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Feels like there were a bunch of mystery box sci-fi shows for a while that managed to get audiences tired of their vagueness and twists before they even started.
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Apr 29, 2021 11:55
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Feels like there were a bunch of mystery box sci-fi shows for a while that managed to get audiences tired of their vagueness and twists before they even started. everyone wanted that lost money
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Apr 29, 2021 11:59
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The Event was also about a new species of human coming back from the past or some poo poo. I don’t think it lasted long enough to get to what the titular event was supposed to be.
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Apr 29, 2021 13:32
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Journeyman with Kevin McKidd and Moon Bloodgood was the sci-fi show cancelled too soon for me. So promising and didn't make it past the first season. Almost Human with Karl Urban was another very promising show that was probably just too expensive to continue.
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Apr 29, 2021 14:16
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Len posted:everyone wanted that lost money Ironically Lost became successfully and was completed with less focus on the mystery than these other shows. Sleepy Hollow on Fox was a hoot. The premise is based on the Founding Fathers being all being superscientists and occult warlocks creating a new country to stop demon worshippers from establishing a foothold on a new continent. However it declined heavily, cursed by screwing over Orlando Jones. This also happened to American Gods, by the way. Fox also made a sequel series to Spielberg's Minority Report. Hilariously the premise is almost exactly like Sleepy Hollow: black woman cop enlists the help of a white civilian (one of the male tank psychics) who has inhuman knowledge after sleeping for a long time.
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Apr 29, 2021 14:52
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I really enjoyed Almost Human, the Fox near future scifi android buddy cop show starring Karl Urban, and was pretty bummed it got canceled.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:21
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The MSJ posted:Boom Blox was pretty great though, and Spielberg usually gets involved with games he gets attached to. Too bad his alien action game got cancelled. I didn't know this until replaying it last year, but Speilberg wrote the story for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. He also made a video game about making movies to encourage kids to make movies. The bonkers part was the movie in the game was a short film directed by Spielberg, starring Quentin Tarantino.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:24
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Almost Human was great and kept hinting at even weirder poo poo to explore in the future, like why the city was walled off and what was still outside.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:24
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X-Ray Pecs posted:I didn't know this until replaying it last year, but Speilberg wrote the story for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. He also made a video game about making movies to encourage kids to make movies. The bonkers part was the movie in the game was a short film directed by Spielberg, starring Quentin Tarantino. You can watch it here
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Apr 29, 2021 15:30
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Almost Human was great and kept hinting at even weirder poo poo to explore in the future, like why the city was walled off and what was still outside. We'll never know what the deal was with the giant red balls 
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Apr 29, 2021 15:31
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Best weird cancelled after one season tv series was Kings. Kings was very, very, very weird.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:39
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Kings was great. Very early awesome Sebastian Stan performance.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:55
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There's a whole thing with shows (and other serialised media) that never get around to their plot payoffs either because the author is too busy setting up even more plots and/or doesn't actually know what the payoffs are going to be. Pretty much any kind of outside pressure (like executive fuckery, or a writer's strike) makes this a thousand times worse. Ironically one of the worst examples of this in recent history has to be the Star Wars sequels, which you'd think would be the last franchise to have this kind of problem.
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Apr 29, 2021 15:56
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Still angry Awake was canceled after one season.
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Apr 29, 2021 16:54
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The MSJ posted:Boom Blox was pretty great though, and Spielberg usually gets involved with games he gets attached to. Too bad his alien action game got cancelled. Yeah I read that it really was his idea, like people expected him to do something with more story but he just figured out a good use for the Wii’s motion controls.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:00
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There's a whole thing with shows (and other serialised media) that never get around to their plot payoffs either because the author is too busy setting up even more plots and/or doesn't actually know what the payoffs are going to be. Pretty much any kind of outside pressure (like executive fuckery, or a writer's strike) makes this a thousand times worse. Don't recall if I already mentioned it in this thread but my favorite example of this was The After, a pilot by none other than Chris Carter made for Amazon. The episode was about a bunch of jerks getting stuck in a hotel basement, going outside to see that the world has gone to hell then at the very end, they find a demon who says "Alea jacta est" and runs away. And once that was done, Carter had the balls to go to the Amazon execs and say "So, the big twist is that they're actually all in Hell. This is going to be my take on The Divine Comedy, so I want to do 99 episodes to match the number of Cantos. Each ep should cost around $4 million. Oh, and I will be making up everything up as I go along because I'm Chris loving Carter...wait, why are you leaving?"
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Apr 29, 2021 17:02
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The United States posted:I feel like out of all those cancelled shows, SAAB really ended with a cliffhanger that functioned well as a finale too. Almost everyone dies, and we find out that Earth was the aggressor, so they all deserve it really. Farscape ended with the most hosed cliffhanger and it was great. The miniseries really did a good job squaring that circle and giving us a fulfilling ending. It's probably the most satisifying ending to a sci show I can remember. Anyone can think of any others?
