Which TV Show has the most wasted potential?

Terra Nova was a very cool concept. Really enjoyed the first few episodes and iirc it forked down the bland teen drama road :/

Heroes

Altered carbon. First season was f****** awesome and built a great world and characters. Second season switched actors for the main character and then fizzled out. I don’t blame Anthony Mackie though, the story just wasn’t there and I already liked Joel too much.

Limitless. It was a sequel/spinoff to the movie with the same name. It started kind of just okay. Nothing special. It got canceled in the middle of the first season but they aired the rest of the season…and it got so good. It was a great show by the end of the season but there was no more of it. Also Dirk Gently. The first season was weird and fun. The second season ramped up the weird too much….also doesn’t help that the creator is a shitty sex pest.

Better Off Ted should have lasted much longer.

Reaper got fucked by the writers' strike and never recovered

The Mick Edit - I meant this in that it was so good, it should’ve gotten another 5 seasons instead of being abruptly cancelled after two. So—wasted potential, but not because of the show derailing or anything

I’m pretty sure the writers of Manifest had no idea what to do beyond the first season because that show became absolute slop as time went on despite such a unique and captivating premise.

The man in the high castle. Could’ve been SO much better.

Mindhunter. It was gettng better and better.

Terriers. Canceled too soon. Santa Clarita Diet. I wanted more too. Dexter: Original Sin. Fantastic cast, got me hooked, cancelled. Go On. Super funny comedy with Matthew Perry that could have had many more seasons.

The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Right before they got canceled John & liquid metal T-1000, who was helping him, were sent into the future. I’ll never get to enjoy how awesome a good T-1000 could be. She did waste a Terminator & save John and Sarah but there could have been so much more

Flashforward

Sleepy Hollow from the 2010s, and my husband and I still talk about it. 😂 They blew through the most compelling story (priest who knows the headless horseman is coming! Headless horseman with pumpkin head!) entirely too quickly.

I think Prison break had one of the best season 1 ever totally addictive binge worthy but went downhill later

Witcher. It could have been a worthy successor to GoT with a Slavic flavour. But nah, the showrunner turned it into a generic American fantasy show with a generic Millennial Hollywood writing.

Halo could have had a massive fanbase and gone on for several seasons if they stuck to the video game premise. All my Gen Z friends including girls like me played, it was a huge f****** game. But no, they had to go do their own thing. The people involved in the TV adaption should never work again. Yeah I'm bitter.

Yellowjackets. I thought there could've been so much more out of Tai's >!politician-killer double life storyline!< & even adult Lottie and Van's stories pale in comparison to that of their younger counterparts. & I'll die on the hill that adult Natalie should've been recasted if her character was supposed to be so integral to the eventual endgame of the story. One thing is that I'm still grateful that this show was my introduction to Sophie Thatcher's work (& I see her as one of the best rising names in horror today)

Once upon a time had a shot at being a Disney version of fables but the writers gave up on fun concepts and became weird de facto ads for Disney movies.

Jericho

If you gave competent writers Taylor Sheridans budgets you could have some beautifully shot well written westerns

Studio 60 and the sunset strip. Too down talented cast. Incredible writer even without cocaine.

The most recent Twilight Zone reboot. “Oh Jordan Peele is resurrecting short-form sci-fi/horror. I bet that’s a great arena to tell some original stories and wait what? They’re doing Nightmare at 20,000 feet AGAIN?!?”

The 100

Revolution

Alcatraz Storylines were fun, had a ton more prisoners to explore, left us on a cliffhanger, acting was solid, SF setting always a banger. But they just let it go after one season...

Reaper. It ended with such a terrible cliffhanger too. A very good show with a lot of charm.

Carnivàle

Kaos - was starting to get into it by the end of the season The OA - didn’t find out about the second season until I heard it was being cancelled Agree with Altered Carbon

Archive 81 anybody? Only 8 episodes and Netflix cancelled it. Great psychological horror.

Awake. A man has a wife and a son. After a terrible car accident, he loses his wife. He goes to sleep, and wakes up in a world where his wife is alive but his son died in an accident. He now lives in two worlds; he lives with his wife, goes to sleep, then wakes up and lives with his son. Fantastic premise, and they turned it into a sitcom cop procedural what the hell.

Seaquest. Basically Star Trek under water. Went down when they really found aliens. 

Firefly, if we are talking about what could have been Westworld (after s1), if we value what we got

Lodge 49 and Devs

1899. Why the f*** would you cancel a show made by the creators of Dark?

Riverdale season 1 was grounded and fun, then the writers smoked half a cake up while doing a heroine foot bath and drove that mf ship right off the edge of a cliff.

