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There are a lot of TV shows. They just keep throwing these things out there to see what sticks. Sometimes it blows up and sometimes you get 4 episodes and nobody but trivia weirdos remember it. This thread is for the shows that time forgot. The stuff that some executive was sure was the next big thing...only for them to replace it with reruns after 3 weeks. First up, let's start with Holmes & Yoyo (1976). Back when The Six-Million Dollar Man was exploding, networks wanted to get in on the robot rush. At the same time, you were deep in the Police/Detective show popularity. You had a bunch of aging cowboys fresh off the cowboy show bubble and needed a vehicle for them. Keep the gun, keep the law, trade the horse for a car, and make it modern times. Why not smash both bubbles together? Well, this is what you get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeJd7j-Rhtg "The series follows Detective Holmes and his new android partner Yoyo, on their adventures and misadventures, as Holmes teaches Yoyo what it is like to be human, while trying to keep his quirky partner's true nature a secret from criminals and fellow cops." Yoyo had a bunch of abilities, depending on the episode. Super strength, speed reading. If he pressed his nose a Polaroid came out of his suit pocket. He could plug various devices into his chest and control them (I don't think plugging the power cord of the soda machine lets you control what comes out, but I'm not a scientist). Most of the humor of the show came from (well, attempted to come from) various ways Yoyo hosed poo poo up or was buggy. There was always some issue Holmes had to solve by adding more oil, or moving him away from the garage door opener or such.  The series lasted 13 episodes. They ran 11 in '76, then quietly burned off the last 2 episodes in late '77. Nobody wanted to watch Robot Detectives but police procedurals continued their popularity without androids. You can find most of the episodes on Youtube if you want to watch.  ABC was so sure that Robots + Cops was going to be a hit, that Holmes and Yoyo wasn't the only show with that premise greenlit that year, the other Future Cop (1976) starred Ernest Borgnine, but only lasted 5 episodes before ending. 
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Aug 12, 2021 02:55
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Number_6 posted:As a wee lad I remember being stoked about Supertrain, a 1979 series which turned out to be a disastrously expensive flop that almost killed NBC. It was basically Love Boat on a disco bullet train. This was latenight talk show fodder for years, but drat if the idea isn't dumb fun as hell. Look at this fellow with his disco guns ready:  madeintaipei posted:Following the late '80's-early '90's trend of titular vehicle shows: Viper, a very '90's show with a whole bunch of very '90's cars in it. What was better to kid-me than a red Dodge Viper? A red Dodge Viper that morphs into a... grey Dodge Viper! It's pretty bad. I think another failed 90s show MANTIS featured a Dodge Viper. Dodge really trying to push those cars through bad tv.
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Aug 12, 2021 21:32
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Moving into the 90s, NBC was loving Dick Wolf and his hit Law and Order. They have to get him in on this robot stuff! So he made Mann & Machine (1992) a show where Yancy Butler plays an android police officer partnered with a human detective. Well...we all know now that the loving Cop + Robot poo poo does not work no matter how hard they try (Even recently with Almost Human (2013)), so Mann & Machine was a bust...but NBC still had Dick Wolf and Yancy Butler under contract to make something and they since Miami Vice had ended a few years earlier, they hoped to get back those viewers. Dick Wolf created South Beach (1993) instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyZx43WL6ZY  Two thieves are given the choice of going to jail or working for a government agency. Since Yancy Butler was still under contract, Dick Wolf wrote this series with her in mind. They added Eagle-Eye Cherry (yes, that Eagle-Eye Cherry) as the 2nd thief and tried to find their new beach hit. They failed. They made 7 episodes, and only 6 were aired. Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo did the music! Still failed. Yancy Butler was great, but everyone else was awful. Turns out just because you have 1 hit song in the 90s, doesn't mean you can help carry a tv show. Hell, they even had John Glover play the handler (someone who will show up again in my failed tv series posts), but he was wooden and real awkward. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXHihDNPVno&t=1924s It ended up being your bog standard "Criminals do good things and learn a bit about themselves and help out the little guy while angering their secretive boss, but also getting the job done" type deal. They had a decent budget for action, but the acting just killed it. Episode 3 had Tom Verica who carries the episode and is a joy to watch, and shows that the idea for the show wasn't bad, but the execution was awful.
