Ask JKM a Question #8: Which Television Programs Would I Bring Back?

My friend and the host of The PC Principle, Troy Foreman asks me:

“If a network studio executive came to you and said we are looking at bringing back three television shows that have been cancelled. What three shows would you pick and why?”

That is a really terrific question, Troy. 

However, picking only three programs is tough given all the great shows that have faced untimely demises and deserve a second chance.  Therefore, I am going to cheat a little bit in my ultimate response.

Here’s my reasoning behind cheating: If I were to pick a favorite series from decades ago, such as Space: 1999 (1975 – 1977), it couldn’t realistically return today in the exact same format.

Some series writers have passed away, others have retired, and the main actors are already ensconced in old age.  This means I wouldn’t really be selecting that specific series for a return at all, unless I could magically reverse the aging process too.   Instead, I’d be -- in essence -- selecting a re-boot or remake, which is a whole different animal.  (And yes, I’m looking forward to Space: 2099, but on those terms.).

This approach means I want a Millennium movie right now, starring Lance Henriksen, but I also acknowledge the fact that the talented actor probably doesn’t want to commit to 24 episodes a year, for the next five years.  In that event, Millennium now works better as a series of films or TV films, or even as a mini-series if we desire to keep much of the original cast intact and preserve “what is” rather than looking at a re-boot or remake.  I’d say the same thing is true about The X-Files.  I don’t believe Duchovny and Anderson would want to come back on a weekly basis, but I’d sure love to see an X-Files 3.

On the other hand, if we could get Millennium on HBO and make six or seven episodes a year with Lance Henriksen starring, I do think the series would work again on such terms, much like Dexter.

See how hard it is to pin down all these factors?  It gets complicated real fast. 

So first and foremost -- no hedging (yet...) -- I’d say, definitely bring back Millennium and Space: 1999 in a way that honors what came before, featuring the original cast where practical, and with as much of the original “creative team” as possible.

But then I have to get more detailed. 

Hence, the following paradigm:  I’d resurrect different shows at different times, at least if we’re talking about a return to weekly television and the grind of producing twenty or so episodes a year.  So instead of magically reversing the aging process, now I'm magically traveling through time, I guess.  I'd go back to the time of cancellation, and advocate for these particular programs, before series regulars moved on to other jobs, and before series creators did likewise. 

Three Weekly Programs to Bring Back Right Now (2012):

1. Veronica Mars (2005 – 2007).  After only three seasons on UPN/CW, this series still has many great stories to tell.  In just three years, Veronica Mars gave us one of the greatest, most memorable TV detectives since Peter Falk’s Columbo in Kristen Bell’s feisty, brilliant character.

The mystery format is an under-served genre on television right now, and no show has achieved as much as Veronica Mars did regarding that genre, adroitly updating the form for our high-tech age and advances like social media and cell phones. Picking up on the series now would allow us to follow Veronica as an adult (with new technology…) meaning a whole new avenue of storytelling, whether she’s at the FBI, or still working with her Dad in Neptune. 

At heart, Veronica Mars was also a mystery series that examined class differences in America: the lives of the obscenely rich and the very poor in one particular context (a California beach town).  Today, that background context feels much more pertinent.  Hence Veronica Mars deserves a return.

2. SGU (2009 – 2011). Space adventure is sadly absent from television today, but I just finished a re-watch of both seasons of SGU.  I am not a fan by any means of military sci-fi, or the other Stargate franchise arms (SG-1, Atlantis).  But SGU is a different animal, and in some ways separate from that franchise.  SGU only had forty episodes with which to establish itself and many of the episodes – to my surprise and deep admiration – are absolutely brilliant.  One episode late in the first season involves an artificial planet, built by advanced aliens who might be “Gods.”  Episodes in the second season looks at an alternate future for the crew of the Destiny, and also meditate on the very nature of human consciousness. 

