All My Cancelled Shows

[shannon_a]

Well, the 2010-2011 season of shows is nearly over, and I've seen a massacre for the dramas that Kimberly and I watch together. I think of all the mainstream dramas we were watching, only Glee survived. (There are a few others like Doctor Who from the Beeb and summer shows like Madmen and maybe The Killing on cable networks.)

Here's what we lost, in decreasing order of quality.

Stargate Universe. Sadly, one of the best science-fiction shows ever, cut down in its prime. I'd be hard set to say whether the new BSG or Stargate Universe was a better show, but I surely liked Universe better, because BSG was a much bleaker show, while Universe occasionally flirted with a sense of wonder. The characters were what really made the show brilliant, especially as they evolved and changed over time. The arc was good too. The series finale was at least an open-ended cliffhanger. We can all imagine what happened as the Destiny hurtled through space with its crew largely asleep.

Caprica. In some ways, Caprica was slightly too unsteady to be a truly great show. It was obvious too often that the show was flying by the seat of its pants, and though the producers got away with that in BSG, it didn't fly quite as well in Caprica. Nonetheless, the transhuman ideas that the show was playing with have been seen very rarely on broadcast TV, and I was intrigued to see where it was going. The producers kind of showed us the show's future with a several year flashfastforward, which at least gave us a bit of closure even if things were never closed (and that's a lot better than we ever got from Babylon 5's Crusade, similarly a younger sibling of a more popular SF show, but one whose plot is a big gaping hole in the overall story of the universe to this day).

The Chicago Code. My only non-genre show on the list. I watched it because of the rave reviews for the pilot, and though the rest of the show never equalled that pilot, it still had great characters that were a lot of fun to watch. The show was overall more episodic than I would have liked, with crime-of-the-week plots (which that original TV reviewer was sure wouldn't be part of the show), but we did get good arc by the end of the show, and everything was tied up very neatly. I actually think they might have ruined things if they did another season, either by bringing back the same villain or retreading the same ground with a new opponent.

The Event. And here we get to the first of the shows that I'd stopped watching before their end. The Event's storyline was really on the edge for me. Nice arc, but lots of annoying characters, and too many people acting way too stupid. In fact it was the stupidity that finally made me turn off the show. But, I might have stuck around if it wasn't looking like the show was going to be cancelled anyway; I could see that it was going to be another Caprica/Flashforward/Dollhouse/Stargate Universe that didn't get to finish its story. So I didn't see any point continuing. I've still got the last 10 episodes sitting on my DVR. If someone can tell me that they get better and/or the show had a good-enough closure, I might watch them. (The last thing I saw was the aliens assaulting the Alaskan prison to free their compatriots; I stopped halfway through the 2-hour return of the show.)

V. And finally I get to the one show that I totally say "good riddance" too. Great premise, some good actors, and an awful mockery of a show. Stupid people doing stupid things in stupid plots that made me more stupid by watching them. Bleh.

Combined with the loss of Dollhouse, Flashforward, and Lost in '10 and Battlestar Galactica in '09 my broadcast shows have really faded away.

Tell me what I should be looking for in '11-'12 that's either good genre or great drama.

Comments

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

You think that they got away with flying by the seat of their pants in BSG? I'd say that's an extreme minority opinion among people I know, and certainly one I don't share myself.

[shannon_a]

I certainly rarely heard complaints about their plotting style before the finale.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I didn't watch any of it until after the finale had already aired, but my impression is that up till then people were trusting them to have had a plan in mind and be leading up to a satisfyin gending; and then when the finale did air, it became clear that this trust had been badly misplaced.

[shannon_a]

I think that was mainly an excuse to cover the fact that science-fiction fans started frothing at the mouth because religion had been introduced into their show. (Though it had actually been there all along.)

But, yeah, that assessment of the general public's mood over time is accurate.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

They weren't frothing at the mouth because religion was introduced, they were frothing at the mouth because the writers used the religious elements as a way to get out of having to have the plot make sense. When part of a mystery is, "who did this, and how?" then making the answer be "God did it, with a miracle of divine omnipotence" is not very satisfying because an omnipotent god can do literally anything. There's a good reason why deus ex machina has been out of favor for two thousand years. It becomes like playing tennis with the net down.

Then there's the question of why, and I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the BSG God makes the Silver Age Superman look like Albert Schweitzer. Why did he want tens of thousands of people to suffer and die on New Caprica? Why did he want the remainder to go to nuked-out Old Earth to suffer a grievous blow to their morale? Given that he did want them to do that, why send a messenger with nothing more than a vague homing sense as opposed to, say, jump coordinates engraved in a diamond plate attached to her flight suit?