An old cop who’s sick of getting shot ends up in “Die Hard on a TV budget” with *record scratch* a LADY COP who *record scratch* can KICK ARSE?! Also 101 EPISODES OF FAILURE TO LAUNCH!
Category: Failure To Launch
Failure to Launch, a podcast about TV series that didn’t quite make it off the ground.
You can subscribe to the podcast, if you’re so inclined, via RSS or iTunes.
Peter Serafinowicz and Rashida Jones make up a mere 1/5th of this Friends clone that gave Ferris an aneurism.
A scientist, a hotshot reporter and a nurse team up to fight a translucent condom monster, just like in the original Omen. [citation needed]
A young cop’s partner goes missing right before his wedding. Also, there are vampires. They’re there, sorta.
1970s Satanists protect and care for a young woman, until they fail to protect her from a sleazy drifter. Guess who the protagonist is.
MTV try to make an all-female version of Animal House, updated for the late 90s with Blink 182 and casual homophobia.
Michael Williams joins us to talk about a good cop who fights the system with a little mask and a lot of sneaking up behind people and punching them in the head.
It’s the beloved hero everyone’s kind of heard of but I’m pretty sure your dad loves it. Your dad will not love this though.
Wes Craven tells the story of an angry old cop who teams up with a lady to solve some murders she’s always at the scene of.
Frank Langella is a classic ‘grumpy doctor with a heart of gold’, except without the heart of gold and he’s also a dictator.
High schoolers decide to start bounty hunting and everyone immediately tries to kill them. They don’t mind.
A horrible family of awful christians, are horrible to each other and everyone else in a pilot aimed entirely at a christian audience. Merry Christmas, everyone!
A half-Native American cop with psychic powers and maybe shapeshifting powers teams up with his fellow cops who mostly have magic powers as well to solve the murder of two women also he found another woman on the beach who seems nice I’ve run out of spac
CW: Child abuse – 70s child star Mason Reece gets his own sitcom, with the worst idea for a pilot plot we’ve ever seen.
A secret group sworn to kill a specific demon team up with said demon to battle another group who want to kill that demon. No one likes her.
Martin Dunlop helps us watch a divorced dad and his 2 kids get haunted by Horny Ghost Pirates, but fuck that, they’ve got stuffy old teachers to impress.
I.T. professional Harry stumbles upon a secret government spy program that is also a sexy lady who is out to stop him from banging his girlfriend!
In the future banging is outlawed, so when Greg and Jenny bypass security to bang (and bang and bang and bang) on the boardroom table things don’t go how they’d expect.
Bidra and Nardo are Intergalactic Space cops hot on the tail of dangerous space fugitive “Cloyd” guilty of the worst crime of all… hilarity.
Michael Richards, Dana Carvey and a supernaturally disobedient dog are odd-couple cops in a town whose population-to-schmaltz ratio was judged toxic by the EPA.
In a dystopic future, a team of elite cops use rollerblades and jetpacks to fight crime. This pilot couldn’t be more 90s if it was soaked in Gak®.
Xander Allan joins us to watch Melissa George get sucked up into a tornado and thrown into the perplexingly boring world of Oz.
Claire Sullivan returns to help us watch Biff from Back To The Future reluctantly adopt a dog, a child and several bread rolls.
GREG EVIGAN is Major Jack North, an astronaut who gains superhuman powers when he is struck right in the god damn eye by a solar flare. So naturally he uses his expanded intellect and strength to solve crime so hard he almost dies. He just keeps doing it. Just stop, Jack. Just stop.
Joe fights his ultimate nemesis – another B-movie actor with even 90s-er hair than Joe’s! Or he would fight him, if not for the constant explosions.
Joe Lara fights a sleepy white supremacist during what isn’t a mutiny on a ship that isn’t called Starfire.
Joe Lara fights a cyborg with a bad moustache for the future of humanity, in a film that rips off Children of Men despite preceding it by 20 years.
BILLY ZANE turns not-great-spy Kim Cattrall into a robot after her not-great-spying gets her killed. She’s still not-great at spying, but at least she’s a robot.
In this week’s Failure to Launch we join the Mcallister clan as they dish up their famous homemade apple pie at the Midway Inn. On a space station. In the twenty second century. To aliens.
This week’s Failure to Launch sees the return of a horse of course. Of course, if you’re making a show about a talking horse, of course that horse will be a family-friendly lovable horse, unless of course that horse is Mr. Ed.