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Apr 29, 2021 17:18
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Daybreak also ended well.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:21
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This discussion reminded me of Carnivale, which me and my brother really enjoyed watching when I found it on DVD, but then we got bummed when we found out it was cancelled and never bothered finishing the episodes. I liked the idea of Clancy Brown's Priest being driven to madness by the Devil's influence and a series of terrible events pushing him to the brink while Carny!Jesus performs miracles by draining the life from things around him.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:28
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The X-Files revival gets points for continuing the stupid pattern of ending every season on an impossible cliffhanger and not bothering to figure out a resolution until the first episode of the next season. It was very fitting that way, even if the new seasons were mostly bad. There was a show called The Pretender that ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved but got two tv movies on TNT years later, and it stupidly wasted them setting up more mysteries and cliffhangers instead of using them to resolve anything. Maybe they were meant to be pilots for a potential second series on TNT and had to do that, but it seemed hugely wasteful of a completely unexpected opportunity.
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Apr 29, 2021 17:55
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I remember with Eureka, as soon as the pilot aired, absolutely everyone guessed that the final scene of the show would be the mirror of the scene where Carter and Zoe drive past themselves going the other way. And it was the last scene. But I don't think the show even bothered to explain why exactly that scene happened - just showed it.
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Apr 29, 2021 18:19
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There's only one episode of The X Files I've never seen. Amusingly, it's the finale of the first revival season, which after ending on a cliffhanger was recapped (and retconned) by the next season's premiere, so I now don't need to watch it.
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Apr 29, 2021 18:24
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BioEnchanted posted:This discussion reminded me of Carnivale, which me and my brother really enjoyed watching when I found it on DVD, but then we got bummed when we found out it was cancelled and never bothered finishing the episodes. I liked the idea of Clancy Brown's Priest being driven to madness by the Devil's influence and a series of terrible events pushing him to the brink while Carny!Jesus performs miracles by draining the life from things around him. Finish the episodes. Carnivale had 6 seasons planned to tell the full story, but each 2-season batch was going to have a different character and setting focus and were only thematically related. The third season was going to focus on Jonesy's baseball career, iirc. The story told in the first 2 seasons is self-contained and wonderful, and is absolutely worth finishing because it feels like a complete piece.
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Apr 29, 2021 18:27
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The MSJ posted:Hahaha, what did they do?  White Wolf sure was edgy... Big Mean Jerk posted:Almost Human was great and kept hinting at even weirder poo poo to explore in the future, like why the city was walled off and what was still outside. John Larroquette being introduced as a cross between Dan Fielding and J.F. Sebastian was pretty awesome and I really wanted to know why he escaped the city.
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Apr 29, 2021 19:22
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:The X-Files revival gets points for continuing the stupid pattern of ending every season on an impossible cliffhanger and not bothering to figure out a resolution until the first episode of the next season. It was very fitting that way, even if the new seasons were mostly bad. I think the first revival season did a good job of matching the real range of what you got out of the first 7ish seasons of the show; there was a miserable mythology episode, an okay Scully episode, a fantastic Darin Morgan MOTW episode, a fun but trashy MOTW episode, a real yikes-arooni mythology-ish episode, and another miserable mythology episode.
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Apr 29, 2021 19:51
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Baron von Eevl posted:I think the first revival season did a good job of matching the real range of what you got out of the first 7ish seasons of the show; there was a miserable mythology episode, an okay Scully episode, a fantastic Darin Morgan MOTW episode, a fun but trashy MOTW episode, a real yikes-arooni mythology-ish episode, and another miserable mythology episode. What was the non-miserable mythology episode in the first revival season?
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Apr 29, 2021 19:56
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Payndz posted:There's only one episode of The X Files I've never seen. Amusingly, it's the finale of the first revival season, which after ending on a cliffhanger was recapped (and retconned) by the next season's premiere, so I now don't need to watch it. That was the last one I saw, and it really felt like Chris Carter’s outline for X-Files The Movie 3, compressed into 45 minutes. Sounds like I should be glad I didn’t come back for the next season.
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Apr 29, 2021 20:00
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:What was the non-miserable mythology episode in the first revival season? The second to last one, it was bad but not on the level of the first and last episodes. It was real yikesy though! edit it also had the Mulder shrooms sequence
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Apr 29, 2021 20:05
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Shageletic posted:Farscape ended with the most hosed cliffhanger and it was great. Berman and Braga had said they weren't sure if Enterprise was going to get a fourth season when they made the cliffhanger Captain Archer kamikazeing himself at Time Traveling Aliens that joined the Actual Nazis. And honestly having the be the ending of the series would've been better than the actual series finale.