I’ll say this to anyone who will listen and be just a little open-minded: SGU is as close to Space: 1999-style story telling as any series has gotten in thirty years (only, alas, without Eagles).   On SGU, you’ll find no rubber-headed aliens who speak English and represent political forces here on Earth, no continuing enemies, and no easy answers about the realm of deep space.  Resources are scarce; supplies limited.  Many episodes deal with finding the least-bad of several bad solutions.  And best of all, there is a mission as yet incomplete.  The Destiny was tracking a signal from the epoch of the Big Bang; a signal that could hold the secrets of our very beginnings. 

SGU is truly in an unenviable position.  The people who don’t like Stargate won’t try it because it is part of that franchise, and those who do like the rest of the franchise don’t like it because it’s too damned different.  My recommendation is to set all those expectations aside and experience, with open mind, one of the most serious, intense, and best-written science fiction series made in the last decade.  It actually delivers on many points the re-made BSG promised to do, but copped out on during the last two seasons.

3. Firefly (2002). Cut down in its prime by Fox, Firefly certainly deserves another four or five seasons on the air, at least, once Nathan Fillion is done with Castle.  The characterizations are brilliant, the cast remains young enough to be plausible as space adventurers, and Joss Whedon certainly has a “vision” for life out in “the black.” 

With the recent success of The Avengers, TV networks should be lining up to get Whedon back behind-the-cameras on this cult property.  More to the point, I’d say that our culture has finally caught up with Firefly’s meditations on freedom.  When is a man truly free?  When is government – even benevolent government – too big and too uniform to assure that individual freedom thrives?  Where does government cross the line from “helping” to “meddling” in personal affairs?   I’m not going to get into a political discussion that answers any of those interrogatives, only note that Firefly dealt with these issues on a regular basis, and could do so again. I’d love to see that.

Three Weekly Programs to Bring Back if it were the year 2000:

1. Millennium (1996 – 1999).  Chris Carter’s Millennium remains one of the most artistic, complex, and most oft-imitated programs in cult-tv history.  Other programs have seized on the procedural aspects (Criminal Minds, Profiler, CSI) or the psychic aspects (Ghost Whisperer, Medium, The Others, Miracles,) but no series has managed to so deftly combine these plot elements with intriguing visual symbols (like Frank’s Yellow House) and deeply intricate story-telling. 

I enjoyed the X-Files episode that wrapped up the Millennium series, but would have preferred to see Millennium last six or seven years and really tell us the whole byzantine story of Frank Black, The Millennium Group, and Jordan Black.  Canceling Millennium mid-way through a seven year run was a grave mistake, and certainly the series was prophetic in terms of warning us about approaching “bad times.”  It did so at the height of the Roaring 1990s, but imagine if the program had still been on the air  in the era of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. 

Essentially Millennium would have lived to see its prophecies of a looming darkness come true, at least to a certain extent.  How would Frank Black have dealt with a Millennium Group on ascent, even more deeply entrenched in power?  I would have loved to see that, but as I said above, now look to the idea of a reunion movie, a mini-series, or an HBO-styled continuation.

2. Brimstone (1998-1999).  This series starred Peter Horton as a resurrected police man, Ezekiel Stone freed from Hell to capture Hell’s worst criminals.  Stone’s boss was the Devil himself (John Glover), and the series ran for just thirteen episodes, again on Fox. 

The program began as incredibly formulaic (aptly described as demon criminal of the week), but quickly became something much more as the dead man had to see life go on without him.  He still loved his wife, Rosalyn (Stacy Haiduk), but she believed he was long gone, and was beginning to move on with her life.  The best episodes of Brimstone therefore saw Ezekiel longing again for the human world, and trying to determine his place in a reality that had passed him by…even as he still held love for Rosalyn.  

The idea, so beautifully rendered, was that in escaping his sentence in Hell, Ezekiel had found another Hell back on Earth, one where everything and everyone he knew and loved was close by, but still unreachable.  This rendered Stone a kind of post-modern Tantalus.  The end-of-days, washed-out look of the series -- which came before this canvas was de rigeuer in horror -- was also a treat.

This is one of those series that sounds high-concept, gimmicky and predictable but the actual execution made it something of a (short-lived) masterpiece.

  

3. Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Can anyone explain to me why this series isn’t still being produced and airing on some cable or premium station, either with Mike Nelson or Joel Hodgson, or both?  There’s no shortage of old bad movies to parody, and the writing on the series was always incredibly sharp.  Sure each episode ran two hours, but that just made Mystery Science Theater 3000 event television in my household. 

