Network Red-Headed Stepchild

That one TV show on a network that doesn't really fit with the rest of the lineup. Maybe it's an action series on a channel full of romance, or a live action show on a cartoon channel. Whatever the case, the Network Red-Headed Stepchild is the odd man out.

This can be beneficial or extremely dangerous. If the show is culturally successful, it might be more willing to be saved by the network even if ratings drop, just to make sure that one niche is filled. But if the show gets too successful, the entire channel might start making programming that is similar, easily leading to Network Decay. Another possibility is that the show may be screwed or even cancelled even if it is successful, as its lack of appeal to the network's core demographic may turn off advertisers. If the show isn't successful at all, expect it to be Screwed by the Network. Compare to Adored by the Network.

For a show that is different from a creator's usual output, see Creator's Oddball. For an installment that is different from the usual output in a single series, see Oddball in the Series.

---

Examples:

Major Networks

• ABC: Lost was ABC's redheaded stepchild, a complex mystery/drama on a network that was increasingly making its name with sitcoms and romantic dramedies like Castle, Grey's Anatomy, Modern Family, Cougar Town and Desperate Housewives. ABC made several somewhat pathetic attempts to capitalize on Lost's success by releasing no less than half-a-dozen copycat shows over years, almost all of which aired in the timeslot after Lost. Every single one was canceled before getting a second season.
  • Major sporting events on ABC have been a redheaded stepchild since the year 2006. In just a short matter of time, ABC gave up/lost the rights to their crown jewel, Monday Night Football, the PGA Tour, the National Hockey League, and the Bowl Championship Series. To make matters worse, by September 2006, whatever sense of independent identity that ABC Sports had left was totally vanquished (really, the only reason that ABC Sports was kept around was because of union contracts) with the introduction of "ESPN on ABC" (Disney had slowly been integrating ESPN into ABC Sports since buying ABC back in 1996). As more and more big money events were crossing over to ESPN (since Disney can, with cable, exploit a dual revenue stream of ads and subscription fees), ABC's affiliates began to complain in by the end of 2009. In order to compensate these complaints, ABC and ESPN put together an ad hoc, cheaply made package on Saturday afternoons called ESPN Sports Saturday (instead of like say, bringing back the legendary Wide World Of Sports, which had been canceled as a stand-alone anthology series around early 1998).
  • FlashForward (2009) effectively revolved around the marketing hook "if you like Lost, watch this!" ABC even made a concentrated effort to cast Lost alumni on the show and hoped the show would replace Lost once it ended in 2010. It didn't work, and speculative fiction essentially disappeared from the network until the arrival of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • Last Man Standing could be considered one because it was a conservative-leaning sitcom on ABC, whose other sitcoms like Modern Family and black•ish appeal to a more liberal audience. When ABC canceled the show (leaving Fox to pick it up), many fans naturally questioned whether it was because of an anti-conservative stance taken by the network heads (it certainly wasn't low ratings; it was the network's second highest-rated sitcom at the time of its cancellation), but this was denied by network head Channing Dungey, who instead cited scheduling issues as the deciding factor. Whatever uncertainty conservatives had over the cancellation were debunked when the very conservative-leaning Roseanne revival debuted, though it was canceled at the end of the season due to its star's racist Twitter comments as opposed to resentment for conservatives, and ABC demanded that the Black-ish producers shelve an episode condemning President Donald Trump that led to its showrunner quitting the program.
• FOX: Continuing the mystery theme, Fringe was FOX's redheaded stepchild, as FOX primarily airs reality shows and cartoon comedies. Touch (2012) was one too, being a complex drama. 24 was also a redheaded stepchild in many ways, as was the famously Screwed by the Network Firefly. Of the cartoons, King of the Hill was the "Animation Domination" block's redheaded stepchild due to being more down-to-earth compared to The Simpsons and the Seth MacFarlane shows.
• NBC: Heroes was, like Lost, a speculative fiction mystery drama on a channel filled primarily with comedies. Chuck helped flesh out NBC's lineup, but only thanks to fan campaigns and the corporate sponsorship of Subway.
• CBC: In the late '90s, the majority of shows were either comedies, news programs or sitcoms (with the occasional drama). Da Vinci's Inquest, about a morally grey coroner who has some questionable ethics (mixed with a large dose of Real Life Writes the Plot), was the exception to this trend, and proved to be one of CBC's biggest hits. Of course, the moment the ratings started to fizzle, the show was unceremoniously yanked off the air.
• CTV: In the mid 90's, CTV developed and produced a sci-fi show that stood in stark contrast with their more down-to-earth programming. That show, RoboCop: The Series, was a Bowdlerised adaptation of one of the most violent films of the '80s, and was quickly canceled after a single season due to middling ratings.
• Star Trek:
