Audience-Alienating Premises in live-action TV.
- Almost Family: A fertility doctor illegally fathering several children by impregnating women with his own sperm doesn't sound like the premise for a heartwarming dramedy. Even critics who liked the cast couldn't get past the idea of a serious issue like paternity fraud being played so lightheartedly, which is likely why the show only lasted for a single season.
- American Crimenote is an extremely brutal examination of the effects of racism and other kinds of prejudice, deliberately lacking any kind of catharsis even to the point of leaving unclear exactly what happened in each season's titular crime. This naturally resulted in a severe case of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring and tanking ratings, with the show making it to three seasons entirely on the prestige it brought to the network, having been created by the writer of 12 Years a Slave.
- While Animal Planet Heroes has won several awards throughout its multiple incarnations, good luck trying to ask non-fans to give it a watch. Pet and animal lovers that Animal Planet caters to would have to watch innocent pets with third-degree cases of Body Horror, along with potentially dying, courtesy from the moral bottom of mankind, with a fair chance that said animal abuser will get off scot-free, leaving that demographic emotionally burning out quicker than a pre-Edison light bulb. Meanwhile, True Crime fans can get bored of watching what could be considered to be the same cases over and over again, just moved to a new city and with different animals.
- This was likely a major reason for Arrested Development becoming an Acclaimed Flop during its original run (though it was Vindicated by History, and eventually Un-Canceled by Netflix). It's a show about a dysfunctional family of egotistical, back-stabbing out-of-touch yuppies, where the only character who’s anywhere near being upright is the Butt-Monkey Only Sane Man protagonist, with the rest of the main cast consisting of otherwise ordinary people who are driven mad by the family’s chaos (his wimpy, incestuous son and rebellious teenage niece), highly eccentric and socially awkward weirdos (his Manchild younger brother and homoerotic thespian-wannabe brother-in-law), self-centered and lazy jerks (his Small Name, Big Ego older brother and Spoiled Brat liberal twin sister), or cold-hearted and corrupt misers (his abusive parents, one of whom is a wanted criminal), and roughly a quarter of the jokes involve Incest Subtext. Its rather dense plot — far more complicated than one would naturally expect of a sitcom — likely didn't help. The stock market, finances, and other similar topics also play a large role in the series, things which not a whole lot of people are familiar with. This was lampshaded by Michael Bluth in Season 3: "Maybe we're not that likable."
- Behind Her Eyes, a Mini Series that aired on Netflix and an adaptation of a book by Sarah Pinborough, is about a secretary who has an affair with her psychiatrist boss while developing an unlikely friendship with his mysterious wife. Although the premise itself was not a bad thing, adding the fact the mysterious wife was a Depraved Homosexual using the woman's body as a vessel via Grand Theft Me to essentially have a de facto homosexual relationship with his best friend turned some audiences off, and the fact the British media gave it away as a Spoiler didn't help things. It may have had an All-Star Cast, but the premise was considered a bit too creepy for some.
- Birds of Prey (2002) (based on the comics of the same name) tried to appeal to both comic book fans and the Dawson's Creek crowd. This failed because the comic geeks were turned off by the unnecessary drama and pointless changes, and the teenyboppers were confused by obscure comic book references they didn't understand. Funnily enough, though, Arrow a decade later was a massive hit, and used essentially the same premise (CW drama mixed with DC Comics). That Arrow had the fortune of launching in the wake of the massive success of The Dark Knight Trilogy probably helped.
- Blockbuster is a sitcom on Netflix about the last Blockbuster in existence. While a show revolving around employees of a video store seemed like a good idea on paper, not many people were willing to give it a chance due to the setting being in The New '20s, as they felt it would've worked better had it taken place during The '90s and The 2000s when Blockbuster Video was at the peak of its popularity. Needless to say, it only lasted one season.
- Blood Ties (2007), the TV adaptation of Tanya Huff's Blood Books, had all the pieces there: a good premise, a convincing love triangle, and good actors (Tanya Huff apparently saw the lead actress on a different series years earlier saying she'd make a perfect Vicki) with good chemistry. There was one big problem, though: the Canadian series got picked up in the US by Lifetime. The dark, supernatural premise alienated fans of Lifetime's normal dramatic romance fare, and Girl-Show Ghetto kept male fans of sci-fi and fantasy from giving the show a fair shake (believing it was typical Lifetime dreck.) It's telling that Lost Girl, another Canadian series with an ass-kicking female lead with a Perky Goth sidekick and a supernatural being as a potential love interest premiered on Syfy and fared infinitely better.
