The 10 Best Short-Lived Series From The Past Decade

We've all been there, finding ourselves attached to a new series and really getting into it only to discover that the rest of the world doesn't share our enthusiasm for the show.  A cancellation headline hits us like a punch in the gut and our mind scrambles for any possible lifeline that may be possible to save the show.  As television programming--even network TV which for all the badmouthing it takes from pay-per-view-cable snobs has offered more sophisticated storytelling in recent years--it's become easier to really, really get into a show when its legs get cut off in a way that wasn't quite as tangible as when more conventional series got canceled 25 years ago.  With that in mind, here's an homage to the 10 series from the last decade that were let go after one full season or less that left the biggest mark when they were formally canceled.

#10. "Life on Mars" (2008-2009)--A great cast featuring Harvey Keitel, Jason O'Mara, and Michael Imperioli along with some very clever writing helped make this police drama set in 1973 New York City sparkle, its gimmick being a modern-day cop suddenly wakes up 36 years before his time and applies his modern sensibilities working a beat within the framework of the rules (or lack thereof) of the mid-1970s, unable to understand why he's lost in this time warp.  It was comparable to "Quantum Leap" in a number of ways even though the character stayed in the same role week to week.   The series only lasted 17 episodes but was a lot of fun while it was on.  For better or worse, it lasted long enough to have closure and explain the context of the lead character's time warp, insane and unsatisfying (to most) as the resolution ultimately was.

#9. "The Good Guys" (2010)--Matt Nix, the showrunner of USA's long-running action-adventure show "Burn Notice" came to network TV in the summer of 2010 on Fox with a silly but fun cop show about a hapless middle-aged detective who remained on the police department payroll for decades exclusively because he happened to save the mayor's daughter's life in the 1970s.  Bradley Whitford played the annoying and incompetent Dan Stark, partnered with youthful straight-man Colin Hanks.  There were moments the show got too silly for me, but it brought back memories of the classic over-the-top police comedy "Sledge Hammer!" from the 1980s, only with the budget of a modern action show.  It lasted 20 episodes which was probably a sufficient run for the one-joke series but was a lot of fun while it lasted.

#8. "Vegas" (2012-2013)--CBS pulled out all the stops in 2012 with a period piece set in 1960s Las Vegas featuring a collision of worlds between the cowboy law enforcement culture represented by Dennis Quaid and the emerging mob culture represented by thuggish casino boss played by Michael Chiklis.  Carrie-Anne Moss and Jason O'Mara supplemented a strong cast and the three-dimensional chess game playing out between Quaid and Chiklis was the backbone of the show.  And it started out with considerable success, getting boffo ratings Tuesday nights.  But at some point in the midseason ratings started to dip and CBS wanted to test out a new show in that time slot, relegating "Vegas" to Friday nights where ratings collapsed and where the creative energy began to wane, reverting to standard CBS procedural fare.  It was a bad combination and led to a cancellation that seemed unthinkable only a couple of months earlier.  "Vegas" actually finished as the #20-rated show of the 2012-2013 season yet still got canceled because of the late-season collapse.  Frankly though, if the showrunners were running out of inspiration to the degree those last several outings indicated, the network probably did them a favor by not bringing it back.

#7. "Game of Silence" (2016)--This is kind of the show that inspired my list since it is ongoing (four remaining episodes) yet was just formally canceled by NBC last week.   The premise is an original, with a group of adult males pushing 40 who were involved in a fatal car accident while joyriding when they were young boys and were sentenced to a boys detention facility called Quitman that was a peyton place of abuse and pedophilia run by a monstrous warden who is now running for Congress on a "family values" platform.  The four men decide to reunite to try to take down the warden and all the corrupt and enabling guards on his payroll.  Six episodes in, it's been very suspenseful and well-crafted, with a number of nicely played twists and revelations that make for great television.  I hope there's some closure at the end of its limited run this summer because the series deserves it.

#6.  "Traveler" (2007)--TV was really starting to get good again in the mid-2000s and the success of modern classics such as "24" and "Prison Break" seemed to inspire a new wave of fast-paced and suspenseful serialized shows.  One of the best was "Traveler" which opened with a trio of college guys partaking in what they thought was an innocent prank that led to a terrorist bombing at the Smithsonian, with an intense manhunt to follow and a wave of plot twists that played out nicely.  I'm not sure what ABC's problem with this show was but they sidelined it until summer and then cut its episode order from 13 to 8 before it even aired.  It generally got good reviews so it wasn't like I was the only one who found this show interesting.  Whatever the case, it ended with an unresolved whimper in July 2007, never to be heard from again.  It deserved at least 13 episodes, if not 22, to fully play out the storyline.

