TV shows that should have been good but weren't

Gilligan's Island.

If they had made it darker -- maybe with the boat being boarded by Somolian pirates and the Howells trying to smuggle a boaload of 10-year-olds from Ethipia to work in a sweatshop, it could have been funnier.

 

"Law & Order" was pretty good.

But it ended up being cancelled.

 

They should have given Bonanza more time to find its audience.

 

It was hip. It was smart. So people had to say they loved it (or preferred it over 30 Rock) so they would appear, you know, hip and smart.

 

Cooper's dream was in the third episode.

Twin Peaks trafficked in the "bizarre" almost from Day One.

It should have been better over the course of its run, absolutely. But "bizarre" is what Lynch does.

Absolutely. I guess my expectations should have been low after Voyager was so consistently terrible.

But Enterprise was a major blown opportunity. When they shoehorned the Borg into a plotline, that was the end.

 

That may be a part of it. I can't say I ever loved it. There were some moments that it lived up to its potential, with a lot of mediocrity in between.

Sports Night does not belong on a list of shows that weren't as good as they should have been. It was damn good. Just didn't last.

 

Love both story arcs. I want to see first drafts of scripts by the end of this week - get busy.

 

I qualified my statement by saying it took a turn for the "very bizarre," which is to say it became bizarre without a point. At least with Cooper's dream there was a point as he tried to solve Laura's murder. It didn't help that the soap opera-ish storyline that was what really hooked everybody in the beginning gradually took a back seat to the weird shit.

 

yes, that was acknowledged before. "sports night" belongs in the same category as, say, "freaks & geeks," shows that should have been more successful but weren't.

 

Concur about "Studio 60." Great cast. One of the best pilots I've ever seen. Every episode after that disappointed me terribly. I was happy when it was cancelled.

"Flashforward" was the first show name that popped into my head when I saw the thread title.

 

Murder One. Was supposed to be the next big Steven Bochco splash after NYPD Blue. Daniel Benzali had the making of great screen presence, and Patricia Clarkson as his wife was a treat. Plus had the gal from In Plain Sight as a young lawyer. But Benzali ended up having no charisma, and the writing was too ponderous to create much excitement about the one case they focused on the first season. Didn't stick around to see if Anthony LaPaglia made the show any better when he replaced Benzali.

 

In a weird way, it's a good thing that Sports Night didn't last, because it means that Aaron Sorkin didn't have time to fuck it up any further than he already had in season two (Pixley? Dana's Dating Plan? Paula Marshall the "choreo-animator"? All lousy ideas) and he moved on to create The West Wing, which when it hit on all cylinders was damn great TV. Studio 60 never lived up to its potential because Sorkin developed a God complex, believing his own hype that because he was Aaron Sorkin, he could write around major problems - in Studio 60's case, Amanda Peet's pregnancy and the fact that Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson had negative chemistry - and people would watch anyway.