TV shows can be canceled for lots of normal reasons.
Maybe people aren't watching the TV show or maybe the lead actor is a total sleeze.
However, these TV shows were canceled for the most bizarre reasons.
Before the iconic 1988 movie The Naked Gun, there was its somewhat less-iconic but still
brilliant television ancestor, Police Squad!
Like Naked Gun and its two follow-up films, the show was a parody of 1960s police dramas
starring the late Leslie Nielsen as the hilariously deadpan detective Frank Drebin.
The humor was fast-paced and often visual, which is a pretty great formula for an audience
sitting in darkened movie theater watching a big screen.
It didn't seem to work so well for the more distractible television audiences of the early
'80s, however.
"there had been a recent waves of murders at the city zoo.
I was bringing in a suspect when I got a call about the kidnapping of Terry Burden."
When asked about the reason behind the decision to cancel Police Squad!, network executive
Tony Thomopoulos famously said the show was canceled because, quote, “the viewer had
to watch it in order to appreciate it."
A TV show you had to watch?
Weird, right?
What he meant, of course, was that the jokes moved so quickly that a casual viewer might
miss something if they were having conversations, eating dinner, or doing anything else other
than paying attention to the rapid-fire gags.
That didn't didn't stop critics from relentlessly dunking on his reasoning, though TV Guide
even went so far as to call his statement, quote, "the most stupid reason a network ever
gave for ending a series."
Considering some other reasons you're about to hear, that's saying something.
Before Star Wars claimed the title of the greatest merchandising vehicle of all time,
there was Batman, the unconventionally popular television series starring Adam West as the
campy caped crusader and Burt Ward as the Boy Wonder.
The 1966 series appealed to a huge audience kids loved the colorful superheroics of the
Dynamic Duo, and adults caught on to the show's self-aware deadpan comedy.
It was so popular that it had two episodes airing each week, with a cliffhanger leading
from Wednesday night to the same Bat-Time on Thursday, and racked up massive ratings
and a list of Hollywood stars who wanted the dishonor of playing a Special Guest Villain
on a genuine pop culture phenomenon.
Batman and Robin spent three years fighting crime on television and even starred in a
feature-length theatrical film, but they couldn't save themselves from the most diabolical death
trap of all: the network.
ABC decided to kill the show halfway through its third season, citing high production costs
and falling ratings.
Sounds normal enough, right?
The story doesn't end there, though.
In a twist right out of Batman's death-defying playbook, NBC was willing to pick the show
up for a fourth season.
Unfortunately, nobody told the guys with the bulldozers to wait a few weeks before destroying
the elaborate and expensive sets.
NBC balked at the idea of spending thousands of dollars on rebuilding the Batcave for a
show with slipping ratings, and POW! that was the end of the dynamic duo.
If only they'd asked millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne if he could spare a few bucks
for the fight against crime, we might have gotten a fourth season.
Fans of Joss Whedon's space western series Firefly are still mourning the early demise
of their favorite show in 2002, and some are even still holding out for some kind of reprieve
or revival nearly two decades later.
"Might've been the losing side.
Still not convinced it was the wrong one."
That might seem more than a little obsessive, but it's also understandable given the circumstances.
The demise of Firefly was a combination of different unfortunate factors, but from a
distance, it almost looked as if network executives were maniacally conspiring to ensure its failure.
They marketed it as "wacky genre comedy" (which it definitely was not), they put it in a Friday
night time slot that was infamous for a lack of viewers, and they inexplicably chose to
air the episodes out of order, with the pilot, where all the major characters and their world
were introduced, appearing last.
While the show's small core group of fans stuck with the show through every considerable
misstep, the rest of Firefly's viewers were baffled by the inconsistencies and disappointed
that the wacky comedy they tuned in to see was actually a western reimagined as a sci-fi
drama that dealt with some pretty dark themes.
Sure, it had lots of jokes, but the stories about desperate criminals and space cannibals
were definitely much darker than viewers had been led to believe.
The poor ratings were enough to convince Fox the show was a failure, and it declined to
resurrect Firefly even after desperate fans organized a postcard-writing campaign to plead
for a stay of execution.
Eventually, however, the completed first (and only) season of the show expanded its audience
on DVD and streaming, and Whedon got the chance to tell more of the story in the 2005 feature
film Serenity, which was largely possible because of all that fan enthusiasm.
Millennials buy smartphones, Baby Boomers buy transistor radios.
And no one sells transistor radios anymore.
Or at least, that was the logic behind the cancellation of Harry's Law, a smart crime
drama starring Kathy Bates as a former patent lawyer-turned criminal defense attorney.
According to the LA Times, Harry's Law was NBC's second most-watched drama of the 2011
to 2012 television season, ranking just behind Smash and just above Law & Order: SVU.
How could 8.8 million viewers be wrong?
Because they were 8.8 million older viewers.
Yes, that's right Harry's Law ended because advertisers didn't think they could sell enough
stuff to Grandma.
"Next thing I know I'm broke.
And starving!
I had no money, not even for food."
Despite winning an Emmy, the show didn't perform well with viewers aged 18-49, a lucrative
demographic for advertisers, which left NBC network executives with a lot of difficulty
in selling the show's advertising time.
