Science fiction and fantasy fandom loves to complain and nitpick about terrible adaptations, remakes, reboots, or how their favorite characters/stories/ideas have been ruined by the wrong people or sometimes people who created the stuff in the first place. (We did it ourselves this morning, then before lunch, after high tea, and we’ll probably do it again in a little bit.)
As an antidote, many of us often demand new ideas, new shows and fresh perspectives. And right now there seems to be a new onslaught of SFF TV shows hitting the screens. Between the various announcements from Starz, to the new SyFy channel line-up, it seems like the small screen is going to enjoy an SFF renaissance. But is this necessarily a good thing? Using a little time machine called the internet, one can locate all sorts of hazy memories of short-lived science fiction shows that may have just deserved their early demise.
Super Force
An astronaut returns home from a Mars mission to find his brother murdered by some kind of conspiracy. So he decides to turn his spacesuit into a super-suit and fight crime as a vigilante. Though we’re fairly confident this show featured the tagline: “The year is 2020 and times are tough, but this man’s tougher” we can’t seem to find it in any of the clips. Further, the only the only good version of the opening credits we were able to find is in German.
Time Trax
Being developed for TV by Trek producer Harve Bennett should have been good news for Time Trax, but sadly this show was pretty darn silly. We admit, some of us had fond childhood memories of this one, but this is painful to watch. So, bad guys escape into the past, and yet all of them are hanging out in the 1990s? If his computer/hologram friend is on his credit card, what happens if his wallet gets stolen? Also, apparently being a “special breed of man” means he is really good at booking flights on Continental Airlines.
Homeboys in Outer Space
This show really seems like they were writing it as they went along. Sure, it was supposed to be a lighthearted comedy spoof, but for who? Were science fiction fans really laughing at these jokes? Was this really airing on UPN at the same time as Voyager? Check out this weird cameo from James Doohan in the clip below. (He comes in around second 51.) This is the same man who turned down returning for Futurama‘s “Where No Fan Has Gone Before” Star Trek cast reunion. (Welshyyyyy!)
Space: Above and Beyond
There are two camps of people in regard to this show. The first camp has never heard of it and has no memories of it. The second camp LOVES it. Could this show have been the Firefly of its time? Was it really all that bad? The first intro is okay. But the second one…it’s never good when the list of places you’ll fight the aliens get progressively more low stakes as you go along. “In space, on land, at sea…” What next? Underground? At the 7-11? Is there anywhere you won’t fight the aliens? Seriously the guy sounds like he’s making it as he goes along, like Jon Lovitz’s liar character on SNL. “We’re called the 58th…yeah…the um…Wildcards. Sure…I’m Lt. McQueen.” (To be fair, the concept of the in vitro humans was sort of neat.)
Tek War
Oh Shatner. We love you so much. But Tek War was a little on the dumb side. We’re not sure where to start with this one. There were characters who were actually called “cyberpunks.” We’re pretty sure one of them was named “Cowgirl.” Also, at some point in the 1990’s it was mandatory to have someone on your show do something with a virtual reality glove. I guess maybe this show (and comic book and novel series) was prophetic about internet addiction. Are you hooked on Tek right now just by reading this?
Space Rangers
Anybody noticing a trend with the leading men for all of these 1990’s science fiction shows? Do they all have the same hairstyle? Was this known as “the MacGyver”? Could the guy from Super Force have subbed for the guy on this show? Or maybe Tek War? Was there a massive crossover possibility that all these producers missed? Anyway, the really troublesome thing about Space Rangers, other than everything, is the faux Ghostbusters uniforms various characters seemed to be wearing.
Come Back Mrs. Noah
This British 1970s comedy about a housewife trapped on a space station was so hated by the network that after only six episodes Mrs. Noah and friends simply spun out of orbit to their doom. Watching this closing credit sequence still gives us no idea what was really going on.
So what have we learned from all this? Should we collectively as fans really complain that much about the ending of Battlestar Galactica or the cancellation of Firefly? Maybe we should be thankful for what we’ve got, because all the upcoming SFF TV shows might end up like these ones!
