We may not know it yet, but we are perhaps in the golden age of OTT content.
Social media takes an active interest in the production of these shows, trying to keep the good shows floating and letting the poor ones sink.
The real losers are the great shows of the pre-internet age whose existence was subject to the whims of studios of the time.
Metrolife looks back at four shows of a bygone era, which were cancelled because they did not get the online love they deserved.
Freaks and geeks
If you were to zap someone from the 90s to 2020, they would be surprised that a feminist, meta-narrative farce like ‘Fleabag’ is so successful. That’s because the hits of the 90s were shows with wafer-thin plots like ‘Friends’, where the height of the comedy is the extra stress on a basic verb. (Could you BE any more gullible?)
‘Freaks and Geeks’ relished in the realism and nuance that OTT platforms would pay big money for today. The show tells the story of a bunch of school kids as they deal with life, and how they pick themselves up.
The show also launched the careers of many of Hollywood leading artistes today, including Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Jason Segel and Seth Rogan.
Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron
If you are a 90s kid, the movie ‘Cats’ that released recently was a disaster not just because it was a bad movie. It’s because you have seen anthropomorphic cats done right.
‘Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron’ was one of the best shows to grace the television screens in the 90s. It was a futuristic fantasy about two pilot-turned-mechanics who moonlight as saviours of their city.
Violence in cartoons was a touchy subject in the 90s. The showrunner Ted Turner testified before the US House of Congress that they do not produce violent cartoons, which led to the show’s eventual cancellation.
Curiously, the violence in ‘Swats Kats’ was tame by modern standards. And though the violence in cartoons debate is untraceable today, ‘Swat Kats’ remains brilliant.
Futurama
Now, this is not necessarily a hastily concluded show because it ran for seven seasons. However, the premature end of ‘Futurama’ is today considered a loss to television. The show told the story of a pizza delivery guy who accidentally gets frozen for 1,000 year, and then wakes up in the future.
The show went through a series of cancellations. Apparently, the people at Fox, where the show originally ran, were not its fans, and they wouldn’t give ‘Futurama’ a consistent day of the week for it to air.
Then Comedy Central picked the show up for a bit, before cancelling it again.
The legacy of the show was its intelligent humour. Not one to shy away from complexity, ‘Futurama’ even joked with mathematical complex theories, while engaging in low-brow cracks when necessary.
Pinky and the Brain
Concluded after four seasons, the show aired on Cartoon Network in India, but was largely aimed at an adult audience. The show made references to a plethora to shows, and even to the contemporary political scene in America, with Democratic Presidential candidate Al Gore making an appearance once.
The showrunners then tried to incorporate the ensemble cast format of ‘The Simpsons’, which was very popular at the time. This failed and the show was soon erased from television.