And then...?! - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

    

While it's almost always sad to see a show one's enjoyed end, at least if it gets to go out on its own terms, where the writers and cast knew it was to be the final episode, there's a sense of completion. Where this has been done, and especially where it's been done right, I'm going to leave for another piece.
     But this is still 2020, and bitterness is in the air.
     The frustration of episodic shows that were unceremoniously canceled, sometimes on a cliff-hanging season-ender, often where the showrunners were making a Hail Mary pass in hopes of being picked up for a new season, is something I'm reasonably sure we've each faced at least once.
     I'm not going to try to make a list, but instead to just mention several of the ones that came quickly to mind as the topic came up again. By all means, please, feel free to chime in with your own unresolved losses in the Comments below.

     One of the ones that's funny to me, at least from this distance and a certain angle, was what happened with the gothic horror, soap opera Dark Shadows.
     The daytime soap had begun at the end of June 1966, and initially been a tortuously slow-burn item, getting over 50 episodes in before any actual supernatural elements arrived. It surged in popularity once they introduced the 200 year-old vampire Barnabas Collins, and came to have a very large audience that began to skew young, which today would have been a boon but back then was discounted because advertisers didn't see younger viewers as steering household spending.
     There's no need to go through the various details that led to the cancellation - there were several. What's key is that the audience only found out that Friday, April 2nd 1971 via a voice-over postscript just before the credits rolled, as heard in this clip of the final few minutes of that final episode. The voice-over starts at 1:44.

     The voice waved off the possible vampire attack as a mere animal bite, and painted a happily ever after scenario for the main characters. What went through the minds of the average audience member of the nearly 5-year series that Friday afternoon probably varied widely, and I wonder how many didn't

quite grasp that was the end of the story.
     Well, come Monday afternoon if they tuned back in what they saw instead was the first episode of a revived version of the game show Password, with the closest thing to supernatural being celebrity contestant Elizabeth "Bewitched" Montgomery... followed perhaps a little distantly by the other celebrity player, Bill Bixby, who while at the time was starring in The Courtship of Eddie's Father as the hip publisher Tom Corbett, he was still trying to shake a strong association with the often lamentable My Favorite Martian.
     Either way, the train to Collinswood was no longer in service. It was gone, and no fit of pique from the audience nor witchcraft was going to bring it back. Granted by most accounts the show had been running on fumes, this including the actors and the writers. Even series creator and show overlord Dan Curtis had reached a point where he was out of ideas and welcomed the end. I've mainly included it here

because of the sudden, unique, voice-over exit. There was no great personal sense of loss for me in this, in large part because my school schedule made me such a casual viewer. Catholic school started and finished much later than the public ones - that was the arrangement with the bus service - so during the school year, even if I were to race up the block from the bus stop I might catch the final few minutes of an episode.
     A show that I did watch week to week, and was among the many (many) I would have gladly kept watching (no matter how much of a guilty pleasure several elements made it) had they kept making it was NBC's Fantastic Journey.
     More like a quick, aborted trip, it was originally supposed to be a 13-episode mid-season replacement, but only made it for 10 episodes, premiering February 3, 1977, being formally cancelled in April, with the final episode airing like a contractual obligation on June 16th.
     An extremely '70s sci-fi show, it included aliens, androids, remnants of lost Atlantis, the Bermuda Devil's(!) Triangle, time travel, healing crystals, and an NBC focus group-approved attempt at a cross-cultural cast. (Be calm, The funky, young black man will not harm you. He's a newly-minded MD, so you know he's one of the Good Ones.)

     Yeah, it's about as bad as it looks. We didn't have great options then, and the conceptual potential at least seemed almost unlimited. Not so the budget or the patience of NBC's ratings-focused execs.
     The core concept was a small group caught up in a storm that included bizarre light effects, shipwrecked on a strange island in the Devil's Triangle (ah, the '70s...), that

turns out to be cross-time nexus. Walk in any direction, and with little to no warning you pass into a completely different era on this seemingly endless, patchwork island.
     Along the way they pick up some new fellow-travelers (including Roddy McDowell, playing an amoral scientist and what have been a  joy for him in the '70s: Not having to wear ape makeup for a role), while losing some others (who presumably made their way back to their own time), and so it's a potentially endless journey home. Nothing, though, could save us or the them

from merciless bean-counters, eyeing the ratings and fretting about how much each crappy special effect cost.
     The show did end up with an increasing array of notable guest-stars, including John Saxon, Joan Collins, Richard Jaekel, Cheryl Ladd, Lew Ayres, Gerald McRaney, and Nicholas Hammond. One episode used the interior set of the Stephens' house from Bewitched, and the final episode recycled stock UFO footage from another

abandoned in mid-story series from a decade earlier, The Invaders.
     The show was up against relative ratings juggernauts The Waltons on CBS and Welcome Back, Kotter on ABC, and so had hardly a chance back in those days when nearly all of us watched what was on when it was on, or didn't see it.
     So it was that we never found out what happened to Varian, Scott, Fred, Willoway and Liana. Toward the production of the final episodes the stench of imminent cancellation was so strong that several members of the production team were scrambling to get over on the ground floor of another not long for this (future) Earth sci-fi series, Logan's Run, which debuted over on CBS in mid-September... and last aired February 6 of the following year.