- Cao Cao 2013 is a Chinese produced drama about the warlord Cao Cao, specifically tailored to show a human Cao Cao rather than the always in control warlord he is normally depicted as. However, Cao Cao is the main villain of the epic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the vast majority of its adaptations (spanning almost 2000 years), and the idea that you could make a drama showing him as being human was so alien to Chinese audiences that the series was actually released in Japan and South Korea first (as they were more accepting of the idea of a heroic Cao Cao). The fact that the traditional hero of the Romance, Liu Bei, is depicted as an opportunist (at best) also doesn't help.
- Carnivàle qualifies: despite having a highly original and engaging plot, the premise of "supernatural battle set in the Depression-era dustbowl", and the thick layer of religious and mystical symbolism all over the show, made it hard for a lot of people to get interested in. It didn't help that the series mythological background (based on both real-world myths as well as components created for the show) wasn't laid out well and the hints were obscure leaving viewers who didn't have an encyclopedia on hand clueless to many aspects. It's been described as a less accessible Twin Peaks for a reason.
- Cavemen: Inspired by an aging ad campaign, it used cavemen as stand-ins for marginalized people and for commentary on social and race issues. The premise was either too offensive (to actual marginalized groups) or too silly (for everyone else) and was pulled off the air before its inaugural season could finish.
- Right from the outset Clarice was fighting an uphill battle to gain an audience. It's a show based upon the Hannibal Lecter franchise...that can't even mention Hannibal (or any characters and events outside of The Silence of the Lambs) due to the complicated adaptation rights. Despite being a popular character, some had doubts about whether Clarice Starling could carry a show alone. Others were more optimistic, at least until they learned the show was structured like a generic police procedural that was only loosely connected to the Hannibal franchise (with there already being dozens of other such shows, especially on CBS). Some fans of NBC's Hannibal had low interest in the show because it was clearly different in terms of tone and plot presentation to Hannibal (e.g. Hannibal leans more into Gothic Horror and surrealism, while Clarice aims to be a more grounded crime drama), plus it takes place in a different continuity, meaning the characters familiar to these fans wouldn't be appearing. Consequently, the show suffered low viewership (the first episode premiered with 4 million viewers, which continued to drop with each episode) and was cancelled altogether one season in after it failed to be picked up for streaming (even though it was faring better digitally).
- The Showtime miniseries The Comey Rule was openly admitted as such by its producer Billy Ray right when it was first announced. It's an adaptation of James Comey's memoir about the 2016 presidential election, in which his investigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton's email scandal likely cost her a substantial amount of votes and led to Donald Trump being elected, only for Comey to quickly be fired when his eye turned to Trump. Ray went to great pains to create a series with absolutely no political bias, to the point of straight-up ignoring some very bad stuff from both sides, and thus ended up with something that will piss off everyone with a solid viewpoint on the extremely polarizing event.
- Community had an Audience Alienating Execution, as their ratings got steadily worse (with the biggest drop off occurring after the Pilot); it's probably because the premise (Fraudulent Jerkass Lawyer has to go back to school, meets wacky misfits and learns the value of friendship) is prime Sitcom material, but the actual implementation of that premise (extensive esoteric shout outs, Continuity Lock-Out to the extreme, weird one-shot genre parody episodes such as and a perverse interest in insulting NBC) killed its chances at being a major hit instead of a Cult Classic.
- This was why the show Cop Rock failed. It's a crime drama... and a musical! Though with the later success of shows like Glee, one wonders if it was just a bit ahead of its time, though these at least had semi-plausible “realistic” reasons for characters to burst into song. Rock on the other hand just had musical numbers coming out of nowhere with jarring results.
