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CHRIS CARTER MONTH begins! The creator of THE X-FILES and MILLENNIUM also produced a lot of failed TV shows, and we're saluting those disappointments, starting with HARSH REALM, a sci-fi epic about a soldier tossed into a virtual reality simulation to assassinate a rogue player. It came out just a few months after THE MATRIX, so audiences were clearly interested in realms as harsh (or harsher)...

There's no better way to celebrate television's biggest failures than with a MASSIVE AWARDS SHOW!!!  This week on CANCELED TOO SOON, William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold pay tribute to all the best, worst and weirdest TV shows they watched in the podcast's epic third year, from the catchiest theme songs to strangest premises, to the shows that definitely were CANCELED TOO SOON... and th...

The year was 1985, and the balls had just gone mad! MADBALLS were a successful series of toys that gave gruesome faces to spherical objects, but although they practically flew of the shelves, they didn't have their own cartoon series. But it wasn't for lack of trying! MADBALLS had not one but TWO pilot episodes, as wildly different as they could possibly be while still starring gross anthr...

Back in the 1970s, the world was a heck of a lot more bionic. That's why shows like THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN and BIONIC WOMAN ruled the airwaves. In 2007, the producer of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and the co-writer of ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL teamed up to reboot BIONIC WOMAN with a new cast and a grim 'n' gritty attitude! The BIONIC WOMAN was derailed by a writer's strike, so maybe, just m...

A sci-fi murder mystery series from Isaac Asimov?! Why doesn't anybody ever talk about PROBE?  Probably because this series, starring Parker Stevenson from THE HARDY BOYS and BAYWATCH, only lasted eight short episodes before getting the ax. But until then it was a fast-pacing and quirky TV show about killer A.I. elevators, super-intelligent apes and sci-fi writers who get all their best ideas...

When she wasn't bewitching sitcom audiences on BEWITCHED, Elizabeth Montgomery was taking over the blockbuster BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID franchise! In the failed pilot for MRS. SUNDANCE, Montgomery plays Etta Place, the outlaw who outlived Butch and Sundance and wound up in her own exciting adventures! It's got a great star and it's based on a hit movie. How could MRS. SUNDANC...

The smash hit western BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID probably could have been the basis of a pretty good TV show, but that's not what we got with BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KIDS! It's a Hanna-Barbera animated TV series about a teen band that solves mysteries for a talent agent supercomputer with dog allergies. It's one of the most non sequitur shows in Hanna-Barbera history (an...

Back in the glory days of the Dubba-Dubba-WB, a group of rock musicians found a magic amulet and won the power to talk to ghosts! And since they're selfish rock stars, they find it really annoying. It's DEAD LAST, a weird new live-action, primetime take on the old Hanna-Barbera schtick, from the writers of GROSSE POINT BLANK and HIGH FIDELITY! It's got the ghosts, it's got the gags...

Paul Verhoeven's ROBOCOP defied all expectations to become one of the most celebrated, satirical, action-packed and politically damning motion pictures of the 1990s. So of course it got a live-action TV series in the 1990s, with adorable kid characters and wacky villains! ROBOCOP: THE SERIES only lasted one season, and has since been largely forgotten, but was it... CANCELED TOO SOON? Film cri...

Vincent Price and Peter Lorre are two of the most recognizable icons in movie history, and legends of the horror genre. So it's pretty amazing that they co-starred in a TV pilot called COLLECTOR'S ITEM, in which they play antique dealers who solve mysteries, and hardly anybody's heard of it. And just to make it crazier, COLLECTOR'S ITEM co-stars Whitney Blake... the co-creator of t...

Who know action star Dolph Lundgren as He-Man, Ivan Drago and The Punisher, but do you know he was also a bodyguard with an intense phobia of the color white? That's the plot of BLACKJACK, an ambitious and action-packed backdoor pilot from director John Woo (FACE/OFF, THE KILLER), in which Lundgren protects a little girl and a supermodel from criminals with a HUGE artillery budget. It was extr...

The night THE SOPRANOS ended, JOHN FROM CINCINNATI began. It didn't last long, but it was probably the most popular supernatural surfing drama in the history of HBO! Austin Nichols stars as a mysterious man who wanders into the life of a troubled all-star surfing family, played by the likes of Bruce Greenwood, Rebecca De Mornay and Brian Van Holt, and then... he confuses them. A lot. It's...

The lovable dog BENJI starred in a series of hit films across multiple decades, but he only had one TV show, and it was a bizarre hybrid of STAR WARS, THE FUGITIVE and GUMMO. It was called BENJI, ZAX & THE ALIEN PRINCE, it aired Saturday mornings in 1983, and it's one weird watch, we gotta tell ya. BENJI, ZAX & THE ALIEN PRINCE is one of the weirdest shows we've reviewed all year,...

