The 10 Greatest Forgotten Geek TV Shows
It’s likely that many of Geekscape’s readers were amongst the letter firestorm that attempted to keep Joss Whedon’s series “Dollhouse” on the air. Certain Trekkies recall with dismay that “Enterprise” lasted only four seasons, instead of “Star Trek’s” usual seven. There is an endless list of sci-fi and fantasy television shows that were popular amongst the geek crowd, but not popular enough to stay on the air. Some lasted a long time (“Red Dwarf”), but never achieved mainstream success, others not so much (“Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”), but each is fondly remembered by its respective cult members.
This list is, however, not that list. What interests me much more than the cult hits, are the television shows that were of interest, of high quality, possessed endless potential, and were canceled to no fanfare, and garnered no cult. The lost shows. Seeing as I was an enormous nerd as a child and teenager, my Magellan-like forays into late-night television exposed me to some pretty wild stuff. I was one of the only kids my age to have viewed multiple episodes of “Night Flight,” and I constantly re-watched my VHS copy of “The Incredible Crash Test Dummies.” I was not interested in joining an established cult; I was much more interested in finding and forming my own.
The following list is the list of the best geek-themed TV shows that have been lost or forgotten through the halcyon mists of memory. The ones that you may have heard of, but probably not, and were actually really good. Such a huge quantity of geeks are fans of “Firefly,” that it’s almost not a cult anymore. But mention the following titles to the initiated, and their eyes will light up.
N.B. Because I am the age that I am, this list is heavily skewed toward my own teenage years. I encourage you to suggest other shows that may, perhaps, be out of my own window of experience.
10. “Special Unit 2” (2001)
Ran 19 episodes
“Special Unit 2” hit the airwaves about the same time “Enterprise” fired up, and was largely ignored. It featured Michael Landes and Alexondra Lee as a pair of Chicago police officers who have been inducted into the police department’s secret paranormal unit. Yes, like “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” and “The X-Files” before it, “Special Unit 2” was another practical investigative approach to supernatural problems, but it was possessed of a clever streak and a sense of humor that make it particularly notable. Boogeymen, trolls, witches, and bigfeet were all apprehended, and merely arrested and thrown in prison. I like that. The cops were often joined by their informant friend Carl (Danny Woodbine), a lecherous, alcoholic gnome. Potentially insufferable, he was actually quite funny.
What’s more, it made Chicago look like a labyrinthine network of pipes, passages and esoteric alleyways that let to secret enclaves and hideouts; it made me believe that monsters and secret cops really could be lurking about. Well, it at least made me want to believe.
9. “M.A.N.T.I.S.” (1994)
Ran 22 episodes
Mechanically Automated Neuro-Transmitter Interactive System, to answer your first question. “M.A.N.T.I.S.” ran on Friday nights, which is usually a horrible time for TV shows. Nonetheless, it managed to run an entire season before getting the boot. This was a pity, as “M.A.N.T.I.S.” seemed to capture the joyous superhero spirit that had not yet become mainstream.
The show followed a paraplegic scientist, Dr. Miles Hawkins (Carl Lumbly), and his tech-head best friend (Roger Rees) as they invented, developed and put to use, the exoskeleton-like M.A.N.T.I.S. harness, a helmeted armor that could send brain signals directly to various parts of the body, bypassing a damaged spine. This allowed our hero to walk again, but also gave him superhuman strength, a special night-vision attachment, and darts that could paralyze (and freeze) bad guys.
So when he was fully-equipped, he would, naturally, take to the night in his supercar, called The Chrysalid, and fight injustice in all its forms, mostly in the forms of an evil industrialist (Andrew J. Robinson), while having to – like Batman – elude the police. As the show ran on, other, wilder crap started to sneak in (like monsters and the like), but the early episodes were way fun.
