Five Cancelled TV Shows You Should Watch

Gone are the days of television producers holding out for that mythical 100th episode in order to guarantee a syndicated afterlife following cancellation. With DVD rentals, Netflix and Hulu.com, On-demand services from your cable provider, and entire cable channels devoted to running and rerunning every old TV show ever produced, no TV show is ever truly gone.

Even so-called failed shows, shows with no ratings and a single season (or half season) run, can have real impact, often years after airing only a few episodes on broadcast TV. Shows like Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, or Joss Whedon’s Firefly can meet untimely ends, but still stick around long enough to find their audiences, sometimes 10 years after their cancellation. Some of these shows were ahead of their time, some were just too idiosyncratic to find their audiences, many were ambitious and brilliant but flawed, and others just aired in the wrong timeslot or on the wrong channel.

Today I’m looking at 5 recent additions to the list of my favourite ‘failed’ shows. I’ll be sticking with shows of 1-hour length, and leave the sitcoms to a future post.

Fall Season 2013: A Look at Five New Sitcoms

Sean Giambrone and George Segal on The Goldbergs, now on ABC

Even in this era of cable television when a series can premiere at any point on the calendar, September, when the major networks premiere the majority of their new shows, remains a special time for TV viewers. Most of the shows you see this fall won't be here come January, but with a crop of almost 50 new shows coming your way in the next few weeks, it may be difficult to figure out which to check out and which to pass on. Today I'm looking at five new comedies which recently showed up on our airwaves, some more promising than others: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox), Trophy Wife (ABC), The Goldbergs (ABC), The Crazy Ones (CBS), and Dads (Fox).

Joie de Mort: Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet

Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant star in Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet.

Early in February, Netflix premiered a new Netflix Original comedy called Santa Clarita Diet. There are many words I could have put in front of the word comedy just now – dark, family, fantasy, horror, zombie, etc. – but none of them on their own would adequately describe this dryly funny, regularly gory, often romantic, and entirely delightful new show. Created by Victor Fresco, Santa Clarita Diet stars Timothy Olyphant (Justified) and Drew Barrymore as Joel and Sheila Hammond, a realtor couple raising their 16-year-old daughter Abby (Australian actor/playwright Liv Hewson) in the very white, button-downed Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita, California. High school sweethearts in their 19th year of marriage, Joel and Sheila have clearly settled into a perfectly agreeable rut. ("I wish I was bold," Sheila muses to herself early in the first episode. "I'd like to be 20 percent bolder. No, more: 80 percent. No . . . that's too much. ") Over breakfast they bicker amiably about parenting strategies, kitchen appliances, and new cars, and spend their days hawking suburban homes to potential buyers – until one day, in the middle of an open house, Sheila unexpectedly dies for a few minutes before waking up with a taste for human flesh.

There are many surprising and wonderful things about Santa Clarita, though I don't expect that the presence of zombies is among them. Prior to Santa Clarita's premiere, I believed (and hoped) we were on the other side of the too-popular zombie phenomenon, with two Walking Dead series on AMC and the more consistently entertaining iZombie beginning its third season on The CW on April 4th. But Santa Clarita has learned all the right lessons from the Walking Deads and iZombie, bringing not only brains (sorry about that!) but heart to the story it is telling. It certainly brings the gore – of the cannibalistic, flesh-eating variety – but frankly there's more genuine horror in an average episode of Breaking Bad than in the entirety of Santa Clarita's 10-episode first season. With more in common with a midlife-crisis family comedy than anything in the horror genre, the show has a fairly simple premise, a tight ensemble cast, and a confident sense of its own fun.

Network Shows Well Worth Watching: How To Get Away With Murder, Quantico and The Grinder

Viola Davis in ABC's How to Get Away with Murder.

This review contains spoilers.
 
Perusing the end of the year Best of ranked lists for television, I noticed the continuing trend of almost everybody’s lists – from Time to Entertainment Weekly – consisting almost entirely of cable TV series, with only the occasional network show, such as Empire or The Last Man on Earth, thrown into the mix. I get that; the TV critics find the lack of censorship and unfettered content that is de rigueur on cable television to be enormously appealing. But that doesn’t mean that network fare is worthless, even if characters say "bullcrap" instead of "bullshit" and nudity can only be implied. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a world where only network TV, Canadian or American, existed, but my viewing habits still skew towards broadcast programming, though they don’t make up all my viewing. (I eagerly await the fourth season of The Americans which begins on FX on March 16.) Three of the best bets currently on the networks – How to Get Away with Murder, Quantico and The Grinder – prove, too, that variations on familiar themes can be wrung even there, where novelty is not expected to exist.