The Cancelled TV Show game

[Starjammer05]

When a TV show I'm watching gets cancelled on a cliffhanger or with unresolved plot threads, I imagine that the reason they didn't tell the story is because everything worked out in the worst way possible.. Death, gloom, despair, romantic tragedy... all options are on the table. This also works for cancelled comic lines or movie franchises.

 

So let's hear yours. How did things go terribly wrong for the TV shows that ended too soon?

[DougGraves]

Dark Matter - they lost

[BjorJlen]

   Mork & Mindy... Such a sad ending...😢 And rest in peace to Robin Williams...

[KelvinKole]

Happy Days. The Shark ate Fonzie.

[BjorJlen]

   No he didn't!!! He ate Tuskedero (wouldn't you?)! 🤪

 

Peace...

[ZorkNemesis]

Titan Maximun, a mid 2000s parody of Voltron made by Seth Green in a stop motion style much like Robot Chicken.  The series effectively ended after the bad guy succeeded in his evil plot, but Seth decided not to continue the series since Robot Chicken was way more successful.

[RebekaElbert]

The best platform to watch a show before it gets deleted is Hulu, in my opinion. Hulu is a well-known premium streaming service in the US that provides live and on-demand television and movies, with and without advertisements. Especially if you invest in this platform's stock, you get special benefits. If you want to know more, you should read here https://timthomas.co/hulu-stock/. Hulu has attracted investors because of its 10.7 million American members in 2019 and 2020. So it's clear that it brings cool profit.

Edited April 10, 2022 by RebekaElbert

[InvaderStych]

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

X-Files: they discover they're both aliens who were abducted and brainwashed by the government.

 

While Mulder falls into a deep paranoiac depression, unable to believe what the Truth turned out to be, the show ends with a montage set to Joan Jett's Light Of Day, as Scully smashes her way into the Oval Office, throws the President out through a window onto the lawn, and declares herself Empress Of Earth, uniting all nations against enemies both alien and domestic...

 

...wait, that's the happy ending.

[Techwright]

6 hours ago, InvaderStych said:

Just when it was getting good, too.

 

 

 

There's an old 1980s show, Otherworld...only lasted 6 episodes or so.  Probably the highlight was Mark Lenard (original Sarek on Star Trek) playing a villainous military commander one episode.   The premise was that a family got "off the rails" on a tour of Eqypt in their Earth and stumbled upon a chamber hiding a portal to a parallel universe.  Entrance to the chamber triggered the portal.  Arriving, they found a parallel Earth ruled by a fascist-like government, about 75 to 100 years more advanced than their Earth. They also heard rumors of ancient markers showing a path that men from another world used find another portal to return to their homeworld, richer and with knowledge that they used to conquer and rule.  The family realizes this must be how a certain ruling dynasties came to be in their own world, and that the path is probably their way home, too.  They set out to discover the path then follow it crossing zones (the government isolated people to zones, requiring special passes to travel between them) and realizing they'll have to learn an advanced technology and different cultural concepts in order to blend in and survive.

 

Pretty cool concept, just never given the chance to build an audience.  In light of cancellation, it's pretty easy to assume the family was eventually captured or destroyed.

 

(I do hope someone will reboot the concept someday.)

[Cancrusher]

Quote

There's an old 1980s show, Otherworld...only lasted 6 episodes or so.

 

I think I remember watching that, as a kid.  If it's the one I'm thinking of, the episode that really stuck in my brain is the one where the family goes into a supermarket and the shelves are just stocked with canned goods with plain black and white generic labels that said things like "Vegetables" and "Meat".

 

A member of the family (the father?  Son?) asks a nearby clerk who is stocking the shelves, "Hey- what kind of meat is that?"  The clerk gives him a sort of annoyed/perplexed look and replies, "What do you mean what "kind" of meat?  It's MEAT."  Then returns to stocking the shelves.  😂

[InvaderStych]

5 hours ago, Techwright said:

Just when it was getting good, too.

 

Yup.  Such a solid cliffhanger at the end and then ..... nothing. 😞 One of those shows I would like to re-watch, but knowing that it gets cut down in its prime sort of sours that desire.  Strathairn just delivers, every time.  Hmm... Maybe it's time to re-watch Good Night, and Good Luck.

