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Quote-Unquote posted:Yeah I loved burn notice for the most part The last season and a half were a bit of a mess though.
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Sep 22, 2015 01:26
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Maxwell Lord posted:The original Outer Limits, despite now being viewed as a kind of cousin to The Twilight Zone, met with much less commercial success and only ran for 2 seasons.
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Sep 22, 2015 03:22
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Ah, here we are: When the Brits try the US style of sitcom writing you get 'My Family', which ran for a billion awful series.
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Sep 22, 2015 08:32
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Creature posted:When the Brits try the US style of sitcom writing you get 'My Family', which ran for a billion awful series. Hey, I was gonna say that! But yeah, My Family had a team of writers like an American sitcom and wound up getting crappier and crappier to the point where the actors outright refused to film some scripts which really says something given the crap we did get.
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Sep 22, 2015 14:27
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FilthyImp posted:TOL suffered from having inadequate creature budgets. And that humanistic Searling touch was lacking. It went back and forth on creatures. There are some that are, for the time, impressive- the creature in "Galaxy Being", the pilot, is really cool, a guy in an oil-slicked suit shot in photonegative so he glows white with dark patches. "The Zanti Misfits" even has brief stop motion. On the other, you have the Megazoid, which is a guy in a gorilla suit with an alien bird head. It wasn't as consistently humanistic as TZ, sometimes it was as simple as "monsters from outer space", but there are some very moving stories. "The Architects of Fear" is about a group of men who decide to manufacture a seeming alien invasion to scare the Earth into world peace, and of course it goes awry, and it has one of the better ending monologues. "Fear cannot save us. Rage cannot help us."
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Sep 22, 2015 16:17
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Related to this, in the 80s you saw sort of a broad attempt at reviving the genre anthology show, with mixed success. Amazing Stories had Steven Spielberg's name at the top, the title of the first major science fiction magazine, and impressive production values and guest stars, and again only made it two seasons thanks to lackluster ratings. Still it was very ambitious, with top writers, directors (Joe Dante! Tobe Hooper! MARTIN SCORCESE!), and a wide range of stories- most erred on the heartwarming side since it was marketed as a family show, but it got creepy now and again. Others from this era included a Twilight Zone revival, The Ray Bradbury Theater, and Tales from the Darkside. While nothing on network TV stuck around for long, HBO's Tales from the Crypt had a good long run and two movies. I've got a theory that the anthology format is basically a holdover from radio drama, where it's much easier to change sets and characters every week, and they kept doing it in TV because every medium starts out imitating an older one. It's declined because from a strict commercial perspective it's much better to get a show with an ongoing setup, and people keep tuning in either to follow the twists and turns of the plot or to just spend time with familiar characters and a comfortable formula (i.e. why procedurals will never die.) Still, folks keep trying at it now and again.
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Sep 22, 2015 16:29
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Y-Hat posted:They're called "series" across the pond, not "seasons." But yeah, I don't know why British TV shows have short series/seasons. All the same, I can't wait for Series 9 of Peep Show, even though it will likely be six episodes. There was such a long gap between two seasons for that show that I completely changed as a person and lost interest in the meantime.
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Sep 22, 2015 22:52
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juniperjones posted:There was such a long gap between two seasons for that show that I completely changed as a person and lost interest in the meantime.
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Sep 23, 2015 03:38
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Just found this thread and I see that Terriers, John Doe, Pushing Daisies, and Raising Hope, all favorites of mine have been mentioned. So, how about Enlisted and The Finder? Both feature the underused Geoff Stults, and the latter has the late Michael Clark Duncan. I thought Enlisted was especially funny and sweet much like Raising Hope.
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Sep 26, 2015 00:08
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It wasn't great by any stretch but BBC school sitcom Chalk was probably cancelled before it's time due to comparisons with Fawlty Towers setting the bar too high. It was given a second series before the first had even aired based on studio audience reaction alone but didn't do well in the ratings or critically. Highlights include the deputy headmaster photocopying his wife's gynaecology pictures and posting them around the school, a rant about geography being a world domination conspiracy that would have been right at home in Doctor Who (the show was created by Stephen Moffat), and the RE teacher attempting to resign because he thought he was Satan.
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Sep 29, 2015 11:27
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computer parts posted:Tripods would be a pretty cool movie series. I remember reading those when I was 8 and they were great. Disney has been sitting on the rights since 1997. They kicked around a screenplay in 2005, but it never went anywhere. Now it just sits in development hell.