Forty-five years before Sam Elliott (and his amazing hair) finally earned an Academy Awards nomination for A STAR IS BORN, he (and his hair) was stuntman extraordinaire EVEL KNIEVEL in a failed TV pilot! He jumped cars on a motorcycle, he fought crime, he ripped off THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES... and he didn't go series. Was the EVEL KNIEVEL television series... CANCELED TOO SOON? Film critics Wil...

In the spirit of MAD MEN comes the glossy soap opera PAN AM, starring Margot Robbie, Christina Ricci and more great cast members as the flight crew of a 707 in the early 1960s. Over the course of the series they'll find themselves spying for the CIA, dating congressmen, selling their nude photos to Andy Warhol and making emergency landings in war-torn countries! It was big, it was romantic, it...

Anthony Bourdain's best-selling exposé of the world of fine dining became a failed sitcom starring Bradley Cooper in 2005! KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL also starred John Cho, Nicholas Brendon, John Francis Daley, Jaime King, Bonnie Somerville and Sam Pancake, and only aired for four measly episodes on Fox. It had the stars, it had the cuisine, but was KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL really... CANCELED TOO SOON?...

Julie Brown, Jennifer Aniston and Wayne Knight co-starred in THE EDGE, the most violent sketch comedy show ever made, in which the whole cast gets killed at the beginning of each episode! It's a lost artifact from the early 1990s, we finally found it, and we can't wait to share it with you. But was THE EDGE really, truly, one hundred percent...   CANCELED TOO SOON? Film critics William Bib...

Professional wrestlers Jesse "The Body" Ventura and "Rowdy" Roddy Piper starred in several action hits in the 1980s, like THEY LIVE and PREDATOR, but their big TV team-up never made it past the pilot stage! TAGTEAM stars Jesse Ventura and Roddy Piper as lovable wrestlers who get banned from the ring and become cops instead. It's big, it's goofy, and there's a scene wher...

Tarzan is one of the most popular characters in the history of popular culture... but not this time. The WB version of TARZAN stars Travis Fimmel (VIKINGS) and Sarah Wayne Callies (THE WALKING DEAD) as Tarzan and Jane, whose modern day adventures take place in New York City, against the backdrop of corporate conspiracies by Tarzan's uncle, played by Mitch Pileggi, and his aunt, played by Lucy...

Ralph Bakshi became a legend by directing animation for adults, like LORD OF THE RINGS and FRITZ THE CAT, but in 1988 he also directed the pilot episode for a Nickelodeon television series about a little girl trapped in a magical land. Everything everyone ever lost comes to life in Tattertown, including Debbie's doll Muffet, who rebels against her owner and tries to destroy Christmas! It's...

STAR TREK was all the rage in the late 1990s, and a lot of other shows were eager to rip off the classic sci-fi show's formula, with interstellar exploration, major moral conundrums, old-fashioned naval wars in space and a bit of sexual tension. Hence, we got a pilot like STAR COMMAND, in which gorgeous 20-somethings take over their vessel when the captains die, and wage war against the bad gu...

The Silver Surfer is one of the strangest Marvel superheroes (and that's really saying something). He's a nearly omnipotent shiny space guy who holds himself responsible for the death of billions, who now wanders the cosmos pondering enormous philosophical questions and trying, and often failing, to redeem himself. And somehow he got his own Saturday morning cartoon series, with all of tho...

The year was 1998, and Marvel had a big hit on their hands with the movie BLADE. But they also had one of the most notorious bombs ever with NICK FURY: AGENT OF SHIELD, a cheesy failed TV pilot starring David Hasselhoff from BAYWATCH as a cigar-chomping, jokester super spy who fights overacting Nazi bad guys who want to destroy the world with a super virus. NICK FURY: AGENT OF SHIELD is one of Mar...

The Marvel superhero BLADE is half man, half vampire, all badass. And after he starred in his groundbreaking movie trilogy, which spawned the superhero movie boom we're stilling living in today, he made the journey to the small screen with BLADE: THE SERIES, starring Sticky Fingaz as the title hero, Jill Wagner as an undercover vampire, and Richard Roundtree as Blade's dad! It was action-p...

The late, legendary Stan Lee helped reboot and recreate the superhero SOLARMAN for a very, very, VERY short-lived comic book series, and a failed cartoon pilot about dweeby comic book nerd whose dad wishes he was more into sports, and who turns into a fantabulous hunk of a hero! He teams up with a stupid robot and fights a bad guy who uses a death ray that destroys suns to save up for the day when...