"It's the End Of the World As We Know It," Vol. 5

And Pt. 2 of the best "one-season-and-done" gems you can seek out (or fondly remember) as we avoid reality for our sanity.

I think we’ve done enough of these to just get right into it, so all I will say is that you can check the archive for more lists and more options for things to watch as we collectively turn our heads from mayhem, fear and stupidity and keep the better parts of our hope and happiness intact.

Also a gentle suggestion:

Now, about those killed too early TV shows, the One and Dones of the world. If you missed the first part of this little sub category, here’s your reminder:

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There are a lot of excellent shows on that first list and a fair bit of nostalgia that seemed to hit many people right in the feels. This second part — of three total — is a little more random and falls into the “deep cuts” vein.

Let’s go.

“My So-Called Life.” 1994-95. ABC. 19 episodes. Streaming: Hulu, Disney+.

Welcome to the show that everybody couldn’t stop talking about or referencing, mostly after it was long gone, yet another in the largest TV pile ever — the One and Dones, murdered by bad management.

But wow, did this series spark nostalgia and, as it was dissected, just how easy it was for network television to overlook a gem (and, I would guess by association, just how how demanding the numbers were for a “hit” show to make it. Those were the days — people would kill for ALL of these canceled numbers now).

For the record, “My So-Called Life” was before my time as a TV critic. And mostly during this era you could find me as a music critic, about as far from a television as one could be.

“My So-Called Life” was the breakout performance of Claire Danes, of course, and the continuation of the heft that Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick (“Thirtysomething”) still had on the industry, tapping Winnie Holzman, a writer on both “Thirtysomething” and “The Wonder Years,” and you could argue that Holzman was wired into a couple of generations and also had the smarts to tell Herkovitz and Zwick that the main character should be a female, not male. Yay for that.

While “My So-Called Life” wasn’t the first series to tackle coming of age, it gets credit for being vastly more real and relatable to teens of the era, especially girls, and there’s a line one could draw from this show through to much more adult fare that centers on personal feelings approached without cliches in future years, much of it on cable. In that, it changed the landscape.

“Rubicon.” 2010. AMC. 13 episodes. Streaming: AMC+.

Along with “Rectify” and “In Treatment,” the tortoise paced “Rubicon” was a building block for the dead-before-it-started Slow TV movement (which I loved and maybe coined). For a quick take on “Rubicon,” I give you this from my early days at THR, where I also mention a pre-canceled series called “Terriers” that made last week’s list among other caught-in-time mentions (series premiere numbers for “The Walking Dead”!).

Ah, good memories.

I’m a sucker for espionage shows so “Rubicon” was a slam dunk, even though I got a sense pretty early that it was doomed to not be renewed. If you get AMC+, you should start that immediately and marinate in the slowness of it all.

“Giri/Haji.” 2020. Netflix. 8 episodes. Streaming: Netflix.

Count this among the ultimate series that I was turned onto by readers of this very Substack who, through persistence, often break through the fog of me. I absolutely loved it. By the time I watched it, the series was already canceled. Heartbreaking but also something you should watch, like tonight. It’s sitting right there! While I never did a full review on “Giri/Haji,” I wrote about it a lot (check the archives) mostly about the aforementioned love of it all (writing, concept, acting, potential, etc.) and also to kick myself for waiting so long. Don’t be like me. You can burn through the eight episodes pretty quickly and it’s a lovely, touching and sneakily funny series.

“Robbery Homicide Division.” 2002-03. CBS. 13 episodes (three did not air, frustratingly). Streaming: No.

Series creator Barry Schindel was mostly a producer but had a hand in a lot of mostly formulaic TV series (he only wrote the pilot of “RHD”), but this series was executive produced by Michael Mann and starred Tom Sizemore (and was, depending on who you listen to, the beginning of the long spiral end for Sizemore). But holy hell did Sizemore act the shit out of this role. I remember thinking it was one of the most gritty and different network shows at the time, far better than “Law & Order: SVU” which nevertheless crushed it in the ratings. In those days, decisions were made quick.

But the eclectic writers on this thing? Whoa.

How about Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad,” duh), Todd A. Kessler (“Damages,” “Bloodline,” “Sopranos”), Jan Oxenberg, who not only wrote the episode of “Relatively” that had the first lesbian kiss in prime time but she worked on series as diverse as “Chicago Hope,” “Once and Again,” “Cold Case,” “In Plain Sight,” “Pretty Little Liars” etc. Frank Spotnitz (“The X-Files,” “The Man In the High Castle,” etc.), Glenn Kessler (“Damages,” “Bloodline”), and Gustave Reininger (“Crime Story”!).

Crazy.

