This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's also the final Thursday of the month, so that means a TV-related edition. This time out, the theme is "lukewarm second seasons". That is, shows that had a good opening season followed by a not-so-good second season. This was a bit tough for me, so in the end I decided to pick three shows that I think all got canceled midway through the second season:
I'll Fly Away (1991-1993). Sam Waterston plays a widowed (technically the wife is in a sanatorium to start the series and dies midway through the first season) North Carolina district attorney dealing with the earlier years of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Regina Taylor plays the family's common-sense maid. As you might guess, the show touched on Important Issues, but in the second season it got even more blunt and preachy. After the show's cancellation, PBS produced a two-hour TV movie to wrap up the story arc.
The Mole (2001-2002). Anderson Cooper hosted this competition show in which the producers had one of the contestants be "the mole", a player who may or may not be sabotaging the other contestants, with the others having to figure out who the mole is and getting eliminated if they don't know enough. I don't think the second season was that much worse than the first, although for whatever reason it got pulled midway through the second season. Well, there was the twist about polling the remaining players about which fellow contestant they liked least, and then offering that contestant a cash payout to leave, which seems like a lousy twist. ABC eventually rebooted it, with celebrities, which is even worse.
Twin Peaks (1990-1991). Apparently, this may not have been cancelled during the second season, as the first season was a mini-season. I was a freshman in college when the show was on, and it was a huge deal among certain people, although I never got it, and it just seemed to keep getting weirder and weirder.
1 comment:
The second Twin Peaks season really got a bit off track. Always made me a little bit sad because the first one was so good!
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