The show was developed by Sam Raimi, fresh off of “Army of Darkness,” and Sam Hamm, who wrote Tim Burton’s “Batman.” It was possessed of Raimi’s manic sense of humor, but still noir-ish enough to be kind of dramatic. I recall many a cheery Friday night watching “M.A.N.T.I.S.” all alone.
8. “Brimstone” (1998)
Ran 13 episodes
Ezekiel Stone (Peter Horton) is a good cop who was killed in the line of duty, and who went to Hell. Rather than a mere eternity of suffering, however, The Devil (a gleefully good John Glover) enlists his investigative abilities to help him track down 113 wicked souls who have managed to escape Hell’s clutches, and who are now roaming free on Earth. After a 15-year absence, Stone returns to Earth, and gets started. A few rules: only the evil souls can hurt him, and, in order to send them back to Hell, he has to destroy their eyeballs.
This seems like one of those shows that is a little too high concept to actually work, and that rarely lasts (“Reaper” anyone?) But the producers actually made a really well-done, slam-bang action show that was magical and fun, not too angsty, and offered a supporting role to Lori Petty.
And then there’s John Glover in the role of The Devil. I have always admired John Glover, ever since I saw him in “Gremlins 2” as a child. I loved him as the identical gay twin brothers in “Love! Valour! Compassion!” As The Devil, Glover is just the right mixture of evil, smarmy, weary, and intelligent. There have been few actors to play The Devil so well. Glover deserves more work.
7. “Time Trax” (1993)
Ran 44 episodes
This show, developed by “Star Trek: The Next Generation’s” Harve Bennet, actually managed to hang around for two full seasons, but, oddly, I never hear it mentioned in geeks’ conversations; it seems to have slipped past most of our memories. Surely not because it’s a bad show; indeed, it’s actually really clever. It’s essentially the same setup as “Brimstone,” but with a sci-fi bent: a supercriminal from the 22nd century has invented a time machine and has been selling one-way tickets to the 20th century to dangerous criminals in need of an escape. Policeman Darien Lambert (Dale Midkiff) travels to the 20th century to apprehend the future criminals, and send them back to the future.
From there, it’s a matter of blending into the 20th century, hiding the fact that his heart rate is accelerated, that he can sprint for hours on end, and that he is occasionally having conversations with a holographic British schoolmarm nicknamed SELMA (Elizabeth Alexander), who is projected from an iPod-sized computer he keeps in his pocket.
Midkiff, in the lead role, was a little too much of a pretty boy, but he held his own, and the show’s fish-out-of-water premise actually worked. It may sound a bit protracted on the page, and it is, perhaps, one of those shows that would not hold up upon re-visitation, but I recall it with delight.
6. “Likely Suspects” (1992)
Ran 9 episodes
This one I have managed to revisit (thanks to the wonder of bootlegged internet recordings), and I assure you that it can indeed stand the test of time. This was a late-night detective sitcom that featured Sam McMurray as the central experienced homicide detective, and, well, you the viewer as the rookie cop who helped him on his cases. That’s right, the show was filmed entirely in the first person, with the viewer as an active member of the proceedings. The show was careful to have some characters talk to you personally, and you even got to offer critical inspiration for the lead detective (I recall one episode where it was implied that the viewer has drawn a smiley face on a foggy window, which is, I admit, exactly what I would have done when presented with that same foggy window).
What’s more, the murders on “Likely Suspects” were never run-of-the-mill stabbings or shootings or poisonings; this was not a hard-boiled world of ultra-dark criminals, but almost a whimsical world of silly people who would commit murders in creative ways. One woman was electrocuted with a hot tub and a bug zapper. One victim had meat flavoring mixed in with her perfume, and then was locked into a tennis court with some hungry dogs. Yikes. One was baked to death in a sauna.
I miss it.