  • In its early years, UPN had Star Trek: Voyager, which, while undeniably the highest rated show on the network, failed to fit in with any other thing on its urban-oriented schedule. In its waning years, UPN had such a schizophrenic schedule, that it seemed every night of the week had a red-headed stepchild compared to the other nights. First was Monday, with its urban and minority-oriented comedies, then Tuesday with Buffy the Vampire Slayer cult horror-drama-comedy appeal, Wednesday with Star Trek: Enterprise a similar cult hit, but for a different cult, Thursday had WWE SmackDown, and Friday had a random selection of crappy movies. It was a strange thing to behold.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was generally treated as this over the years by Paramount and later CBS — always running as the secondary series (first to TNG, then to Voyager), it didn't receive as much promotion or push from Paramount compared to the other shows and movies, but gradually gathered an audience by way of their continuing storylines and evolving characterization as compared to the other shows. As of the 2010s the show has been Vindicated by History in the age of streaming, with much of the new Trek content taking some sort of influence from it (most notably the shadowy Section 31).
• CBS generally makes at least one attempt a year to break out of the Police Procedural mode that has dominated its drama schedule since the rise of CSI. The only one of this type of show that's even remotely succeeded is semi-serialized legal drama The Good Wife, and even then, its ratings lag far behind just about anything else that's lasted more than a year on their schedule. The fact that the network has kept it on the schedule for three seasons and counting is quite commendable, even if its scheduling (currently Sundays @ 9, against Sunday Night Football and the likes of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, and that's only if the show starts on time because of football delays from the afternoon) is less so. The Price Is Right and Let's Make a Deal also stick out, as since 1993, they have been the only two network-based, daytime game shows on anyone's lineup.
• For The CW, and to a lesser extent the WB:
  • Reba (starring Reba McEntire) fit this role during its run. While the network was lasering in on the young, hip, and urban demographic, Reba stood out as a much more traditional, conservative sitcom. The show almost didn't make the WB-to-CW jump, but when they realized the show was already renewed through season six and that the "kill fee" for canceling the show early would have been more expensive than making a season six, they ordered a shorted 13-episode final season to fill contractual obligations and quietly ignored it as much as they could. Even some industry professionals said the show would have been a sure hit on another network.
  • The CW had zero interest in renewing its deal for WWE SmackDown once the UPN merger was done, despite garnering the network's highest ratings by a wide margin (nearly double that of the rest of the lineup). With the CW's focus at the time going squarely for mostly 16 to 24-year-old females and its lineup reflecting it, this meant that none of SmackDown's ratings were translating over to anything else on the network, which led to the then-CW president walking away from it.
  • Whose Line Is It Anyway? is nothing like any of the shows it is promoted with. Reviving the show has been hailed as a great decision for the network, now known mostly for soapy dramas and superhero shows. However, the network chooses to air most of the episodes during the summer (when most of their shows are on hiatus) or whenever a hole needs to be filled in the schedule.
  • The same can easily be said for Masters of Illusion and Penn & Teller: Fool Us.
• Nieuws 2 (literally: News 2) was a Belgian news commentary program on 2BE, a network mostly known for American imports.
• Belgian children channel Ketnet used to have a lot of programming for adults as left-over from their past as the general entertainment network BRTN TV2 (such as Married... with Children and King of the Hill ). For the obvious reasons they stuck out like a sore thumb. Eventually, the people behind the network used up a few of the national budget to create the network OP 12 as a separate entity in 2011. It, however, had so low ratings that the thing was dropped entirely from the network.
• When it came to Fox Kids, almost all of the anime they showed was of the inoffensive Toyetic kind aimed at boys 6-11, but then there was their short stint with The Vision of Escaflowne, a show aimed at a much older, more gender neutral audience, with the content to show. The Fox Kids edit of the series completely cut out anything (including entire episodes) that was considered "too girly" or "boring", downplaying schoolgirl protagonist's Hitomi's importance, and the typical censorship, leaving pretty much only the action and exposition. In spite of the amount of cuts, a surprising amount of blood was left uncensored, making it possibly the most violent show ever shown on an American Saturday morning block. Whether due to bad ratings, parental complaints, or Fox realizing just how inappropriate the show was for that timeslot, it was unceremoniously pulled after only ten episodes aired.
• PBS Kids:
  • Redwall, distributed by American Public Television and aired on select PBS stations, was very violent and serious in contrast to the rest of the lineup's sweet, slice of life lineup. It also wasn't educational, and was likely aired solely to get kids to read the Redwall books.
  • Odd Squad is this to the modern PBS Kids lineup. It's not animated unlike every other show (Sesame Street is more of an HBO show nowadays) and has serialization. However, it was a huge hit for PBS.
  • When it premiered, The Magic School Bus was the first cartoon on PBS, sticking out against the kidcoms, sketch shows, and puppet shows. However, it proved to be a huge success, so more and more cartoons were greenlit by PBS.
  • Donkey Hodie is the first puppet show on PBS since It's a Big Big World, and another live-action series in a sea of Flash-animated cartoons.