Stubby the Rocket is the voice and mascot of Tor.com. A show about Stubby would be awesome as long as one of those guys with those 90s haircuts wasn’t piloting.
Totally expected to see Automan listed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automan)
You can’t talk about Space: Above and Beyond like that!
I want my Wildcards back.
The Legend is right!
That lead in is a touch goofy, but mocking it’s attempt at updating the Marine Corps Hymn seems like the least interesting way to criticize the show.
Some of its episodes are woeful in quality and it’s overstuffed in terms of SF ideas (clones! Evil Corporations! Cyborgs! Aliens!) that it never quite balanced properly, but as a sci-fi version of “Combat!” that aired for one season on Fox, it hardly deserves to be on this list.
I’d take S:AAB off that list right now. No seriously, I’ll come find you. Heh. 0_0
I guess we are all in the second camp of Space:A&B.
Seriously though the show had potential but didn’t receive the legs it needed to wrap up the half dozen plus plots it had going. It has some bad episodes but it had some really good ones too. I have it on DVD and watch it from time to time.
Space : Above & beyond……..oh man, this was Battlestar Galactica all over again…one season and cancelled………..aaaaaarrrggghhh.
I’ll never understand these decisions. The 70’s Galactica was the best there ever was. And Space : Above and beyond comes right after it, I loved it.
Just last week I found the dvd box…..but hell, it was import, region 1….it hasn’t come out yet over here. And I don’t want the hassle with making my player region free….but I was almost tempted, just to be able to watch the show again, if only for that one season.
Agreed. Space: Above and Beyond may have started slow and was super low budget but I recently watched the whole series and the later episodes stand up as some of the best sci-fi tv ever!
Tek War, Space: Above and Beyond, and Space Ranger. Those were the three for me. I watched them because they were bad. It was onlyover time that they grew on me and they eventually developed and matured. But I think you have forgotten SeaQuest 2032. Now, that was a bad show.
I also came here to defend Space: Above and Beyond and to point out that space/land/sea reflects the Marine Corps Hymn. Bad Stubby, no cookie for you.
I don’t remember how good or bad it was, though the fact that it only lasted 8 episodes may be an indicator, but you might consider Quark. It was created by Buck Henry and starred Richard Benjamin and Tim Thomerson, so you might expect good things from it. But it suffered from the maladies of all but the very best late 70s sitcoms.
I gave Space: Above and Beyond a chance, but gave up after a few episodes. The whole planes-in-space thing was hokey, and the characters were too “cowboy” to be taken seriously. Like, these supposedly disciplined Marine space pilots would regularly go off the handle, disobey orders, and do stuff like steal “planes” to search out lost sisters.
My friends and I got a preview tape of Space Rangers: Fort Hope. Oh, sweet Jeebus what a piece of crap. I was on USENET within hours to register my disappointment. (No, really, I was.) So, the character’s ship is attacked by flying space mantas (“They have their own physics!”) and cling tenaciously to the hull and start to chew their way in. The excitable ship’s engineer saves the day by . . . by . . . popping the artificial heart from his chest and applying its power cell to inside of the hull, electrifying it. I mean, sheesh. Like there weren’t any handier, more potent power sources they could have used for that?
I remember reading an interview with one of the show’s creators, who noted how the producers had gotten advice from toy companies on how to make the show more appealing to kids and how to arrange for merchandise tie-ins.
In its favor, the show gave Ron Howard’s homely brother something to do for a few months.
Not that this is a bad show, in fact it was pretty damn good, but sadly remains forgotten: Total Recall 2070.
Philip K. Dick meets Isaac Asimov, while drinking with Raymond Chandler.
A agree with most people here, S: AaB had potential. I would replace it on the list with Team Knight Rider –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Knight_Rider
I . . . don’t remember much about it, but I have nothing but fond memories of Space: Above and Beyond. Even if I only caught every odd episode when my parents forgot to enforce my bed time (I was 8/9 during the season). XD
I’m with @10. There’s a third camp of people in regards to Space: Above and Beyond, and that third camp is those of us who saw it, remember it, and hated the hell right out of it. It was so overpumped with testosteronic bravado and nonsense plots that it couldn’t possibly have been worse unless it included an episode penned by Stephen King. (It didn’t.)
