Girlboss
The origin story of Sophia Amoruso’s online clothing empire for vintage tat, Nasty Gal, way back in the salad days of 2006. Will the 23-year-old hustler find those prom dresses the people are clamouring for? Will the bank give her a loan without her daddy co-signing? Will she get blocked from eBay? Does anyone give two figs?
No one needed this show, and surely only the most mindless materialists adored it. Thankfully, Netflix admitted defeat and canned it this week. Is it the beginning of the end for the streaming behemoth? It looks distinctly like they have finally realised they aren’t unbeatable – and certainly can’t keep their dominance with duds like this in their arsenal. The armour has been pierced at last … by a vapid, faux-feminist soldier. You go, girl! KA
Twin Peaks
As my old mate Ecclesiastes wrote, for everything there is a season. And right now, if the digital jibber jabber is anything to go by, is the season for David Lynch. Such has been the raving about Twin Peaks’ return that it seems odd the original should ever have been cancelled. And yet it was, after a second series that maintained the weirdness of the first but ditched the trappings of a crime procedural for those of a supernatural shocker.
It’s all a question of perception of course (for the viewer as well as those trapped in the Black Lodge). If you had tuned in for a creepy murder mystery, suddenly nothing made sense any more and, indeed, it all felt a bit indulgent, insulting even. If you were tuning in to see one of cinema’s true auteurs wreak havoc on the small screen, however, you would surely have been more satisfied. 26 years on and we are in a different world. With the shattering of broadcast television into a million niches, every show can now be made for a specific audience, just as long as the creators know who that is. So 2017 fans should be glad Twin Peaks got binned in 1991. Without its cancellation, it could not have come back as it is now; weird as hell and in no mood for compromise. PM
Vinyl
Oh Vinyl, with your coke-hoovering set pieces and egregiously signposted famous-person-from-history cameos: you thought you were celebrating punk and the counterculture in 70s New York, but you never realised that you yourself were exhibiting the worst qualities of prog – technically proficient, but entirely devoid of substance and soul. Not even the esteemed presences of Martin Scorsese and Bobby Cannavale, as exec producer and star respectively, could save the drama first from critical derision, then low viewership and finally the axe after just one very pricey season. The fact that it wasn’t the only expensive 70s-set music biopic to receive a cancellation notice in the past 12 months suggests that people have finally had their fill of the endless paeans to that period in music. GM
Heil Honey I’m Home!
The surprise here isn’t that Heil Honey was canned after one episode. The surprise is that this scarcely-believable and jaw-droppingly inappropriate comedy got as far as it did. Just to be clear, your worst suspicions about the title are correct. This is a breezy sitcom in which Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun find themselves living next door to a Jewish couple called the Goldensteins.
It aired on Sky’s Galaxy channel in 1990, back when Murdoch’s brains trust were willing to try anything once, in the hope that it might stick. This didn’t stick. But it’s still extraordinary viewing. From the gaudy, golden interior of the Goldensteins’ house to the central plot (Neville Chamberlain is coming to visit and Hitler is keen to direct conversation away from his recent invasion of Czechoslovakia), everything about it is eye-poppingly wrong. Still, if you’re going to make a show that gets cancelled after one episode, why not do it in style, eh? PH
The OC
For fans of teen drama, the first series of The OC is near perfection. It’s Chrismukkah and “welcome to the OC bitch” and a cracking indie soundtrack. It’s a show that both loves and skewers pop culture; it even had the knowing chutzpah to embed a parody of itself (“The Valley”) into its own universe.
But the best shows make serious missteps too, and The OC’s came with the controversial series three decision to kill off troubled rich girl Marissa Cooper. Though her death actually made sense within the world of the programme – she’d arguably been heading that way since the outset – it was greeted with fury. The ratings subsequently plummeted during the fourth, and it turned out final, series. (No one needed to watch Seth commune with his inner spirit animal in a sweat lodge with the loathsome Che, even if he was played by a pre-fame Chris Pratt.) By the time the axe fell it was an act of mercy: the original OC – that sparkling ode to suburban Californian life – was long gone. SH
Shafted
The idea was actually quite interesting. Could game theory be used as the basis for a gameshow? How would the balance between altruism and selfishness resolve itself in the unforgiving glare of primetime TV, with money at stake? This was going to be a winner. But like all gameshows, it would stand or fall on the appeal of its presenter. Oh well; there went that idea …
There was something unspeakably sinister about watching Robert Kilroy-Silk, eyes blazing with deranged relish, explaining the choice the contestants faced. “Will they share? OR WILL THEY SHAFT?” Ugh. Incredibly, 20 episodes of Shafted were made and 16 remain unaired. Which hints at the urgency with which it was deemed necessary to remove this grotesque – indeed even slightly infernal – spectacle from our screens. PH
Rome
In describing the cancellation of Rome, it reads much better and more fancily in Latin; dignum et iustem est. Yes it was right and proper that the extensive, expensive, drama about the greatest empire that ever bestrode the Earth got nixed after two seasons and 20 episodes. The HBO show had a visual scope and sprawling cast, clearing a path that Game of Thrones was one day to barrel down. It also featured some of the greatest names in history – Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Cleopatra et al. But it chose to tell its story through the actions of those tangential to the annals of Roman lore, such as Kevin McKidd’s legionnaire Lucius Vorenus or Polly Walker’s Atia of the Julii. All historically accurate, but the underlings were better written, more interesting than Ciarán Hinds’ Caesar or James Purefoy’s Marc Antony. This meant that Rome always felt a bit lopsided as you waited for the big names to get out of the way so you could see what the smaller names were doing on the fringes. Other problems included the fact that there’s only so many semi-raunchy orgy scenes one can sit through (a problem that also afflicted The Tudors, The Borgias and The Simpsons). One final nail in the coffin: season two killed off Antony and Cleopatra, which was kind of a reasonable point to finish at anyway. PM
Horne & Corden
Hot on the heels of Gavin and Stacey, two of the sitcom’s stars (the male ones, obviously) were given their own sketch show. Much like the recent election, it started off as a safe bet – riding the wave of Gavin and Stacey’s astounding popularity – before ending up such a spectacular failure nobody could remember why it ever seemed a good idea in the first place.
