The end of the syndicated action/fantasy series??

[wizard55]

I’m sure everyone here has at some point watched one of the great syndicated action/fantasy adventure series of the 90’s. Cheesy yet always a fun watch. Xena, Hercules, Relic Hunter, Beastmaster, etc. My personal favorite being The Lost World tv series that ran 3 seasons.

The last one made was Legend of the Seeker which sadly was canceled after season 2. My question is, do you think we will see more of these silly yet fun adventure series anymore or is the sub-genre dead?

[schmacky]

It’s dead.. along with shows that take place in space.

[marilou]

@Schmacky wrote:

It’s dead.. along with shows that take place in space.

shhh… don’t say stuff like that, I was hoping for a new space opera in the near-ish future.

[evilqueen]

@wizard55 wrote:

My personal favorite being The Lost World tv series that ran 3 seasons

Oh my, a fellow TLW fan! I LOVED the show, my favourite character was Marguerite, probably my first crush! 😆 (I guess one can see a recurring theme in what sort of characters I favor – she has some parallels with the Evil Queen )
I hated the way they finished it – they left it at a point with such a potential!

I know this kind of shows is incredibly cheesy… but isn’t it why we watch it?

[obisgirl]

I will admit this now: I watched Hercules and Xena. Buffy too. When I was in high school, she was in high school struggling all the way through it.

I think the cheese factor of these shows aren’t coming back. TV is reinvented a lot. It could come back (later decades from now or something).

[Myril]

@obisgirl wrote:

I will admit this now: I watched Hercules and Xena. Buffy too. When I was in high school, she was in high school struggling all the way through it.

I think the cheese factor of these shows aren’t coming back. TV is reinvented a lot. It could come back (later decades from now or something).

Not sure if the “cheese factor” is all gone. Look at a show like Lost Girl (Showcase/Syfy) – not first run syndication, but a show with some cheese factor, reminding of Xena and Buffy.

¯\_(?????? ?)_/¯

[antbee]

@myril wrote:

Not sure if the “cheese factor” is all gone. Look at a show like Lost Girl (Showcase/Syfy) – not first run syndication, but a show with some cheese factor, reminding of Xena and Buffy.

Yes, I think there will always be a place for cheese/camp, but I think the syndicated series like it was in the late 90s and early 00s is probably dead as we know it because it seems like it’s much cheaper for independent stations to run reruns or nonstop reality programming.

In fact in a lot of ways, the death of those syndicated series reminds me of the death of daytime soap operas that would happen only a few years later. It just became too expensive to produce soaps especially with a shrinking audience that was working or watching other programs since there’s more choices than ever before. It doesn’t mean that soap operas will die though, but they’ll just live on in a different form like how the cheesiness of those syndicated shows just got recycled into something else.

I’m sure everyone here has at some point watched one of the great syndicated action/fantasy adventure series of the 90’s. Cheesy yet always a fun watch. Xena, Hercules, Relic Hunter, Beastmaster, etc. My personal favorite being The Lost World tv series that ran 3 seasons.

I know most people seem to prefer Xena, but I never got into it that much compared to Hercules. I guess I had a thing for Kevin Sorbo.

Some other syndicated shows that I watched/remembered not strictly from the late ’90s or early ’00s though.

Small Wonder – I still think Billy Corgan looks like an adult version of Jamie from this show.

Out of This World – I’m sad that apparently Wikipedia says that Evie did meet her father in person, but I never got to watch it.

She’s the Sheriff – I don’t remember much about this show except that Suzanne Sommers was in it. There don’t seem to be any big egos on the set of OUaT, but hopefully if there are, someone points them in the direction of this show and Jade and Troop Beverly Hills and One for the Money to show what happens to stars when they think they’re better than the show they’re on.

Friday the 13: The Series – It had nothing to do with the awful movie series, they just wanted to cash in on the name.

Thunder in Paradise – I didn’t watch this show by choice but because my dad watched it, and we only had one television at that time. (My dad was worse than Cora. 😉 )

[wizard55]

@EvilQueen wrote:

Oh my, a fellow TLW fan! I LOVED the show, my favourite character was Marguerite, probably my first crush! 😆 (I guess one can see a recurring theme in what sort of characters I favor – she has some parallels with the Evil Queen )
I hated the way they finished it – they left it at a point with such a potential!

I know this kind of shows is incredibly cheesy… but isn’t it why we watch it?

Agreed. Silly looking dinosaurs from season one aside…the effects weren’t bad the last two seasons and the cast’s acting IMO was fantastic through out! Their chemistry and stories made the show. 🙂

I like all the characters…even Finn. At least fans got the big “Summary writeup” from the writers of what was in store for series 4 and the end of the series if it had continued. The fact they were going to bring Frankenstein to the Plateau was awesome.

and I never even thought about the fact that “Space Operas” are indeed kind of dead these days. True.

[Josephine]

I loved “Out of this World”. I always wanted Evie’s power to pause time. I remember one episode where she did it for a test in school and I always wanted to have that power because it used to take me forever to take tests. Yes, very nerdy I know, but I was in Middle School at the time. I just googled the show and realized that this was the show Steve Burton, who plays Jason on “General Hospital” was on. A few weeks ago it was really bugging me what show he was on before “General Hospital”. Turns out it was this show and “Days of Our Lives”, which I remember him on there, too.

I was never into “Hercules” or “Xena”. I’ve probably seen an episode or two, but I was never really a fan. I also didn’t get into “Buffy”, but that was because I liked the original movie and the series was nothing like the movie so I could never get into it. Talk about cheese-fest, the original Buffy movie was full of it, and had a young Luke Perry after his days on the soap “Loving” and before “Beverly Hills, 90210”.

Keeper of Rumplestiltskin's and Neal's spears and war paint and crystal ball.

[evilqueen]

@wizard55 wrote:

the effects weren’t bad the last two seasons and the cast’s acting IMO was fantastic through out! Their chemistry and stories made the show. 🙂
I like all the characters…even Finn.

yeah, the effects were quite good, considering the low budget! I agree that it’s good that the fans had their summary before it all ended but there was so much potential to continue the story from where it ended! Even at least one episode would suffice, I would even be happy if they killed off half of the characters but finished what they started!
As for Finn, dunno, I always saw her as a more modern version of Veronica if not slightly more irritating 😉

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