- One of the reasons that Dollhouse didn't do particularly well (or gain quite the cult following of other Whedon shows). The concept of people repeatedly having their mind wiped and personalities implanted to act as prostitutes, assassins (and more) isn't exactly a comfortable idea, even if the show criticizes it, not to mention how hard it is to get attached to characters who have a completely different personality from week to week. More to the point, the show is uneven in its criticism. For the first season, the Dollhouse seems to function just fine, except for one evil escapee and a Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist who only makes progress when he gets help from the Dollhouse itself. Then there are episodes where the ongoing plot is absent, or nearly absent, which could imply that some of the Dollhouses' work is just fine.
- Faking It is a sitcom about two straight best friends pretending to be in a relationship for attention, which undergoes a swift Romantic Fake–Real Turn as one of the girls (Amy) realises she is a lesbian and has genuine feelings. However, much of its LGBT+ target audience were initially put off the premise, which immediately drew criticism for being homophobic.
- Feed The Beast was created by AMC as a "quirky crime drama" in the vein of their previous work Breaking Bad (adapted from a Swedish drama called Bankenrot ("Broke") ), this time focusing on the increasingly-digging-themselves-deeper-in-crime misadventures of a duo consisting of a cook who had just got out of prison (and was an obvious pastiche of "rock star" cooks like Anthony Bourdain), his best friend (a widowed, alcoholic, single-parent wine connoisseur with a son that was still struck silent from seeing his mom get hit by a car in front of him) as they tried to create the Bronx high-class restaurant dreamed by their deceased friend and wife (although in reality more of a swindle to buy time and obtain money by the cook to pay the mob boss that he used to work for, the mob boss accepting this because he's obsessed with cooking), and the cast of people surrounding them (an obsessive cop that wants to take down the mob boss, the aforementioned mob boss and kid, the wine connoisseur's Racist Grandpa of a father that wishes to get closer to the family, the somewhat-less-but-almost-there Amoral Attorney that got the cook out of prison (and he knocked up))... if you made it through that list, you can guess why the critics completely demolished the show (although they praised the acting of the entire cast, especially David Schwimmer's leading role): the "cooking drama" part of the show was unfulfilling (quoting shows like the failed adaptation of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential as an example of why such things don't work), the constant attempts at Food Porn were deemed laughable, the "crime drama" part of the show clashed with the kitchen drama part to the point that it felt like two entirely different shows, the location didn't work for them, and to make things worse the characters were such a collection of miserable people facing constant setbacks that it was a slog to watch. The show burned its single season (ending on a Cliffhanger) and then was removed.
- Ferris Bueller, the TV show based off Ferris Bueller's Day Off, would have an interesting idea of continuing Ferris's escapades. However, the first episode establishes that the movie is loosely based on TV!Bueller's life and proceeds to destroy a cardboard cutout of Movie!Bueller to denounce it. Fans were insulted that this show tossed out their favorite movie and replaced the cast; non-fans weren't interested in watching a TV show of Ferris's day-to-day life since they haven't experienced the movie. With both types of viewers tuning out, the show got canned after 13 episodes.
- The First is a series set 20 Minutes in the Future about a group of astronauts preparing to become the first humans on Mars. However, despite ostensibly being a show about space, it features very little space travel or even many sci-fi elements, being more of a normal human drama whose main characters just happen to be astronauts, turning away science fiction fans who would've been the show's main audience. After all, there's really no point in watching a show whose main draw is seeing astronauts go to Mars, only for them to never actually do so by the end of the first season. Hulu would end up cancelling it after its first season.
- Freaks and Geeks was never going to last in network television. The period setting, mixed with the hour-long length (most American sitcoms clock in at under 30 minutes) and subdued, quirky humor, completely turned off most viewers. It didn't help that the show had the bad timing to air before '80s nostalgia really got into gear later in The 2000s. Plus, beginning the series at the very start of the '80s meant that the setting was culturally still very much The '70s, which might have also been confusing to viewers.
- Not nearly as severe as other examples, but some viewers find themselves put off by the fact that Friday Night Lights is "about football". It kind of is, but interest in football isn't necessarily a requirement to enjoy the show at all, any more than an interest in ghosts is required to enjoy Ghostbusters. It's just a good and interesting small-town/family drama.
- And the flipside was that NBC also targeted football fans, promoting it heavily during Sunday Night Football telecasts, only that those fans found too little football and passed, and everyone else who passed on it thought "too much football."