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Sep 29, 2015 11:45
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EricFate posted:Disney has been sitting on the rights since 1997. They kicked around a screenplay in 2005, but it never went anywhere. Now it just sits in development hell. That's really weird. I guess they missed the Hunger Games fad and just decided it wasn't worth the effort.
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Sep 29, 2015 12:56
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Death Zebra posted:It wasn't great by any stretch but BBC school sitcom Chalk was probably cancelled before it's time due to comparisons with Fawlty Towers setting the bar too high. It was given a second series before the first had even aired based on studio audience reaction alone but didn't do well in the ratings or critically. Highlights include the deputy headmaster photocopying his wife's gynaecology pictures and posting them around the school, a rant about geography being a world domination conspiracy that would have been right at home in Doctor Who (the show was created by Stephen Moffat), and the RE teacher attempting to resign because he thought he was Satan. Chalk was absolutely terrible. It was on around the same time as a bunch of other awful one-series comedies like Hippies and tha weird one about loads of ginger haired scottish people.
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Sep 29, 2015 14:49
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penguins can't fly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JsZbSzMi08
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Oct 1, 2015 11:39
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pahuyuth posted:So, how about Enlisted and The Finder? Both feature the underused Geoff Stults, and the latter has the late Michael Clark Duncan. I thought Enlisted was especially funny and sweet much like Raising Hope. Same TV season as Enlisted - Trophy Wife. Great actors (Bradley Whitford, Malin Akerman, Natalie Morales, Marcia Harden) in a really fun and heart-warming comedy series. Sadly also only got one season.
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Oct 1, 2015 13:40
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Terriers is one of those shows where you're all like "no way is it as good as all these loving goons say it is" but then you watch it and flip out because it somehow managed to get cancelled on FX while The Strain is still happening
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Oct 2, 2015 03:13
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FX seriously has been churning out incredible series. I loved terriers and lights out. I forgot they were both on there
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Oct 2, 2015 03:47
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Decius posted:Same TV season as Enlisted - Trophy Wife. Great actors (Bradley Whitford, Malin Akerman, Natalie Morales, Marcia Harden) in a really fun and heart-warming comedy series. Sadly also only got one season. I just re-watched the entire show and it stills holds it's own. It's not cutting edge in any way, but there is a good chemistry, I would have loved to see a couple of seasons a least.
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Oct 26, 2015 10:30
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Whoever brought up Journeyman earlier in the thread, thanks. I tracked it down based on that post and the show was great. I wonder why it only had a single season, was it timeslot fuckery or was it how incredibly serialized the show was? Seriously, there wasn't a single filler episode out of all 13, every single one directly linked the ones before and after. Some of the revelations made in the last few episodes... drat, I would have liked to see where they would have gone.
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Oct 26, 2015 19:14
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pahuyuth posted:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3733950&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=6#post449945620 I posted this before. The Finder was going nowhere after you scratched the surface. I never watched Enlisted, though.
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Oct 26, 2015 19:18
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Doctor Butts posted:The Finder was going nowhere after you scratched the surface. It was having a good time getting there, though.
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Oct 26, 2015 19:31
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precision posted:Terriers is one of those shows where you're all like "no way is it as good as all these loving goons say it is" but then you watch it and flip out because it somehow managed to get cancelled on FX while The Strain is still happening I watched Terriers after reading about it on this thread and have to say that I was disappointed. It had some brilliant moments and characters (the introduction of Donal Logue's sister being the real highlight) but it was terribly melodramatic, especially when dealing with the two main characters' romantic relationships. It had the Justified plot where the hero's ex-wife marries a total scumbag who the original husband has to deal with, which would be an interesting premise if it weren't both completely unbelievable and total wish-fulfillment. And Logue's weird enmity with the evil developer felt shoehorned in (his whole speech about how he was going to "take him down" or whatever was laughable). That being said, it's one of those shows that very easily could have been great in a second or third season; it definitely had potential, especially with Raymond-James being sent off to prison. A few of the plots definitely surprised me, like with the city councilman being bought off, but it's nowhere near Deadwood in the "cancelled before its time" pantheon. More on the level of Firefly, full of personality but spotty in terms of actual quality.
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Oct 26, 2015 19:50
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