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Take every wacky comic relief stereotype, give them each a badge and a gun, and put them to work at the some police station and you get THE LAST PRECINCT, a quirky POLICE ACADEMY knockoff starring Adam West (BATMAN), Ernie Hudson (GHOSTBUSTERS) and James Cromwell (L.A. CONFIDENTIAL), as well as Randi Brooks as Mel, who - as near as we can tell - might potentially have been the first transgender ch...

What would you do if you could travel between three alternate realities, and all of them were kind of hard to look at? You'll find out in CHARLIE JADE, an ambitious Canadian/South African co-production about a private detective solving mysteries in parallel dimensions, and running afoul of the truly bizarre supervillain 01 Boxer, who is either the greatest bad guy we've ever come across......

It's the exciting conclusion to our epic two-part episode! Last week we traveled across the universe with the sci-fi classic BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, and this week we're stuck on a stupid old Earth with GALACTICA 1980, the short-lived spin-off that couldn't decide if it was about time travel or super babies, and wound up stupider than a whole boxful of stupid. Sure, it was ridiculous, but...

Few sci-fi television shows were more ambitious than BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, a sci-fi space epic from MANIMAL creator Glen A. Larson, whose expensive saga about evil robots chasing noble humans throughout the galaxy came out right on the heels of the game-changing blockbuster STAR WARS. Some people loved it, some people (like the creators of STAR WARS) didn't, but BATTLESTAR GALACTICA left a las...

She's one of the most popular, iconic and inspirational superheroes ever created, but even though Wonder Woman has a new blockbuster movie and had a hit tv series in the 1970s, she's also had some REALLY bad luck on television. Over the course of nearly 50 years there have been not one, not two, but THREE failed pilots for a live-action WONDER WOMAN series: including a wacky sitcom, a supe...

The history of television is full of horror anthology shows like THE TWILIGHT ZONE, TALES FROM THE CRYPT and THE OUTER LIMITS, but we've never seen anything quite like TERRORVISION. This low-low-low budget horror series about monsters, vampires and murders aired on the Lifetime network in the 1980s, and it's either absolutely terrifying or totally, utterly laughable. But was TERRORVISION,...

A newspaper reporter with a suspiciously expensive house goes back in time to save lives, endanger his marriage and completely ignore his day job in JOURNEYMAN, a sci-fi series starring Kevin McKidd (STAR WARS REBELS), Gretchen Egolf (ROSWELL), Moon Bloodgood (FALLING SKIES) and Reed Diamond (DESIGNATED SURVIVOR), which aired for just 13 episodes in 2007. Fans tried to save JOURNEYMAN by sending R...

Everybody knows L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is one of the best movies of the 1990s, and maybe even one of the best movies ever made. But not everybody remembers that just a few years after James Ellroy's classic novel became a classic movie, it almost became a television series, written by Walon Green (THE WILD BUNCH) and starring Kiefer Sutherland (24), Anna Gunn (BREAKING BAD), Eric Roberts (A TALKING...

The time has finally come to review one of the most notorious television series in history: MY MOTHER THE CAR, a 1960s sitcom with the stupidest premise imaginable, and a Freudian nightmare that could only happen in the deepest, darkest subconscious of the typical suburban male. Yes, Jerry Van Dyke's mother is a car... and she will spank him. It's been called the worst tv show in history,...

We've been sifting through television's biggest failures for one whole year, and it's time to pit all of these amazing/amazingly bad TV shows against one another in horrifying death match!  As film critics William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold prepare another whole year of bizarre discoveries and notorious pop culture punchlines, join them as they look back at the first 43 shows and reve...

The 1990s were full of failed sci-fi television series, but few ever reached the heights of EARTH 2, an expensive show about colonizing an alien planet that lasted one whole season on NBC. EARTH 2 won an Emmy Award and debuted as one of the highest rated series of television, and somehow it concluded as one of the lowest.  What the heck happened to EARTH 2, and was it... CANCELED TOO SOON? Film cr...

After Joel Hodgson left MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, but before he rebooted MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, he invented a new form of television called THE TV WHEEL. This complicated sketch comedy show rotated a set in front of a stationary camera, challenging the limits of the medium and testing the comedic talents of future superstars like Judd Apatow (KNOCKED UP), Paul Feig (BRIDESMAIDS), David...