Order Chinese food, pour the red wine…and watch Manos the Hands of Fate.  What could be better than that?

If I could choose a number four from this era, it would be Twin Peaks.

Three Weekly Programs to Bring Back if it were the Year 1980:

1. Space: 1999 (1975 – 1977).  The iffy science of Space: 1999 has been fussed over and dissected for nearly forty years at this point, but as my friend, mentor and series story editor Johnny Byrne always noted, that conceptual “weakness” became a great strength in terms of telling stories distinctly different from Star Trek and other space programs. 

Featuring mind-blowing visuals, the greatest spaceship design in history (the Eagles), and stories that explored the terrifying mysteries of space in an era where man was not psychologically or technologically prepared to face them, Space: 1999 gets pilloried all the time for its weirdness and unusual storytelling.  For me, these very elements remain notable strengths.  Television in the 1970s was weirdly homogenized and “safe,” and Space: 1999 – warts and all -- was anything but homogenized and safe.   Instead, it was trippy, gorgeous, oddball, unconventional, frightening, and unique.  The program deserved at least five years and a hundred episodes to continue taking visual and narrative chances (and no doubt, it would have continued provoking people all the while…).

2. Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974 - 1975). Canceled after only one season, this series starring Darren McGavin as an investigative reporter who explored the supernatural deserved a much longer life.  Looking back on the series, one can detect how it deals with a very Watergate/mid-1970s context: a heroic journalist speaks truth to power and fights City Hall.  I love the show for much the same reasons I love Veronica Mars: the lead character is such a singular and unique individual, and provides an interesting "lens" through which to view the world.

Had the series run until 1980, Kolchak would have felt very timely and of the moment considering such 1970s frissons as the Three Mile Island disaster.

3. Battlestar Galactica (1978 – 1979). Bolstered by an immensely likable cast and spectacular production values, the original Battlestar Galactica was rushed into production in 1978, and offered a premise filled with potential.  It didn’t always meet that potential,  hence all the space westerns and rip-offs of popular movies (“Fire in Space” =  The Towering Inferno), but ABC should have followed through with its enormous investment, hired better writers, and committed to Galactica for three full seasons at least.  Had that happened, the series would have no doubt more frequently reached the potential that first season episodes such as “War of the Gods,” “Living Legend,” “Man with Nine Lives,” and “The Hand of God” delivered on.

Runner-up: The Fantastic Journey (1977).

Three Weekly Shows to Bring Back if it were 1970:

1. Star Trek (1966 – 1969).  I don’t think I need to expand much on this choice.  But just imagine if we had seen the original Enterprise complete her five year mission. Just imagine another fifty Star Trek episodes featuring Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley…

2. The Outer Limits (1963 - 1965).  The Outer Limits is so beloved an anthology that most people forget it only ran for, essentially, a season and a half.  Imagine now that the Control Voice had, for five years, been given the opportunity to transport us from the inner mind to the Outer Limits.  As it stands, the series is filled with inventive writing, beautiful noir photography, and stellar acting.  Who wouldn’t want more of that?  The series was revived in color in the 1990s, but it just wasn’t the same animal anymore.

3. Thriller (1960 – 1962).  Pretty much everything I just wrote above about The Outer Limits?  Now just repeat it for this Boris Karloff-hosted horror anthology, which also ran for just two seasons.

And finally, one weekly show to bring back if it were the year 1990:

Otherworld (1985).  This short-lived program about an American family -- the Sterlings --trapped in an alternate dimension, could have and should have been the Star Trek of the 1980s (at least before TNG, anyway). 

The individual episodes were extremely well-written, the show evidenced a wicked sense of humor (see: “Rock and Roll Suicide”), and even boasted a strong dollop of social commentary (“I am Woman, Hear Me Roar.”).  Otherworld lasted eight episodes, but at least six of them are pretty damn good.   The series had even begun to develop a mythology about the city of Imar and a gateway back to Earth, but it was canceled before the “arc” could be resolved.