- That the football in question is the American variety didn't help it overseas; in Britain, ITV4 only aired the first season (although Sky Atlantic did eventually... well... pick up the ball).
- There's a sizable number of football fans who'd rather not see the game deconstructed or radically criticized. There's a sizable number of football detractors who resent the central role it plays in many American communities and finds the mere depiction of this role a fundamentally irritating reminder. That eliminates an awfully large chunk of the potential audience.
- Girlboss was a Netflix series about a snarky young hipster who starts her own company after being fired from her job. The problem is, one of the main plot points was that the protagonist was extremely smug, rude and generally unlikeable, which made it very hard to root for her. And if that wasn't enough, the real person the show was based on got herself mired in serious legal trouble over her mistreatment of her employees shortly before it was released. The series also tried to appeal to the feminist public by selling its protagonist as an example of "Girl Power", but the unpleasantness of its main character and the fact that in real life Sophia Amoruso fired workers for getting pregnant made that effort look like hypocrisy. It ended up being cancelled after just one season, an extreme rarity on Netflix which is famous for their lenient standards on renewal.
- Part of the reason The Gnomes of Dulwich failed was due to the fact that it was considered by audiences to be both too childish but also too smutty.
- Heathers (2018) had a core of an interesting idea in exploring how teen dynamics have changed in the 30 years since the film, and how a similar story might look in the new setting. Unfortunately, the trailer was a massive turnoff as it gave the impression the crew went so far with this idea that they turned the show into a neo-conservative fantasy about a beleaguered attractive, straight white girl who wreaks righteous fatal justice on her overweight, non-white, and LGBT oppressors, without a shred of irony to be seen. When multiple school shootings in 2018 made it seem even more out of touch, Paramount Network initially pulled the show altogether. It finally aired in October 2018 over the course of a week and re-edited its final two episodes into one by way of dropping some of the more upsetting content, and its advertising decided to run with No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, but it didn't work and it received lousy ratings at the end.
- Mich like Birds of Prey (2002), Gotham Knights (2023) had an uphill battle and for the same reason and it and Gotham got heat: a Batman series without the Dark Knight himself — expect unlike BoP, where Bruce Wayne merely retired, and Gotham, where part of the story was Bruce growing up into becoming Batman, GK had its version of Batman dead as the thing that kicks off the plot, with the series focused on a Canon Foreigner instead of Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake (all three thanks to their use in Titans (2018)) or Damian Wayne (due to being earmarked for James Gunn's The Brave and the Bold film, as well as Stephanie Brown, Carrie Kelley from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Duela Dent, and Harper and Cullen Row. Naturally, like Birds of Prey, it crashed and burned after one season.
- Heil Honey I'm Home!: A 1990 British sitcom starring caricatures of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun who live in matrimonial bliss until they become neighbors to a Jewish couple. It was probably supposed to be a Deconstructive Parody of 1950s Sitcom tropes, but if so it ended up being a Stealth Parody as well. The fact that you could have replaced Adolf with a generic "bumbling Nazi" caricature as the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist and the show still wouldn't have been all that funny didn't help.
- Hi Honey, I'm Home!! was a forgotten '90s sitcom that was a Deconstructive Parody of 1950s sitcom tropes, set in a universe where sitcom characters are real and the main character, Mike, lives next door to his favorite (fictional) '50s sitcom family. All is well and good... except this was a Nickelodeon production (even though the first season aired on ABC, on the TGIF block) and was instead for kids (the show was part of a block meant to lead into Nick at Nite; the clumsy attempt at Multiple Demographic Appeal was on purpose). The problem is a lot of the jokes rely on the viewer's knowledge of classic television and its tropes. The show even had a cameo from a classic sitcom character every episode, which is great if you're a television nerd, but for a kid in the '90s, you didn’t get it. The show was very inconsistent with its theme as well. In one episode the mother, Honey, learns about sex, and another episode deals with sexism, while at the same time there's an episode about Mike trying to get a girl to a dance. This makes the show very confusing on who they want this to appeal to. Plus it can be argued that the main character of the show is Honey, when being a Kid Com, Mike should have been the true lead. All in all, the show was a major flop, limping around for two seasons.