It wasn’t just because Horne & Corden was bad – although it was. Many of the sketches relied almost exclusively on jokes about Corden’s weight, making for an uncomfortable not to mention inane half hour. But when Corden stops jiggling his stomach, the show isn’t as heinous as its infamous critical mauling might suggest. What was most objectionable about the pair’s below-par japes was that it was such a nightmarishly crap imitation of the friendship between Smithy and Gavin that it threatened to dull the brilliance of Gavin and Stacey itself. RA
The Carrie Diaries
Great idea! Let’s show the formative years of that most notoriously complex and intellectual of individuals, Carrie Bradshaw – before she sat in her rent-controlled Manhattan apartment living her best life, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights and churning out drivel about her nearest and dearest’s sex lives.
Here’s the chance to hotfoot it to the 80s to watch your favourite SATC girl fall in love with a cheeseball for the first time, sneak out to parties and paint her mom’s vintage handbag with nail varnish – oh my gosh she was born to be a fashion maverick! From start to rara-skirted finish, the most inessential prequel imaginable. KA
Luck
HBO’s horse racing drama Luck had a lot going for it. The guiding hand of visionary creator David “Deadwood” Milch. Dustin Hoffman as a ruthless crime boss. A stellar supporting cast including Nick Nolte and Michael Gambon. A tight, twisty plot underpinned by lashings of Milch’s trademark mysticism. What it didn’t have was the right to claim in its credits that no animals were harmed during its making. Unsurprisingly, this became a problem.
One horse died during the filming of the pilot and another two during later episodes. Eventually, HBO had to accept that however good the show might be, this level of equine carnage wasn’t going to wash. As filming for season two got underway, the network pulled the plug – and one of the oddest, saddest moments in recent US TV history came to an end. PH
Heroes
It took us a surprisingly long time to realise that Heroes wasn’t actually all that super. The first series of Tim Kring’s fantasy series about a group of regular joes who discover they have magical powers was impressively popular, despite in retrospect resembling a bargain-bin version of Lost. The performances were more wooden, the characters were less interesting, and the peculiar aspects – like the bloke who could paint the future – lacked the glorious WTFness of the hatch, the numbers or the Others. What it did share was Lost’s habit of stringing its audience along with twists and withheld information until a large chunk of it said “enough” and the fourth season became its last. Curiously, NBC decided five years later that there was ample appetite for a reboot. There wasn’t: Heroes Reborn lasted just one series. GM
The Wright Way
It would have been great if The Wright Way had worked. Ben Elton – instrumental in the creation of classics like The Young Ones and Blackadder – had by 2013 completed his transition from comedy hero to punchline (Get a Grip, his current affairs show featuring Alexa Chung, hadn’t helped). Elton’s place in the narrative of British TV history was becoming incomprehensible. But The Wright Way, sadly, was irredeemably bad.
Centring on an uptight health-and-safety worker called Gerald Wright (your cue to groan internally), we follow the man of the half-hour as he battles with his daughter, her girlfriend Victoria, and his colleagues. For its laughs, The Wright Way mines the topic of health and safety regulation, which is bad enough for the most radically right-on comedian of the 80s. But its main crime has to be the treatment of Beattie Edmondson, who plays Victoria. Jennifer Saunders’ daughter was dealt one of the worst hands in sitcom history when she was cast as the cringe-a-second DJ, who recites youth jargon (and Jamaican patois) so awkward it’s like she’s a 54-year-old father of three channeling the spirit of a 21-year-old (oh…). Elton may have been willing to further sully his name, but he didn’t have to drag the next generation down with him. RA
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
On paper, Aaron Sorkin’s take on life behind the scenes at a Saturday Night Live-style comedy show should have been brilliant. The subject matter – the ins and outs of television – was close to Sorkin’s heart, the fantastic cast included Sarah Paulson, Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford and Amanda Peet, and the tense workplace setting seemed ripe for a classic Sorkin meld of humour, intelligence and pathos. So what went wrong?
Well, Sorkin used the series to work through his issues with everything from the Christian right to the growing power of the internet. Plus, the man who gave us CJ Cregg couldn’t even be bothered to write half a personality for his female leads. Also, NBC commissioned 30 Rock in the same year – and Tina Fey actually understood life on an SNL-style sketch show, and was funny with it. But really the reason Studio 60 was cancelled (correctly) after only one season is because it’s a show so busy telling us how clever it is that it forgot to spend any time showing us why we should care. SH
What are the programmes you think were most wisely cancelled? Please let us know in the comments below.
