What shows have great premises with terrible executions?

Terra Nova on Fox. Scifi show where in the future, the world is polluted and over-populated. Scientists discover a time rift that lets them send people to the cretaceous era (on a parallel world so no butterfly effect shenanigans). They build a colony in dinosaur world. GREAT fun setting/premise. Really boring/bad show.

Designated Survivor. Such a fantastic concept with so much potential for great storytelling, but fell prey to the typical network TV tropes. Revolution was another one.

Under the Dome

The man in the high castle

I won't say terrible execution, but Kevin can F*** himself.  The idea is really bold and interesting, but the overall experience isn't really all that interesting.

*The Starlost*, a Canadian science-fiction show (set on a derelict interstellar generation ship) that ran for sixteen episodes in 1973. Created by Harlan Ellison, the network meddled with his ideas so much that he left the project before the first episode aired, and hated what it had become so much he asked to be credited as series creator under his "Go F*** Yourself" alias: [Cordwainer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer) Bird. [The Series' Premise is summarized at the beginning of each episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZi9qOzq0RA): >Earthship ARK: Man's greatest and final achievement, out of control drifting through deep space over 800 years into the far future. >Its passengers, descendants of the last survivors of the dead planet Earth, locked in separate worlds, their destination long forgotten. >Unless three young people, can save....THE STARLOST! The series starts out with a lot of promise: The main characters are exiled from their Mennonite-inspired society totally cut off from the rest of the ARK, scrounge up an access key, find the Bridge (where they realize the ARK is on a collision course with a "G-type Solar Star" after suffering a catastrophic failure to the nuclear propulsion system), and begin their mission: travel to other Domes in search of anyone who can help them repair the ship's engines and get them back on-course. Episodes two and three even contain some light serialization elements, but by episode four it becomes clear the show is going to drop most of that and instead focus on "problem-of-the-week" type episodes where the goal of "find allies to help" becomes the backdrop to surviving whatever self-contained issue they stumble into. They manage to get some fantastic guest stars who anybody familiar with this era of science-fiction television will recognize (Including a couple of \*Star Trek\* and \*Space:1999\* regulars), and the special effects (including the model work) are genuinely impressive for the early 70s (especially considering the sort of budget that a Domestic Canadian television budget from that era would have been) but the biggest let-down is the writing and the acting. SO MANY of the scripts needed a second pass to tighten up the dialogue and patch obvious plot holes, and the actors they got for the main trio were simply not up to the task of elevating the mediocre material they were given. Serialized character development is set-up, then largely dropped except for the occasional oblique reference five to ten episodes later. The premise simply DOES NOT WORK in an episodic format like this. We often see posts in the same vein as this one, asking "which forgotten show deserves a remake?"; I think \*The Starlost\* should be at the top of everyone's list. The entire series has been uploaded to YouTube, if anyone wants to see it.

Torchwood: Miracle Day. "Everyone on Earth suddenly becomes unable to die" is a great high concept idea. It also seemed promising because it was a follow-up to the previous miniseries Children of Earth, which was by far the best Torchwood thing to date, and seemed to be a sign that Russell T Davies had finally got the hang of how best to handle the series. Also in its favour it had Jane Espenson (writer of some of the best Buffy episodes) as one of its writers. 

yellowjackets

Manifest. It's amazing how quickly it turns to some shitty religious soap thing, where each dialogue has to include bizarre phrases such as life boat.

"Torchwood Miracle Day" has a very interesting premise. One day, for seemingly no reason, people around the world stop dying. No matter how much blood you lose, no matter what disease you have, you won't die. But... You'll still have pain. You'll still age. You perhaps will even want to die, but can't no matter how hard you try. It's a pretty weird idea! I quite like it. And I wouldn't say the execution is "terrible", as there are elements of it that are still worthwhile. It never does live up to it's cool premise, though. Way too much of the show is an aimless mystery, where the episodes go "You may have caught me, but I didn't cause the Miracle Day. My boss did! Actually, no, their boss did. Actually, wait, it was *their* boss... 's boss's boss's boss. Probably." These are my least kind of mysteries. It feels frustrating as a viewer to get told over and over that the conspiracy just runs *even deeper.* No pay off, just runarounds and wasting time. "Torchwood Children of Earth", which comes right before Miracle Day, is excellent, though.

Flashforward.

Westworld. Specifically anything post-season 1, which we pretend does not exist.

Heroes

Alcatraz, where they brought inmates into the 21st century. With Jorge Garcia and Sam Neil

The 100, especially s5 and beyond

The Dresden files. Just follow the f****** books!

Highlander... but oddly the TV was 20 times better than any of the movie sequels

American Horror Story

Persons Unknown. Barely remember what happened but absolutely loved the concept and mystery.

Stranger Things. Started interesting and then became bigger and bigger until it just consumed itself.

The Marvel Inhumans series -- its villain could have been quite sympathetic, part of an interesting political intrigue plot. (He has a point about the faults of the ruling monarchs who are failing to see the suffering of the lower classes!) Alas, the writing is so bad that it manages to make *everyone* unsympathetic.

Yellowjackets Homeland (after season one) Weeds

Jericho Revolution  The 100 

Lovecraft Country. It jumped ALL over the place after episode 1. 

I'm going to say FlashForward. One of the disaster shows that came out in the wake of LOST based on a best selling novel was about a worldwide disaster event that caused everyone to blackout and have visions of their future.