- Even the most pro-capitalist viewers have reported difficulties with the show Hou$e of Lie$. It's about taking money from rich business owners... and giving it to rich management consultants instead. This wouldn't be so bad if the consultants in question didn't Kick the Dog every episode, or act in some hypocritical fashion that makes it difficult to take the characters seriously.
- Most reviews of Inhumans noted the problem in being expected to root for a group of elitist slave owners who benefit from and enforce a brutal caste system that they see no issue with, while considering the villain a character trying to tear it all down. Even comic books fans would hardly be interested, as there was an increased disdain for Marvel, and Ike Perlmutter in particular, pushing The Inhumans instead of the X-Men for the extremely petty reason of not having the movie rights to the X-Men at the time. The Mutants are easily relatable because they are Randomly Gifted victims of Fantastic Racism; it's not as easy a sell with the Inhumans, who are a monarchy rooted on Fantastic Racism, as it's heavy on intolerance and separatism.
- I Hate My Teenage Daughter: It didn't have the cynical and crude humor of shows like Married... with Children or Two and a Half Men as the title may suggest, making it unattractive for those audiences, and at the same time the premise behind it wasn't attractive for audiences preferring the family-friendly humor of shows like Full House or The Middle. Moral Guardians hated it because they saw it as contrary to traditional family values and the more edgy viewers didn't care for the normally Anvilicious Aesops that the show drops in every single episode. The show suffered from extremely low ratings and was canceled after one season.
- A good example is The John Larroquette Show, in which Larroquette played John Hemingway, an acerbic recovering alcoholic. The first season was insightful, provoking, filled with race baiting humor, and a bartender was implied to be Satan. Thanks to Executive Meddling, the show was made Lighter and Softer, alienating those faithful viewers who did watch the show.note
- Kidding had an A-list cast toplined by Jim Carrey, but while it was able to run two seasons and end with closure, the Showtime Dramedy about an Excited Kids' Show Host dealing with cruel offscreen realities and mental instability in the wake of the death of one of his adolescent sons fared poorly in the ratings, to the point that the second season was burnt off in five weeks by airing two episodes at a time rather than the one-episode-per-week approach of the first. This positive review of the first season
admits upfront "I don’t blame viewers for skipping the 'Mr. Rogers has a breakdown' show" for being too upsetting conceptually. On the other side of the coin, the fact that the protagonist manages, despite some horrible mistakes and acts of passion, to remain an All-Loving Hero despite it all meant it was too optimistic for cynical viewers who would appreciate a Deconstruction of the trope rather than a Decon-Recon Switch. - A particularly infamous example is Kid Nation, a Reality Show in which 40 contestants were left in a desert Ghost Town to create a functioning society on their own. The issue? All the contestants were children, ranging from 15 at most to 8 at youngest. Needless to say, nobody wanted to see a bunch of little kids starving and suffering while adults filmed them for entertainment. The show lasted a single season, and while it was officially claimed that everything was on the up-and-up, testimonials from the kids involved would later reveal that the whole thing really was as unsafe and morally objectionable as the critics claimed (the children only had one poorly-dug outhouse, ate dangerously unhealthy diets because of being made to feed themselves, slept in the freezing cold on barely adequate bedding, had almost no privacy, were constantly frightened of the filming crew and host, and some even drank bleach by accident due to lack of supervision).
- Kookyville was an extremely short-lived Channel 4 improv sketch comedy show, built on a twist that the performers have no acting experience, have no on-camera experience, and no script. The show was blasted on sight by critics for being as unfocused and boring as one might expect — rather than showing people being naturally funny and charismatic in candid moments, all the show really caught was them standing around talking about nothing — and combined with low viewership, the show was cancelled after one episode.
- Lone Star was supposed to be the big headlining show of the 2010-11 season for the Fox network, but the premise turned off audiences so badly it was canceled after only two episodes were aired. Unlike shows such as Leverage or Hustle, the Con Man Villain Protagonist was not a Just Like Robin Hood type who restricted himself to stealing from Asshole Victims; he was also cheating nice, hard-working people. The Heel–Face Turn that was supposed to set him up on the road to redemption (and audience sympathy) turned out to be just a way for him to marry two different women and maintain a double life. When the audience finds no redeeming qualities in the main character and wants him thrown in jail as soon as possible, the premise just doesn't work.