#5. "Chicago Code" (2011)--Fox got in on the wave of harder-edged cable-style police dramas back in 2011 and had a winner on their hands with the three-dimensional "Chicago Code", documenting the seedy underbelly of corrupt local government machinations in the city of Chicago, particularly the brilliantly corrupt Alderman Ronin Gibbons played by character actor Delroy Lindo who used an elaborate ring of patronage to keep a tight grip on friends and enemies alike.  Jennifer Beals played the new Police Superintendent who naively tried to do right and change the crooked culture of the department and its connection with corrupt politicians (none more than Gibbons).  Great performances throughout and it was always thrilling to see the chess match between the police and Alderman Gibbons, who always seemed to be one step ahead of them.  It lasted an all-too-brief 13 episodes following its premiere in February 2011 and regrettably did not get renewed for the next season.  I figured for sure it would come out on DVD and was hopeful to at least pick that up, but strangely, it never did get released.

#4. "Chase" (2010-2011)--Even with the reinvention of the crime drama/action show on network television in the 2000s, most of the shows were more serialized and had a different feel than the 80s era action shows from my youth that I so enjoyed.  But perhaps more than any other show of the last decade, "NBC's Chase" stood out as a throwback to the action shows of a bygone era, featuring a team of US Marshals chasing after a new target each week in Texas.  The cast was solid, the stories were clever, and the action was well-produced for network TV.  The show got off to a decent start ratings-wise but didn't survive a timeslot change from Monday to Wednesday and was rather abruptly cancelled in January 2011.  There were five episodes left in the can that eventually aired on Saturday nights in the spring of 2011, and I'll have to concede those last episodes didn't live up to the standard of the early episodes and perhaps made NBC's decision to cancel easier.  I was pleased to get 18 episodes out of the show, most of which were great, but still would have liked to have seen what the show could have done with a second season had the opportunity arose.  I'd have been even more pleased if it came out on DVD, which unfortunately it did not.

#3. "Do No Harm"  (2013)--Few shows in recent years have had as absurd of a premise as the NBC drama "Do No Harm", a modern-day take on Jekyll and Hyde with actor Steven Pasquale playing the split personality role of righteous brain surgeon Jason and ruthless drug dealer Ian, but the previews looked so ridiculous I just had to check it out.  Sadly, I was one of few who did as the ratings were absolutely disastrous, but the country missed out on a masterfully crafted 13-week adventure with outstanding performances that made you laugh, roll your eyes, and sit on the edge of your seat in gripping suspense almost every episode.  NBC pulled the poorly rated series after only two weeks but I kept a close eye on it knowing it would likely return in the summer to burn off the remaining episodes, and thankfully it did, playing out its entire run firing on all creative cylinders.  I'm almost glad this show only lasted 13 episodes because the premise would not have lent itself to an extended run, but was it ever a hoot while it lasted, a throwback to a prior age of series but adjusted for modern viewer sensibilities.  I'd give up my first-born to get this series on DVD but it'll never happen.

#2. "Harper's Island"  (2009)--Why is it that the best shows of the last decade got such piss-poor ratings?  Such was the case with the promising CBS murder mystery which premiered to heavy promotion in the spring of 2009 in a decent time slot but did so badly in its first three episodes it was shipped off to the Saturday night ghetto for the remainder of its 13-episode run.  The show was dark and gory unlike anything else I've seen on network TV, featuring a wedding party on an isolated Pacific Coast island with an ugly history and a resurfaced serial killer offing the members of the wedding party "one by one" in devilishly elaborate and clever ways.  The cast was great and the slow burn of the narrative was nicely played all around, taking several episodes before the wedding party began to realize the extent of the danger they were in.  In most cases, serialized mysteries such as this disappoint in their resolution, but after flirting with a resolution that would have seemed unsatisfying, they came up with a great curveball in the finale that just about nobody saw coming.  I'm rewatching this show on DVD right now and enjoying it immensely.  There's no way it should have gone beyond its original 13 episodes, but it's a damn shame that so few people were around to watch those 13 because they would have liked it.

