Five Great (but Short-Lived) Geek TV Shows You Haven’t Seen

The popular term is “Brilliant but Cancelled.” Many (maybe even most) great TV shows don’t make it to a hundred episodes, or even fifty. Like a flash of lightning, they produce a few hours of wonderful entertainment, then disappear. In the geek world, these shows are often venerated. Firefly is the prime example, having gathered a huge cult following that is strong to this day despite barely producing half a season. You may also know about The Lone Gunmen and Crusade, spin-offs of The X-Files and Babylon 5, respectively, which were never quite able to capture the popularity of their parent shows but are still beloved by fans. And like any self-respecting geek, you’ve puzzled over the 17 episodes of The Prisoner. You may think you’ve seen it all, but you haven’t.

These are five shows that suffered the same fate as Firefly and Freaks and Geeks, but are far less well known. Not all of them will be to your liking, I’m sure, but I have a feeling that most geeks will find something to like in this bunch. I would highly recommend all of them, though some higher than others. Before the internet and TV on DVD, shows like these would have been impossible to find. Now they’re all fairly easy. So enjoy:

The Middleman

The show that inspired this article, it’s hard to describe except that it makes me happy. I tried to tell a friend it was “like Gilmore Girls if they were also superheroes” and he looked dubious, so let’s go with “Men in Black if Will Smith was a geeky girl,” which I read somewhere once. It’s the story of Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales), who gets a new job as the side-kick to the Middleman (Matt Keeslar), who fights “monsters, aliens, robots and things” with a mix of weird gadgets and gumption. The cast also includes a helper android whose chameleon circuit got stuck on grumpy schoolmarm, and Lacey, Wendy’s roommate, who somehow makes a living as “a confrontational spoken word performance artist”.

The show, created by Lost staff writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, is incredibly witty, and when it aired on ABC Family of all places in 2008 it was way too smart for the room. This is a show with genuine emotional depth and characters you can relate to, yet it also managed to work the line “My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity” into almost every episode. You will never find more geek references per square foot in an hour-long show. The series ran for 12 episodes before the ratings got too low for ABC Family, which means very few of you were watching. Unfortunately, the season was supposed to have 13 episodes, so the (ridiculously awesome) season finale only exists in the form of a cast table read from last year’s Comic-Con. (Thankfully, it’s on YouTube) Still, it’s better than a lot of shows get. I could talk about The Middleman for a long time, but just watch this fun video and we’ll move on:

Wonderfalls

This is a series about a girl in Niagara Falls who begins trying to help people after inanimate objects (in the shape of animals) start giving her instructions. It is way, way better than it sounds, but most people did not take a chance and find out. Fox cancelled it after only three episodes aired in the fall of 2004. However, a full 13 episode season was already completed, which has since been released on DVD and aired on LOGO in the US and Sky1 in the UK. The series is both the least-known and probably the best work of Bryan Fuller, of Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies fame. He co-produced with Joss Whedon-disciple Tim Minear.

Wonderfalls suffered that great TV curse, being called “quirky”. Really it’s more sarcastic than anything. Quebecois actress Caroline Dhavernas (most of her other work is in French) gives a performance you won’t forget in the lead as Jaye, a very cynical Brown University graduate who lives in a trailer park and works in a gift shop. The main conflict of the series (other than her conviction that she’s gone completely insane) is that she’s being forced to come out of her shell and actually interact with people, something I’ll bet a lot of us geeks can relate to. The great cast also includes Tyron Leitso, Traci Thoms, William Sadler, Lee Pace, Katie Finneran, and Diana Scarwid. Still need convincing? Check out the first ten minutes of the pilot now:

No Heroics

If you’re American, the reason you haven’t seen No Heroics is probably that it’s never officially been made available here. Even in Britain, it was on a relatively obscure network (ITV2) and only ran for one season of six episodes. Of course, British TV is weird (that’s as many episodes as Fawlty Towers ever got). This is a raunchy half-hour sitcom about four friends who like to hang out a bar. The difference is that they’re all superheroes (capes, tights, the whole shebang), and the bar is a superhero hang-out where costumes and powers is banned.

The show has a few rough spots, probably the greatest of which are those moments when it tries to make the annoying jerk “The Hotness” (he has the power to control fire) into the main character. The other three characters are probably more interesting. This series does indeed have a debt to awkward comedy like The Office, and it somehow makes it work pretty well with geeky superhero jokes. Check out this very fun trailer, which includes probably NSFW language (this is the show that introduced me to the use of “cocking” as a swear word). This aired on cable.

The Dresden Files

To me this is probably the weakest series of these five, but it’s also the easiest to find, since it’s available on Hulu and Netflix Instant Streaming. Harry Dresden (Paul Blackthorne) is the only wizard-for-hire in the Chicago phone book, working with the local police to solve cases that are a little out of the ordinary. This series has the advantage of being based on a pretty good series of books by Jim Butcher, and it is probably more faithful than you would have expected (the pilot episode is a fairly direct adaptation of the first book). It also was aired all out of order by what was then still known as the Sci-Fi Channel and lasted for only one twelve episode season in 2007.

The Dresden Files takes itself seriously without seeming over serious. On one level you have probably the most worked-out system of magic I’ve seen on TV, and strong film noir influences (I’ve heard the series described as “Buffy starring Philip Marlowe”). But on another you have his sarcastic ghost sidekick Bob (Terrence Mann) and Valerie Cruz doing a great job as always-in-over-her-head Detective Murphy and lots of other awesome stuff, and Harry obviously knowing how awesome it is. The show never quite transcends the feel that it came off SyFy’s Canadian assembly line (Toronto subs for Chicago), but its one of the highest quality products to come off that line. Rather than paying to go see The Sorcerer’s Apprentice this week, why not check out this (probably more interesting) modern magic series? Here’s a cool fan-made trailer, which, yes, includes Warehouse 13‘s Joanne Kelly as a vampire:

Harsh Realm

Chris Carter produced four television series. These are The X-Files, Millennium, The Lone Gunmen, and, finally, Harsh Realm. It is very different from the other three. It lasted exactly three episodes in 1999 before being cancelled by Fox due to low ratings. The remaining six episodes that had been filmed were eventually aired on FX during the early days of that cable channel. It is (very) loosely based on a comic book of the same name is about a soldier (Scott Bairstow) who is sent into a virtual, vaguely-post-apocalyptic world created by the military for training purposes. His mission is to take down a military dictator, Santiago, who is also from the “real world”.

Santiago is the best thing about the series, as he’s played by a pre-Lost Terry O’Quinn in a performance that’s different from anything you’ve seen him do. Somewhere there’s probably a post-apocalyptic computer simulation where this show was a mega-hit and Lost lasted nine episodes. The cast also includes D.B. Sweeney, Rachel Hayward, and others. Being set in a computer simulation, the series had a lot of potential to explore different avenues, and you can see some of that potential in the nine episodes we got, which combine elements of cyberpunk, alternate history, fantasy, and lots of other fun stuff. It’s very different from other Chris Carter shows you’ve seen, but it still has enough conspiracies to keep X-Files fans happy. Here’s a video of Terry O’Quinn being awesome:

So if you’re sad at the current state of entertainment and looking for something a little different, put one of these next in your Netflix queue. You won’t be disappointed.

About Dan

Dan Joslyn grew up in Ohio but now lives in Las Vegas, NV with his lovely ginger girlfriend, Tiarra, where he works as an office monkey. He enjoys reviewing movies and television for the site, and over-analyzing such things. He may be the Chosen One… but he probably isn’t.

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