Why is it that so many shows I like only last one season?!??

May 30, 2007

Thursday Thirteen 95::31: Death by Executive Decision

I live under a curse. That curse is that shows I like...don't last more than one season. I've been in enough situations where I get passionately involved in efforts to save a show (which then gets canned) that I've just given up.

1. Brimstone (Fox Broadcasting). A cop's wife is raped. In revenge, he kills the rapists...but catches a bullet himself. When he gets to Hell (for murdering the rapists), the devil makes him a deal: he gets to go back to Earth, and in return his job is to catch 110 horrific damned souls, all of whom have escaped from Hell. Peter Gabriel did the music, and John Glover played the devil. The show had its rampantly implausible moments; but it also had excellent lines. And John Glover as the devil?!?? He looked like he was having a Hell of a time. (I later bought the audiobook of Christopher Buckley's "Thank You for Smoking" because it was read by John Glover. The book is satirical enough...but having it read by "the devil" was just an extra touch of the delightfully absurd.) This series is still not available on DVD.
2. Space: Above and Beyond (Fox Broadcasting). War, from the grunts' point of view. Many fans speculated that the show drew some of its inspiration from Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (and we were o so much more bitter when that movie was released!!). The show was bounced around on the schedule, was criticized as being "Space: 90210" by some detractors for its good-looking cast, perhaps under-marketed, and sh!tcanned after a single season. (On a cliffhanger. Of course.)
3. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (Fox Broadcasting). Takes the western genre, casts Bruce Campbell as the hero, and turns all genre conventions on their collective ear. It never went far enough to be out-and-out camp, though it did tread that line fairly closely.
4. Harsh Realm (Fox Broadcasting). {Why, yes, there does seem to be a pattern. O*#^%!(% Fox Broadcasting...} Military testing meets new technology...but the baddies got there first. A soldier volunteers to test out the Navy's new virtual-reality training world, only to discover (once he's in the game) that a renegade soldier has "taken control" of the game-world by setting off a nuclear bomb in that world's version of New York. This series has been released on DVD, but I haven't had a chance to see it since its original airing, over a decade ago.
5. Firefly (Fox Broadcasting...again). Your "typical" science fiction show, this ain't. Instead of following the squeakyclean adventures of the morally unambiguous heroic types, Firefly told the story of a ship's crew living on the edge. They took work where it came, they didn't precisely love the government, and while they weren't looking to topple the 'dominant' society, they didn't think very highly of how the government and the corporations were manipulating people. Fox didn't quite know how to market it, didn't leave it in one time spot, and really kind of treated it as the redheaded stepchild. Yet the fervor of its fanbase and the creator's unwillingness to let things lie meant that this cancelled TV series got itself a big-screen movie (Serenity). If you haven't ever given this one a look, go to your local library and check out the series. It's all there, on DVD (one of the publicity campaigns involved buying the series and donating the copies to public libraries).
6. Jericho (CBS). Jericho has, indeed, not been picked up for the Fall 2007 season (in other words, cancelled.) The show managed to deal fairly well with how a small American population might deal with a slowly disintegrating society in the aftermath of a disaster. In some interviews, the show's creators said that the events in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - most especially the seeming failure of the government to competently help restore critical infrastructure. So many of us simply take for granted that, if something bad happens, it will get fixed up. Jericho showed, quite nicely, that no, it won't all get fixed up...and that it's up to each of us to take responsibility for the survival of ourselves, our families, and our neighbors. The show stuck to post-apocalyptic restoration/restructuring of society, rather than the direct fallout (literal and figurative) of a nuclear disaster. Two neighboring towns were just beginning a civil war in the show's final episode. While someone from CBS has said that the network might consider a "followup" movie in a year or two...I've seen those, and how unfulfilling a job they do. The Farscape fans got "The Peacekeeper Wars", which seemed to be a quick wrapup/dismissal of many of the series' years-long plotlines, and a quick soap-opera fix for the 'shippers. Network "followups" rarely have much follow-through. While I'd like to know what happened to the citizens of Jericho, New Bern, Blackjack, and the rest of the country, my stomach gets queasy whenever I try to imagine what kind of "followup" CBS might deign to give us.

Okay, that's half. I'm going to take my medication, relax for a bit, have dinner, and then finish. (And - hey - I have an excuse this week. As opposed to those weeks where I'm only halfway done when Susan comes to make her first comment...)

I'm back. And that only took - what - four days? Moving onward:

7. Legend (UPN). A womanizing, hard-drinking, gambling writer of dime novels is cajoled into impersonating his heroic literary creation. Run during UPN's first season as a network, it was a victim of the mass purges following a major management clear-out. (And now, that network is dead. And thus is symmetry maintained.)

Other Participants

• Do you have issues? with things she loves about Savannah, GA, US
• Journey of Cross and Quill
• Domestic Geek with favorite albums
• Di's Book Blog with things her family does that make her crazy
• Writing Aspirations with funny one-liners
• Whiskey Talking with utter randomness
• The hidden side of a leaf with the answers to last week's Calvin and Hobbes trivia quiz
• This Eclectic Life with things she's thinking about...
• Wylie's Words with a Google-meme
• Jennifer's Family with indulgences we think of as requirements
• Colloquium with overused corporate-meeting-speak
• CrAzY Working Mom with seminars for women
• And as the world turns with reasons she hasn't been blogging much lately
• Taking the scenic route to joy with favorite web sites

Keywords: | Thursday | television | memes | Fox Broadcasting |
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