I will agree that the in-vitro people (“nipplenecks”) were an interesting idea, but only from the perspective of the prejudice they faced. This was, alas, almost completely unexplored in favor of the massive pissing contests that each and every single! damn! episode! turned into.
I’m really fond of Time Trax, I keep waiting for the DVD to come out. And as I recall, one episode was _entirely_ about his wallet getting stolen with SELMA inside (if I ever get an AI assistant, I can think of worse personas than SELMA).
C’mon, you can do better than that.
How about “The Powers of Matthew Starr”? Teenaged alien prince with powers flees a coup with loyal man at arms/guardian (the always wonderful Lou Gossett Jr) comes to Earth to hide. First they did the pretending to be a high school student, but hunted by alien enemies. When the ratings weren’t good, they were found out by the government and were blackmailed into doing jobs/missions, usually involving protecting a gorgeous girl. Hmmm. Did the writers of “I Am Number Four” watch this one?
Or then there was “Otherworld” in which a family, doing a nighttime (huh?) tour of the interior of the Great Pyramid of Giza (Yeah, right) get transported to parallel Earth and followed a path marked by pylons looking to get home, while hunted by a local cop. Personally, I loved the episode where they hide out in a city and through a contest at school, the two kids ‘invent’ pop music, going from Beatles to punk before they had to go on the run again.
And of course there is *the* classic bad series, “The Starlost”. You know, the series where Walter Koenig showed up from time to time as a villain. I actually enjoyed it when I saw it in reruns as a kid. And it included the work of Harlan Ellison on the first episode, with Ben Bova as a science advisor for the show.
OK. You asked for it:
My nomination for the all time worst s-f series in the history of television. We’re talking West German classic, here –, before the writers and actors from Lexx were born — and without the saving grace of Lexx’s sense of humor. Cue the music:
“Zum bum bum. Zum ba bum bum:
Zee erssss man Flassssh Gordon. Veee vill destrooy him!”
FWIW, re “Come Back Mrs. Noah,” the fact that it ran only six episodes is not particularly meaningful given that in Britain six episodes is a standard seasonal package for most programs, unlike in the U.S. with our @22-24 episode expectations. Note, for example, that “Fawlty Towers,” which was very popular in the U.K. and did pretty well by import standards in other markets like the U.S., ran for only 12 episodes in all–a six-episode first season and four years later another six-episode second season. “Touching Evil” ran for three seasons of four episodes each. “Foyle’s War” ran for seven seasons of three to four episodes each (I think an eighth is coming up, or has already aired–lost track).
Mind you, I’m not saying that “Come Back Mrs. Noah” does not belong on this list. I’ve never seen it, and in fact never heard of it until I saw it mentioned here. I’m just saying that six episodes is not unusual in the British context (though the fact it was not picked up for another six probably does say something about the show!).
OK. You asked for it:
My nomination for the all time worst s-f series in the history of television. We’re talking West German classic, here –, before the writers and actors from Lexx were born — and without the saving grace of Lexx’s sense of humor. Cue the music:
“Zum bum bum. Zum ba bum bum:
Zee erssss man Flassssh Gordon. Veee vill destrooy him!”
“Dig that wig, Dale! Dig that wig Dale. Pray for toupee!”
You know, I would swear I heard that JMS was involved with Super Force (at least until too much executive meddling caused him to leave in disgust), but I don’t find any mention of it in the Wikipedia entry.
OK, granted, I was just a kid back then, but I thought it was actually a pretty cool show. Among other things, it introduced me to Patrick Macnee.
Space Above & Beyond was AWESOME. The last episode ripped my heart out. I remember watching a few episodes when I was a kid and loving it.
Another great show from the 90s that never got the chance it deserved was Earth 2. Had a few weak episodes, but on the whole fantastic.
