CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 10/19/07

The Decade That Could Have Been:
Seven Great One-Season Wonders

By peter clines

As the new fall schedule kicks into gear, CS Weekly looks back at some older shows that perhaps fell under the network axe a little too early.

As a wave of new television programs hit the channels, you can't help but think about how fast shows come and go in recent years. Airing a full first season has become an extreme rarity, with any weakness in the ratings punishable by immediate replacement with reruns of Dancing With America's Next Pussycat Survivor. For a while, genre shows tended to end up on the block first, but these days almost no show is safe. You know it's getting ridiculous if Family Guy can make a joke just by listing off the sheer number of shows one network had cancelled over a two-year period.

Now, in all fairness, some of these programs will never, ever be missed, and in a just world whoever approved putting The Secret Diaries of Desmond Pfeiffer on the air is now stocking shelves at a Target somewhere. However, in the desperate, frenzied rush to have absolutely nothing but massive hit shows on the air, there were more than a few series that carried tons of potential that never had time to be realized. And in almost every case, a legion of sad fans will tell you the idea was just too good for television.

Firefly
2002, Fox
Created and written by Joss Whedon
Written by Tim Minear, Ben Edlund, and Jose Molina

What It Was:
In the 26th century, mankind has spread out to the stars and terraformed an entire solar system, creating dozens of worlds within relatively easy travel of each other. Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) was a resistance fighter who fought against the formation of the Alliance and now ekes out a living on the fringe border towns of this small space empire. With a crew of veteran soldiers, hired guns, and other collected travelers, Reynolds and his "Firefly" class cargo ship, Serenity, work as transporters, smugglers, or gunrunners while dodging Alliance members intent on retrieving one of his passengers (Summer Glau).

What You Missed: A solid sci-fi setting.
Stories are real if the characters are real. If characters are real, it follows that their world is, and so the real gem of this show was how perfect the world (or worlds) of Firefly had been created. Just as Joss Whedon set down the rules of his cult-favorite "Buffy-verse," every detail of this series was carefully planned out, from the history to the physics (one notable point was Whedon's insistence on the scientifically accurate lack of sound in a vacuum, so the ship's engines were always silent in space). An interplanetary western, Firefly worked classic frontier elements into a futuristic setting without ever seeming clumsy or contrived. The world of Firefly was the future, but a future close enough that the people and the technology were still well within the audience's understanding. Seen in order, the episodes draw out a solid arc through their world.

Keen Eddie
2003, Fox
Created and written by J. H. Wyman
Written by Steven Kane, Jeff Vlaming, Richard Dresser, Robert Palm, Andi Bushell, and Jim Praytor

What It Was: Eddie Arlett (Mark Valley) is a New York detective who goes to London to follow up on a drug bust and ends up staying on as a special transfer to Scotland Yard. Now teamed up with the libidinous Inspector Pippin (Julian Rhind-Tutt) and answering to a no-nonsense commander (Colin Salmon), the blunt and wisecracking American has to negotiate Britain's subtle cultural and political differences while putting his American spin on catching ruthless soccer fans, international jewel thieves, and gentleman pickpockets. He also has to deal with his landlord's often-furious daughter (a then-unknown Sienna Miller), who's dropped out of school to live secretly in her parents' London apartment—which they've rented to Eddie.

What You Missed: Razor-sharp storytelling.
Walking an incredible tightrope every episode, Keen Eddie was an amazing balancing act of genres. Part police procedural, part comedy, part drama, and even part sex romp, the scripts managed to dance around easy classification by switching gears with less effort than most shows cut to commercial. By creating strong characters who could be completely believable in moments of crisis or absurdity, the writers gave themselves the freedom to cover any topic. Eddie could be chasing a sociopathic stalker one minute, then trying to escape the amorous embraces of his singing-diva victim the next. The dialogue could be amazingly blunt [such as the jaw-dropping lines regularly delivered by the commander's alluring secretary (Rachael Buckley)], while at other times subtle and filled with unspoken meaning. Every episode provided laughs, thrills, and even a bit of budding romance that proved shouting "I hate you" can have many different meanings.

Miracles
2003, ABC
Created and written by Richard Hatem and Michael Petroni
Written by David Greenwalt, David Graziano, Chris Brancato, Zack Estrin, Chris Levinson, Bert Salke, and Christian Taylor

What It Was: Paul Callan (Skeet Ulrich) is a young priest in charge of researching the hundreds of reports of miracles the Vatican receives every year, and the constant work of refuting them has worn him down. What breaks him, however, is when he finds evidence of a true, holy miracle, and the church refuses to believe him. That's when he meets Alva Keel (Angus McFayden), a defrocked priest who has been investigating the dark things of the world without the church's help. Now, with Keel's partner, Evelyn (Marisa Ramirez), they investigate mysterious events and dark rumors, all of which hint at a coming apocalypse.