Cable Networks

• BET:
  • BET had exactly two original shows targeting children in the 1990s, which is a bit odd since even back then, the channel targeted much older audiences. In question, the two shows were titled "Story Porch", a series where guest stars read books to kids, and there was even a Goofy Suit red donkey character named Bunky. The other show, "The Fabulous Reggae Dogs", featured puppet dog characters, and not much else is known due to the show being extremely obscure.
  • Around the late 2000s, BET began airing reruns of The Proud Family. This trope is actually doubled with this example, as not only is it also an animated children's show, it's also a series from Disney Channel, on a channel owned by Paramount Global (or, named Viacom at the time). The show also reran on Centric (now BET Her).
• Cartoon Network: A strong example of Network Decay, in the late 2000's, Cartoon Network tried to expand by adding some live action shows into its lineup. To the surprise of no one (except the network higher-ups), these efforts flopped, leading to the shows becoming red-headed stepchildren for the network.
  • In Cartoon Network's earliest days, The Banana Splits was aired despite being mostly live action, just with a few animated segments.
  • The earliest original live action series (albeit with plenty of Flash animation) was Out of Jimmy's Head, which aired alongside the Fried Dynamite block. They were later followed by CN Real, a whole block of live-action programs.
  • Unnatural History and Tower Prep provide examples of a fandom stepchild becoming a network stepchild. When the two were announced, they were written off nearly instantly because they were both live-action shows produced by Cartoon Network. Unnatural History debuted first, to middling ratings, which caused Cartoon Network to give up on Tower Prep before it even began, leaving both shows dead in the water after one season. Both shows received mixed to positive receptions and likely would have been successful if they'd aired on another network without "Cartoon" in the title.
    • A few years later, there was Level Up which met a similar fate, followed by the even less popular Incredible Crew, which curtailed any further attempts at live-action on the channel until 2021.
  • As far as animated examples go, Samurai Jack was significantly Darker and Edgier than their other first-run programming.
  • Regular Show was a show that pretty much would have easily fitted with [adult swim] if it wasn't for the fact it did everything in its power to replace heavy themes such as addiction, killing, and the like with child-friendly similarities, but to say the resemblances were subtle would be an understatement. It's no wonder the show got no reruns right after the final episode aired.
  • The Amazing World of Gumball: Its humor is constantly clashing with self-awareness not seen in any other cartoon in the block, though said humor proved to be so effective with even children that the network itself still keeps rerunning the show even after it ended; a rare privilege for a Cartoon Network series at that time. It is also much more episodic and less narrative-driven compared to the other shows, even after it became Darker and Edgier.
  • Infinity Train is darker and more serial than the usual lineup of the network. It also deviates from most Cartoon Network series by being an anthology show where each new season has different main characters, lacking any one core protagonist.
  • Due to Executive Meddling, Cartoon Network's Toonami block, which was dedicated to action animation, had to show Hamtaro, a cutesy anime about talking hamsters aimed at a younger audience than the one Toonami typically attracted. Even the promos for the show lampshaded how strange and unfitting it was.
  • The revived [adult swim] version of Toonami, which still focused on action animation, also showed Pop Team Epic, a surreal Gag Series that would have been right at home among Adult Swim's comedy cartoons. This was apparently an experiment to try and broaden Toonami beyond just action anime, but considering there hasn't been any other non-action anime on the block since, it must not have done so well.
    • Actually, it seems to have worked because not long after, Toonami debuted Food Wars! an anime focusing mostly on....cooking. On an action adventure block. And it's now on its third season. Yeah. It still fits since it's a Shonen Jump title that approaches cooking in the same way one would a shonen battle.
• Disney Channel:
  • Lizzie McGuire was the first Disney show to involve a singer as the main character who could then be marketed everywhere. It later became impossible to find a Disney show (and increasingly, a Nickelodeon show) where this is not the case.