- ABC's Lucky 7, a drama (that was advertised as being mostly) about the downsides of winning the lottery, was cancelled after only two episodes in 2013. In hindsight, it probably wasn't a good idea to air a show about how suddenly coming into a lot of money is a bad thing during an economic downturn.note
- The 1983 British music program Minipops was built on a simple premise: People like kids, and people like pop music, therefore people will like kids dressing up as pop stars and singing their songs. The trouble was that pop music is often a sexually suggestive medium. As it turned out, an adult wearing high heels, makeup, and a revealing outfit to sing about making love was one thing, but a preteen doing the same thing garnered a different reaction. The later, similar Kidz Bop in comparison tries hard to avoid this reaction by cleaning up a lot of their songs, and still attracts a lot of criticism. Minipops did it straight, and only lasted a single series. Some more successful takes on the Minipops formula lie in Kids Incorporated and Kidsongs, which, like Kidz Bop, also Bowdlerised their covered songs when they needed to, and those series had a proven longevity — Kids Inc. lasted a whopping eight seasons and five seasons for the Kidsongs TV show.
- Mitten im 8en was a Daily Soap launched on Austrian TV as part of a massive retooling of the public broadcaster, was heavily advertised and was hailed as a Smash Hit before the pilot even aired. It had numerous characters, few of which were sympathetic and each one of which was supposed to feature in a significant capacity in each of the 23-minute-episodes, and featured primarily unfunny comedy and uninteresting plots. It bombed heavily, both with critics and with audiences, and lost viewers at a quick rate. It was cancelled after 56 (of 118 produced) episodes had aired.
- The Moment of Truth was a Peruvian game show where contestants had to answer deeply personal questions in front of their family members and a live studio audience while hooked up to a polygraph machine. While that already sounds uncomfortable and humiliating, the show drew serious controversy for its very first episode, where a woman had to admit she'd cheated on her husband and that she wished she was married to her ex-boyfriend, with the producers even bringing said ex-boyfriend onto the show to ask the question, to which she answered yes. All while her parents and husband just had to sit and watch. This resulted in the end of their marriage and many people, even the host, wished for the episode not to be aired, calling it the most uncomfortable situation he'd ever seen. The Moment of Truth only lasted 38 episodes, 15 of which were unaired.
- A major reason for the failure of Mrs. Columbo was that it was meant to be a series focused on Columbo's wife, unseen in the series proper... and yet the producers cast a 24-year-old actress in the role, a young Kate Mulgrew, to play the wife of a man who had clearly been married for decades. This then forced a hasty Retool that declared she was absolutely not Columbo's wife, at which point the show had no real premise at all beyond "woman solves mysteries."
- Despite initial promise and the first episode doing well, many felt that this is the reason why The Muppets (2015) failed, as the show's The Office-like workplace mockumentary premise, the more cynical and grounded tone, and the edgier humor wound up being a poor fit for the usually over-the-top, family-friendly, heartfelt, and optimistic Muppets, with Muppet fans being turned off by the adult, grounded and cynical humor, and those into adult workplace mockumentaries showing no interest in one featuring The Muppets. While the show would attempt to address most of the criticisms via a later retool, it wasn't enough to save it, and the show was ultimately cancelled by ABC after 15 episodes due to poor ratings.
- Musikantenstadl was a long-running German show presenting volkstuemliche Musik, "folksy music" (often falsely called "Volksmusik", i.e. "folk music"). It was quite popular with older audiences; eventually, however, executives decided to aim for a younger audience (never mind that the producers were public broadcasters and therefore supposed or at least expected to take niches into account as well), and Musikantenstadl was Retooled into the Younger and Hipper Stadlshow. It was a spectacular flop; after all, young people are generally not interested in folksy music, to begin with, so virtually all the retool accomplished was alienating the existing viewership. Nevertheless, it was decided to keep the Stadlshow concept, except that the program is now limited to new year specials, with only a single regular episode having been produced.
- The Amazon Series Night Sky was a little much for people looking for an escape. The first episode is light on the science fiction and VERY heavy on the drama of two aging, forgetful seniors. This probably hit many elderly viewers and folks who care for their aging parents a little too close to home to bother continuing with the story.