What You Missed: The stuff of water-cooler talk.
Just over a year and a half before the crash of Oceanic Flight 815 made mysterious and creepy shows all the rage, Richard Hatem (Supernatural) created this exceptionally dark series that kept drifting back to the phrase "God Is Now Here," and all the permutations of those words. Each episode of the show was peppered with foreshadowing and clues that hinted at the epic story going on just out of sight of both the characters and the audience. Like its modern-day island counterpart, the writers realized the half-glimpsed mystery behind each week's plot could be even more compelling than the actual stories. People didn't just talk about this show, they compared notes and theories. And with the number of interpretations on the vast amount of Biblical subject matter, they could have been at it for a long time.

John Doe
2002, Fox
Created and written by Brendan Camp & Mike Thompson
Written by Gretchen J. Berg, Russell Friend, Aaron Harberts, Garrett Lerner, Michael Berns, Geoffrey Neigher, Matt Pyken, Timothy J.Lea, Adele Lim, Gardener Stern, and David Manson

What It Was:
A man (Dominic Purcell) wakes up naked on an island off the coast of Seattle and comes to realize he has complete amnesia, unable to remember even the simplest facts about himself, his history, or his personality. However, he knows everything else—every word of every book, every language, every scientific theory and principle—literally everything else. Taking the somewhat appropriate name of John Doe, he spends his days trying to discover some clue to his real identity, playing piano in a local bar run by his new friend, Digger (William Forsythe), and helping the Seattle police (John Marshall Jones and Jayne Brook) solve some of their most baffling crimes.

What You Missed: A rock-hard character concept.
One of the biggest hurdles any new show faces is introducing the cast of characters and establishing back story while still moving forward. Brendan Camp and Mike Thompson turned this problem into the premise of their whole show, with a main character whose existence begins with the first minute of episode one. He meets himself at the same moment as the audience, and so John Doe—both the show and the character—has no choice but to move constantly forward. Plus, there was just something compelling and endearing about a man who can recite the Moscow phonebook in Russian, tell you the number of dimples on a golf ball, and knows how many funeral homes are in Seattle's Little Saigon district, but has no idea if he likes mustard or sauerkraut better on a hotdog…or even if he likes hotdogs. While the rest of the cast and the extended story arc of the mysterious Phoenix Group were excellent, every episode was really about the pleasure of watching John rattle off the most obscure facts and statistics pertinent to their current case, only to be baffled later as he tries to decide if he likes his furniture or not.

Profit
1996, Fox
Created and written by
Written by David Greenwalt, John McNamara

What It Was:
Jim Profit (Adrian Pasdar) is the newest vice-president at Gracen & Gracen, a sprawling, multinational company that makes the Umbrella Corporation look like Greenpeace. Even in a world of sharks, however, Profit is a ruthless and complete amoral manipulator, using his skills against his coworkers almost more often than he does against the competition. He engineers the crisis that cements his place in the corporate structure, manipulates the therapy sessions of the company's head of security, and even buys off his own drug-addicted stepmother (Lisa Blount) who plans to expose his past. Then the fun really begins as more people realize Profit may not be the good-natured, smiling saint he appears to be…

What You Missed: The bad guy as protagonist.
Years before The Sopranos and a decade before Dexter, David Greenwalt (Angel) and John McNamara (Fastlane) sold the idea of a villain as a show's main character. Not just a J.R. Ewing-type villain, but a full-on, creepy, borderline sociopath (the network actually requested that some aspects of his personality be scaled back) in a show that broke almost every existing taboo of the time. Unlike many negative characters, Profit actually became less likeable as we learned more about his past, his twisted need to sleep in a refrigerator box, and perhaps even a murder or three. And yet there was still a sort of guilty pleasure in seeing how happily this man repeatedly committed extortion, blackmail, or even kidnapping, often dragging other cast members along for the ride and down to his level. Just as actors love to play a good villain, audiences loved to watch him.