The sequel to MASH could have been great. Life after war and all that.

The Last Man on Earth. The title only made sense for the pilot.

Raised by wolves.

Terra Nova.

Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches books were really good source material. But the show? Ugh. Alexandra Daddario is beautiful, but that girl is not a very geed actor.

Currently airing : Paradise. Started with an incredibly interesting premise, but quickly devolved into a messy plot with way too many tropes.

There was a show called "Cult" from 2013 that I really liked the idea of but it was on CW. Had it of been somewhere like FX it could've been great.

The Beauty, for sure.

Ascension. Yeah, they say it was planned as a miniseries, but I don't buy it.

This is probably not something a lot of people can agree on, but Sherlock. I love Sherlock Holmes archetypes and I love the idea of a modern prestige television retelling, but Sherlock misses the mystery element of it completely. It feels more like a superhero show than a whodunnit mystery because Sherlock just randomly knows things the audience never has a chance to figure out or even worse his network of homeless people tells him off screen. This could be fine if they relied more on their characters like for example House does, which I absolutely love. Sherlock is smart and an ass for no reason, Watson is a damsel in distress most of the time (even though he is a war hero) and that's pretty much all important characters. I think most of my issues with the show are exemplified when Sherlock kills a room full of Taliban by hand to save Irene Adler. That's not Sherlock Holmes that's Batman. It's also not Irene Adler who famously outsmarts him in the source material but I digress. I would've loved a high budget non procedural version of Elementary or House.

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The Acolyte has an entire galaxy between it's potential from the ideas presented and the execution. The Witcher could have been Netflix GoT but they choose the worst possible showrunner.

I loved Travelers for the first 2 seasons, but they clearly realized they weren't getting picked up for a 4th and tried to cram the rest of the plot into like 4 episodes, leaving it a mess.

Revolution Zoo Interestingly, Billy Burke stars in both of them and Zoo came out right when Revolution got cancelled.

Forever I loved the whole "man who doesn't age and his son is an old man" thing, but the show itself was crime-of-the-week. I think I have a DVD somewhere that I recorded all the father/son scenes between Ioan Gruffudd and Judd Hirsch onto so that I could rewatch those scenes without having to rewatch the show itself.

Found on NBC with Mark Paul Gosselaar. It could have been much better than it was, the hammy acting and premise got old quick especially when they tipped their hand enough too early at the end of season 1. Wasnt surprised it got canceled, but he was the saving grace of the show and deserved better.

99.9% of anime

The Loud House

Sons of Anarchy. A realistic and gritty portrayal would have been better than the shit we got

Yellow Jackets. Never has a show actually pissed me off for having botched a good premise and first season.

Smoke. It was interesting for most of the season but the ending cemented it as just awful.

Point Pleasant. I love the idea of a horror soap about a female Antichrist coming into a small town but it was just really dull. The advertising campaign made it seem like it'd have a fun campy but Gothic vibe, but it did not. There was also All Souls on UPN, loosely inspired by The Kingdom (a couple of years before Stephen King did his Kingdom adaptation miniseries). Love the concept and how it tried to be weird and off-the-wall but the show itself is nonsensical and poorly written.

Heroes

Revolution nbc

Last resort, could have been good with hbo style writing, but it was on a network and was just too soapy

That one show where they introduced a grand mystery in episode one, but the showrunners and creators had no idea what the resolution of that mystery was, nor any idea how long the show would be on for and therefore no idea how long they had to resolve that mystery. 

Altered Carbon. Started as a banger of a world builder, then got "Mackied" and season 2 went so f****** poorly.

Almost Human- The future. Karl Urban as a gritty cop paired with a bot to unravel crimes and stuff. Producers started bickering. Show got shown out of order. Cancelled after first season because of the producers

Star Trek: Voyager. Two warring crews, lost in space, with dwindling supplies and personnel? Killer premise. But the network wanted *Next Generation Lite*, so suddenly they were all BFFs and had an endless suppy of shuttlecrafts and redshirts. Thankfully, Ronald D. Moore re-used that same premise for *Battlestar Galactica* and got his money's worth.

A bunch of the shows named so far are from the post-Lost formulaic mystery box era. They were doomed from the start. A show will go nowhere when it's based on an ensemble cast of c**** no-name actors meant to fill shallow drama. A few times throughout the season they drop breadcrumbs about the main premise, but never actual go anywhere with it. JJ Abrams had created a red matter sized black hole in television.

The TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Under the Dome could have been amazing. It started at a miniseries which would have been perfect but CBS wanted to make more money so turned it into a regular series. A small town post-9/11 cut off from the rest of the world by an impenetrable dome, run by tin pot despot corrupt town selectman? The main hero is an Iraq vet? The military has no idea what to fuckin do? There’s a murderer on the loose as well. The entire book takes place in the span of about a week and things devolve amazingly quickly. The show went off the rails story wise after like episode five and it was quickly cancelled in the second season I think. I gave it up after a few episodes. Man, if Mike Flanagan wanted to remake that I’d be so happy. It’s one of my favorite books.

Halo. They had one of the best selling, most popular games of all time and they wiped their ass on it and gave us the used toilet paper.

Daisy Jones and the Six has great source material but it is not even close to the book. I found it unwatchable.

Lost