Dollhouse for me. It was a Josh Whedon show and had an excellent cast and premise. It could have been very interesting if not ruined by the network. They aired episodes out of order and generally just fucked around and killed it.

Wasted because it got cancelled... But my answer for these questions is always **"Raised by Wolves"** Probably the most ambitious thing on TV in decades, hell maybe ever. At times it was certifiably insane, teetering on nonsensical. But it's the only thing in TV or film from the past few years that made me feel like I was watching something with true audacity and fearlessness to it.

Th Event.

Sense8, strange but great ideas going on in that show cancelled middle of build up.

Revenge, which had a knockout first season, learned the wrong lessons from Lost, and had a conspiracy-type storyline in the second season that made me lose interest. Ironically, the presumed dead father of the main character coming back was what led me to start watching the show in its final year.

Rings of Power. So so so much money invested and they gave it to inexperienced nepo baby show runners. We could have had a genuine all-timer on our hands here. It will get all 5 seasons also it has been announced what a drag. Most expensive television show in history also I think. I could be wrong here. Production is beyond amateur. Scenes look like theatre sets. CGI looks not-worse than the 2000s films, but too obviously CGI? If that makes sense. The costume design is such a downgrade compared to the films. I know there are some fans of Bear McCreary and the score but I think it’s extremely forgettable.

Every year I rewatch Freaks and Geeks and get pissed that we didn’t get more.

Powerless.

Earth:Final Conflict tops this list for me. The story they were weaving in the first season was amazing. Then they started replacing or dropping cast, dumbing everything down, until Season 5 was not even recognizable.

The Wheel of Time. A fantasy show based on one of (imo) the best fantasy books ever written, with millions of fans world Wide, given to an absolutely incompetent showrunner who wants to change everything willy nilly and show no respect for the source material.

American Gods. Incredible first season then got derailed by behind the scenes bullshit.

Yellowjackets. Solid bones: Lord of the Flies but with the unique dynamic of teenage girls, and mysteries unraveling between two timelines. With a terrific cast. It's hot garbage. They got famous actresses and felt they needed to justify that by writing contrived Scooby Doo shenanigan filler which eats up half the screen time. Such a waste of potential.

Jericho had the potential to be the next Lost and it just got terrible… but not worse than… Revolution had an amazing premise and could’ve been ground breaking and atypical and it basically became a Hunger Games trope and just a mess of plot points trying to cater to everybody. The cast was amazing. So much wasted potential.

Stargate Universe. The first season was very slow, and had a little to much personal drama, but once it got going it was great. Also Dark Matter (2015) was amazing, I can't believe it got cancelled but they let killjoys keep going instead 

Silo for me. I think it’s a classic case of “the book is better than the show” because the show made insane choices that made the story worse.

Westworld - had so much potential to do different themed parks for a few seasons before trying to take it outside of the parks. Firefly - A lot of potential for a multiple season run but Fox just Fox'ed it up. Dollhouse - I wasn't the biggest fan of the series, but I wish they could have explored the epitaph episodes a little more. Sarah Conner Chronicles - cancelled too soon.

Star Trek Voyager. The premise is that you have a Starfleet ship suddenly sent way out into the other side of the galaxy, all alone, with some of its crew getting killed and needing to get supplemented with members of a (depending on perspective) freedom fighter/terrorist organisation. They've got limited supplies, they don't know anything about the area they're in, they're decades away from home, and they've got political and ideological schisms between various crewmembers. The show proceeds to do the following: 1 Almost immediately ignore that they've got limited supplies, outside of a handful of episodes where they need a part replaced. They mention that they only have a handful of photon torpedoes very early on and then use up dozens of them throughout the show, not to mention their shuttles that constantly get blown up and replaced. 2 Goes out of its way to not bother with changing or adapting the ship or its crew really at all beyond the first couple of episodes, and a very late addition. They get a couple of alien crewmembers at the start, and a Borg towards the end, but any aliens that want to join inevitably end up dying or being evil etc. And the ship itself never really changes despite years of needing to be repaired from battle damage and such, they just fix it up like new and it looks the same throughout (though that's probably down to budget constraints). One of the crewmembers is also revealed to be >!a Cardassian spy (who would very much be at odds with the freedom fighters/terrorists and the Starfleet crew too) but they just make her a villain of the week that pops up from time to time. She has a couple of cool episodes but that's it. !< 3 They take cool concepts and squish them into single episodes or two parters. As an example there's the Season 5 episode "Night" where the ship enters a region that's essentially empty, there's nothing around for ages and ages, it's so empty that there isn't even any visible starlight. Considering the premise of the show, having them be stranded there for several episodes or even a half or full season could have been amazing. The episode itself that we got was good, and the aliens that evolved in this empty space that they found were interesting, but it's kind of marred by being a perfect opportunity to do something really interesting, wasted. 4 Very little focus on the characters adapting or coping with their situation outside of when its plot relevant. This is a ship with a couple hundred people stranded years and years away from home, they don't even have the ability to contact home for most of it either. But very little is done to really explore this aside from with the captain. 5 The people from the freedom fighter/terrorist organisation are never an issue outside of a couple of episodes. There's never any real discussion or compromise needed, they're just told to act like Starfleet and then they do, or are evil. 6 It attempts to have to spiritual element to it with Chakotay (a character with Native American heritage), but it's written really badly, almost always feels forced, and so incredibly stereotypical in parts that it's kind of racist. This is probably because the cultural advisor they hired was an Italian guy who had spent his life making money off of pretending to be Native American (he'd been outed years before he was hired onto Voyager). Star Trek DS9 which started earlier did a significantly better job with the subject matter. To conclude - the entire premise is a Starfleet crew and vessel facing the unknown and seeing what they needed to do to survive, and whether they keep their morals and integrity doing so. The execution was them mostly being fine, being mostly the same, and losing most of the new stuff they got before they even got home anyway. Ironically the biggest changes that came to the crew and the ship were a result of >!a future Captain Janeway bringing advanced tech back to help them get home faster!<

