Foreign Perspectives

By and large, only the American produced series that have been running for more than a single series are picked up by the UK TV companies so we only see a fraction of the shows that are cancelled on this side of the water.

However, now and again shows are picked up before they’ve gotten the approval for a second series and, if that sample is anything to go by, some of the series that end up on the scrap heap are there for no particular reason or at least none that relates to the quality of the show itself. Generally speaking shows in the UK are allowed to run for a series or two to gather up an audience as it’s accepted that not every series will pull in the big numbers at the outset. OK, some dreary shows get through that process but then you don’t get silly things like Star Trek being cancelled long ago and only on the second run did that whole franchise really take off.

Odyssey 5 was one that bit the dust towards the end of its first season. It’s one of a group that were ongoing at that time centered around the idea of some kind of conspiracy and/or it being the end of civilisation as we know it (very common in the run up to 2000). Was it any good? It certainly wasn’t at the top end of that genre but it was well off the bottom end of it. As with many such series it seemed to be written with a 5 year cycle in mind (much more explicitly used on this particular series of course) so there were multiple subthemes running through the various episodes.

Many such shows at the time built elaborate subplots spanning series and with some major league plotting (Babylon 5 springs to mind as perhaps the ultimate such show) and perhaps there were just too many of them fighting for position in audience share at the time. Certainly there was a bumper crop of conspiracy shows from around the mid 1990s through to the early years of this century. As I say many of those pre-2000 ran with “end of the world” themes although with us being past 2000 now that kind of show isn’t nearly so common these days.