Misunderstood TV: Great (and Sort of Great) Shows that Lasted Only One Season

It's a tale as old as television time. Someone comes up with a fantastic idea for a show, it premieres to rave reviews and critical praise, it seems poised on the brink of success...and no one watches it. There's no real formula to these things. No matter how strong a show, there's no way of knowing whether it will become a runaway hit or fizzle out into obscurity. With all the terrible shows that have been on the air for ages, it's clear you just can't count on the viewing public.

Thankfully, the internet hosts more than its fair share of elitists and snobs who are more than willing to show us all the error of our television watching ways. Really, just look at anyone who comments on the Onion's AV club. These types quick to tell us all what heathens we are for holding mainstream television viewing habits. To these TV snobs, popularity amongst the masses is the kiss of death. Everyone knows the only way to determine quality is if everyone hates something. Aside from a select chosen few who have the unique wisdom and intelligence to understand it, of course.

Luckily for you, I'm only sort of like that. I wouldn't consider myself an elitist. I just think I'm smarter than everyone else. What? I'm kidding. Only most people.

Joking aside (and for the record, I am joking), it's not about snobbery. It's just pure luck, plain and simple. Some shows make it, and others fly under the radar and face cancellation. Thanks to the almighty power of DVD, though, not to mention all sorts of online clips, there's hope for you yet on some of these:

Freaks and Geeks



This is one of those classic examples, the show everyone brings up in praise of underrated media everywhere. While nowadays some people are sick of the ever-growing Judd Apatow empire and its monopoly on the comedy market, back then he was a fledgling producer pushing a little show about high school misfits. He assembled a team of talented young comic actors and gave them a great script, but audiences just weren't biting. Apatow was loyal to his cast picks, though, and featured them all heavily in future projects. It's safe to say that even if you never saw an episode of Freaks and Geeks a day in your life, you'd recognize most of the ensemble today.

The show was set in the 1980s in small-town Michigan and focused on the daily lives of two groups of social outcasts: the "freaks" and the "geeks". It's a winding story of adolescent self-discovery and tribulations, and the show treated its characters with respect. Despite its disparaging title, the show's characters were more than the stereotypical nerds. They were multifaceted enough that we could relate to them in a distinctly human way. It's no wonder the show's become a cult classic: with the extensively detailed and commentated DVD release, it's every elitist nerd's dream.

Unfortunately, audiences responded similarly tepidly to Apatow's sophomore sitcom effort, college comedy Undeclared which lasted a single season from 2001-2002. You've got to admire his stick-to-it-ness though. He certainly got his due.



The Ben Stiller Show



Creating a sketch comedy show requires a delicate balance. Over the years, the marketplace has been flooded with them, some funny and some falling flat. It's always something of a crapshoot. This Ben Stiller's foray into sketch comedy came early in his career, preceding his ascendancy into movie stardom. And, surprise, surprise, Judd Apatow wrote for this one too. Was there any TV pot in which he had no hand? Any unpopular ones, I mean.

This show was 90s incarnate. With supporting stars like the then-unknown Janeane Garafalo and Andy Dick, this show oozed Gen X-iness from every frame. It began with a short run on MTV and was later picked up by FOX, impressed with the debut. The show mainly parodied popular media, but it was just a tad too witty and wicked for its own good. It overstepped that boundary of middle America by giving us multi-layered creative jokes that don't test well with wide audiences. TV snobs, yes, but regular people, no. That equation, however, usually equals good DVD sales over a decade later from die-hard fans, so it wasn't a total loss.


The Critic



Okay, okay, you got me. There were technically two seasons of The Critic, though each had a very limited number of episodes and showed on two different networks. In The Critic, Jon Lovitz stars as Jay Sherman, "New York's third-most popular early-morning cable TV-film critic". The show parodied popular movies and Jay offered his critiques, set against the backdrop of plots based on Jay's everyday life. In an ironic twist of fat, the Jay character has an aversion to popular taste and is generally contemptuous of well-liked media. No wonder elitists like this show so much. Jay is them. He is the epitome of the snobby intellectual New Yorker on which all intellectual poseurs base their TV show preferences. A near-perfect fit.