  • Power Rangers for the entire Disney family of networks. They eventually admitted it never fit in. For example, look at the ABC Saturday morning lineup, where it was a superhero action show amongst tween sitcoms, and because it wasn't an Edutainment Show, many ABC stations pre-empted it or moved it to graveyard slots because they were embarrassed to show it. This is why Disney ultimately sold it back to Saban (the acquisition of the goldmine of more evergreen boys' properties, Marvel, likely hastened this). Of course, by the time they launched a network where it would fit in, Disney XD, they were actively trying to kill it and so didn't include it there.
    • The One Saturday Morning block on ABC had a few, including The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show (awkwardly squeezed in after the main portion of the block, with generic bumpers that didn't refer to Disney or the block's name, with no promotion and frequent preemption for afternoon sports). Digimon Frontier was this for the spinoff One Too block on UPN since it was forced on them like Power Rangers was.
  • Good Luck Charlie is a mild version. Unlike their other shows, the adults often get main plotlines, and there isn't much of a twist to the premise (family with 3 older children suddenly has a baby). Also, it was intentionally created to have Multiple Demographic Appeal so that families can watch together, as opposed to their other shows which usually don't appeal to people over the age of 16.
    • Its Spiritual Successor on the network was Girl Meets World which, similarly gave more focus to adults. This is likely because it's a Sequel Series to Boy Meets World and made an honest effort to appeal to that show's fans, even within the limitations of the network.
  • My Babysitter's a Vampire, a surprisingly dark (at least compared to the other shows on the network) supernatural dramedy - which is not made for/by Disney.
• Nickelodeon examples:
  • Nick News with Linda Ellerbee was this when it ended in 2015— it was created in 1992, when the network's mission was much more focused on elevating and educating kids in addition to entertaining them (as opposed to now, when seemingly every show is either a kidcom or animated show that either is rerun endlessly or abruptly pulled).
  • Invader Zim seems like an Old Shame for the network. However, it was a Cult Classic that was eventually Vindicated by Reruns, attracted a decent Periphery Demographic, and became heavily merchandised at certain subculture retail chains, getting a comic series and a full-length movie.
  • Robot and Monster was given little advertising when it premiered in 2012, was denied a second season, and the first season wasn't even fully aired on the main channel. Some of the remaining episodes were shown on Nicktoons, and the last episode was released on the Noggin streaming app in 2015. If anything, the show at least got full series DVD (with all the unaired episodes) released on November 11, 2014; the DVD was discontinued in 2021.
  • KaBlam!. Even during its airtime, this anthology show was thrown around the schedule with little promotion or was put in unfavorable timeslots. Once the show was canceled, Nickelodeon acted as though it had never existed, neglecting to even mention or feature the show in a Thanksgiving promotion showcasing every Nicktoon, the Continuity Cavalcade-laden Nicktoons: Attack Of The Toybots, or even The 90's Are All That before the block was rebranded as NickSplat (and later NickRewind). This is all the more glaring as KaBlam! is one of the network's biggest Cult Classics. It took more than ten years before it finally was acknowledged and announced to be given airtime on The Splat for the 25th anniversary of the Nicktoons brand. (However, it's been stated that Nick only owns the rights to the Henry & June segments and Action League NOW! ^note  which is evident for the latter by the fact that the spinoff show aired on Nicktoons for years , thus making it legally tricky, which may explain why the show was ignored for so long after 2007.)
  • The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss
  • The Legend of Korra never fit in the network’s offerings during its run between 2012-2014. In its first season, the show did extremely well on Saturday mornings but didn’t fit in the slot from a programming angle due to its Darker and Edgier nature, including a murder-suicide in the finale. In the second season, it was moved to the Friday Night Death Slot with less marketing where it didn’t do well on live viewings but did very well on their website and various digital platforms due to the audience skewing young-adult. Then came the third season which had four (of thirteen) episodes mistakenly uploaded to the Latin American affiliate’s website and for damage control, had to be dumped once again on Friday night with no marketing, this time in the middle of the summer. At that point, the damage had been done and Nick completely stopped caring about the show. Mid-way through the season, it was moved to digital only after the ratings tanked even further. However, coincidentally or not, the episode that was the first to move, just happened to be the one with the brutal, unambiguous murder by asphyxiation. The season ends with the titular heroine getting mercury poisoned. Nick has said that they always intended to move the show to digital but if it was due to the content or the demographics of the viewership making the show this way remains unknown.
