Journey Planet 58 - Cancelled Too Soon

Introduction Steven H Silver I have an old friend, well, he’s my age, but we’ve been friends since we were five years old, who often asks me for recommendations of television shows to watch. Over the years, I’ve recommended shows like E/R1, The Building2, Superior Donuts3, Going to Extremes4, Doctor Doctor5, and more. He has explained that one reason he likes to get recommendations from me is that he can watch the entire series without a lot of time expenditure because anything I recommend is invariably cancelled within a season or two (only one of the shows mentioned above made it to a third season and even then it only aired 40 half hour episodes, essentially two full seasons).

Sure, I’ve watched shows with long runs, like M*A*S*H6, but I seem to have a tendency to be drawn to shows that don’t have longevity, like Mel Brooks’ short lived (and, having recently re-watched it, deservedly so) When Things Were Rotten7 or Quark8.

Last year, I posited the question on Facebook, asking people to recommend their favorite shows that were cancelled too early, in this case meaning two years or less. It proved to be a very popular thread, resulting in 125 different shows being named in more than 300 comments. I had clearly struck a nerve and was similar struck by the thought that there was a fanzine idea in that list.

When I discussed the idea with Journey Planet publishers Chris Garcia and James Bacon and my coeditor Evan Reeves, we agreed that we wanted to expand the scope beyond the shows that aired on American television and we reached out to authors and fans in Finland, Poland, China, Israel, Italy, Brazil, and Russia.

We were a bit surprised by the nearly universal response that we received. The question we were asking, for shows cancelled before their time, had no real meaning in those countries. We were told that shows were conceived in terms of limited runs, what in the U.S. would be called a miniseries, although not necessarily shown on sequential nights. Shows would run their natural season and that was it. One intrepid author, Ekpeki Donald Oghenechovwe, did agree to provide us with a glimpse into Nigerian television.

The shows discussed range from Jonny Quest, which debuted in 1964 and was cancelled the following year after a 26 episodes) to Daybreak, which debuted and was cancelled in 2019, airing a mere 10 episodes.

While none of the shows approached the record set by You’re in the Picture9, Wonderfalls only aired four of its 13 episodes before being pulled from the air.

Other shows have reputations that belie their brief appearance on television, such as Firefly, which has garnered a massive fanbase, or Battlestar Galactica, which not only had the sequel Battlestar 1980, but was eventually rebooted as the successful 2004 series that lasted five years and launched its own spin-off series (which would be eligible for an article in this issue, having lasted a single season), others have faded into obscurity, not necessarily deserved and authors like Zev Winicur explain why you should be saddened if you don’t remember Woops!

In addition to fans writing about their favorite sort lived shows, we also offer glimpses into shows provided by writers (Margaret Dunlap’s look at The Middleman and Michael Cassutt’s thoughts in StrangeLuck), show-runners (Bryce Zabel on Dark Skies) and even the guy who wrote the book on which the series was based (Robert J. Sawyer on Flashforward). Of course, just because they worked on the shows doesn’t mean they weren’t fans. In fact, they were fans of the shows before you even had a chance to watch them before they were ignominiously cancelled.

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