5. “Remote Control,” (1987) “Rock & Roll Jeopardy,” (1988) “Beat the Geeks” (2001)
Ran four seasons, one season, and two seasons respectively
In the early days of MTV, when pop music carried more cultural currency, and music videos were actually still in regular television rotation, “Remote Control” offered a laidback, Gen-X antidote to the ultra-mannered game shows and blandly materialistic non-games that were stinking up the airwaves at the time. Its contestants would sit in easychairs, answer pop culture trivia off of a haphazard “Jeopardy”-like wall of televisions, and were encouraged to playfully banter with the host, Ken Ober. At the show’s halfway mark, snacks would rain down on the contestant’s heads. This is a show that didn’t take itself seriously, but still required trivia chops to play. I know no one who watched this show who didn’t want to be on it. What’s more, celebrity guests like Adam Sandler, Kari Wuhrer and “Weird Al” Yankovic would occasionally show up. What a fun show.
On VH1 at the same time was an unexpected spinoff of “Jeopardy” called “Rock & Roll Jeopardy,” which was nothing but music trivia. Jeff Probst hosted, and the guests were often people from the music industry. I saw an episode featuring Michael McKean as a contestant. For a kid like me, who knew nothing about pop music, and am only now, in my 30s, learning some of the important stuff, the show seemed bootomlessly cool, and the contestants, supergeniuses.
And what geek worth his or her salt can forget “Beat the Geeks” from Comedy Central? The contestants would face off against a panel of pop trivia experts (Andy Zax for music, Paul Geobbel for TV, Marc Edward Heuck for movies), and would be asked increasingly difficult questions, while the Geeks themselves had to answer already near-impossible questions to match. It was a show that took the concept of geek snobbery to its logical extreme, and made it fun and playful. But not cynical; what I liked about the show is that the players and contestants and hosts were actually smart, and that was celebrated. Comedy Central viciously axed the show after two seasons.
I have to mention that I actually work for one of the Geeks these days, and I can only assure you that by including it on this list, I am not brownnosing; my thoughts are sincere.
4. “Nowhere Man” (1995)
Ran 25 episodes
A spiritual child of “The Prisoner,” “Nowhere Man” starred Bruce Greenwood as a war photographer who snapped the wrong photo. After taking a picture of a mysterious scene of war torture, Thomas Veil found himself, in the span of a single morning, stripped of his home, his wife, and his identity. No one seems to remember who he is, and now he must take to the streets using his intuition and resourcefulness to uncover what was going on in that picture, and who is responsible for his erasure.
It’s a dangerous balancing act, pulling off a show like this. If you go too far in one direction, you have a thuddingly dull show, where the mystery is artificially extended and protracted beyond credibility, leading to a feeling of being jerked around. You lean too far in the other direction, you give away too much, and the show will have nowhere to go. But “Nowhere Man” managed to give us a taut mystery that stretched over every episode, which still having the grace and efficiency of episode autonomy.
Here’s a cute homage I liked: In one episode, Thomas Veil found himself infiltrating a mysterious gated community to look for clues. In the community, the denizens were given numbers instead of names. Thomas was fittingly given the number 6, which was, no doubt, a reference to Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six in “The Prisoner.”
3. “Friday the 13th: The Series” (1987)
Ran 72 episodes
This is another one of those shows that actually ran long enough to be noted, but no one seems to discuss it anymore for some reason.
“Friday the 13th: The Series” actually has nothing to do with the 1980 feature film, any of its 11 ½ sequels, or Jason Voorhees. It was, in fact, a lot more clever: A pair of young investigators (Jack Marshak and Micki Foster) and a kindly old man (Ryan Dallion) ran an antique shop in an unnamed big city. On the main floor were all the usual tchotchkes, but in the basement was a collection of magical, cursed items that they had accumulated. At the outset of every episode, an everyman would find one of the cursed items, and discover that it could imbue them with some power or wish, usually in exchange for human lives. They would begin killing others to gain more power, and it was up to the little-seen heroes of the show to find the cursed object, and spirit it back their antique shop.