Wonderfalls
2004, Fox
Created and written by Bryan Fuller and Todd Holland
Written by Tim Minear, Gretchen J. Berg, Aaron Harberts, Krista Vernoff, Dan E. Fesman, Liz Garcia, Harry Victor, Todd Holland

What It Was: Jaye (Caroline Dhavernas) is a gleefully antagonistic young woman working at a Niagara Falls gift shop with a manager several years younger than her, living in a less-than-glorious trailer park, and dodging her wealthy and highly dysfunctional family. And if all that wasn't bad enough, many of the different toy animals in her store have started to talk to her. One day a bit of odd advice from the wax lion or a suggestion from the brass monkey, the next day a vague tip from the wind-up penguin. Far from being signs of early dementia, however (well, okay, maybe aside from being…), her tiny animal muses are guiding her to help others and improve her own life in the process.

What You Missed: Dialogue that took names and kicked ass.
The joy of this show wasn't so much seeing Jaye being guided to various acts of kindness that will better the world, but her snappy, almost non-stop commentary on the journey. She was the lost Gilmore Girl. She would douse her friends, family, or anyone else who would give her an opening with a stream of blunt, matter-of-fact dialogue that would usually sink her a foot or so deeper than she'd been standing before she opened her mouth. While her friends and family got in on the verbal action often enough, Jaye carried the show as a borderline anti-heroine, following, fighting, and often completely misinterpreting her animal guides. Wonderfalls made banter seem effortless and helped bring about a style of fast, non-sequitur dialogue that people still try desperately to master today.

Drive
2007, Fox
Created and written by Tim Minear (again, the poor bastard)
Written by Ben Queen, Craig Silverstein

What It Was: For as long as there have been cars, there has been the Race. An annual, highly illegal cross-country road race that has phenomenal rewards for the winning driver, possible death for those who fail, and huge money for the people behind it all. Alex Tully (Nathan Fillion again, the poor bastard) has been blackmailed into competing when someone kidnaps his wife. His partner (Kristin Lehman) wants revenge on the organizers. A cancer-ridden scientist (Dylan Baker) sees it as a last chance to bond with his daughter (Emma Stone) and make sure she's provided for. There's also a desperate mother (Melanie Lynskey), an Iraq vet and his girlfriend (Riley Smith and Mircea Monroe), an ex con and his affluent half-brother (Kevin Allejandro and J.D. Pardo)—the list goes on. And every one of them is waiting for their cell phone to ring with a clue to their next checkpoint.

What You Missed: High concept at its highest.
Honestly, could anyone come up with a more high-concept, longer-lasting idea than this? You get the action of a chase story, the character development of a road trip movie, and the reality-show appeal of a huge pool of contestants slowly being whittled down as they fail to reach checkpoints or do poorly in "elimination rounds" that really are as final as they sound. And since it's an annual event, the writers can do a very solid, one-season story arc, because next year will be another Race with new contestants. Much like 24, the show had almost limitless longevity, since every season could change the basic rulebook for stories and introduce a new cast of characters.

And while I may be a bit biased, it's worth mentioning, as first runner-up, Sci-Fi Channel's The Chronicle. Blacklisted journalist Tucker Burns (Chad Willet) takes the only job he can get, working for a supermarket tabloid that reports poltergeists, government conspiracies, alien visitors…and turns out to be 100% true. With scripts that spanned bizarre premises from a convention for vampire Elvis impersonators to a monster under Central Park that's attracted to cell phones, almost no idea was so outrageous or goofy that it didn't seem somehow plausible on this show, giving it limitless story potential.

Ironically, out of all these shows, the two that ran a full season (John Doe and The Chronicle) are still not available on DVD, and alas neither is Drive. However, if you find out one of your friends still has them somehow stashed on their Tivo or some old VHS tapes, it's definitely worth buying him or her a pizza and breadsticks as you sit down to watch.

And, please, give me a call when you do.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

Firefly, Wonderfalls courtesy 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Keen Eddie courtesy Paramount Home Video
John Doe courtesy Fox

From the Trenches
Working screenwriters discuss in their own words a particular aspect of screenwriting, from the mechanics of writing to the personal and professional impact that writing has had on their lives. > VIEW ARCHIVE

The Big Picture

Features that cover all aspects of screenwriting, from our "Seven Best" lists to analysis of old favorites and new classics. > VIEW ARCHIVE

Weekend Read
Film, book, web site and technology reviews from a writer’s perspective. How can these items help a writer on his or her journey, or make that journey more enjoyable? > VIEW ARCHIVE

DVD Review of the Day
DVD reviews from a writer’s point of view. What aspects of this script and features of this DVD illuminate the writing, development, and storytelling process? > VIEW ARCHIVE