@17: Starlost was ‘supposed’ to be Ellison’s big chance at crafting an SF television series that was horribly twisted by producers. To get some idea of the experience, try reading Bova’s The Starcrossed, which fictionalizes the event.
Space: does not deserve to be on the list, nor does the suggested Quark which was quite clever in many ways.
Galactica from the 70s “was the best there ever was”? Maybe if you really like cheese….
LKBurwell@16: The Starlost was such a squandered opportunity: created by Harlan Ellison — who hated the results so much he attached his ‘Cordwainer Bird’ pseudonym to the episodes — and staring Keir Dullea, with the occasional guest appearance by Walter Koenig. Basically, Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky as a weekly series; such a cool concept.
Destroyed, as everything always is, by the managers.
Phoenix without Ashes, co-written by Ellison, is the story on which the series was based, and is a good read. It appears to have been turned into a graphic novel as well.
S:AAB was great.
Who Monitors the Birds was one of the best episodes.
My favorite from the 80s was The Voyagers – where a man and a boy traveled time with the aid of a pocket watch. Very few special effects but the costuming was good. Sadly, I don’t even remember any of the plots. I may have to see if there are copies of it somewhere.
I really liked S:AAB but, the idea that highly trained (read: expensive) pilots would be out pounding the ground (even in a future Marine Corps) was ludicrous. Also a lot of plot hints that never got to play themselves out.
@dwndrgn
Voyagers!: The Complete Series is available on DVD from Universal. I’m not sure if it is still in press but you should be able to find a set. It may not hold up as well viewing as an adult but it is still campy fun. Another series with Meeno Peluce which I wish they’d bring out on DVD is Best of the West (not really sci-fi but it does fit into the Wierd-Wierd-West.)
There was another short lived series with a similar plot but didn’t involve a special watch. The two (or three) stars were stuck in a world where time was fractured. You could walk from Ancient Rome to the Civil War era American South in a day. I cannot remember the name of this one. Maybe someone out there does.
Now onto S:AAB. I didn’t think it was all that great when it ran first time but I did watch it because I saw its potential. Compared to ST:TNG’s first season, S:AAB wasn’t all that bad and I felt that it could have gotten better with another few seasons.
Another series some might want to add to this list is Eerie Indiana. Not for being bad, but for being forgotten. Eerie was a wonderful What’s Wrong With This World series. Hey. Elvis lives on his paper route and Big Foot eats out of his garbage can. What more need I say?
Edit for those who may search for Voyagers. I just checked my copy of the boxed set. The series title was Voyagers! not The Voyagers. Yes, the ‘!’ is part of the title.
I loved SAAB (lol at first I said E&B and I do miss Earth and Beyond too) and hated seeing it cancelled. Like B-5 it got better as it went along. I know a couple of people who are contemplating starting a SAAB RPG in Second Life but with the recent DMCA take downs of fan Sims there I’m not sure if they will make the effort though.
I remember the Voyagers with the kid from “Best of the West” and Jon Erik Hexum. It was a rip off of ‘Time Bandits’ IMHO but I thought it was fun. Hexum tried to make “Bats Breath” a catch phrase. He was the actor who died from an unfortunate accident playing with blank bullets in a prop on the set of his next series the spy show ‘Cover Up’.
Another one that had a lot of promise but got screwed up big time is the War of the Worlds TV series. It was a Frank Mancuso production in the late 80s, back when original-run syndicated shows were really taking off. The first season was actually pretty good and was Paramount’s highest rated syndicated show, but the suits completely replaced the creative team. The new guys totally altered the focus of the show, dropped a bunch of unresolved storylines and changed a lot of the premises. Not to mention killing off one of the most popular characters. The second season was awful.
The first season of War of theWorlds was great! They even mamaged to tie the radio broadcast, the movie and the book into their storyline.
Col. Ironhorse, if I remember correctly. I hated to see him go.
Here’s one that lasted a season on a short lived network: “Mercy Point” on UPN. Wiki entry: http://motherjones.tumblr.com/post/4046557808/the-best-journalism-job-want-ad-ever-ever – and yes, I thought “Sector General” when it appeared.
