Some of the best TV series of all time were canceled too soon, but those overlooked classics
at least had enough episodes air to build up a fanbase that was devastated when the
shows were pulled before their time.
Imagine how it must feel to be a creator, producer, or star of a TV series that performed
so poorly that it was ripped off the air after only a single episode.
Here are some shows that share that very unfortunate distinction.
Co-Ed Fever
The biggest movie comedy of 1978 was National Lampoon's Animal House, so naturally all three
broadcast TV networks at the time looked to cash in on the craze.
CBS's attempt, Co-Ed Fever, was canceled before it even debuted in its regular time slot,
thwarting countless wacky hijinks ...
"Why don't we all go over to Dean McPhee's house and glue his wife to the ceiling?"
After the TV premiere of Rocky in 1979, CBS had some time to fill, and aired a "special
preview" of the show, which was set on the campus of a former women's college that had
just started admitting men.
While the show ranked a reasonable 19th in the Nielsen ratings for the week, it lost
so much of the Rocky audience that CBS shut it down completely.
Public Morals
In the '80s and '90s, producer Steven Bochco, the creator of critically acclaimed hit shows
such as NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, and L.A. Law, was just about the king of TV.
CBS jumped at the chance to get into the Bochco business, and committed the laugh track-laden
Public Morals to its fall 1996 schedule.
Ratings and reviews for its October debut were dismal, and the show about a vice squad
also suffered from bad timing: it premiered in an election year that included a debate
over whether TV was growing too vulgar…because of shows like Public Morals.
CBS canceled it after just one controversial airing.
Emily's Reasons Why Not
ABC reportedly spent $5 million on an ad campaign for the midseason launch of Emily's Reasons
Why Not, a 2006 sitcom about how dating is hard and weird, starring the always likable
Heather Graham.
Graham starred as Emily, a woman unlucky in love trying to figure out who not to date
and why.
Viewers must have decided there were plenty of reasons why not to give the show a chance:
it lost more than a third of the audience of its lead-in and lost a quarter of the audience
of The Bachelorette, the show that had occupied its time slot a year earlier, which led to
ABC immediately pulling the plug.
Secret Talents of the Stars
One part Circus of the Stars, one part American Idol, this reality competition show featured
celebrities known for one talent demonstrating a different talent the general public didn't
know they had.
Just over 4-point-5 million people tuned in to watch, to mention just one representative
example, country singer Clint Black try stand-up comedy ...
"I am gonna use index cards tonight."
Viewers at home were supposed to vote for their favorites each week—had CBS not canceled
the show after its first episode in April 2008.
Quarterlife
High-quality TV streaming on the internet?
It's common today, but in 2008 it was revolutionary.
Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, creators of critically acclaimed dramas thirtysomething
and My So-Called Life, debuted Quarterlife on MySpace, which was a hot social media platform
at the time.
The show was made to reflect its medium—episodes were short and resembled YouTube clips, and
it looked like it was shot on webcams or hidden cameras.
While there was no real precedent for what constituted a hit streaming series in 2008,
enough people watched that NBC decided to put it on terrestrial television.
After taking a few episodes and pasting them together to fit an hour-long programming block,
its premiere brought in just 3.1 million viewers—the worst mid-season ratings of an NBC show in
nearly two decades.
The network canceled the show and dumped the five remaining prepared episodes onto its
cable counterpart, Bravo.
South of Sunset
Eagles singer and guitarist Glenn Frey didn't fare nearly as well in his foray into dramatic
television as he'd done with smooth California rock.
Very few viewers got a peaceful easy feeling with South of Sunset, a lightly comic detective
show in which Frey starred as a former movie studio security chief who opens his own private
investigations company in Beverly Hills.
Despite CBS frequently airing ads for the show during its broadcast of the 1993 World
Series just before the premiere episode, only nine percent of viewers tuned their dials
to South of Sunset.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the show amassed "the lowest premiere ratings on record"
for a show on one of the Big Three networks to date.
CBS put the show "on hiatus" almost immediately, but South of Sunset never returned to the
schedule.
Osbournes: Reloaded
An attempted revival of MTV's The Osbournes, Osbournes: Reloaded debuted in a plum post-American
Idol time slot in 2009.
It presented metal god Ozzy Osbourne and his family at the center of a variety show featuring
pre-taped segments, sketches, audience participation bits, and musical performances.
Following a high-profile preview episode, nearly one in five Fox affiliates refused
to air further episodes of Osbournes: Reloaded due to concerns over racy material and bad
language.
Critics were brutal: the Washington Post called it "a revolting debacle" and "must-flee TV.",
Fox didn't even bother to air the rest of the episodes already in the can.
Lawless
Fox apparently didn't learn much from CBS's disastrous South of Sunset, and ordered up
another series about a private investigator starring a famous non-actor.
Lawless starred standout University of Oklahoma linebacker and Seattle Seahawks washout Brian
"The Boz" Bosworth as an ex-Special Forces tough guy named John Lawless who unravels
mysteries in Miami.
Very few people wanted to see "The Boz" off the gridiron, and Fox canceled the 1997 series
after its premiere episode.
"This just doesn't seem to be your lucky day."
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