  • PAW Patrol became this for Nick Jr. when it premiered. While the other shows on the block focused on preparing kids for school, this show was a Canadian import from TV Ontario that focused on social morals. However, unlike most examples of this trope, it went on to be their biggest hit since Dora the Explorer, and would inspire similar shows in its wake.
  • Sitcom-wise, The Other Kingdom was constantly seen a oddball among Nickelodeon's live-action programming. Leaving out the fact that it's not considered part of the Nick Verse, despite most of the network's other programs being so, the series was more story-driven and dramatic than the average Nickcom at the time. Also it doesn't have a Laugh Track. This is especially the case as it was produced in Canada and co-created by Family Channel, but sadly, the network did very little to advertise the show and it was quietly cancelled with tons of loose plot-threads.
• Also if it's a Nickelodeon production made for their British and/or Australian channels, expect it to get the barest promotion possible and get the usual push-off to TeenNick within weeks in the United States because of contractual obligations. This is even though Nick's Australian productions have pretty much become a farm team for The CW, as H₂O: Just Add Water was where The Vampire Diaries and The Originals star Phoebe Tonkin (and her co-star Claire Holt) came to prominence.
• Noggin:
  • Most of Noggin's earlier shows were made in the USA... except for Big Kids, a co-production between Noggin and the BBC, which was filmed in the UK with an all-British cast. The dry British humor and obvious accents made the show stick out like a sore thumb among Noggin's lineup.
  • O'Grady was the only animated show on Noggin's overnight block for teens, called "The N." The goofy character designs and outlandish plots were a pretty stark contrast from the live-action dramas that dominated the block's lineup.
  • Robot and Monster was moved to the Noggin streaming app in 2015, and it immediately stood out since the rest of the app's lineup was educational. While the show (especially Monster) includes some positive messages about friendship and perseverance, it's not exactly educational and has lots of cartoonish violence. It's possible the show was chosen to provide some content for older kids (Noggin started out as a tween-targeted brand, after all).
• Lifetime:
  • Blood Ties was an exceptionally dark series for them, and it was a sci-fi series, which is normally way outside of Lifetime's typical wheelhouse.
  • Lifetime tried again with Witches of East End, though considering they'd been airing reruns of Charmed in syndication during the mornings, it doesn't stand out nearly as much as Blood Ties did.
  • Any of the surprisingly enjoyable horror movies like "I'll be Waiting for You" and "Legend of Lucy Keyes" they aired could count.
  • Earlier in the network's history, they aired game shows. These included Supermarket Sweep, Shop 'Til You Drop, and Debt; the last one was canceled because it attracted more male than female viewership, which ended any game shows on the network from then on.)
• Ironically, because of Network Decay, video game based shows like X-Play ended up being this for G4TV. When they were outright canceled, G4 went into a flopped over state of stale reruns, and went off the air after a plan to rebrand it as Esquire (like the magazine) was moved to the Style network because of that network's wider distribution; ultimately Esquire Network was killed off in 2016 as NBCUniversal slimmed down their cable portfolio).
• On HBO, True Blood is a show about vampires and the supernatural (among other things) on a network whose original programming tends toward showing gritty reality. Same for Carnivàle when it was on.
  • Boardwalk Empire eventually took the redheaded stepchild, as it got a lot less attention than Game of Thrones or even the Adored by the Network Girls (of which the network promoted like there was no tomorrow, despite falling ratings every season that it dropped to under a million viewers a week).
  • Primarily beginning in the late 1980s-1990s era, HBO entered the children's market and began airing kids shows. Usually, out of all times, on Sunday evenings. Considering their history with "Taxicab Confessions" and other gritty shows, this could come off as a surprise to somebody. Eventually with the launch of HBO Family the children's programs migrated there. This example wouldn't be seen on HBO again until Sesame Street began airing in 2016, followed by Esme & Roy two years later.
