Critically Acclaimed Network

Our MARVELOUS MONTH OF MARVELS turned tragic this week, so we begin our episode with a eulogy for Stan Lee, the co-creator of most of our most beloved Marvel comics characters, and eventually created a multimedia empire. But along that journey to box office billions there many missteps, and boy howdy, was GENERATION X one of them. This failed pilot for a live-action, teen-oriented X-MEN primetime...

Not every chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a success. Despite the best efforts of Disney, Marvel and ABC, MARVEL'S INHUMANS takes some of the most fascinating characters from the Fantastic Four comics and drops them in the middle of a boring adventure series about classist a-holes who oppress an entire civilization into manual labor because their powers aren't cool enough... an...

Our MARVELOUS MONTH OF MARVELS begins! Marvel movies and Marvel tv shows rule the world today, but there was a time when the comic book company struggled to get into the multimedia marketplace. And so we got weird esoteric ephemera like the animated series FRED AND BARNEY MEET THE THING, in which the rocky superhero from the Fantastic Four goes on solo adventures with a group of teenagers, and tur...

One of the greatest reporters of all time could hardly publish a word. He's KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, he's played by Darren McGavin, and every week he uncovers another supernatural or sci-fi monster, and every week the evidence vanishes or the government shuts him down. If that sounds familiar, it's because KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER was one of the biggest influences on THE X-FILES....

The greatest horror movie TV host of all time, Elvira, almost had her own sitcom in the 1990s! It was called THE ELVIRA SHOW, it co-starred actors from TWIN PEAKS, HEROES and SOAP, and it was all about the wacky and salacious adventures of an alluring witch keeping her supernatural powers a secret in Kansas. It's bright, it's sexy, it's funny as hell... but it only lasted one episode....

The supernatural soap opera DARK SHADOWS inspired legions of cult followers, a big budget movie from Tim Burton, and a failed 1991 television reboot starring Ben Cross, Joanna Going, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and big screen legends like Jean Simmons and Barbara Steele! DARK SHADOWS was an epic tale of love and death, starring vampires and ghosts and witches and what the heck, let's throw a little...

Shelley Duvall ruled cable television in the 1980s, with her award-winning kids show FAERIE TALE THEATRE, which adapted classic faerie tales with all-star casts, and warmed the hearts of an entire generation of kids. But a lot of those kids never knew about her short-lived spin-off series NIGHTMARE CLASSICS, which adapted timeless tales of terror like THE TURN OF THE SCREW, CARMILLA and THE STRANG...

What happens when someone runs for public office as a publicity stunt and accidentally gets elected? You'll find out in... real life, but also in THE MAYOR, a short-lived sitcom starring Brandon Micheal Hall as a young hip hop artist who gets a crash course in civics when he ends up running a whole town all by himself... as well as his best friends, GLEE's Lea Michele, COMMUNITY's Yvet...

It's the distant future, the year 1999, and BLOOD DRIVE is a hit television series starring real life serial killers who race across the country, in cars that run on human blood instead of gasoline. With post-apocalyptic monsters at every pit stop, can a goody two-shoes cop and his murderous partner hit the finish line before their heads blow up?  BLOOD DRIVE is the most GRINDHOUSE television...

A 21st century film critic decides to live his life 100% by The Bible in LIVING BIBLICALLY, a sitcom that tried to explore the complexities of Christianity in a clichéd sitcom format, complete with a doofus married to an implausible awesome wife, a pair of mismatched best friends (a priest and a rabbi), and a high-paid journalism job that normally would have been downsized years ago. LIVING BIBLIC...

Our SUDDENLY, LAST SEASON month begins! Every week in September we're review recently canceled television shows, and we're starting with a doozy: WILL, about a hunky young William Shakespeare, who rises to fame in Elizabethan England while having sexy sex, doing druggy drugs and singing James Brown songs. It's wild! It's wacky! But was it... CANCELED TOO SOON? Film critics William...

From the writer of DIE HARD, 48 HOURS and COMMANDO comes the failed TV pilot for K-9000, starring Chris Mulkey (TWIN PEAKS) as a tough cop who accidentally gets a microchip shot into his brain which allows him to hear the thoughts of a cyborg dog. It's hard to imagine a TV show with that premise not being a big hit, but K-9000 got canceled immediately anyway. The question is, what it... CANCEL...

Everyone remembers GOOSEBUMPS, but let's take a moment to reflect on the popular kids horror novel series BONE CHILLERS, which inspired a one-season wonder television series on ABC, staring Charles Fleischer (WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT) and Linda Cardellini (FREAKS AND GEEKS). It's a spooky, kooky, and totally manic live-action series about teenagers who go to a horrifying high school where f...

