Some of TV’s best shows ever died young and left handsome corpses.
They make up our list of all-time top flops — shows that were canceled too soon but buried with full creative honors.
Better that than to live in infamy, in the scruffy company of two-time Nielsen ratings champ “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
Television’s all-time favorite failure is none other than “Star Trek,” which broke free from the grave and mother-shipped a franchise.
True, “Star Trek” wasn’t axed after a month, or even a season. But it was hard-pressed to last from 1966 into the 1968-69 season, leaving behind those eternal 79 episodes.
To the NBC brass, “Star Trek” was a fanciful clunker with a small but rabid fan base. If it had had the stuff of a true hit, it would have knocked CBS’ “Gomer Pyle” out of the box. It didn’t, and it died, only to fulfill its phenomenal Lazarus destiny in the world of syndicated reruns.
Most of us can recall an attachment to some prematurely canceled series. “My So-Called Life” maybe. “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.” Or last season’s “Nothing Sacred.”
Here is one critic’s list of 14 other shows that were canceled in their youth — usually the first season — but deserved longer runs.
– “The Ernie Kovacs Show,” CBS, 1952-53. Kovacs could always get noticed, but he never had a national hit. And yet he was the inventive comedian who broke from the radio-with-pictures mold and used the techniques of television itself — including video tricks and blackouts — to get laughs. Among the regular features were the ape-suited Nairobi Trio, the lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, singer (and Kovacs’ wife) Edie Adams and all manner of people emerging from a single bathtub.
– “East Side, West Side,” CBS, 1963-64. Starring George C. Scott as New York social worker Neil Brock, it lasted one gritty and ratings-impaired season. It was a period of high idealism and grand social shifts in American life, but TV viewers apparently weren’t ready to see urban social problems, including race relations, dramatized in a weekly series.
– “The Paper Chase,” CBS, 1978-79. Based on the novel and 1973 movie, the series starred James Stephens as a first-year student at a prestigious Eastern law school and John Houseman as the legendary law professor who was especially adept at terrorizing first-year students. The drama was a favorite of CBS chairman William Paley. And still it was canceled for anemic ratings. But like “Star Trek,” it found a new lease elsewhere. Showtime cable picked up the series for what would become 36 new episodes. It was the first such network-to-cable transfer.
– “The Associates,” ABC, 1979-80. Way too slick for the ABC of 1979. “Laverne & Shirley” and “Happy Days,” sure, but this was a smart, attractively produced comedy about lawyers. The main characters were three youthful associates at a Wall Street legal firm headed by the ever-so-slightly senile Emerson Marshall (Wilfrid Hyde-White). One of the associates, Tucker Kerwin, was played by a relatively unknown Canadian comic, Martin Short. The show was mainly a victim of scheduling. It was slotted after “Mork & Mindy” on Sunday nights, when ABC foolishly decided that Robin Williams could finish off Archie Bunker.
– “United States,” NBC, 1980. First telecast, March 11. Final telecast, April 29. That’s grim. But this comedy from Larry Gelbart was a ground-breaker anyway. Starring Beau Bridges and Helen Shaver, it downplayed jokes and tried to mix comedy and drama in the course of examining the tribulations of a modern marriage. Viewers apparently found it grim and preachy. And, in truth, it doesn’t stand up well to time. But for 1980, it was daring adult television.
– “Bosom Buddies,” ABC, 1980-1982. It hung around for a season and a half, but it was touch-and-go all the way. The idea was that two desperate male roommates had to masquerade as women to live in a New York residential hotel for women. “Bosom Buddies” relied too heavily on cheap laughs and short towels for the boys’ new gal pals. But the stars had talent and chemistry. One was Peter Scolari, pre-“Newhart.” The other was Tom Hanks, pre-everything.
– “Bay City Blues,” NBC, 1983. That’s October 1983 and November 1983. Co-created by Steven Bochco, it was a one-hour drama about life with a minor-league baseball team, the Bay City (Calif.) Bluebirds. Guess what; there’s never been a hit TV series about baseball. And this show had an amazing distinction; every single quarter hour it was on the air, its ratings declined from the previous quarter hour. That’s failure, and yet “Bay City Blues” was a good, textured show. The cast included Michael Nouri, Pat Corley, Bernie Casey, Dennis Franz, Michele Greene, Ken Olin, Peter Jurasik, Sheree North and, as the wife of the bed-wetting star pitcher, Sharon Stone.
– “The `Slap’ Maxwell Story,” ABC, 1987-88. It was somewhere in the middle of Dabney Coleman’s string of TV flops, after the better-remembered “Buffalo Bill.” The show was also a dramedy, a drama-comedy hybrid that’s never quite sprouted in Nielsen soil. Coleman adroitly balanced the laughs and pathos as an acerbic sports columnist for a little newspaper in New Mexico. Splendidly written and acted, the show failed to survive for a full season. Among the other cast members were Megan Gallagher as Slap’s girlfriend, Susan Anspach as his ex-wife and Bill Cobbs as a bar proprietor.
– “A Year in the Life,” NBC, 1987-88. NBC’s programming chief, the late Brandon Tartikoff, swore that this cancellation really hurt. It should have hurt. Spawned by a 1986 miniseries, the intelligent and realistic drama series was about a Seattle widower and businessman (Richard Kiley) and his four grown children. Viewers seemed to mistake it for educational television. So producers Joshua Brand and John Falsey, fresh from “St. Elsewhere,” were forced to pack and move on to their next big project, “Northern Exposure.”
– “Twin Peaks,” ABC, 1990-91. It’s an anomaly among these vaunted failures. Everything else was killed off. “Twin Peaks” amounted to a suicide. The David Lynch-Mark Frost series premiered to critical raves, a ready-made reputation for hipness and decent ratings. Then, over the next year, the producers ran it into the ground. The show bogged down in confusion, tangents and surrealism when it should have advanced the continuing story line of Laura Palmer’s murder. But when it was good, “Twin Peaks” could elicit a giggle, a shudder and a “huh?” almost simultaneously. Certainly coffee and cherry pie will never be the same again. Such a squandered opportunity.
– “Middle Ages,” CBS, 1992. Would Baby Boomers watch a TV series that reminded them they were getting older? Absolutely not; “Middle Ages” lasted less than a month. And the show had so much to say, most of it revolving around the humdrum life of a 43-year-old traveling salesman (Peter Riegert) in the throes of a midlife crisis. Sexual dysfunction, insecurities, career stall, corporate downsizing — it was all here. Nice cast too. Besides Riegert, there were William Russ, Michael O’Keefe, James Gammon, Amy Brenneman, Kyle Secor and Maria Pitillo.
– “Profit,” Fox, 1996. Adrian Pasdar was Jack Profit, the company’s junior vice president for acquisitions. He was also a psychopath who’d been raised in a cardboard moving box, where he could watch TV through a peephole. This sardonic series simply teemed with nasty metaphors for our times. It was probably on the wrong network. Or maybe Rupert Murdoch saw something of himself here and got spooked. Too bad.
– “EZ Streets,” CBS, 1996-97. Producer Paul Haggis created his own pea-soup world of public and private corruption in the decaying heart of a Rust Belt city. So OK, it wasn’t exactly designed to be a huge hit. But the drama, which starred Ken Olin, certainly deserved better than it got. Joe Pantoliano was wonderful as a mob boss on the make. In one pilot scene, he made small talk while he and a dim-witted underling (Mike Starr) rummaged through severed hands in a freezer, looking for just the right fingerprint to attach to a murder weapon.