 

[WanderingAries]

On 3/31/2021 at 1:31 PM, Starjammer05 said:

When a TV show I'm watching gets cancelled on a cliffhanger or with unresolved plot threads

 

Then it's probably because it was a good show that I got interested in (and they didn't already make a few episodes/seasons in advanced). So on that note: My Bad!

 

Hence why I normally watch things after they've had a chance now a days.

[Oubliette_Red]

Despite Netflix being the NCsoft of series cancellations I got hooked on 'Messiah'. Sadly, due to the pandemic and mostly international filming it got the axe at the end of the Season 1.

 

[Flintlock Burnfur]

 

Appearing on CBC Television, it lasted 14 episodes (hey, so did Firefly).  Not the traditional western, as it contained fantasy elements to it, making it more weird west.

[Kyksie]

Remember the sitcom "ALF"? It ended with a cliffhanger where ALF was captured by G-men intending to dissect him. He was supposed to have been rescued next season... but the series was cancelled.

[TerroirNoir2]

On 4/8/2022 at 11:16 PM, Techwright said:

There's an old 1980s show, Otherworld...only lasted 6 episodes or so. 

OMG. I remember that!  As a kid I didn't understand cancelllations, so the show I was watching just...never came back.  Lots or references to the pyramid and the eye on the dollar bill I recall.

[TheOtherTed]

"The Bob Newhart Show," although this is kind of cheating in that we know what happened.  Bob divorced his wife, changed his name, took four years to find himself, got re-married, and opened an inn in Vermont.

 

Spoiler

...except it was all a dream!  Holy M. Night Shyalaman, Batman!

 

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

There was a spate of Canadian supernatural series for a while from around 2005-2015, winding up with borderline-soft-porn-but-fun Lost Girl.

 

Blood Ties (based on Tanya Huff's books) was... not great, but decent performances and deserved a better shake of things. At the end of S2 when it was randomly cancelled, Henry the vampire was looking for a change of scene, so probably moved to N'Awlins and wound up feeding off drunk tourists and constantly explaining he wasn't Lestat. Vicki and Coreen are now teaching parapsychology at McGill, and Celluci is a male model for Marshalls, specialising in evening dress and flannels (same thing, really).

 

Side note: the Dresden Files series only lasted the one run, despite a decent cast, a couple of very good original stories (the Hand of Glory one is great), Nic Cage producing and no budget. I would have liked to see them at least do a half-series arc of Dead Beat (zombie dinosaur!) or at least introduce Mouse. I've kinda gone off the books - feels like they should have closed down the series a couple of volumes ago - but would like to see someone else give this a try. 

 

13 hours ago, Kyksie said:

Remember the sitcom "ALF"? It ended with a cliffhanger where ALF was captured by G-men intending to dissect him. He was supposed to have been rescued next season... but the series was cancelled.

That wasn't the FBI. That was the CIA...

...Cat Imperial Army. Revenge is a dish best served kibbled.

Edited December 5, 2022 by ThaOGDreamWeaver

[Techwright]

11 hours ago, TerroirNoir2 said:

OMG. I remember that!  As a kid I didn't understand cancelllations, so the show I was watching just...never came back.  Lots or references to the pyramid and the eye on the dollar bill I recall.

Exactly.  The chamber that teleported the family was a lost room in a pharaoh's tomb as I recall, and markers on the path to the return portal in the other world were Egyptian obelisks.  The hero family hypothesized that the Pharaohs of their Earth rose to power because of the advanced information they gleaned from the alternate Earth, and that the journey was undertaken by many pharaohs as a rite of passage, to secure their power (hence the need for the markers).  While I don't remember references to Masons or Illuminati (It's been 35 years) per se, I could easily see this as a sci-fi origin story for secret powerful societies with Egyptian imagery.

 

[TerroirNoir2]

Ok, I don't remember all that!  I just remember the name, and a bit of the opening credits and there was one guy chasing them all the time.  And another OMG for me!  Having looked it up, that was Jonathan Banks!  Wow.

 

[Techwright]

21 hours ago, TerroirNoir2 said:

Ok, I don't remember all that!  I just remember the name, and a bit of the opening credits and there was one guy chasing them all the time.  And another OMG for me!  Having looked it up, that was Jonathan Banks!  Wow.

 

That I didn't remember (I do remember the pursuer).  Wow indeed.  I'm kind of surprised I don't remember because Banks was in Wiseguy only 2 years later, a show I followed closely.