F. Murray Abraham fires himself into a volcano and dies. Later, a group of generic arseholes do the same, but without the dying so it can be a TV show.
Jessica Simpson, beloved pop-star, struggles to launch her career in television by playing a beloved pop-star struggling to launch her career in television.
Anthony Strack is a horror novelist with writers block, a new wife, a dead wife, a creepy son, a deeply confusing housekeeper and a new daughter who needs the child protection services right fucking now. Seriously. Call them.
1970-era Dr. Strange battles Jessica Walters with Kung-Fu, lasers and the best afro/gold chains/porn ‘stache combo we’ve seen outside of World Series Cricket. Guest starring Michael Williams and Sarah Baggs!
Dad accidentally buys a circus, and won’t stop firing people & injuring his kids until he makes it work, damnit!
Cam Tyeson helps us examine a TV adaptation of the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie (without Pitt and Jolie, obvs) gets worse in a way you probably didn’t expect.
90s live action Justice League! Which means no Superman. Or Batman. Or Wonder Woman. Plus, it’s mostly about relationships. Also, David Krumholtz.
Martin Dunlop joins us to ask: Hey you guys remember Sliders? Well apparently somebody at Fox apparently didn’t since they tried to make this shit in 2015.
Claire Sullivan guests on this week’s Failure to Launch, in which Elaine’s boss from Seinfeld hosts a talent show with b-list celebrities doing things they’re OK at.
Eternal teenagers Archie, Betty & Veronica are transformed into adults with ‘adult’ problems. Serious ‘adult’ problems.
Two cops. Ones a priest, the others a ghost. If you’ve ever heard a better pitch, it probably made it past the pilot stage.
Wil Wheaton and Rutger Hauer spice up Frankenstein with car chases and giant eyeballs. Contains traces of blackface.
A frozen cop wakes up in 2069 (nice) and plays Failure to Launch Cop Show Pilot Bingo – No Fun Edition™.
Famke Janssen is a supermodel with a secret: she also beats up carjackers whilst wearing underwear and a StackHat. Also, boobs. Sexy?
In the season finale, Leonard Nimoy is a psychic race-car driver who has to a foil a fountain of youth/identify theft mystery in an old English mansion. What don’t you understand?
William Shatner & Adam West star in the sort of 60s historical war epic your dad would’ve fallen asleep in front of on a Sunday afternoon.
A 1992 pilot based on a 1990 Sam Raimi movie based on horror film noir of the 1930s. Plus weird face stuff.
Based on the video game, this pilot ticked all your 90s cartoon boxes: bizarre catchphrases? Check! Poor animation? Check! BDSM pig monsters? Check!
Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey (98 Degrees) host an 70s-style revue with music, sketches, guests and some wacky surprises that surprise no-one.
Imagine if Lost had been made in the early 90s and featured way more exploding fruit and giant man-fish monsters. Welcome to Danger Island.
To help solve a break in at a laboratory, an old school, tough as nails cop gets teamed up with his new partner, a stuffy, by the books, clean cut young rookie. Who is also a robotic talking dog.
CBS tried to convert the touching 1989 Oscar winner into a laugh-track sitcom. Even more boring than it sounds, except for, ah… this one bit.
Nick Swardson’s pilot about a Gay Robot who’s gay, and a robot. He says lots of gay stuff, ‘cause he’s a Gay Robot. Gay. Gay gay gay.
This is the worst thing we’ve ever seen.
An early 90s attempt at “sexy vampires” for TV, except the sex was all incest-based. We can’t prove this show single-handedly delayed the genre by a decade, but I’d drop a tenner on it
Textbook 80s sitcom in which a former CIA agent juggles his new job, new wife, and wacky best friend/disgraced West-African dictator Colonel Ntsunge (okay, not quite textbook.)
A cop from the future travels to 1988 to wreck the future. Isn’t the bad guy. Time Travel has never been so much like a student art film.
Sean Bean is Eddie Prey, who is actually John Robson, who is in fact played by Brett Cullen. Look, you might wanna take notes on this one. It gets dense.
In the mid 1970s, CBS noticed that America was in love with famed motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel. That’s why decides to slap his name on this show, which features no actual Evel Knievel and very few stunts.
Melissa George teams up with some hip young Los Angelenos to catch a murderous psychopath, who is literally impaling people because he misses some ponies. Can the gang catch him with just a handi-cam and the power of free association? Yes. Yes they can.