A full season of the show was produced, but ABC canceled The Critic after thirteen episodes. As other episodes were already moving through production, FOX jumped on the bandwagon and picked up the rest of the season, only to drop it once the remaining ten had aired. The now-defunct UPN was in talks to air some more episodes, but the deal fell through. Webisodes premiered in 2000, but it just wasn't the same. You'd think a show with Simpsons crossovers would be able to garner some interest, but it just never took off.


My So-Called Life



No, your eyes do not deceive you. I posted the entire first episode above, in hopes that you'll watch it and be pulled into the angsty goodness that was the underrated My So-Called Life. This is one of those other quintessential examples of a show that died too young. I may never recover from the shock of learning I'd never find out the answer to the season finale's cliffhanger. It plagues me still. Brian or Jordan? If you have any insights, do share. I'm still considering the possibilities.

On the other hand, this show was pretty heavy-handed with the issue-tackling. It squeezed so much into its 19 hour-long episodes, it's almost hard to imagine a continuation. In one episode, Angela muses, "When someone dies young, it's like they stay that way forever, like a vampire." Such is the case of My So-Called Life. In its existing canon, it's nearly perfect. It never took that ratings-seeking risk that could have tainted its goodness. It gets to stay that way forever, as it should. Like a vampire, only with less bloodsucking and sparkling in the sunshine.



The Dana Carvey Show



Like I said, sketch comedy shows are shaky ground, creatively speaking. Not everything that succeeds as a smaller part of a larger show will fare well when released into the wild unshielded by the popularity of its parent show. Dana Carvey was very popular on Saturday Night Live, and had a loyal following ABC hoped to to bring on board to his self-titled debut. The show was a little risque, especially considering it aired right after the family comedy Home Improvement. The sponsors were none too pleased with the iffy content, which combined with the plummeting ratings spelled imminent early cancellation.

We did get one good thing out of it: The Ambiguously Gay Duo, which later re-premiered on SNL. Thanks, Stephen Colbert and Robert Smigel. You guys did us proud.


Of course, there were many other shows that didn't get their due, but that's all we've got time for today, folks. Now they really didn't get their due, considering I wouldn't even pay tribute to them here. So, I'm sorry, Eerie, Indiana, Twin Peaks, and all you others. You've been doubly screwed. Luckily, there will always be a vocal contingency of TV elitists to keep singing your praises, canceled TV shows. There's hope for you yet. You know, on DVD--the TV snob's medium of choice.

90s TV Spinoffs

With all the movie remakes currently in the works, it's not a stretch to wonder if we've just plain run out of ideas. The Karate Kid and The Never-Ending Story are just a few decades young and already they're being treated like golden oldies in need of revamping for the new millennium. To dismiss this generation of hangers-on as a new fleeting phenomenon would be dishonest, though. Our coming-of-age era entertainment was equally if not more guilty of the same abhorrent offenses. We didn't call them rip-offs back then, though. We called them spin-offs.

A spin-off is an admittedly lazy creative process of launching a new program. Relying on the popularity of an already successful show, spin-off creators simply take existing characters and separate them from their natural habitat in an established program. The moment audiences respond remotely positively to a secondary character, producers often jumped on the spin-off bandwagon. The theory was, you liked seeing them on this show for five minutes, why not thirty? It seemed a logical leap, and certainly easier than coming up with an original idea.

In reality, some spin-offs work better than others. There's a fragile balance to keep: true enough to the original characters to ride the wave of the established show's popularity, but original enough not to appear a complete facsimile of the first show. Most of the successful spinoffs relied on repackaging standby semi-major characters, though some managed to coast on showcasing minor or one-time guests. The best of them went on to outstrip the fame of the show from which they were spawned. The worst faded into obscurity as poorly thought-out network schemes to milk a show's popularity for all it was worth.

There were many, many spin-offs in the 90s, but let's take a look at a few of the most-watched:

Cheers-->Frasier



Here's an incidence of a seriously popular spin-off. It ran eleven seasons, the same as its predecessor, Cheers. The show followed regular Cheers patron Dr. Frasier Crane as he hosts a pop psychology call-in radio show. His brother is also a psychiatrist, and a very neurotic one at that. Frasier takes in his aging father and his full-time character, and hilarious, toned-down subdued antics ensue. The show was witty and didn't talk down to its audience, which was always a refreshing notion for a sitcom. Though it wavered a bit in its final years, it remains one of the most successful spin-offs to date.