Heather Graham stars in EMILY'S REASONS WHY NOT, a heavily promoted sitcom that was going to be one of ABC's flagship TV shows in 2006... until it was canceled, after only one episode. What the heck? How do you get canceled after only one episode, when the network spent millions on marketing? What did you do , EMILY'S REASONS WHY NOT? And were you truly CANCELED TOO SOON? William Bibbi...

Either Amy and Raquel are mentally ill, or there really are demons possessing people in England, and they really do need to be beaten up with sticks. That's the plot of CRAZYHEAD, a horror-comedy series from the producer of MERLIN and FUTURE MAN, and it's got a lot of promise. Does CRAZYHEAD live up to that promise? Was it really... CANCELED TOO SOON? Film critics William Bibbiani and Witn...

A hunky time traveler accidentally kidnaps a history-obsessed young kid and takes him on a never-ending adventure through time in VOYAGERS! The ambitious but short-lived primetime series starred the dashing John-Erik Hexum and the precocious Meeno Peluce, and a host of guest stars playing famous figures, like Jonathan Frakes (as Charles Lindbergh), Gregg Henry (as Teddy Roosevelt) and Julia Duffy...

Rodney Dangerfield was one of the most beloved standup comedians in history, a master jokester whose self-deprecating persona was practically tailor-made for sitcoms. But when the time came to make one, for some reason it was all about teenaged Rodney Dangerfield fan who had the power to summon (and teleport) Dangerfield from wherever he happened to be at the moment, to give him relationship advic...

After he was MACGYVER, but before he was STARGATE SG-1, Richard Dean Anderson was a LEGEND. In this short-lived steampunk western series, Anderson played a hard-drinking coward who writes books about Nicodemus Legend, a saintly hero who wields extraordinary technology, courtesy of a sci-fi scientist inspired by Nikola Tesla, played by John de Lancie from STAR TREK. LEGEND was overshadowed by the o...

Everyone was trying to cash in on the MIGHTY MORPHIN' POWER RANGERS boom in the late 1990s, and one of the weirdest imitators was VAN-PIRES, a live-action/CGI hybrid about human teenagers who turn into vampire cars to fight other vampire cars and make terrible, TERRIBLE car puns.  Oh yeah, and somehow it had an original soundtrack by John Entwistle from THE WHO.  Crazy, right? So maybe it'...

Reese Witherspoon took the world by storm in LEGALLY BLONDE, a blockbuster feel-good comedy about a Beverly Hills sorority girl, clad entirely in pink, who goes to Harvard Law School and proves all her naysayers wrong. Two years later we got a sequel everyone remembers, and a failed TV pilot that nobody heard of, starring Jennifer Hall (UP ALL NIGHT) as Elle Woods! It only lasted one episode, but...

The year was 1995, and virtual reality was going to unlock all the mysteries of the universe. Or at least, it was going to be the subject of endless sci-fi movies and TV shows like VR.5, a post X-FILES knockoff about a secret society who employs hacker Sydney Bloom (Lori Singer) to drag criminals into virtual reality and unlock their deepest secrets. Over a dial-up phone line. VR.5 may be a little...

Jim Varney was a comedy sensation, thanks to his beloved character Ernest P. Worrell, who starred in TV commercials, hit movies and - for one short season - HEY VERN, IT'S ERNEST! It's a sketch comedy series for children that aired after GARFIELD AND FRIENDS, and won two Emmy Awards, including one for Varney himself. It's remembered fondly by fans of Ernest P. Worrell, so is it possibl...

You know her name, you know her dolls, but you probably don't know that Barbie had her own animated series in 1987... because it only lasted two episodes. It's called BARBIE AND THE ROCKERS, it emerged from the short-lived toy line that Mattel invented to compete with JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS, and it's a time travel adventure in which - somehow - almost nothing happens. BARBIE AND THE ROC...

It's the series that jumpstarted the careers of Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, Linda Cardellini, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, James Franco, Samm Levine, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr and Busy Philipps. It's FREAKS AND GEEKS, and it's one of the most acclaimed television shows of all time. Indeed, (almost) everyone agrees that FREAKS AND GEEKS was... CANCELED TOO SOON! And this wee...

Since the creation of CANCELED TOO SOON, one sitcom has been requested more than any other. That show is SELFIE, starring John Cho and Karen Gillan as updated versions of Henry Higgins and Eliza Dolittle from MY FAIR LADY and PYGMALION, in an eccentric comedy about the pros and cons of living on social media! It's got a dedicated cult following, but it couldn't find an audience in its orig...