AHS: Coven in particular but AHS in general. I would say AHS: Freak Show was just a stupid mess, but it was from the beginning. Coven could have been world class.

I don't care if I'm too late and this sits at the bottom, The Riches. Got killed by a writer's strike but I'd argue it did blow through too much of something that should have been a slower burn in the first season. You had prime Suzy Izzard in a more serious role that worked well and Minnie Driver + a couple of great teens who'd go on to do other stuff *and* a freakishly before-its-time addition of the youngest being a sensitive, nuanced story about a kid dealing with gender identity issues. All wrapped up in the *dynamite* plot of a family of grifters trying to pose as the family of this lawyer dude they accidentally got killed in the fancy gated community he was moving to. "Stealing the American Dream." It was funny, it was dramatic, you wanted to root for the family, there was just enough mystery/crime thriller elements to make it really pop...there were the bones of something on par with Breaking Bad & The Wire. Luckily, means you do have a pretty good self-contained first season.

Designated Survivor. Great premise but bad, weak follow-up. The wife, played by Natascha McElhone, should have been revealed as having been involved in a conspiracy to get her husband to the White House.

Under the Dome!

Wheel of Time House of the Dragon (granted it’s basing a series on a few hundred page blurb in a book)

Space force. Man, what a charismatic cast that was given a god awful script and forgot how to act. The show started coming together in the second season, but with that star power, it reallt shouldn't have been so tough to watch.

Boardwalk Empire. I think it has the best cast in TV history (excluding shows with one-off cameos/guest appearances), the production value and set design is perfect, had lots of creators from The Sopranos, Scorsese directed the pilot, and overall I think it’s a good show but it never comes close to exceeding the sum of its parts. It’s just all so surface-level, never leaves you thinking or reexamining anything, just nuts and bolts gangster machinations, and as much as I enjoy that stuff it doesn’t live up to the promise of its excellent individual parts.

Flashforward. It started out like Lost, but with a blueprint for the mythology. The way it played out in the single season felt like it was drowned by never ending studio notes.

Inside Job… so good.. all wasted because of shitty Netflix.

The Quantum Leap reboot. It somehow managed to lose all the charm of the original series, something they desperately needed to strive for in the absence of Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell.

Pretty Little Liars. They had books to follow, but made it worse by having reveals that lead to nothing and presented a final boss introduced by the end.

Colony. Nobody ever seems to talk about it anymore. Still mad it got cancelled.

Defiance is an interesting contender because the original goal was to have an MMO that would tie in with the show. Actions in the show would affect the game; actions in the game would affect the show.

The newsroom

The Walking Dead. Fantastic pilot and just about down hill from there for what seemed like 20 years. 2-3 meaty episodes per season and the rest where filler with people walking around talking about how bad they have it with 1 minute and 19 seconds of fighting off some wayward zombie herd that was not threatening to the main cast members.

Through no fault of its own being cancelled, mindhunters had so much potential. The irony would’ve been with so much popularity they would’ve ruined it anyway.

The 100. It got so stupid at the end but I had already watched the majority of the series and I would be damned if I get no resolution after all this time. Also, Penny Dreadful and Almost Human.

HEROES. CONSTANTINE. PANTHEON. WESTWORLD. V (2009 VERSION). SCAVENGER'S REIGN. AGENT CARTER. MARCO POLO. LIFE. THE OA. THE GIFTED. REVENGE. THE CAPE. MINDHUNTER. REVOLUTION.

My So Called Life.