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Apr 29, 2021 20:11
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The MSJ posted:Sleepy Hollow on Fox was a hoot. The premise is based on the Founding Fathers being all being superscientists and occult warlocks creating a new country to stop demon worshippers from establishing a foothold on a new continent. However it declined heavily, cursed by screwing over Orlando Jones. This also happened to American Gods, by the way. Sleepy Hollow was one of my favorite shows the first season, they had a crazy world lore and would just get more bonkers each episode, and plenty of awesome recurring roles (most of which were African-American actors due to 2 of the 4 leads being black), including Abbie's sister who is basically T2 Sarah Conner who fights demons. But then they stopped doing anything with Orlando Jones (why???) and dropped his whole family, boosted some terrible new supporting characters instead, alienated their very large black fan base, and then gave Nicole Beharie such terrible stories that she asked to leave the show. As most of the of the show that was left was her and Tom Mison's chemistry they had successfully murdered the show which somehow still stumbled through one more season duz posted:Berman and Braga had said they weren't sure if Enterprise was going to get a fourth season when they made the cliffhanger Captain Archer kamikazeing himself at Time Traveling Aliens that joined the Actual Nazis. And honestly having the be the ending of the series would've been better than the actual series finale. Enterprise being terrible until season 4 is one of the things one of the modern Trek series could easily fix with a six episode arc.
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Apr 29, 2021 20:29
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I don't remember much about Sleepy Hollow other than it having a promising few early episodes then falling completely off a cliff.
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Apr 29, 2021 20:56
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Lovely Joe Stalin posted:I don't remember much about Sleepy Hollow other than it having a promising few early episodes then falling completely off a cliff. My memory is that the whole first season was excellent pretty much from start to finish. It was the second season where it fell of the cliff. And not right away, like halfway through the 2nd season.
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Apr 29, 2021 20:58
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I'll back that up. Hell, I tell people to watch Sleepy Hollow as a one season miniseries because that final arc is so good.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:00
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Can we turn it around and talk about terrible shows that were bad right away and rightfully died immediately? I want to talk about Do No Harm, the medical drama from NBC's 2013 lineup that was also an update of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was about a brilliant surgeon who had an evil alternate personality that wanted to kill patients and ruin the main guy's life. It starred Steven Pasquale from Rescue Me, Phylicia Rashad from The Cosby Show, Samm Levine from Freaks and Geeks and Inglourious Basterds, and Lin-Manuel Miranda???? It was dreadful and NBC mercifully killed it after only 2 miserable episodes. The reception was so bad Samm Levine gave a radio interview before the second episode aired in which he threatened suicide.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:10
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There's a whole thing with shows (and other serialised media) that never get around to their plot payoffs either because the author is too busy setting up even more plots and/or doesn't actually know what the payoffs are going to be. Pretty much any kind of outside pressure (like executive fuckery, or a writer's strike) makes this a thousand times worse. You say that, but Netflix has lots of examples of shows that suffer from having too much creative freedom. So many of them feel sort of blah, and I think its because the creator is just allowed to do whatever they want, and nobody tells them that something isn't working. Remember, you usually only hear about the bad examples of executive meddling.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:18
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The Paul Reiser Show immediately jumps to mind. Another NBC show canceled after two episodes. I remember Reiser going on some rants at the time about how audiences didn't appreciate good humor any more which I'm sure today would have been a diatribe about safe spaces or whatever. Looking it up now, Helen Hunt also directed an episode.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:19
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Yeah, I think because of their whole model they don't really actually care whether something is good, they only care about whether it gets people to either decide not unsub for one more month or maybe get a handful of people to subscribe. Getting attention is what they want, and they do that by making things very attractive to content creators. Guaranteed creative freedom, no censors, no need to fit strictly within a 22 or 44 minute slot, guaranteed 2 seasons.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:20
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END ME SCOOB posted:I'll back that up. Hell, I tell people to watch Sleepy Hollow as a one season miniseries because that final arc is so good. Ah, the Millennium cut. Speaking of, I really wish they had ended that show on the second season finale. There's so much totality with that ending, that it's thrown away on a weaker third season that gets rid of many of the series favorites, like CCH Pounder, and while it has some good episodes in the third season despite the change in format, it's not really enough to save it.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:22
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Feels like there were a bunch of mystery box sci-fi shows for a while that managed to get audiences tired of their vagueness and twists before they even started. i think there's been at least one of these on the major networks (almost) every season since Lost premiered. very few have lasted more than one season Baron von Eevl posted:Can we turn it around and talk about terrible shows that were bad right away and rightfully died immediately?  meanwhile David Cronenberg is returning to sci-fi and i am very hyped https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1387810888317509633 FoneBone fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Apr 29, 2021 |
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Apr 29, 2021 21:22
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AccountSupervisor posted:Kings was great. Very early awesome Sebastian Stan performance. Kings had the problem of absolutely terrible advertising that didn't actually address what the premise of the show was (a retelling of the story of King David) and instead kept pushing it as an alternate history thing about "What if America had a king?" when that had nothing to do with anything since it was set in a fictional country. Basebf555 posted:My memory is that the whole first season was excellent pretty much from start to finish. It was the second season where it fell of the cliff. And not right away, like halfway through the 2nd season. Season 2 was messy but still had all the regular characters around. Season 3 was a complete garbage heap where they ditched the basic premise of the show (that the main characters are trying to stop the Biblical apocalypse) and turned it into some generic fantasy crap involving ancient gods. Season 4 was a soft reboot where they actually moved Ichabod away from Sleepy Hollow to Washington DC and introduced a whole new cast.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:39
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