• Long before the days of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, AMC ran Remember WENN, a half-hour Laugh Track-less dramedy about life at a 1930s radio station, filmed on 16mm and processed to look like Technicolor, so as to "fit in" with its classic movies programming. Ironically, the same executives who pushed AMC in its current direction were also responsible for the cancellation of WENN, under controversial circumstances.
• The previously mentioned WWE Smackdown was this on Syfy as well, along with its predecessor programs on that network, the ECW revival and the initial incarnations of WWE NXT.
• On MTV:
  • The Real World was pretty much the first reality show to air there. The years went by, more and more variety programs were aired, with less and less focus on music. Even the returning Beavis and Butt-Head didn't escape this treatment: instead of reviewing music videos, the duo started reviewing things like Jersey Shore episodes.
  • The Hard Times of RJ Berger was the only scripted series on the channel at the time and was canceled after two seasons. Awkward., which aired after RJ Berger was canceled, became a lot more successful despite even less advertising.
  • The series I'm From Rolling Stone, while being a reality show, featured a realistic view of working life. It featured interns working at Rolling Stone magazine. As it was targeted to a more mature audience than MTV viewers and suffered from lack of advertising and inconsistent scheduling on the channel, it only lasted one season.
• The NHRA (the National Hot Rod Association), the sanctioning body for drag racing in the United States, was supposed to see their events air on ESPN2 every weekend. That's wasn't really the case though; whenever there's a delayed event on the main channel and something else like a baseball or basketball game is scheduled, the NHRA was shoved off and viewers have to cross their fingers that ESPN moves it over to ESPNEWS to air in full, the ESPN2 broadcast is only a few minutes late, or that the later replay isn't pre-empted itself. In 2016, the NHRA began a new contract with Fox Sports 1 and 2; Fox announced plans to be a bit more consistent in its broadcasting of NHRA events, stating that it would broadcast live Sunday coverage from most of the events in its flagship series.
• The 700 Club is this for Freeform (and Fox/ABC Family before it), thanks to the network being contractually forbidden to get rid of it. It also airs on places that are more of a home for it, TBN and the local stations that are willing to sell Pat Robertson a full-hour infomercial block.
• Spike TV:
  • Early in the network's life, they had a block of three cartoons on an otherwise live-action lineup: Stripperella, Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon", and Gary the Rat. While all three were "adult" cartoons, they still stuck out like a sore thumb on a network that was already targeted to adult males.
  • Back when it was still The Nashville Network (TNN), the game show Top Card was the red-headed stepchild, being a fairly straightforward blackjack game show on a network otherwise targeted to Country Music audiences. Indeed, the show narrowed its' questions to be solely about music, then to be about only country music as it went on in an effort to fit in better.
  • Even less of a fit was ECW, a gritty not even remotely country professional wrestling promotion based out of Philadelphia. The acquisition of the ECW rights came right around the same time that TNN rebranded itself as The National Network, even though outside of now being the home of low budget hardcore wrestling the programming didn't really change. About a year later TNN would swipe Monday Night Raw from the USA Network and left ECW with dick in hand to die. Literally, as the company was out of business 3 months later.
  • As of 2015, Lip Sync Battle—a program in which celebrities compete against each other with increasingly elaborate lip-sync acts to popular music, has become the new redheaded stepchild of Spike as the first major product of a plan to begin downplaying its male skew. That didn't prevent the series from becoming Spike's biggest premiere ever.
• Travel Channel's oddball was The Great Getaway Game from 1990-91. To be fair, it was still travel themed, but it remains to date the only game show aired on the network.
• Mr. Robot on USA Network. Most of the other shows on USA are either prime time soaps or procedurals (whether medical, legal/police or otherwise), and thus are episodic shows. Mr. Robot is a heavily serialized, borderline Psychological Thriller about hacking with an Unreliable Narrator. The show almost seems like it would be more in line with the type of shows on AMC or HBO.
• When it started in 2008, truTV's programming consisted on reality shows, countdowns of "suspense" videos, and... World's Dumbest..., a comedic take on the latter format. Turns out the red-headed stepchild became better-received than the other programs and by 2015, truTV became an all-comedy network.
• Canada's Family Chrgd is a channel that primarily airs boys' action cartoons, similar to Disney XD in the States..but Nature Cat, which is an educational show for preschoolers, aired on the channel.

