opportunity to utilise different kinds of science fiction or fantasy each week, depending on the various inventions that would be involved.
The reason we don’t mention the older series is that the OP was pointing around to series from the 90s, when there was apparently a huge explosion of F & SF on TV. Prior to that, it was very limited stuff. Oh, sure, they had their Time Tunnels, their Land of the Giants, their Green Hornets, their Battlestar Galacticas, but really, not a lot compared with the 90s. I didn’t mention the Flash because I thought it was from the 80s, but apparently it squeaked in in the early 90s.