TV Shows that didn't hang around long enough (aka Brilliant but Cancelled)

Kolchak - Created by Richard Matheson, the relatively unknown author who wrote dozens of classic shows and movies you probably know, and David Chase who wrote The Rockford Files and the Sopranos. Influenced the X-Files.

Heist - Kind of like an episodic Ocean's 11, lots of fun to watch, cancelled halfway through the series, and is the main reason (along with Vanished) I won't watch any new episodic shows on NBC.

Probe - Sherlock Holmes / MacGuyver style genius solves mysteries for the government. Quasi-hard-science-fiction created by William Link (Columbo) and Isaac Asmiov.

Rubicon - 70's-style paranoid espionage thriller, which I'm a sucker for, on AMC for only one season and now unavailable anywhere. Includes, from what I've heard, one of the most accurate portrayals of a secure/compartmentalized information facility on film.

 

I agree the series was underwhelming (about five of the episodes were pretty good not great mind you which I feel that the first TV movie was). I’d still,love to,have commentary tracks on the series. Darren McGavin was an uncredited producer on the show and worked night and day to rewrite scripts to improve the quality. If it hadn’t been cancelled, I don’t doubt McGavin (who did not get along with one of the executive producers who supervised the scripts) would have either left at some point or would have reduced his involvement as the subpar writing was frustrating to him as was the lousy time slot ABC gave the show and his hard work was unappreciated.

 

Actually Kolchak was created by Jeff Rice. Matheson’s script for the first movie was based on Rice’s then unpublished novel. Rice began as a reporter. Mathewson had nothing to do with the series"

 

Loved the show and my friend got all of the unaired episodes from the producers. I think there were 18 shows total.

 

Loved Open All Night.

 

It was his own fault. The two movies were produced by the brilliant Dan Curtis and McGavin cut him out of the series, as well as Richard Matheson, who I believe wrote the two movies. He went cheap and got what he paid for.

 

Darren McGavin told Dan Curtis to go take a hike?

Downward Dog

 

Intelligence is excellent. The show's creator, Chris Haddock, was also the man behind Da Vinci's Inquest, a show about a crusading Vancouver coroner, arguably one of the greatest Canadian television series ever on air. Ian Tracey, who played the protagonist Jimmy on Intelligence, was also one of the main players on Da Vinci's Inquest.

Rumour is Canadian government pressure was a contributing factor behind Intelligence getting the axe by the CBC- apparently the Canadian government wasn't too keen on how the series tended to make the Canadian and American intelligence agencies look bad at times.

 

John from Cincinnati

 

Search. Great music, good dialog. Far fetched idea at the time, now relevant.
Suave detectives trying to locate lost items that typically lead to murder when being investigated. They wear rings of jewelry that allows them to communicate with a data center HQ that is loaded with computers and can give him information into his ear.

 

Thank you for explaining. what little memory I have of it was how boring the show was after those great tv movies.

 

The Riches.

 

Season 3 was a real drop in quality IMO. Still, they could have turned the slide around and given us a strong final season.

 

Paper Chase.

 

I also thought the Dark Shadows revival in 1991 was pretty good with Jean Simmons, Ben Cross and Joanna Going. Oh, and Barbara Steele!

 

I'd say it had a chance. It was cancelled after one season on CBS, but Showtime came to the rescue and ran for three more years. The series was able to depict Hart go through all four of his years at Harvard, before it was through.

 

Alien Nation was pretty decent with real potential, and certainly had a good cast, great chemistry between the two leads, and Kenneth Johnson as showrunner (which he handled ably for The Incredible Hulk, as well as writing/directing the terrific original V mini-series)... FOX gave it the chop after only one season, only to later admit to Johnson himself that it had been a mistake to do so, and thus let Johnson bring it back in a few television movies in the mid-1990's as recompense.

There was also the pretty brilliant Stephen J. Cannell show Profit... a show ahead of it's time by all accounts and which didn't even make it to a whole season before being given the axe... had it been produced a decade later, it would have been huge.

Hooray for Hollywood indeed!!!

Oh, and the 1999 British vampire series Ultraviolet, axed after only one season... by far one of the best (and most intelligent) genre offerings that Blighty has produced in relatively recent years.

 

Pig Sty

 

I agree. And I'd add Deadwood to your list.

 

EZ Streets. Great moody show that got great reviews, but CBS couldn't seem to keep it in the same time slot for more than one week at a time, and then came a writers strike and...all gone...way too soon.

Rubicon (only one season).

 

Max Headroom.

 

I don't know, Butchie, instead.

A very strange show, but I did enjoy it. I didn't want to enjoy it. I was harbouring a grudge, as I partially blamed it for the cancellation of Deadwood.

 

Completing the David Milch trifecta started with Deadwood and John From Cincinnati, the show that might've become his best had it not been yanked; Luck!

 

A couple people already mentioned it, but Men of a Certain Age was one of my favorites when it was on. It never got the recognition it deserved and was canceled way too soon.

 

...and, was the author and creative force behind What Dreams May Come, a novel that was eventually (and to Matheson's way of thinking, far too long getting into Development Stage) turned into a gorgeous, optimistic movie with a fresh way at looking at the Afterlife...which The Author appears convinced, has basis in reality.

See what Robin Williams and the ever-desirable Annabella Sciorra do in this aggressivly-painterly tableax. Don't fear, it is not as soap-opera-ly as it first appears.

Then, grab the original novel. Then...dream on it.