Perfect Strangers-->Family Matters



Perfect Strangers: two wacky mismatched cousin roommates with differing nationalities. Family Matters: charming middle-class black family. Tough to see the connection, right? Winslow matriarch Hariette Winslow started as a character on Perfect Stranger and was deemed worthy of further exploration. Of course, then they brought in Urkel and everything changed plot focus-wise, but it was a decent staple of the popular TGIF lineup. Not too shabby for a spin-off.



Buffy the Vampire Slayer-->Angel



If you think vampires are the hot new thing, you're probably suffering from acute memory loss. I'd get that checked out if I were you. In the 90s, it was all about Buffy. Her vampires didn't need skin sparkling gimmicks, just her pure ass-kicking finesse. The show spun off Angel in 1999, featuring Buffy regular David Boreanaz as its title character. Angel was a vampire cursed with the restoration of his human soul, thus racking him with guilt and internal struggle. It was a little hokey, but if you're into that kind of thing, it was a pretty for Buffy seconds.




Golden Girls-->Empty Nest-->Nurses + Golden Girls-->The Golden Palace

Talk about a strangled route on this one. The Golden Girls actually split into two separate spin-off tracks, one focusing on a once-featured neighbor couple and the other rebranding the original as a Bea Arthur-less project. None of them assumed the level of popular of Golden Girls, but they did reasonably well for spin-offs.

On track one, we had Empty Nest, a project that had a bumpy road to production. Originally intended to spin from the GG episode Empty Nests about a neighbor couple whose children had all flown the coop. Unluckily for producers, the characters bombed, so they brought in entirely new characters with a different premise altogether: a widower whose post-college aged daughters come back to live with them. They still called it Empty Nest, which of course makes no sense. It was a full nest. The hen was gone, but all the chicks were there. Sounds full to me. Guess they just wanted to spare themselves the embarrassment of admitting they had to can the original concept altogether.



Remarkably, Empty Nest also managed to spurn a spin-off, Nurses. The Nurses in question worked at the same hospital as Dr. Harry Weston of Empty Nest. The show was okay, but the first-season ratings were in a bit of a slump. In response, show writers played all sorts of cheap tricks including like adding new characters and completely changing existing ones. Regardless, the show lasted 3 seasons, so they must have been doing something right.



Meanwhile, on track two we had the McLanahan/White/Getty vehicle, The Golden Palace, in which Don Cheadle gives his second best performance as a hotel manager. Throw in Cheech Marin, and you've got yourself a zany bunch of hotel proprietors. That was the idea, at least. The theme song was a cheesy musakified version of The Golden Girls' "Thank You For Being a Friend". It only lasted one season, partially because of its terrible time slot and partially because it wasn't all that great.





Animaniacs-->Pinky and the Brain



After seeing them on Animaniacs, how could you not give these little lab mice their own half hour to shine? If nothing else, I'm sold on theme song alone. It's so straightforward. One is a genius, the other's insane. So incredibly simple, yet so humorous. Well played, Warner Bros.



Beavis and Butthead-->Daria

This is the first half of the first episode...intrigued? They're all up there. On YouTube. Just don't tell the authorities. They've been uploaded backwards. Ingenius, no? Now go watch them before they're gone.

Here's a case in which the spin-off was entirely different from the series from which it originated. Daria had none of Beavis and Butthead's bonehead humor. It was smart, sarcastic, quick-witted, and hilarious. It was as sharp as B&B was dumb. Our protagonist Daria was something of a social outcast, giving voice to misfits and brains everywhere. The show so perfectly captured the stereotypes of high school, though it treated its subjects with kindness even while mocking them. It had heart, but just when you thought they were going in for the kill on an aww moment, they triggered back with a biting retort.



Party of Five-->Time of Your Life



Another one-seasoner, Time of Your Life was meant to launch Jennifer Love Hewitt's character from Party of Five character into her own series as she tackled New York City. It didn't even make it all the way through its first season before cancellation, if that gives you any hints to the critical reception. It was really pretty terrible.