#1. "Gang Related" (2014)--I was pretty excited when Fox revived "24" for the summer of 2014 for an abbreviated 12-episode season, but if you had told me that "24" would only be the second best show Fox would air in the summer of 2014 and ultimately get upstaged by the action-drama "Gang Related", I'd have questioned your mental health, but that's exactly what happened and it was pretty clear from the pilot that "Gang Related" was my kind of show.  Terry O'Quinn and Cliff Curtis brought some minor league star power to the cast, but all of the performances were good and the show's central premise was what sold it, focused on the conflicted loyalties of Ryan Lopez, a young cop taken in by the Acosta crime family as an orphaned young boy who was then foisted into the Los Angeles Police Department to work as a double agent and do the bidding of the crime family.  Lopez was a good guy trapped in an impossible situation, and had an endless litany of suspensefully nervous moments trying to work both sides and not blow his cover.  Cable snobs looked down their noses at it as being a ripoff of "The Shield", and having never seen that series I can't comment on whether it is or isn't, but I know compelling TV when I see it and "Gang Related" was 13 weeks of uninterrupted awesome with some of the best hours of programming I've seen in years.  Ratings were poor, but Fox had low expectations for the summer and word was that they were expecting to renew it for the following summer.  Unfortunately, a couple of months later, the cancellation news came in and I was distraught.  Worse yet, the show got replaced by the lukewarm "Wayward Pines" the following summer...and somehow that show did get renewed despite not doing any better in the ratings.  If any show in TV history was deserving of a second season, it was "Gang Related", but instead it has to settle for the being the best 13-episode series in network TV history.


Going through this list, it's regrettable but quite likely to deduce that more great series will come out in the decade to come and not live up to their ratings potential despite being better than just about anything else on the air at the given time.  But it's a safe bet that if there's a hidden gem out there I will find and do my best to let the world know what it's missing.

What Does Donald Trump's Path To Victory Look Like?

Ten days ago, an unthinkable proposition one year earlier became America's reality....Donald Trump became the Republican Party's presumptive nominee for President.  It's rather stunning that the nation hasn't spent these past 10 days in an aghast paralysis that such a development would be possible in the world's only remaining economic superpower, so it's rather striking that American life has gone as if this is business as usual.  There are conflicting signals about Trump's general election viability with a variety of theories on what a Trump nomination means for the long-standing red-state/blue-state divide.  Few of the smart guys saw the Trump phenomenon coming in the first place and many denied it was actually happening every step of the way, so perhaps quoting conventional wisdom is a poor choice all-around this cycle, but my sense is that they're right that the range of Trump's possibilities extend from a (relative) landslide double-digit defeat to an extremely narrow Electoral College victory.

There are two scenarios where Trump attains a narrow Electoral College victory, and the first is entirely uncomplicated.  He could benefit from a combination of incorrect polling data and low Democratic base turnout.  Polling has gotten less and less reliable in recent years with the demise of the landline, leaving even the best pollsters scrambling to accurately assess public opinion.  So let's say polls show Hillary ahead by 7-8 points going into election day.....but their polling models were as far off to the Democrats' artificial favor as they were in the 2014 midterms.  This could help suppress the Democratic base's turnout, thinking Hillary has it in the bag, while allowing Trump to sneak in and win a number of states with growing minority populations that would be out of reach for Trump if the minority vote came out at 2012 levels.  Much as we're told that nonwhites hate Donald Trump with the power of a thousand suns, it is not without precedent for the Democratic Party's nonwhite base to sit out elections and I'm not yet convinced they will have the fire in the belly to oppose Trump or support Hillary at levels needed to stop Trump.

But for the second scenario, let's operate under the theory that minority voter turnout will rival that of 2012.  If that's the case, Donald Trump's path to victory is only doable through an inside straight through the Rust Belt.  Several quadrennial swing states have growing minority populations and have been trending Democratic for a few cycles now.  If those minority voters turn out in respectable numbers, Trump is toast in Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, and probably Florida.  Florida is particularly important since previous Republican victories in the state depended upon strong GOP support among Cuban-Americans, but this demographic has been trending away from the GOP for a few cycles anyway and early indications this cycle is that they have no use whatsoever for Donald Trump.  If the Cubans are gone from the GOP on top of other unfavorable demographic shifts in Florida, the Republicans have a nightmare on their hands trying to get to 270 electoral votes.

