Critically Acclaimed Network

Not every AMC series is as successful as MAD MEN, BREAKING BAD and THE WALKING DEAD. Case in point: RUBICON, an ambitious espionage series starring James Badge Dale (IRON MAN THREE) that only lasted one short season in 2010, and which completely switched gears after the pilot episode, transforming from a conspiracy thriller into a workplace drama that occasionally remembered it used to be a conspi...

The success of HBO's GAME OF THRONES has led to a lot of expensive, epic, violent and sex-filled television shows, but none were less successful than OF KINGS AND PROPHETs, the ABC series that told the story of King Saul (Ray Winstone) and David (Olly Rix), was expected to be a huge audience draw, and which only lasted two episodes. Who could have foreseen the failure of OF KINGS AND PROPHETS?...

Before there was HBO's WESTWORLD, and after there was Michael Crichton's WESTWORLD, there was the short-lived television series BEYOND WESTWORLD. Jim McMullan and Connie Selecca star as Delos agents who are tracking down realistic robots that have been unleashed on the world by a mad scientist, played by James Wainwright. Will they be able to foil his nefarious scheme to take over nuclear...

What did Leonard Nimoy do after the STAR TREK television series but before the STAR TREK movies? He was BAFFLED! It's a feature-length pilot for an NBC mystery series, in which Leonard Nimoy plays a psychic race car driver solving mysteries in a weird Agatha Christie-like house, along with an alluring female companion played by Susan Hampshire. This funky fantasy never went to series, but was...

It's one of the most infamous shows in TV history, a series that only lasted four episodes in 1996 before ratings and controversy shut it down. It's PROFIT, a cynical and disturbing drama about a sociopathic businessman who will stop at nothing to get ahead, indulging in sex, drugs, murder, blackmail and worse to become President of Acquisitions at a multibillionaire company. Critics raved...

The old MACGYVER ran for seven seasons and two tv movies. The new MACGYVER is one of the biggest hits of the 2016 television season. But between those two action series, all but forgotten to history, was YOUNG MACGYVER... a failed pilot starring SUPERNATURAL's Jared Padalecki as the scientist secret agent's nephew, who makes life-saving gadgets out of portable propane stoves because he&#39...

An Irish prostitute has been found murdered, and the Russian mafia, the prince of England, a mentally unstable tailor and Billy Zane are somehow involved. When an American teenager gets fingered, everybody goes nuts and nobody is innocent. That's the set-up for GUILT, the short-lived mystery series from Freeform that tried to be the next SCANDAL but wound up playing more like JIM HENSON'S...

Before the Marvel Studios movies you know and love, there were a lot of Marvel superhero movies that nobody remembers. Case in point: DOCTOR STRANGE, a 1978 made-for-tv movie starring Peter Hooten (ORCA) as an oversexed psychologist who does battle with Lurch from THE ADDAMS FAMILY and Jessica Walter, the mom from ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, who plans to seduce him for Cthlulhu (more or less). The TV mo...

Sam and Max are a dog and a rabbity thing. They are freelance police. And they are completely insane. The award-winning comic strip by Steve Purcell became a series of hit video games from LucasArts and Telltale Games and, from 1997 to 1998, an animated Saturday morning cartoon series that ripped rationality a new one and riddled kids full of wildly inappropriate humor. It was SAM AND MAX: FREELAN...

In the 1980s and 1990s, Gary Larson's THE FAR SIDE was one of the most popular comic strips in the world, selling books and calendars and infiltrating the pop culture consciousness. The strip was such a hit that CBS produced a Halloween special in 1994, just a few months before Gary Larson retired, and it was a morbid and experimental animated short filled with death and dismemberment. It may...

Wes Craven, the master of horror, was famous for creating classic horror movies like A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, SCREAM and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. He was significantly  less famous for co-creating NIGHTMARE CAFE, a 1992 television series starring Jack Coleman (HEROES), Lindsay Frost (CROSSING JORDAN) and Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger himself) as employees of a magic nightmare cafe that travel...

It's not just a film, it's a legend. In the year 2000, the feature-length Halloween special CRY BABY LANE debuted on Nickelodeon and was immediately pulled off the airwaves, allegedly after parents complained that the film - about a young boy who accidentally raises the ghost of a conjoined, but severed twin - was too violent for children. CRY BABY LANE vanished for years, becoming a horri...

Why was there never a LOST BOYS or MONSTER SQUAD television series? It's probably because DRACULA: THE SERIES had it covered. This one season wonder co-starred Mia Kirshner (THE L WORD) and Geraint Wyn Davies (FOREVER KNIGHT), and was about a pair of plucky American kids living with their uncle Gustav Van Helsing, next door to "Alexander Lucard," a.k.a. Dracula. They fight the forces o...