90210-->Melrose Place-->Models, INC



Melrose Place was intended as an expansion of the 90210 franchise to reach out to the twenty-something demographic. The Jake Hanson character originally appeared on 90210 as a bad-boy biker hired to do some construction for Kelly's family. The two engage in a brief tryst, which was conveniently resolved in time to transfer Jake to the MP apartment complex setting. The show went on to establish its own following and featured much darker storylines than its after-school-special-leaning predecessor.




I'm going to open myself to mockery and admit that as a child, I was a shameless Models, Inc. fan. Really, it was awful, but I was probably among the only disappointed people upon news of the cancellation following the first season. I mean, they ended it with To Be Continued... I heard they eventually aired the continuation on E!, but obviously I missed it. I may never know these answers.


The Tracey Ullman Show-->The Simpsons



You have to give some credit to the longest running sitcom of all time, especially considering it's a cartoon. The Simpsons premiered as animated shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show, featuring a dysfunctional family and their humorous episodic experiences. It may not still be up to its original quick-witted standards, but they do still have their original cast. That's almost as good.


Good Morning Miss Bliss-->Saved By the Bell-->Saved by the Bell: The College Years-->Saved by the Bell: The New Class

How many times can you repackage a franchise? That's the question Saved By the Bell producers must have asked themselves, obviously putting faith in the answer "a whole lot". The original Disney Series centering around junior high students and their teacher played by Hayley Mills was cute enough, but nothing cult fanship worthy. Producers tweaked the shows into the California-based Saved by the Bell and launched a franchise that begot awesome product tie ins like my previously mentioned Zackberry flavored shampoo. The show wasn't really one for continuity, but it made its shaky way to graduation and we assumed they'd all call it a day.

Not so. Featuring a distinctly huskier Zack Morris and some god-awful 90s flannel getups, Saved by the Bell: The College Years, ran one lone season from 1994-1995. It was an effort, sure, but not a particularly valiant one.



Oh, and there was an even worse but far longer-running spin-off, Saved by the Bell: The New Class, retaining only Screech and Mr Belding from the original. And really, I doubt those two were swatting away dozens of projects. They needed the work.

A few of the originals drop by The New Class

Spin-offs can obviously be very hit or miss. Some characters have the potential to carry their own series, while others are better left fading into the background. One thing's for sure, though: if you can grind a franchise into the ground, you might as well give it your best shot. You might get a Frasier, you might get a Time of Your Life, but the odds seem pretty well-stacked in your favor.

The Golden Girls

It might be hard to fathom that a show detailing the daily lives of the elderly could be racy and envelope pushing. When we think of older people, many of us are apt to imagine hearty, wholesome, grandparent-like characters. We don't, generally speaking, think of promiscuous 50-something Southern belles and wisecracking Sicilian grannies. It's just not in the repertoire.

When it premiered in the mid-80s, The Golden Girls was like of the Sex and the City of senior citizenry. Granted, it was preachier than SATC, particularly in later seasons, but they always padded those movie-of-the-week themed episodes with enough good laughs to keep us watching. It was edgy and controversial, portraying older women in a light not usually cast on them by popular media. They were the ultimate hip grannies. They were up on all the issues, the popular crazes, fashion--well, 80s and early 90s fashion. You have to give them a pass on that one, it was a dark time for the fashion industry, a desolate landscape littered with shoulder pads and oversized sweaters.

While this would be pretty tame for SATC, this type of thing was all but unheard of in the 80s and early 90s

This is probably as good a point as any to offer a caveat to my readers: I am something of a Golden Girls fanatic. I mean, I wrote an angry letter to Lifetime after they sold the syndicated reruns to WE and Oxygen, asking why they couldn't keep my favorite show on a channel I get on the TV in my bedroom? That's borderline cat-lady behavior, I know, but I just need to get my fix. I've seen every episode dozens of times, I could probably recite the jokes right along with Dorothy, Blanche, Sophia, and Rose. There's a sort of timeless quality about the humor that can draw you in again and again, even if it may not be enough to impel you to write an angry letter to the proprietors of a popular women's TV network. That's reserved for the loyalest of us Goldies.


