10 TV Shows That Should Have Run Forever (Firefly number one!)

movieseum.com ^ | August 2014 | Unknown

[Enterprise]

Firefly, Twin Peaks, Jericho, Carnivale, My So-Called Life, Undeclared, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip; Pushing Daisies, Veronica Mars, Heroes

[Bogey78O]

The main character, Mal, is very well written.

He’s a reluctant soldier who watched a lot of friends die in an war that was justified yet failed. Hard to write that type and keep him “real”. The show is in a way, people living their lives in the fallout of a war lost to a corrupt government.

[Vermont Lt]

Then the Afghan and Iraq shows are going to be pretty frackin tedious unless they are really, really good.

[Still Thinking]

Nobody mentioned Love Boat!!!!

Aside from the bikinis, it sucked.

[chaosagent]

The clerk was a huge fan and said we needed to watch at least one episode of the TV show “Firefly” first to understand the characters. So I rented a first season disk.

I then bought the series and have watched it many times.
_________________________________________________________

Maybe I’m lost, but wasn’t the ‘first season’ disk the same as the ‘series’ disk?

[GreenHornet]

Married With Children

[dfwgator]

Benny Hill and Python were just what I needed to warp my pre-teen and teenage sense of humor.

Dave Allen at Large as well.

[molson209]

Then the Afghan and Iraq shows are going to be pretty frackin tedious unless they are really, really good.

The Mussies will not approve

[tallyhoe]

Gilligan’s Island? It is still on reruns on KVOS!!! Or Antenna TV!!! Many good old shows on there... Perry Mason, The Fugitive, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Big Valley, Gun Smoke...

[Vermont Lt]

At some point it would have to turn grim. And Shultz would not look good being a jerk.

[jjsheridan5]

1) Firefly — obvious choice
2) Babylon 5 — would have been hard to come up with a new story line that could compete with the first, but a great cast (at least until the last season)
3) Blackadder — so many possibilities

[cuban leaf]

The show was very conservative in its political and social viewpoint.

Throughout the series there is sexual tension between the captain and the incredibly hot “companion”. He constantly ribs her about her basically being a whore but you can tell it’s because he cares and it’s pretty darned obvious they both like each other.

So they go to this planet where a “rogue” companion runs a “whore house” very much as an american old west thing. The companion seems to be a close friend of Firefly’s companion. And she eventually gets to bed the captain.

Our companion sees him coming out of her room the next morning. It’s awkward but she says she is very glad he did it and that her friend was the perfect one to do it with after all these years of him apparently being celebant. And they walk away.

The next scene shows our girl sitting in a corner of a room sobbing her eyes out.

The show does not hide from our humanness and try to champion progessive nonsense about the nature of man and how God wired us. At the end of the day, in spite of all her training, the man she loved slept with someone else. The training was moot.

[McGruff]

This episode scared the crap out of me as a kid.

There was some pretty seriously interesting film-making associated with the Twilight Zone, as you can see if you watch The Invaders. The entire sketch is shot almost without dialogue, with the only speech occurring in the closing minutes. There’s an old lady who lives in a sparse and poor country cabin, who is encounters two tiny aliens and a flying saucer. She manages to kill one and chases the other back to his spaceship. Just as she attacks it with an axe, we hear the alien broadcasting in American-English, warning of a planet inhabited by giants, who would be very difficult to defeat. As the ship is smashed by the giantess, we see the writing on its side: U.S. Air Force Space Probe No. 1.

[LibWhacker]

Goes back to the 80s... Vampire, with Jack Palance. Really liked it. Yanked after a dozen or so episodes in Season 1. Nobody will agree with me because, apparently, I was the only one in the world watching it.

[Squawk 8888]

Enterprise should've kept going IMO. First couple of seasons were a dog but it was cancelled just as it got interesting. Loved Through a Mirror, Darkly.

[IYAS9YAS]

Dave Allen at Large as well.

Never saw that. My local PBS (Podunk, Idaho) never ran it.

[Still Thinking]

The Lost Room. Sort of reminiscent of Warehouse 13.

[chaosagent]

Haven has not been cancelled. Here’s from their Wikipedia page.

“On January 28, 2014, the show was renewed for a split 26-episode fifth season. The first half will be aired in 2014 with the second half in 2015.[6]”

[kevkrom]

Almost no show should ever run "forever"; most shows should have a roadmap leading toward a satisfying conclusion. To continue the "line" requires spin-offs to introduce new cast and situations.

Now, some shows, like "Firefly", and to a lesser extent, "Jeremiah" and "Babylon 5: Crusade", were unjustly killed off for no good reason before they could reach an ending. "Crusade" was already a spin-off in a universe of many possibilities, and the the fact that it was cut off at the knees (and the "Legend of the Rangers" series never made it past pilot) is a shame because as a franchise, it should have gone on for a long time. "Jeremiah" was rushed into an unsatisfying ending when the studio kicked JMS out of the project, but at least it had some kind of ending.

"Stargate SG-1" had a good run, and indeed, may have gone on a season or two too long as it was, but again, spin-offs were possible. "Atlantis" was good, not as good as the original, but good enough to keep the concept alive. ("Universe", from all accounts, is useless, though.)

Some shows should absolutely have a definitive end. "The Prisoner", for example, no longer has any need to continue once Number Six finally figures out what's going on.

Some very few shows have it built into themselves to continue forever. "Doctor Who" is the prime example - the decision they made, when they replaced Hartnell with Troughton a few years into its run, to not try to make him the same, but to encourage the differences, allows the show to continually re-invent itself while sticking with the same basic concepts and backstory (and with time travel involved, changing the backstory when they need to isn't all that different).

[cuban leaf]

My daughter was a nut on “Friends” so we used netflix to watch the entire series (ten years?) in a few months. It was very revealing of why the show had to go off the air.

To wit, what was funny when the characters were 21 was NOT funny when they were 31. They didn’t really grow up.