The witch is going on strike unless her demands are met in THE HALLOWEEN THAT ALMOST WASN'T, a.k.a. THE NIGHT DRACULA SAVED THE WORLD, an award-winning holiday special from 1979 that aired on the Disney Channel every year until the mid-1990s. It's a goofy short that stars Judd Hirsch as Dracula, Mariette Hartley as The Witch and Henry Gibson as Igor, and to some of us, it's a nostalgic...

One year after the cancelation of TWIN PEAKS, the incredible team of David Lynch and Mark Frost got back together for a television series that didn't take America by storm. It was called ON THE AIR, and it reunited many of the cast members from TWIN PEAKS to help tell the story of a wacky 1950s variety show that becomes a hit entirely by accident. It's one of the strangest sitcoms in telev...

They were created to convince kids to wear their seat belts, but they wound up making car crashes look freakin' awesome. They were THE INCREDIBLE CRASH DUMMIES, a group of wisecracking robots who could explode and put themselves back together again. The toys were a big hit, there was even a video game, and yet the odd pop culture legacy of THE INCREDIBLE CRASH DUMMIES probably hit its apex in...

Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and HBO. You might think that if you put them all together you'd get the best TV series ever made. Instead you got VINYL, an ambitious and expensive drama about the music industry in the 1970s, which had an impressive cast and an amazing soundtrack, and which only lasted one season before getting canceled. But was VINYL... canceled too soon? Join film critics Will...

It was 1975, and Warner Bros. had to do SOMETHING with BLAZING SADDLES or else they'd lose the rights. Their solution: shoot four whole seasons of a sitcom spin-off called BLACK BART, starring future Academy Award-winner Louis Gossett Jr., and only air a single episode. Loopholes! You gotta love 'em! BLACK BART is one of the weirdest series in TV history, but was it... CANCELED TOO SOON? J...

Before there was WALKER, TEXAS RANGER, there was CHUCK NORRIS: KARATE KOMMANDOS! Back in 1986, martial arts superstar Chuck Norris hosted and starred in this action-adventure series about the animated adventures of Chuck Norris and Chuck Norris's sidekicks, like Kimo the Samurai Warrior, Tabe the Sumo Champion (he really likes food!) and the world's most annoying sidekick, Too Much. Togeth...

Two years after he created LAW & ORDER, Dick Wolf co-created a sci-fi cop show about a macho detective and his sexy robot partner. MANN & MACHINE co-stars David Andrews and Yancy Butler as "Mann" and the machine, respectively, as they solve mysteries about far-fetched futuristic concepts like computerized dating services and a multi-year drought in Los Angeles. But, was MANN &...

It was a dark time - the eight years between BATMAN & ROBIN and BATMAN BEGINS - and The WB decided to fill it with the live-action superhero series BIRDS OF PREY. Created by Laeta Kalogridis (TERMINATOR GENISYS), with many episodes written by Melissa Rosenberg (TWILIGHT, JESSICA JONES), the short-lived BIRDS OF PREY teamed up Batman's daughter, Black Canary's daughter, the former Batgi...

Canada is home to unspeakable horrors in the short-lived anthology series DARKNET, about a YouTube-like website that hosts videos of real-life violence. The six-episode show tells the stories behind these proto-creepypastas, an interconnected series of of tales. Some of them are terrifying, and some of them... well, let's just go with "not," shall we? But was DARKNET canceled too soon?...

At the height of the "Skinemax" boom of the 1990s, HOT SPRINGS HOTEL reigned supreme. It was a sitcom about oversexed jerks who ran a hotel and solved every problem (that they usually caused themselves) by having sex with it. Constant, very vanilla intercouse abounds as the cast of HOT SPRINGS HOTEL lives out their weird fantasies in their one and only season on Showtime. But was HOT SPRIN...

Everybody loves The Muppets, so why didn't everybody love THE MUPPETS? The new sitcom starring Jim Henson's popular puppet characters was one of the most anticipated TV shows of the 2015-2016 season, but a series of unusual creative decisions turned off the hardcore fans, and failed to bring in new audiences. So, what the heck happened to THE MUPPETS? William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold ar...

It's one of the most notorious one-episode wonders in television history: LOOKWELL, a sitcom that aired on NBC in July of 1991, and has gone on to become a cult classic. Created by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel, and starring Adam West (BATMAN) and future Oscar nominee Todd Field (IN THE BEDROOM), the sitcom is about a former 1970s cop show star (West) who still thinks he's a detectiv...