     Much like those on carousel, there was never any real chance of being renewed, though I don't recall it particularly rocking my world that that show wasn't going to have an ending.
     Jumping to the '90s, we had another sci-fi adventure that never quite reached an ending. This was the independently-produced cross-realities series Sliders, which I know I talked a little bit about in a piece last year.

     It aired for three seasons on Fox, starting March 22, 1995, before skipping over to the Sci-Fi channel (back well before it changed its spelling) for its final two seasons. All along the way, a lack of serious commitment by the host network kept everyone's personal and professional plans on the edge, and the budget was slashed at every opportunity, and network meddling helped steer the show in questionable

directions, leading to a string of notable departures and character replacements. By the last episode the only original Slider remaining on the show was Rembrandt "Crying Man" Brown (Cleavant Derricks).
     While the cast and crew knew from a variety of strong hints (basically that the execs stopped giving them memos, and didn't react even when they deliberately put things in the script that had been previously prohibited) that the show would not be renewed for  sixth season, and had set aside money from earlier episode budgets for more of a finale, but in a murky set of details it at least appears that executive producer Bill Dial made a personal decision to close with a cliffhanger as the last of the original team makes a dangerous gamble in a bid to save his original Earth timeline.
     So far, the examples I've pulled have all been of shows where either the creative juices had largely

dried up, or where it was so poorly managed that any regret over the lack of additional episodes or a finale is mostly nostalgia-driven, or an OCD impulse.
     The supernatural comedy series Reaper debuted on the CW September 25, 2007, but was cancelled near the end of its second season. It centered on Sam Oliver (played by Bret Harrison) who on his 21st birthday learns that he'd essentially been sold into servitude to Satan years earlier due to a deal his parents made to save his father's life.He has pre-emptively been pressed into service as bounty hunter, capturing and retrieving souls who've managed to escape Hell.

     It was a show I enjoyed, but it was also a show that had the big disadvantage of launching on a relatively fledgling network - the CW, which had formed the previous year - and having its first season

upended by the 2007 Writer's Guild of America strike that lasted just over three months, then having their show moved to a different night soon after new episodes resumed airing.
     I'm sure there were all the usual elements that went into the cancellation decision, ranging from ratings and budget negotiations to key actors seeing other opportunities elsewhere. As a viewer I was really only concerned with the show. Season two ended on a cliffhanger, as the lead's girlfriend offers her soul as collateral to win Sam (the show's lead) a second chance to win his freedom. (While the seasons are available to buy or rent on Amazon Prime, no one seems to be streaming it as part of their general service.)
     Newer series have been abandoned, too. When it's more sci-fi material, I can't help but get a little angry because in each case they know anything with a need for a strong effects budget is going to cost, and that it's not - especially in a short term - going to generate ratings that will in any imaginable circumstance approach the cost/ad revenue ratio of another stinking "reality" show, so why bother?
     One such series from the 2013-14 season was a Fox series starring Karl Urban: Almost Human.

     A generally thoughtful, intelligent, action police procedural set about mid-21st century, I was among the core audience that was following it from week to week, even though typical network executive

meddling scrambled the series broadcast order, presumably as they scanned for this flashy bit or that sexy one and decided which week which needed to be seen. It's said that the show had a loyal, core following, but by the final episodes, according to their ratings/tracking services, we were just under 8 million, and they felt they needed "CSI numbers" - so better than 11 million - to justify continuing.
     So... they pulled the plug. It's part of the reason I don't trust Fox when it comes to genre shows. They greenlight them seemingly expecting a ratings miracle, and in the meantime interfere with production.

    Even now in this era of streaming services, where one would think they know better, we still have shows dead-ending rather than receiving a reasonable attempt at a conclusion.
     Debuting on Netflix in early 2017, the horror comedy series The Santa Clarita Diet starred Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant. They played a married couple who were also real estate agents, Sheila and Joel Hammond, who have to try to navigate the bizarre changes Sheila undergoes after she (at least initially) inexplicably becomes undead, loses any sensation of pain and most of her inhibitions along with gaining a craving for human flesh. The family tries to come to grips with it, adapt, and deal with a cascade of problems while dealing with the ramifications of Sheila's new unlifestyle.

     After having headed two series playing alpha male, decisive, lawmen with vast capacities for violence (in both HBO's Deadwood and FX's Justified -- both highly recommended) a great deal of the

entertainment in this series was seeing him play so against type in a very non-aggressive (at least by nature) role, sometimes surrounded by alpha types - including both real estate competitors and agents of the law who are getting dangerously close to the family's secret - and essentially becomes Renfield to his wife's Dracula.
     The series had three, ten-episode seasons, and was canceled less than a month after the third season appeared. The third season ended with a
quick series of more revelations and another big change for a main character... but now, presumably, we'll never see them tie the pieces up. I'm left in that awkward situation - and so is Netflix - with an enjoyable series that one can only recommend with caveats that include "well, you don't get an ending." As streaming platforms multiply and each has to increasingly make a case for themselves based almost entirely on exclusive content, one would think it's a natural to try to make sure any technically completed projects have a satisfactory end-point.
     Any long-term tv watcher knows that the above is the tip of a huge iceberg. What shows were you a dedicated fan of only to have the plug pulled on them mid-story?
     Next week I'll aim to take a look around again at what's new or recently returned, along with what's soon to arrive. That'll be Black Friday -- whatever that means this year -- the day after Thanksgiving and so pretty much officially one foot into the end of year holiday season. And, boy, do we need that feeling, however we can manage it, this year.   - Mike