- The short-lived series The Nine. It was advertised and marketed as a crime thriller but was actually more of an emotional drama. Thus people that wanted a crime thriller were turned off by the melodrama and viewers that would have liked the melodrama were alienated by the crime-focused advertising.
- Of Kings and Prophets is a Game of Thrones clone retelling the Books of Samuel—probably the best part of The Bible for a political drama. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have occurred to the creators that the people most likely to watch their show would be religious people. As a result, it was promoted for being Hotter and Sexier and Bloodier and Gorier, and its Values Dissonance seemed to treat God and the Israelites as Villain Protagonists. It was canceled after two episodes in the United States, with a total of nine (everything already filmed before the premiere) airing in Australia.
- Phyllis, the short-lived spinoff of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was based on Cloris Leachman's Phyllis Lindstrom. While Phyllis was beloved as a character on MTM, she worked as a supporting Foil to the protagonist Mary, as well as because of her dynamics with the rest of the cast. Essentially, Phyllis was a self-centered, entitled, well-meaning, pushy, insecure and oblivious social climber who'd be tough to take on her own — but she was made hilariously funny in the way that she interacted with Mary, Rhoda, and the WJM staff. The spin-off focused only on Phyllis and her daughter and attempted to soften the neurotic busybody in the hopes of making her more sympathetic as a lead, but it ended up removing exactly the qualities that made audiences like Phyllis in the first place. Not helping matters were the unexpected deaths of three major cast members over the relatively brief course of the series, as well as prominent supporting actress Jane Rose falling ill. Throughout the show's behind-the-scenes tragedies, the concept was re-jigged, new characters were added, they tried wedding episodes and surprise elopements — but audiences just couldn't get invested in the series. Cloris Leachman herself expressed disappointment in Phyllis, noting that it didn't recreate the magic that made the parent show work.
- Profit featured a Villain Protagonist before other shows dabbled with the concept. It didn't last a single season.
- Resident Evil (2022) aired to only lukewarm reception from critics and downright abysmal reception from viewers, owing a lot to how it falls into the crevice between three distinct groups of people. Fans of zombie horror in general are going to be turned off by the teenage girl high-school drama and are going to gravitate toward the multitude of other much better received zombie horror shows like All of Us Are Dead. Fans of teenage girl high-school drama are going to be turned off by the zombie gore and the constant references to a franchise they've probably never even touched. Fans of the games or the movies are going to be turned off by how it's an In Name Only affair that has nothing to do with either, its Race Lifted version of fan-favorite Big Bad Albert Wesker who doesn't act in any way like his game or movie counterparts, and its focus on original characters Billie and Jade rather than using any of the existing characters. Needless to say, its first season was also its last.
- RoboCop: The Series, much like RoboCop 3, was part of an attempt to turn the up-until-3 very hard "R"-rated franchise into a franchise for children. Fans didn't take well to it, and it only lasted one season.
- Santa Clarita Diet: This is a sitcom about a family where the mother becomes a zombie and starts to eat people. The show has been praised for being hilarious even at its darkest moments, but it has more gore than your average horror movie, with very graphic deaths, Bloody Horror and Body Horror both being Played for Laughs, which turned off several viewers who couldn't handle the very dark comedy of the show.
- The Super Sproutlet Show: Many LazyTown fans either liked the series or thought it was babyish and that the character of Bean was rather "unnecessary," while other liked it. The series ran for three years and probably ended for these reasons.
- Supertrain is The Love Boat (though closer to a mystery dramedy rather than a romantic comedy) on a train. A nuclear-powered train. This makes it look both too sci-fi (which it is not) and too derivative for their aimed audience, and the Three Mile Island incident that happened less than two months after the show's premiere made that premise alienating to everyone else as well. (And railroad enthusiasts found too many issues with the train to enjoy the series.) It lasted only five months and nine episodes before it got pulled off the air, and disappeared outright, never being syndicated or put on home video.
- Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills was a show that focused heavily on harshly criticizing the Tokusatsu genre and showing how the creators thought one of those shows should be done. Fans of the genre were turned off by its vindictiveness, and people who didn't like it didn't even bother to watch it.