You'd think they could just shore things up with commercials for medical alert systems,
Werther's Originals, and those Jitterbug phones with the giant buttons and get at least a
little cash out of those 8.8 million, but no.
Maybe it's for the best, though.
Those companies tend to pay for air time with crisp five dollar bills folded up into birthday
cards.
Given his track record in children's television, you'd think any network targeting kids would
let Paul Dini do pretty much whatever he wanted.
After all, he'd worked on kid-friendly hits like Tiny Toon Adventures before becoming
one of the showrunners behind Batman: The Animated Series, where he co-created Harley
Quinn and gave Warner Brothers one of its most popular and profitable new characters
in decades.
Unfortunately, Cartoon Network didn't want to take the chance, canceling his popular
series Tower Prep after only 13 episodes.
The reason?
In a 2013 interview, Dini accused Cartoon Network of ending the live-action teen drama
because it had too many girls, both on screen and, probably as a result, in the audience.
Don't misunderstand it's not that the network wanted Dini to leave out female characters
altogether, it just wanted him to make sure that female characters were, as he put it,
quote:
"one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as the boys."
So when Dini ignored this helpful advice and kept on writing some compelling backstories
for his female characters, the show got the axe, frustrating fans even further by ending
on a cliffhanger.
So why exactly did Cartoon Network want to exclude half of Tower Prep's potential audience?
Allegedly they didn't think girls would buy enough merchandise to make it worth having
prominent female characters, who apparently need to be justified in order to exist.
Because if there's one thing we know about teenage girls, it's that they never spend
enough money to make someone ridiculously wealthy on genre stories that include women,
right?
"Are there by chance and vampires in this book?
Dark, brooding vampires, who know they shouldn't fall in love with a mortal, but do anyways?"
Tower Prep wasn't the only victim of Cartoon Network's terrible decision-making.
Just look at Adventure Time, one of Cartoon Network's most unexpected hits.
It was the weirdly compelling story about a boy, a dog, and a bunch of people made out
of candy or magic fire, or lemons, or cinnamon buns, or… space... lumps?
Either way, they had, well, adventures in a fantastic world of magic and mystery that
was bright, fun, and relentlessly charming, right up until it turned serious and hit its
viewers right in the emotions.
"This means someday you'll die.
You know that, right?"
"I guess that will be my last adventure."
As a result, the show didn't just appeal to the kids it was originally aimed at, it also
got the attention of a huge audience of adult viewers.
Great, right?
Well, no.
It turns out kind of presented a problem for Cartoon Network.
They couldn't move it into their grown-ups-only Adult Swim time slot for fear of losing their
huge kid audience, but they couldn't monetize all of those adult viewers if they left it
in the earlier time slot.
To be fair, Adventure TIme ran for a full ten seasons and is unquestionably one of the
most iconic cartoons of a generation, but in the end, it was canceled because it was
just too popular with the wrong audience.
You know when you were a kid and you were supposed to write a story for school, but
you got a little too weird and couldn't think up a decent ending so you just wrote, "and
then she woke up... and it was all a dream?"
Dallas, an incredibly popular prime-time soap opera, did that to an entire season in 1989,
swerving viewers with a twist so profoundly ridiculous that it could have easily come
from the mind of a bored 10-year-old who didn't feel like finishing their homework.
So why exactly did the show's writers decide that a grade-school level plot device was
the right way to wrap up their ninth season?
Because back in Season 8, star Patrick Duffy decided he was too big for Dallas.
The writers sent him off with a bang, or rather a flip, killing his character after tumbling
over a speeding car.
A year later, he changed his mind.
According to Duffy himself, he was asked to come back, but feel free to take that with
a grain of salt.
Either way, the producers came up with a spectacularly clever way to bring him back and just erased
the entire 9th season by explaining it away as someone's dream, having Duffy's character
show up in a shower like nothing had happened.
The show limped ahead for a couple more seasons, but the damage had been done.
Viewers just couldn't stomach the stupidity of the plot twist and the ratings never recovered.
In early 2000, Fox decided to ride the reality show craze to success with some wildly over-the-top
ideas, including the hugely popular special Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, about…
well, you can probably guess from the title.
There were immediately plans for a sequel, but by February, Fox announced it was killing
its plans to produce a follow-up because of some bad press about star Rick Rockwell, namely
allegations that he was a) a jerk, b) a liar, and c) probably not actually a multi-millionaire.
Among Rockwell's transgressions was an accusation by a past girlfriend of physical abuse, which
led to a restraining order.
The real estate developer, failed stand-up comedian, and self-proclaimed motivational
speaker also seemed to have lied about at least one part of his resumée.
Several venues he claimed to have a history with revealed that he'd never actually performed
for them.
"My girlfriend left left me.
Well, I’m a comedian.
It's mandatory."
Perhaps most damning of all, it eventually came out that he wasn't really living the
gold-plated lifestyle most of us associate with multi-millionaires.
His 1,200-square-foot ranch home in California was pretty far from Beverly Hills, and the
backyard was decorated with an old toilet.
In case you're curious, the unlucky bride who "won" on the show, Darva Conger, had the
marriage annulled just seven weeks after exchanging vows, and you can't really blame her.
Even if he actually had the piles of money that he claimed, which he didn't, the real
treasure here was about a million red flags.
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