This makes for a series that was scary, featured a largely new cast each week, hundreds of interesting kills, and had a steady stream of really cool, wicked objects. As a film buff, one of my favorite of the cursed objects was an 8mm movie camera that would kill whom it filmed, and eventually cause the filmmaker to become a werewolf. There aren’t a lot of horror series in the world (“Tales from the Crypt,” “Tales from the Dark Side” and “Monsters,” were all on cable), so I’m grateful for when comes along.
2. “Family Dog” (1993)
Ran 10 episodes
Created by Brad Bird, and designed and backed by Tim Burton, this animated family sitcom, all told from the perspective of the family dog, was one of the funniest and most clever comedies my teenage eyeballs had the pleasure of viewing. It was very high concept at the time (“The Simpsons” was crying out for imitators), and, I recall, had a very ubiquitous TV advertising campaign. The characters were well-designed and the dialogue was snappy and offbeat.
And yet – and we’ve all heard this story before – the ratings just weren’t there. Critics praised the show, and many of my peers expressed a huge interest in it, but Fox wasn’t getting the numbers they wanted, so they started rescheduling it, putting it in really bad time slots until it slipped unobtrusively from the air after less than a season.
These days it’s near impossible to find, but if you have the gumption and the wherewithal, I encourage you to track down some of the rare VHS tapes that Fox put out back in the day. If you do, you will rediscover a goofy little show that was telling edgy, silly and daring jokes long before “Family Guy” made such things gross and of dubious intelligence.
1. “The Edge” (1992)
Ran 19 episodes
I will state this uncategorically: “The Edge” is the funniest sketch comedy show since Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” No sketch comedy show since has managed to capture the hilariously naughty, anarchic spirit of “The Edge.” Well, maybe “The State.” “The Edge,” however, has that particular fashion of gleeful cartoon chaos that one usually feels when watching “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” but whacked out on stimulants.
It featured a cast of funny comic stars, and a few not-yet-famous comedians. Julie Brown (remember her?) was the erstwhile hostess of the show, and it featured Wayne Knight, Alan Ruck, Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Nealon, Paul Feig, Tom Kenny, and others. It featured quick one-liners (What Prince is doing RIGHT THIS MINUTE), and in-and-out sketches that never outstayed their welcome. Like any sketch comedy show, it did bring back some recognizable characters, but you can tell they were kind of riffing on the idea of catchphrases and mascotry.
The show’s one running gag was that, at the outset of every episode, after a brief, friendly introduction, the entire cast would, all at once, be horribly killed in some fashion. In the first episode, the set fell on them. An announcer claimed that the show was pre-recorded, so this was not a problem. Every episode since had them feeling increasingly nervous about their impending dooms. It was a surreal and grim joke that had me rolling on the floor.
Add to all this animated bumpers by veteran animator Bill Plympton, and you have a bona fide classic.
Why is this show not available on home video? Why has it been consigned to obscurity the way it has? This was a brilliantly funny program, and a bizarre object of its time. It’s long overdue for reconsideration. Well, if “The State” can get a DVD box set after 15 years off the air, maybe “The Edge” will after 20.
Other shows I encourage you to investigate:
“Broken Badges” (1990)
“Danger Theatre” (1993)
“The Incredible Crash Test Dummies” (1993)
“Heil Honey, I’m Home” (1990)
“They Came from Outer Space” (1990)
“NightMan” (1997)
“Black Scorpion” (1995)
“The TV Wheel” (1995)
“Platypus Man” (1995)
“Pryde of the X-Men” (1989)
“Defenders of Dynatron City” (1992)
“Black Books” (2000)
“The Inside” (2005)
Witney Seibold spent a lot of time watching TV as a teenager, yet never managed to see anything popular. He eventually drifted into the world of movies, where he became a professional film critic, a wonk in a movie theater, and a haughty snot. He lives in California, where he spends most of his time taking baths and shooing that cat out of his apartment. You can read his hundreds of film articles on his ‘blog: http://witneyman.wordpress.com/