- Time of Your Life was an attempted spin-off of Party of Five, following Jennifer Love Hewitt's Sarah Reeves as she goes to New York looking for her birth father. Although the actress had plenty of popularity as a Teen Idol, Sarah had been a supporting character and borderline Satellite Love Interest for Bailey in the parent show, and the premise of the spin-off saw them having to break up to allow her to have her own story - meaning the concept hinged on a supporting character having to carry a show on her own without the family dynamic that made Party of Five so appealing. Marketing didn't help, where the show was put on hiatus for five months during its first season alone, and attempts by the network to promote its return as 'The Summer of Love', hyping Jennifer Love Hewitt as Ms. Fanservice yielded little results, given that Sarah was a Girl Next Door on the parent show. Ultimately it was cancelled before all the episodes had even finished airing, and the full season didn't air until 2021.
- Tomorrow's Pioneers is a Sesame Street-esque children's TV show, complete with a blatant ripoff of Mickey Mouse... which also glorifies the militant pro-Islamist group Hamas and frequently espouses violence towards its targets such as Israel and the United States of America. Needless to say, it only lasted around 2 and a half years, and was never officially broadcast outside of Palestine.
- The BBC's soap opera Triangle: a ferry operating in the gloom of the North Sea was hardly the most glamorous of locations. Famously, the first episode featured Kate O'Mara sunbathing topless on an obviously freezing deck. Clichéd relationships, stilted dialogue and production problems related to being on a real-life ferry cemented the show's mockable reputation.
- Threes A Crowd was a quasi-spinoff of The Newlywed Game that ran from 1979-1980, which had cheating husbands appearing alongside their wives and the secretaries they were cheating with, with each wife and secretary trying to match up with more of the man's answers than the other. Both feminists and Christian conservatives denounced the show, arguing that it glamorized sexual exploitation and infidelity, and the show was soon cancelled.
- Ultraman Leo was a Deconstruction of tokusatsu before audiences were used to such storiesnote . The premise practically tears apart the Invincible Hero trope, and the MAC members seem to interact and react with the world around them far more realistically than other Science Patrols. As well as all that, Leo himself relied much more on fists and kicks, which was jarring in a franchise far more used to heroes who used flashy, dazzling energy rays. All this led to the show falling into the single digits, the worst rating in the franchise history.
- The drama/musical Viva Laughlin (the U.S. adaptation of The BBC series Viva Blackpool) got horrid reviews and was canned after only two episodes, even with a singing, dancing Hugh Jackman. After the crashing and burning of Smash, it would seem that musical TV series simply don't work; TV movie musicals like High School Musical seem to fare better.
- Musicals, in general, are a bit of a hard sell (High School Musical being an outlier). Glee survived through a number of factors: 1) it played into the camp appeal, 2) sales of the music made up for any underperforming ratings, 3) most the songs were covers of classic or contemporary hits the audience already knows and loves (it is telling that the few original songs weren't particularly memorable), and 4) like its suspiciously similar predecessor, Fame, the context of the series allowed for its characters to break into song and dance because, duh, the characters were singers and dancers and most musical numbers were thus presented in the context of putting on a show. This is not the same as a bunch of cops suddenly deciding to sing for no reason.
- Wicked City tried to ride the Breaking Bad train by focusing on a Villain Protagonist and the woman he slowly drags into joining him. Unfortunately, what it missed is anything to make its main character Kent at all engaging or sympathetic so that people would be willing to follow his story in spite of his evil actions. It was pulled after three episodes, with the creators putting up a further five that hastily wrapped up the story (sort of, as Kent ends up a Karma Houdini so it feels like there was even less point to watching the thing) online. Then it lost any possibility of becoming a Cult Classic when Kent's actor Ed Westwick was accused of rape by several women in the early days of the #MeToo movement, making his character's actions hit way too close to home for anyone to be comfortable watching it.
- Work It was a cross-dressing comedy about two St. Louis guys forced to dress as women in order to get jobs as pharmaceutical sales representatives, as said company only hires women. While that concept might have worked in The '70s with Bosom Buddies, it had no chance in 2012, and was quickly cancelled after two episodes.
- The Will was a reality show pulled after the first episode. A huge advertising push ensured that everyone would be disgusted with the premise of a group of family members competing to be the sole heir of their rich benefactor's estate before it even premiered.