That's not to say the show wasn't without its pitfalls. Golden Girls, throughout its 7-year run, was chock-full of cheap tricks. I've never seen a program with more clip shows. It's almost as if at the laziest point of a season, the writers would spin the giant wheel o' arbitrary themes, dig up archive footage, and throw together a half-assed episode with all of seven minutes of new material. There were even two-part clip shows, which really was pushing it. How long can Blanche deliberate over selling her house to a Japanese businessman before they run out of wistful household memories to reminisce over? Apparently an entire hour, which in TV time is equivalent to something like a month.

Really, the light premises of these clip shows are borderline absurd

And like any good comic writers, Golden Girls' staff never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Continuity was at best an afterthought and at worst completely abandoned. The principals all had pretty shaky backstories subject to change for the sake of a particularly potent joke. Their children, ex-husbands, and current beaus were generally interchangeable. The major components of their life stories usually remained intact, but these secondary characters were often portrayed by different actors in different episodes.

Worse yet was the recycling of the same actors to play two completely different roles, as was the case with Harold Gould, who played both an early-season date to Rose named Arnie and her later long-term boyfriend Miles. We can only assume there are only so many old people with a sense of humor out there, we had to keep cycling the same ones through to get a laugh.

The characters were simultaneously multifaceted and cartoony. Each with their specific stereotyped character traits and everyone played the butt of a joke as a one-note player, but each got a fair amount of additional development that still allowed us to feel empathy for them. Yes, we had the dumb blonde, the smart sarcastic one, the maneater, and the wise old firecracker, yet we often got to see other sides of each character. For the most part, though, they were at their funniest when they played it straight in their preassigned roles. Our major players are:

Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur), a divorced substitute teacher with a biting wit and penchant for sarcastic humor. Growing up, she was my humor icon. She's quick-witted, sharp, and has impeccable timing. Even with all this stacked in her favor, she doesn't quite have it all together. She got pregnant out of wedlock after her prom and married the guy, Stan, who her mother Sophia appropriately dubbed a yutz. He cheated on her, they got divorced, and she works as a substitute teacher. It's not exactly the stuff childhood dreams are made of. You have to admit though, she has the best one liners:



Rose Nylund (Betty White), a proud St. Olaf native and recent widow. She's the epitome of the dumb blonde, with charming naivete and gullibility. Rose is the queen of long-winded, non-sensical stories brimming with Nordic charm, or as it's known to all you non-Minnesotans out there, craziness. She's good-hearted and relentlessly upbeat, which is almost enough to make you forgive her for the god-awful stories. Almost.



Blanche Devereux (Rue McClanahan), an Atlanta transplant who, ahem, enjoys the company of men. Or, as Sophia might say, she's a total slut. Blanche is the original Samantha. She's a sex-crazed older woman generally uninterested in being tied down. Well, not in that way. In one episode, I heard she's got handcuffs. By the way, if you've never read McLanahan's My First Five Husbands and the One That Got Away, I highly recommend it. You can borrow my copy.



Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty), Dorothy's elderly mother who previously suffered a stroke and managed to escape her "imprisonment" in the Shady Pines retirement home to come and live with her daughter and friends. Sophia is full of old-world charm, a Sicilian with all sorts of cockamamie stories that begin with, "Picture it: Sicily." Her Italian language skills are pretty suspect for someone who allegedly grew up in the old country, but it all boils down the tried-and-true Hollywood formula of treating real-life Jews and Italians as interchangeable casting-wise.

The show initially blamed her lack of filter to her stroke, but it was obviously just an excuse to let an 80-year old get away with absolute ridiculousness. Granted, Getty was actually younger than Arthur, who played her daughter on the show, but they made her up fairly convincingly. In the later seasons, at least.



The show had scandalousness and hilarious wit, so its no surprise two of its writers went on to create Desperate Housewives (Marc Cherry) and Arrested Development (Mitchell Hurwitz). More than that, though, it wasn't afraid to tackle issues. Golden Girls took on HIV, the importance of safe sex, sexual harassment, drug abuse, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, and when they ran out of high-caliber issues, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

It all sounds pretty heavy for a comedy, and it was. The show hit that unique balance of humorous irreverence and substantive issue exploration that made it a pioneering comedy for its time. I can almost guarantee that if you saw it as a child, most of the jokes went totally over your head. Lucky for you, it remains on constant rerun. Or, you could come over and watch the episodes my DVR is currently 74% full of. Take your pick.