Here’s the intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK8TAF6K80A
Ludon @30: Exactly. The first season was so good and the second was such a pile of suck. The fact that the replacement of Ironhorse with Adrian Paul was the least bad change says a lot.
Another show that I liked a lot but is probably forgotten is M.A.N.T.I.S. which starred Carl Lumbly. He was basically a black Iron Man, except he was a scientist instead of an industrialist. He also had more of a Batman vibe going on. Sad to say, but the fact that virtually the entire cast was black, probably hurt the ratings.
I watched all of these except for “Come back Mrs. Noah.” I remember really loving the idea of Selma the holographic computer… but never understanding why she was dressed like little house on the prairie. LOL
@16LKBurwell… thanks for bringing up Otherworld… I loved that one too as a kid.
Space, Above and Beyond, you either love or hate… I loved it.
I think there were so many short runs of sci-fi shows in the 90’s because of star trek TNG. Trek was so popular with so many demographics that all the networks were trying to come up with something similar… but no one could do it.
@Ludon – thanks for the info!
Space Above and Beyond was genius. Whenever somebody tried to get me to watch BSG, I came away thinking that it was just Space Above and Beyond with DS9 thrown in for good measure.
While it’s true that 6 episodes was standard for BBC sitcoms then, my memory is that only the first episode of Come Back Mrs Noah was actually transmitted. There was another BBC SF sitcom shortly afterwards written by Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden (of Goodies fame) but I can’t remember the title.
My favourite forgotten SF was an Australian show called Phoenix 5 that was shown in north east England one summer in the ’70s. I’m the only person who remembers it and until I found the credits on youtube, I bagan to fear I had dreamt it.
I don’t think I’d heard of any of these, except TekWar in book form. What about Space: 1999?
So apart from Come Back Mrs. Noah were any of these shown in the UK? I’ve not heard of any including Mrs Noah, OK I was a bit young in the 70s, but still…
Was Mrs Noah on BBC or ITV? Coz ITV had different regions so if she wasn’t on our local one it would make sense that I’d never heard of her.
a-j @36: I imagine you’re thinking of Astronauts. It was remade in the US where it starred MacLean Stevenson and was wildly unsuccessful.
What about the British “UFO?” I saw it on Public Television years ago.
The absolute worst is “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” Disco in space.
Ohhh, the painful nostalgia…
I actually remember watching a lot of this stuff, including (gag) Super Force. Best thing about it was the computer voiced by Patrick Macnee. I also remember the tagline (in Macnee’s voice) distinctly: “It is the end of the beginning. It is the time of Super Force.”
Another reason to hate War of the Worlds: some wackos who took the series too seriously made death threats against the lovely Catherine Disher (who played one of the Brylcremed aliens in Season 2), so she was never willing to go to conventions when her later series, Forever Knight, started up.
Then there was My Secret Identity, and the TV series “sequel” to Starman (with Robert Hays replacing Jeff Bridges as the alien)…
One Scifi show i remember fondly was “The Starlost” i realy loved the whole premise and the storyline, i wish someone would redo it.
natty bumpo@40: Do not be dissin’ UFO.
What? No Earth: Final Conflict (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth:_Final_Conflict) or Cleopatra 2525 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_2525)? How about Black Scorpion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Scorpion_(TV_series)? As horrible as they were I still loved watching them and many more “bad” sci-fi shows that aired on various networks. Honestly the only one that I could never actually stomach was Star Trek: Enterprise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Enterprise)and that was because the entire concept of having better technology in a prequel than in the origional series was just dumb. That show was so bad that even I gave up on it 5 episodes in, and I normally love watching bad sci-fi tv and B or even C movies.
16: And of course there is *the* classic bad series, “The Starlost”. You know, the series where Walter Koenig showed up from time to time as a villain.