That only leaves a handful of swing states where Trump would have to vastly overperform John McCain, Mitt Romney, and even George W. Bush.  There are only two blue states from 2012 that I think have an even-money chance of flipping to Trump in 2016, and they are Ohio and Iowa.  I'm not formally predicting that Trump wins them at this point, but for the sake of this "path to victory" exercise, let's give Trump these two states on the strength of his populist, blue-collar message delivered to those state's demographically friendly white working class-heavy voters.  Together, the two states are worth 24 electoral voters so add them up to the 206 electoral votes Romney got and we're up to 230.  But the pickings get very slim very quickly after that.....

It's hard to gauge right now whether Trump's brand of secular and populist Republicanism will sell in the northeast better than the disastrous performances of prior Republican nominees or not, but even if it does, New Hampshire is the only northeastern state Trump would have a prayer of overcoming massive Democratic voter advantages.  This state has been trending Democratic in recent cycles so it's a reach for Trump, but for the sake of the exercise let's give him NH's four electoral votes, bringing him up to 234.

Wisconsin is also theoretically doable for Trump.  Ted Cruz did very well in Wisconsin's primary, indicating a coolness towards Trump's brand of politics, but at the same time, Trump's county-level victories over Cruz occurred in the vast rural counties of northern and western Wisconsin, which are the bellwether counties in Wisconsin, so if he can translate primary wins in places like Wausau and La Crosse into general election victories, he could narrowly win here.  It's a longshot--and even more of a longshot in demographically similar but more inelastically Democratic Minnesota--but it's possible.  So stack up 10 more electoral votes for Trump from Wisconsin and put him at 244.

It gets ever harder from there as we move onto Michigan, which Obama carried by nearly 10 points in 2012.  There's a reasonable line of argument that Obama overperformed the Democratic baseline in Michigan in 2012 because of the auto bailout he supported and Mitt Romney opposed, and that the state is likely to be closer in 2016 without that built-in advantage, particularly given Trump's campaign pitch directed so specifically towards a state like Michigan.  But there's little in the data to support such an abrupt rightward turn for the state, particularly with as horridly unpopular as its current Republican Governor is. The media's long-standing association with Michigan as a "swing state" seems to be driving the narrative more than anything else.  I don't think Trump can win Michigan but if he does, it puts him up to 260 electoral votes.

And that leaves Pennsylvania.  The media likes to throw Pennsylvania in with Michigan and Ohio as Rust Belt states, imagining that Trump's populist campaign message will lasso in retired steelworkers in the Pittsburgh collar counties by the hundreds of thousands.  Certainly if this election was being held with the Pennsylvania demographics of 1988, that might be possible, but the media narrative ignores that for a generation now, Pennsylvania's elections have been won or lost in its growth zone which is the Greater Philadelphia area.  And from everything we know about the socially liberal, upscale suburbs of Philly, they are not the kind of place where Donald Trump would have much appeal.  In fact, the Republican that was probably best positioned to win over suburban Philly was the guy they ran four years ago, and Romney nonetheless fumbled.  Trump would need to win an otherworldly number of votes in shrinking blue-collar counties to make up for what he seems very likely to lose in Greater Philadelphia.

But just for the sake of argument, let's say Trump manages to win Pennsylvania but doesn't get Michigan.  That would be the difference of 260 electoral votes and 264, still below the 270 he needs to win.   If recent turnout models hold and disqualifies Trump from victory in the aforementioned demographically unfriendly Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, and Florida as I speculated, then Trump would need to run the table on Ohio,  Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to win a bare 270-268 Electoral College majority.  And even with Iowa and New Hampshire on board, he has no path to victory without Pennsylvania, last won by a Republican in a Presidential election in 1988.  It's a tall order to say the least, and would depend upon virtually everything going Trump's way in terms of suppressed turnout models amongst the Democratic base.

Trump's nomination victory proves anything is possible, and Hillary is a special kind of awful for a Democratic nominee that presents its own challenges for the Democrats.  But it's really hard to see how Donald Trump is well-positioned to win over converts at this stage of the race that aren't already on his side, and Hillary would have to run the worst Presidential general election campaign since Michael Dukakis to allow Trump to gain at her expense to that degree.  I'd give Trump about 10% odds at victory.  The headwinds he's facing are enormous, and that becomes even clearer when you break down the states Trump needs to persevere in the Electoral College.