British TV

• The British quiz show channel Challenge was lumbered with TNA Wrestling because it was previously shown on Bravo, and when Sky, who already air WWE, took over the Living TV Group, which included Bravo and Challenge, they closed Bravo down, but didn't want to put TNA on a Sky branded channel for fear of upsetting WWE. Since Living was rebranded as a Sky channel and is aimed at women anyway, Challenge was the only available home for TNA. It's completely out of place and definitely fits this trope.
• Channel 5's unquenchable thirst for procedurals increasingly means that almost any scripted import which can't fit into that category somehow (or which isn't an Australian soap opera) is living on borrowed time. Just ask British fans of Once Upon a Time (which the channel let go despite it doing well), Breaking Bad, Everybody Hates Chris or 30 Rock.

Other

• Pokémon: The Series on Russian cable network 2x2 is this. While 2x2 is animation-centered, it is more skewed towards an older demographic (The Simpsons and Family Guy are getting constant marathons and reruns, and [adult swim] shows are aired as well). Then again, it is the only network in Russia where anime has a considerable amount of airtime. Still, it clashes with the overall feel on the network.
  • That not enough? It airs SpongeBob SquarePants. Let that sink in.
  • At least both are animated, you know. Professional wrestling, on the other hand, made a few jaws dropped when WWE announced their programming was about to air on 2x2. For once, it resulted in WWE finally visiting Russia for a couple of house shows, but at some point, 2x2 clearly stopped caring much, pushing RAW and Smackdown way past midnight and pretty much making a mockery out of shows in promos. They dropped WWE in favor of Lucha Underground, which makes a little bit more sense to air there.
• While he had overseen plenty of Darker and Edgier content, Walt Disney's signature characters and core ensemble were found in his lighthearted short cartoons. Then, nearly three decades after his death, along came Gargoyles, complete with Justice League-worthy content. Including a shooting complete with a fallen body and a pool of blood. The Disney brand was never the same again.
• Disney+:
  • Disney+ is largely dedicated to family-friendly TV shows and movies, albeit with the occasional bit of Values Dissonance, a good selection of PG-13 superhero/action-adventure films, and nature documentaries unafraid of showing animal-on-animal combat. As such, them having the (almost) complete run of The Simpsons, a show that - while enjoyed by many kids - is intended for adults and filled with raunchy, sexual humor and scenes of heavy violence, stands out a great deal. Especially since, outside of the aforementioned Banned Episode, it's completely uncensored, in contrast to some of the other shows and movies on the service.
  • Another oddball choice was The World According to Jeff Goldblum, an infotainment series with few kid-friendly elements. In 2023, Disney+ removed it as a tax write-down.
  • The Beatles: Get Back is notable for being aimed at a much older audience than most of Disney+'s content - obviously in part because it's focused on a band from the sixties, but also because it features heavy, uncensored swearing. Disney reportedly wanted to censor this, but Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr wouldn't budge.
• Crunchyroll is primarily an anime streaming service; the vast majority of its content comes from Japan with China supplying most of the rest. However, it also streams RWBY, High Guardian Spice, and Onyx Equinox, all three western productions and the latter two made by Crunchyroll.
• The Pluto TV channel Totally Turtles, as the name suggests, is presented as a 24/7 stream of every animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television series Nickelodeon has the rights to... except when it periodically plays episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. While Avatar also being an action cartoon doesn't make it entirely out of place on the lineup, it is unknown as to why Nickelodeon has it air on a channel for a completely different franchise.
• The The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers became this when it started airing episodes of the TV Series on HuHa, a YouTube channel dedicated to Adult Animation (a lot of it leaning towards Animated Shock Comedy). While The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers is an animated comedy, it's also family friendly and had previously aired on children's TV Channels like CBBC, CITV, YTV and Cartoon Network, making it stick out.

---