I rewatched and reviewed all of Starlost a while back – I’d link to the reviews if I didn’t know this would get nuked as spam as a result. The series as a whole was even worse than I remembered but I’d like to defend Koenig’s character, the alien Oro, who I don’t think was a villain at all. The first time we meet Oro, he isn’t willing to help repair the Ark because that will cost him his opportunity to return home [1] but he does take the time to rescue a human woman who would have otherwise died of a medical condition; she ends up being saved despite the best efforts of the humans.
The second time he has returned to take command of the Ark; granted this is for selfish reasons but his actions would have saved everyone on the ship had the humans not stopped him. He even tries to talk the puny humans into letting him save the Ark although admittedly he has no intention of not saving it no matter what Devon, Rachel and Garth say.
Oro does have a stick up his butt the size of a sequoia and he is somewhat dismissive of human achievements but on the whole his actions would have produced more good than harm.
Devon sees Oro as a villain but Devon is a smug xenophobic ass who would rather see the Ark and all aboard it careen into a star [2] rather than have Oro divert it to Zan (or possibly Xan).
1: Admittedly, using Ark parts to fix his ship was a jerk move but the whole place is headed into a star anyway.
2: As far as I can tell, the Ark is accidentally saved in the second last episode when a scientist diverts it to send it through a cloud of space debris at one third the speed of light so he can study the debris. Nobody seems to pick up on the fact that the Ark has been saved from stellar doom, perhaps because they got distracted by the revelation that racing through a thick cloud of debris at one third the speed of light is hazardous.
Cooper: “Who monitors the birds?”
Monitor: “I monitor the birds”
Cooper: “…who monitors you?”
Oh, SAAB, you do not deserve to be on this list.
Way back in 1995 I thought Who Monitors the Birds, Sugar Dirt, & The Angriest Angel were epic stuff. It wasn’t just good for its time though. It was damn good tv for any time now that I go back watch them again. Sure, the special effects were just above B5 level, but we are talking the mid-1990s. If you only watched them during scifi reruns in 2003 maybe you couldn’t get past the CGI or something. They story and the characters are still good though. The guys behind the first few seasons of The X-Files (aka: the good ones when the mythology made sense) made S:AAB and it shows. When I first watched the new BSG I thought of it in terms of S:AAB first. S:AAB deserves a place in ground breaking scifi, not a kitsch list like this.
Space above and Beyond was a great show, and doesn’t deserve to be on your list. I truly enjoyed that show. Have you watched the whole season?
Okay okay. Maybe Space:Above and Beyond didn’t deserve to be on the list. Bad Stubby!
“Come Back, Mrs Noah” was actually an ITV programme and did run for its full six episodes. As it was broadcast, it overlapped for half an hour with the initial broadcast of the last series of “Blake’s Seven” – I know this because I hated said last season of “Blake’s Seven” so much that I watch “Come Back, Mrs Noah” instead.
Not that it was very good, but the first episode contained the line, in the middle of a lot of panic among scientists, that, “The gluons are unsticking!” I’ll forgive it a lot for that.
DemetriosX@39 – that’s the one. Thanks.
Helen@38 – Space: Above & Beyond was shown on BBC2 in the mid’90s, rather late at night if memory serves. Come Back Mrs Noah was on BBC in 1978 (check the copyright notice at the end of the credits). Space Rangers was available on video which is how I saw it and I remember reading an article in some SF magazine which lumped it in with Babylon 5 and ST:DS9 because all three were set on space stations!
For some other shows that will be barely remembered (and not even heard of by most Americans) you could have chosen.
Kinvig is another SF comedy and was written by Nigel Kneale. I remember absolutely nothing about it, although I would have probably watched it.
Doomwatch I remember with some fondness. Star Cops ditto.
Moonbase 3 is worth mentioning although I can remember nothing about it.
If you add in children’s genre TV then the field is wide open. Children Of The Stones, Robert’s Robots, TIMESLIP, The Changes, and Ace Of Wands (which got 3 series).
What about Red Dwarf? Anybody? Anybody? Rimmer? The Cat? English Comedy and Sci-Fi = CLASSIC!!!!
While not a bad series, the storyline never got completed in “Tripods”. After 30 years, no one is going to be finishing *that* production.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tripods_(TV_series)