7 Of The Most Expensive Flops In Television History

By Miss Cellania in Everything Else on Feb 1, 2010 at 12:23 pm

Television programmers have to take chances in order to find the Next Big Thing. Sometimes those leaps of faith fail miserably -and expensively! Personally, I’ve never seen any of these shows except for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, but that wasn’t so much a flop as it was an expensive mistake. Among the rest are some truly weird ideas. Remember Cop Rock?

A police procedural musical would be one of the weirder ideas in television history, but if ABC hadn’t marketed the show and spent so heavily on the production I imagine Cop Rock would be looked at as just another weird flop, one of the probably hundreds in television history. Instead ABC seemed really, truly convinced that a musical cop show was going to work.

The show actually made it 11 episodes, which is still 11 more than I would have expected. I mean really, just for emphasis, this was a musical drama about our nation’s legal system, and it cost $2 million per episode in 1990 dollars.

Link -via reddit


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  1. c0ldfish
    Feb 1st, 2010 at 12:53 pm

    despite the fact that i hate musicals, cop rock actually looked kind of good. i guess my main problem with musicals is that the words never mean anything “shapoopy” and what not. so this musical kind of rules, because the lyrics have weight.

  2. Gail Pink
    Feb 1st, 2010 at 1:26 pm

    I watched just part of one episode of “Cop Rock.” It was unforgettably bad.

  3. VonSkippy
    Feb 1st, 2010 at 1:38 pm

    In all of “TV history” they can only come up with seven?

  4. Miss Cellania
    Feb 1st, 2010 at 1:51 pm

    Sigh. I’m sure they could come up with more, but as I have experienced many times, the amount of research that goes into a blog post is limited by how much your time is worth.

  5. DonS
    Feb 1st, 2010 at 5:03 pm

    “Man Oh man Oh Manimal!”

    Letterman used to make fun of this show all the time in his first season.

  6. Necronomic Recovery
    Feb 2nd, 2010 at 6:59 am

    I liked Father of the Pride. The insanity of, and banter between, Siegfried(sp?) and Roy made me laugh.


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