TV Series with a basic premise that you cannot believe lasted more than a season (tv show, shows)
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This isn't exactly what you're going for but my vote goes to The Dome. It was supposed to be a one-off, limited episode summer filler show that wrapped everything up in a season. However, I guess it got just popular enough they decided to milk another season. It was not great but I stuck w/ the first season to see how it ended. Once they announced S2 I never did tune back in to find out what it was all about. Just wasn't that good. Still don't know what the Dome was...Lol!
It's easy to think of shows with completely absurd premises... but most were played at a completely absurd level. Bewitched, Alf, My Favorite Martian, Mork and Mindy... all very stupid one-shot ideas that lasted multiple seasons simply because they were played out on the stupid level.
A more challenging question might be an absurd, even stupid premise that is played out seriously, with an attempt to put the premise in something like the real world.
Two brothers tooling around the country Route 66-style, fighting and killing monsters, for example. No way that could stretch out more than two weak seasons.
After I heard the premise, I couldn't believe this show lasted more than an episode.
For the win.
Although the only really stupid/unbelievable point was the first one it all turned on - that a tenured public school teacher somehow didn't have health insurance.
'Lost'.
That never should have lasted as long as it did. It seemed like the writers were winging it the whole time.
That's a whole different subject. Starting a show with a half-thought concept that the runners allow the individual episode writers to run with leads to the kind of muddled disaster that was Lost.
The best example of how/not to is Babylon 5 vs. the remake of Battlestar Galactica. B5 (despite some hurdles) was planned out start to finish, end to end; there are things set up in the first few episodes that are cleanly resolved in the last few, and very, very few major slips in continuity or story progress. BSG wandered off into five weird and incompatible sub-plots by the third season and could barely be pulled together for a conclusion.
Carnivale, although terminated early, had many moments of complete weirdness and surprise, but every one of them folded neatly into the storyline, eventually. Nothing was left to random chance. ("I know who you are." "Yes, but do you know what that means?")
But that's separate from just having a weird/strange/complex concept.
Although the only really stupid/unbelievable point was the first one it all turned on - that a tenured public school teacher somehow didn't have health insurance.
Walt had insurance, but not one that would pay for the state's top oncologist.
Supposedly, after Vince Gilligan pitched Breaking Bad to an executive at AMC, detailing a show about a high school chemistry teacher who gets cancer and decides to cook meth, the executive sat silent for a minute, then said. "That is the worst idea for a TV show I have ever heard. Go make it."
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