Kevin Conroy (Voice of Batman) and his team have 48 hours to find a colleague lost in a future wasteland filled with murderous mutants. They’ll get to it at some point.
An unwilling donut store owner becomes the center of a love triangle for two creepy mechanics. Everybody sings about it. Poorly. Except for those who rap about it. Poorly.
1965’s Lost In Space gets rebooted for the 21st century. Somehow, Dad dragging his unwilling family across space because Dad Says So™ doesn’t quite work anymore.
A madman kills his own family (off screen) and then kills himself (off screen) by exploding into a volcano (off screen). From Robert Jordan’s expansive Wheel of Time Universe (Off screen). Has BILLY ZANE.
Two cops. One mad scientist. A shit ton of super sad monsters. And a thick layer of grease slopped all over all them.
David Hasselhoff plays the Marvel super spy in this 1998 pilot, delivering a performance that David Hasselhoff agreed (several times) was better than whoever’s doing it now.
An old 60s sci-fi gets remade for 2002 – now with more Nazis, bubonic plague and false rape allegations. Fun for the whole family.
Jesus fights demons (kind of), spreads love and doesn’t care if his friends die in modern-day Phoenix. Made on a budget of 1 potato.
A newspaper editor’s wife is replaced with a murderous robot. He kills it, along with several other female robots, but not before having sex with most of them. No one believes him.
Promises a giant, fire-breathing robot Tyrannosaurus. Delivers a Blade Runner ripoff about a man going mad with grief over the death of his child.
Mena Suvari investigates a virus spread via social media that infects 3 people, sort of. Entire town panics. Made in 2014(!).
Angels & demons fight for the souls of humans with boring conversations and free tequila shots. Wishes it was The Matrix.
Sherlock Holmes is unfrozen in mid-90s California to solve a bunch of tiger-based murders with nothing but the clothes on his back and a shitload of cocaine.
Painfully 90s teen X-Men come together to fight Jim Carrey’s version of Freddy Krueger (played by Matt Frewer).
Norman Bates’ best buddy from the asylum inherits the Bates Motel, and tries to get it running again. Utterly baffling from start to finish.
An out-of-work cop very, VERY luckily stumbles across/into a spy agency whose primary weapons are Nokia 3310s. Based on a Warren Ellis comic.
Dean Cain saves the world by betting Hawaii on a game of FutureSport, possibly the dumbest fictional sport ever created. Also stars Wesley Snipes as a “Jamaican”.
Rachael Leigh Cook is an FBI agent born without the gene for fear. Based on books from the author of Sweet Valley High. Surprisingly dull despite a scene with an attempted milk drowning (really).
Heather Graham plays a single self-help book editor, in a sitcom that was written either by or for 15 year olds (contains repetitive use of the phrase “that’s gay” and a poo joke).
Jensen Ackles (Supernatural, again) brings his brother’s ashes back to his family after stealing them from the funeral a year ago. It’s 7th Heaven, but serious to the point of being sillier than 7th Heaven.
Jared Padalecki (Supernatural) stars in a 2003 attempt to make MacGyver current and sexy! We think. It was hard to pay attention due to intense boring. Really needed a Richard Dean Anderson cameo.
The Osbournes who aren’t Ozzy drag Ozzy into a 50s style variety show. In 2006. An ill-conceived mess with a stunt that goes as badly as everyone should have expected.
George R. R. Martin creates Sliders about 3 years before Sliders, but forgets to make it any fun. At all. Stars Poochinski’s partner, Robert Knepper and Red from That 70’s Show.
Jesse “The Body” Ventura and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper get fired from wrestling and become cops, with surprisingly charming results.
Peter Boyle is a detective. Then he dies, and his soul is trapped in a creepy puppet dog. Not as much fun as it sounds.
Billy Zane is an immortal bad guy turned good guy who trains knockoff-planeteers to fight other Billy Zanes in this Matrix-era piece of martial arts themed batshit insanity.
Two female detectives, who are secretly lovers, investigate an overly-horrific crime in New Orleans. Being fairly progressive for its time doesn’t save it from also being really bad.
A police department investigates crime in an alternate universe where magic has replaced science. A half-decent concept, let down by the most hilariously lazy/utterly insane execution we’ve ever seen.
Amy Adams replaces Sarah Michelle-Gellar in a prequel to Cruel Intentions, where everyone tries to fuck the underage main cast. Including their step-parents. It’s meant to be sexy (very much not.)