Final Space
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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Television
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Set in the 2050s as mankind has learned to predict and use naturally occurring wormholes for interstellar travel, they are drawn into a war with a new alien species that destroyed a colony. The show focuses on a squadron of fighter pilots in space. One of them is a cloned, enhanced human used to fight in an earth bound war against synthetics and is seen as subhuman by many.
The show had a very good plot, a serialized story but also self contained episodes, interesting moral dilemmas. But it was horribly marketed by Fox so it died after a season or two. The final episode was a huge cliffhanger too.
I would say Firefly, but I think that was just Fox sucking at marketing.
I had never even heard of it until Serenity was about to come out.
Not just shit marketing. The Fox executive in charge of it hated Sci Fi. They kept moving around it a time slot and quickly put it into the Friday night death slot. Where it lived longer than most shows before being cancelled. They also aired the episodes out of order and with the Pilot episode last, after it was cancelled.
So it started with absolutely no character introduction and with absolutely everything stacked against it, and it still almost made it by the sheer will of the fanbase.
Don't forget that Joss Whedon was a serial sexual harrasser who got on the wrong side of a female exec.
Marketing and the insurmountable task of deciding upon which order to air episodes. One would suspect that the original chronological order would be ideal, due to stories typically making the most sense that way, but I am to understand that airing content is quite complicated.
Fox was very trigger happy at the time. They canceled a lot of stuff that only ran for one season. It amazes me how quickly a network will dump a promising show. It costs so much to get one up and on the air. You could move the show to another time slot. Or retool it. Or resell it to another network.
Better Off Ted
I don't know if it's just the same few people that bring up Better Off Ted around here, but I love that it comes up as often as it does in these sorts of threads
I did not like it because it was a drama, but apparently a lot of people did like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and it probably would have fared better if it was not "competing" with 30 Rock.
Terminator: the Sarah Connor chronicles. The strike killed it. It was really getting juicy.
Also heroes. There will forever only be one season of heroes.
That first season really was amazing.
The Wire would blow up in the binge era
The Ben Stiller Show.
Space Rangers. Really cool show from the early 90s, good cast, lots of fun, cancelled after 6 episodes. The US just really wasn't doing much SF back in the day, and especially things that weren't franchises.
I'll also plug Quark, a 70s science fiction comedy about the adventures of the crew of an interstellar garbage scow. It had it's flaws and parts are dated, but they lampooned a bunch of major SF entities of the time.
Rome
Rome ran for ~~three~~ two seasons and was successful, but extremely expensive to produce. It was a joint production from BBC and HBO. And then there was a huge fire at that burned a bunch of the sets down between seasons. They were lucky to get that last season put together.
I do wonder if modern tech would have made it more easily producible. I mean, we did get Game of Thrones which was hugely expensive and expansive.
Not to the intention of the question but in Australia, Duckman as well as Ren & Stimpy were aired under the guise of kids shows. I remember watching Duckman after school. 4pm or so.
I wish Lost hadn't come out back then. I wish I could watch it brand new today, at this age I would have enjoyed it more.
You could try Chronologically Lost, which re-edited the show into chronological order.
Brisco County
According to Vince Gilligan: The lone gunman
Witchblade from 2001
Easily more than a decade ahead of it's time in many ways. It's themes, style, and narrative would all be premier TV stuff today.
From what I know of it, it seems as if the "Kings" tv show from 2009 might qualify?