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Aug 13, 2021 03:54
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Goblin Craft posted:Also John Doe aired for a season alongside Firefly I think, ended on a massive cliffhanger twist and was canceled. Kind of one of those procedural-with-a-twist shows, John Doe turns up as an amnesiac who has for some reason encyclopedic knowledge of everything except his own past. This was a really fun one. It was a 90s/Early 2000s "Person with strange quirk solves weekly mysteries." "In the opening scene of the series' pilot episode, a mysterious man awakens on an island off the coast of Seattle, Washington, naked, with absolutely no memory of who he is or how he got there. However, apart from the details of his own past, "John Doe", as he comes to call himself, seems to have access to the sum total of all human knowledge: he knows how many dimples are on a golf ball, the population of Morocco, and other such obscure (and not-so-obscure) facts. He also has expert knowledge on everything from the stock market to computers. Over the course of the series John attempts to find clues about his past by using his unusual ability while also helping to solve crimes with the Seattle police department. In the process it becomes clear that an international conspiracy known as the Phoenix Organization is watching John's every move. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgb1c39jyaY It starred Dominic Purcell of Prison Break fame. It was enjoyable and had those X-Files Mytharc type episodes. Another one of those "It's set in Seattle" that was crazy popular for a while. Goblin Craft is right, it ended on a huge cliffhanger, and the show never got to explain why this man who didn't know who he was, knew every fact in the world, but the creator did an interview later and spoiled how the rest of the story plays out: Make that someone who looked like John's friend. The villain unmasked in the finale was actually just a Phoenix member with some fancy facial reconstruction. Turns out, the Phoenix believed Doe was the Messiah and its members were actually protecting Doe from a second group, which wanted him dead. The truth: Doe was injured in a boating accident. That mark on his chest? A scar left by a piece of shrapnel from the explosion. His Überbrain? A by-product of transcending his body during a near-death experience, traveling to a spiritual plane where all the universe's questions are answered
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Aug 15, 2021 19:40
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Turn-On, the infamous ABC bomb from 1969. Some networks refused to air it, at least one cut it off after 10-15 minutes and some that did air the episode were flooded with complaints. Few clips of the show exist. This is amazing. Looking into it, the lead-in was a Talky Western (not much action, mostly drama) called Here Come the Brides (1968). It also replaced a popular nightime soap opera, Peyton Place (1964) (Mia Farrow's big break show), which opened on a shot of a church, and was about small-town soap opera stuff. So you put a raunchy, sex comedy, line pushing, social commentary skit show after a family western, replacing a family soap opera, and make it the lead in of ABC's weekly movie night. I mean, read the description here: Production executive Digby Wolfe described it as a "visual, comedic, sensory assault involving animation, videotape, stop-action film, electronic distortion, computer graphics—even people." Just a loving word salad. The clips that remain are non stop cuts and just throwing things at you.
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Aug 16, 2021 05:56
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Remember the Karl Urban cop show with the robot partner? That was real good. I mentioned it a bit in my South Beach post. Another in the long line of "robot cop" failures. Almost Human (2013) I did really enjoy it. The car banter was the best part. The storylines were relatively weak and generic, but the world was cool and the acting was solid. Ugly In The Morning posted:As far as 1 season wonders go, Terriers is the best show of the 2010’s. This was fantastic and a shame it ended. Both main characters were fun as hell to watch.
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Aug 17, 2021 02:44
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I mentioned John Glover in another failed show write up, but this time, the show is really good and he shined. X-Files was huge at the time. It had recently moved to the Sunday timeslot, and had a spinoff running (Millennium (1996)) in the Friday Night timeslot, and Fox was looking for another dark, spooky, and hit tv show to put in the lead in. In comes Brimestone (1998). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKJR8BEJsaU In 1983, Ezekiel "Zeke" Stone (Peter Horton) was a New York City Police detective whose wife, Rosalyn, was raped. He tracked down and arrested the offender, Gilbert Jax, who was then cleared of the charges. Furious, Stone then murdered Jax. Two months later, Stone was killed in an unrelated incident and went to Hell for murdering Jax. Fifteen years later, 113 souls breakout from Hell. Because the Devil is largely powerless on Earth, he makes a deal with Stone: Stone will be returned to Earth to track down these 113 escapees, and if he can return all of them to Hell (before one of them kills him), he will earn a second chance at life on Earth. John Glover played the devil and was fantastic to watch. He'd gently caress with Stone as much as help him, and any scene with these two was fantastic. One of the small twists is that the longer you have been in Hell, the more it becomes part of you so some of the 113 are very powerful. It ends up being a monster/detective show of the week. Since it's been 15 years there are some fun things with Stone trying to fit into the "future." He also enjoys pissing off the Devil by taking time to eat, something the Devil tells him over and over he doesn't have to do. Every morning Stone wakes up with his badge, his fully loaded service pistol, and $36.27 - the amount of money he was carrying when he was murdered. There are various supporting characters including another detective, the hotel he lives at owner (played by Lori Petty), and a blind priest. It was enjoyable seeing him track down who he needed to, solve the mystery of the week, and try to figure out how to live a life with the Devil there all the time. Fox only aired 13 episodes before they decided the ratings were not the next X-Files and canceled it. Peter Horton played the part well, the stories and villains were interesting, the world building was basic but had some neat parts, but John Glover was the part that shined the most. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pQDRFYUCWI&t=89s They still replay them randomly on SciFi channel or other various bullshit. Give them a shot if you see it on.
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Aug 17, 2021 23:44
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