In those days, wow, you could get a LOT of work if you were plugged into network television, and you could occasionally rock the boat before getting canceled. Anyway, I wish this series would have kept going but apparently Sizemore’s spiral (and some gossip about the unaired episodes being, uh, pretty bad) prevented that.

“Sons & Daughters.” 2006. ABC. 11 episodes (one unaired). Streaming: No.

My recollection of this show is that nobody thought it was funnier than I did, basking in its daring (for network television at the time) mix of improv ad-libs and a loosely written script. I felt like was wandering the Earth, trying to get people to watch. It was created for American television (based off and Australian concept) by Fred Goss and Nick Holly, with Goss also playing the lead. I remember loving an older Max Gail in this series and all I want to do now is look in my cold storage to find some random DVDs and maybe report back on whether it still makes me die laughing or not.

Welcome to my home, er, box.

“Profit.” 1996. Fox. Eight episodes (I don’t think they all aired; definitely not at the time, but possibly later on Chiller and/or in another country; which is what happened with “Sons & Daughters.” Streaming: No and probably never.

Oh, the memory is pretty clear on this one because I was very new on the TV critic beat but I was at least savvy enough to know that this dank piece of bleakness was probably going to go nowhere, even though I loved it because it was, frankly, just unlike anything that had come before it at the time.

These are the things that stood out:

1. Adrian Pasdar played a greedy, obsessed, win-at-all-costs junior executive willing to kill to climb the corporate ladder at a multinational corporation that was, at best, horrible, at worst, evil. He made tons of money. He was Wall Street bro culture personified and then….went to sleep naked every night in a cardboard box in his beautiful modernist home, mostly because that’s where he was raised — in a box — where his father would toss in food when he remembered. The box was stamped with the Gracen & Gracen, where our boy Jim Profit is now said power exec. Pasdar positively dripped with attractive evil.

2. I had just started on this TV beat — and I call it that because I covered it like a beat, not just as a critic — and was constantly talking with executives trying to figure out How Things Worked (which, for those of you who were paying attention, was clearly the precursor to love of Failure Analysis). This particular press tour I was talking to John Matoian, president of Fox and I asked him why Fox had canceled “Profit” so quickly — after just four episodes (of eight, total, though the pilot was two hours). With disdain in his voice as he recalled the show, Matoian said viewers were not only tuning out in droves within 15 minutes of the start of the show — a metric he said they don’t normally put much faith in, preferring to wait for 30 minutes — but that “Profit” was clearly making people “viscerally hate it,” and that executives there basically knew it was dead after 30 minutes (with another 90 to go!). I loved that talk. It taught me a lot.

3. John McNamara, who co-created the series with David Greenwalt (they wrote six of the eight episodes), was clearly taken with my passion for the show and we talked on the phone about the unaired episodes (and later in person). One day, a box of VHS tapes showed up— all the rest of the episodes, sent from McNamara.

I don’t have access to everyone else’s reviews but the series was mostly well received and I remember kind of losing my mind for it, cognizant that in my relatively short time as a TV critic I hadn’t seen anything remotely like it on network television. That remained true for a long time and now “Profit” is one of the great cult series that people try to track down on DVD.

“Love Monkey.” 2006. CBS. Eight episodes (first three on CBS; last five on VH1). Streaming: No, and likely never because of the music.

OK, this one hurt. By the time “Love Monkey” came out, I had lost about 18 pounds via the sweat I was using to beat the living shit out of pretty much every CBS series I saw. Had I kept reviewing network television for much longer I would have been the Thin White Duke. (Thankfully, I eventually opted out and focused primarily on cable and then streaming, which is why I am healthy today).

I love music. “Love Monkey” was about an A&R guy in the music industry — exactly the kind of A&R guy that a former music critic would appreciate. It was perfect and Tom Cavanagh (“Ed”) was perfect as the lead, appropriately called Tom. CBS killed it after three episodes. It later turned up on corporate sibling VH1. CBS execs said of course I would love a show that lost than three million viewers by the time the third (and final) episode aired. I said of course you would give up on a quality show because you’d seen so few of them on your network before. We were quite the pair, CBS and I.

“Love Monkey” featured Teddy Geiger as Wayne, the ideal singer-songwriter Tom’s character wanted to sign and Geiger, a rising teen idol, would have a huge real-world hit in “For You I Will (Confidence),” that actually became the series theme song as the story followed the success of Wayne panning out in the business, validating Tom. It was a fortuitous development — except by then the series was canceled. Geiger transitioned in 2017 and is still recording and writing songs for others. “Love Monkey” (I’m sure the name didn’t help with the CBS crowd) also featured appearances by Aimee Mann, Ben Folds, LeAnn Rimes, James Blunt, Dr. John, John Mellencamp, Lisa Loeb and Natasha Bedingfield, among others. So don’t expect it to ever stream, sadly.