Fans of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 know all about MASTER NINJA, a series of "movies" starring Lee Van Cleef as an old white ninja and Timothy Van Patten as his hunky hamster-enthusiast sidekick. But before MASTER NINJA got riffed on by MST3K it ran for an entire season on NBC in 1984, under the title of THE MASTER, and featured guest stars like Demi Moore (GHOST), Crystal Bernard (WINGS)...

There are more tv shows about lawyers than we could possibly care to count, but almost all of them lasted longer than DOUBT, a courtroom dramedy starring Katherine Heigl (GREY'S ANATOMY), Laverne Cox (ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK) and Elliott Gould (MASH), which was canceled last February after airing only two episodes. Katherine Heigl plays a lawyer who's in love with her murder suspect client...

The year was 1993, and STAR TREK ruled the airwaves. That was good news for Trekkies but bad news for SPACE RANGERS. When this blue collar sci-fi series debuted, STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION was still on the air and STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE had only premiered three days earlier. Audiences just weren't interested in watching SPACE RANGERS, a lower budgeted series that was aired out of order...

In the history of television, there are few shows that have a more embarrassing reputation than MANIMAL, an NBC series that ran for eight short episodes in 1983, and starred Simon MacCorkindale as a crimefighter who turns into a panther, a hawk, and any other animal the situation requires. Audiences balked, critics laughed, and MANIMAL became a pop culture punchline that endures to this very day....

The cult comedies BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE and BILL AND TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY got turned into a short-lived live-action sitcom in the early 1990s! The pilot was written by the creators of BETTER OFF DEAD and SEX AND THE CITY, and the series found the lovable goofballs traveling back in time to learn how to rock from Elvis Presley, how to woo ladies from Casanova, and how to do math...

Fifty years ago, hundreds of Alcatraz inmates disappeared. Now, the most notorious criminals in American history are loose in San Francisco, where a tough cop and a comic book nerd team up to find them and discover the real story behind their magic silver blood and super-duper mystery keys. ALCATRAZ was a weird, weird, weird show from Bad Robot, the makers of LOST, that was canceled after only one...

David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker took the comedy world by storm with AIRPLANE! in 1980, and two years later they brought their rapid-fire signature schtick to ABC with POLICE SQUAD!, a parody of self-serious cop shows starring Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin, a cop who lives in a wacky world where nobody knows how silly they are. POLICE SQUAD! became a cult favorite and eventually sp...

They're some of the most popular superheroes ever created, but before a hit animated series and blockbuster film franchise turned the X-Men into a household name, they were featured in PRYDE OF THE X-MEN, a pilot episode for a different animated series that failed to take off. Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, X-MEN was one of the most legendary failed pilots ever, even though it got a lot o...

After BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER got canceled, fans found a new destination for teen supernatural horror: POINT PLEASANT, a soap opera about the antichrist, co-created by Marti Noxon (BUFFY) and John J. McLaughlin (BLACK SWAN), starring Elizabeth Harnois, Grant Show, Dina Meyer and - before they got really famous - Aaron Paul and Jon Hamm. It's a strange series, full of teen angst and religious...

You know SAILOR MOON, COWBOY BEBOP and NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, but do you recall the most culty anime series of all? It was called DRAGON HALF, its four episode OVA release was canceled after just two episodes, and it's developed an enormous reputation for being funny as hell thanks to anime fans around the world. But was this satirical saga about a half-girl, half-dragon on a quest to romanc...

You must remember this: a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and nothing is sacred in Hollywood. Even the classic drama CASABLANCA became a short-lived television series (for the second time) courtesy of NBC and the producer of WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY in 1983, starring David Soul (STARSKY AND HUTCH), Hector Elizondo (PRETTY WOMAN) and a young Ray Liotta (GOODFELLAS).  Maybe...

It's one of the weirdest shows in the history of television, about a hero based explicitly on Donald Trump, who buys a haunted mansion in the Caribbean and teams up with the ghost of a black pirate who was lynched for freeing slaves. Together they jump in their high-tech superboat and solve crimes in THE 100 LIVES OF BLACK JACK SAVAGE, a series brought to you by Walt Disney, super-producer Ste...

What happens when you get the director of GREMLINS and the author of THE ALIENIST together? You get a STAR TREK knockoff called THE OSIRIS CHRONICLES, about a band of rebels trying to fight off an invading army of enlightened philosophers who just want everyone to be nice to each other. It's an outer space series that never got off the ground, but which was eventually released as a Made-For-TV...