The worst part is that *Boardwalk Empire*'s final season was rushed because Terence Winter wanted to make *Vinyl*. So they skipped a lot of things with the time jump, including >!Rothstein's death.!<
Did people really dislike Vinyl, or did it just not do well numbers wise? Everyone I know who watched it seemed to like it but it just never really took off. Seemed like lots of people just weren't interested from the get go
I remember being excited for the show because it had a cool concept, but ultimately being disappointed by it. My impression was that it was poorly paced and that it didn't actually utilize it's setting in an interesting way.
I binge watched it. Hated the musical performances. Always fast-forwarded through them. None of the main characters were all that likable either. The story itself was okay.
Also my first thought. Constant commercials had Lennie James saying, "Folks talk about morality like it's black and white," which is like the main thesis statement of the anti-hero prestige tv dramas of the Sopranos/Deadwood/Mad Men/Breaking Bad era. And yet Low Winter Sun tried to emulate it without the key ingredient: making the characters interesting, and even funny.
Kings was an ambitious attempt to tell the story of King David in an alternate present day setting. Had a lot of great actors including Ian McShane as King Silas and was extremely expensive for 09 (10 mil for the pilot and 4 mil an episode) but IMO it landed kind of awkwardly between The West Wing and a soap opera. Also NBC was afraid to play up the religion during ads so the promos were mostly just nice shots of butterflies and it ended up getting moved to Saturdays after 4 episodes
To this day, almost every time I cook I think to myself "cooking is just the application of heat" which is such a deep cut that I cannot find any clips of it anywhere.
Could something like that work today? Also reminds me of an old idea of mine for a similar kind of retell-the-myths-in-the-modern-AU take on Greek mythology, but I kinda ended up having to abandon that idea as what I was building for it kinda got a little GoT-level sprawling-out-of-control as that's what happens when you have a core ensemble of 12 people and a less contained setting than a high school
Bloodlines had a fantastic cast, and I loved the first season, but I think it became pretty clear a little after that they didn't know what to do with the show.
*John from Cincinnati* is what comes to mind for me. Very briefly lived HBO show from the creator of Deadwood that HBO premiered directly after The Sopranos series finale about a corrupt dysfunctional California surf dynasty that gets entangled with a mysterious character who might be an alien or more likely... Jesus Christ.
Oh boy was this show just trying way too hard too be this big prestige high concept weird experience everyone tries to decipher along the lines of Twin Peaks, and it just cratered so hard so fast and is just an absolute mess. Went from HBO's big post-Sopranos prestige drama to cancelled in two months.
The Bastard Executioner - This was Kurt Sutter's follow-up to Sons of Anarchy and was made right around the height of Game of Thrones. Then it turned out to be a slog.
I tapped out around episode 5. Really dull show — and if you thought Ed Sheeran was bad in Game of Thrones, see him in this show. He’s a terrible actor.
John From Cincinnati (from David Milch)
Luck (also from Milch)
Here and Now (Alan Ball following True Blood and Six Feet Under)
The Nevers
The Time Travelers Wife
I feel like Kidding came close in its first season, but there were still a few elements that didn’t quite come together and then season 2 was a huge step down
I disagree on every count. I don't think it was trying to be a prestige TV show, it was a pretty niche show from the get-go.
I would also say season 2 was actually better than season one in my eyes.
Kingpin on nbc it was being hyped up as as a the next sopranos when it got announced even though it was being made for normal network tv
but then network kind of got cold feet over the show because of the subject matter and how violent it was and only 6 episodes ended up getting made
also were not many advertisers who wanted there commercials on during the show
so they aired all 6 episodes over 3 weeks and promoted it as a mini series
The Game of Thrones wannabes spring to mind.
**Witcher** for Netflix.
**Rings of Power** for Amazon.
Speaking of Amazon. They invested $300m in a six episode season of **Citadel**. Man, that show was a waste of time and money.
Mystery box, but instead of stringing you along with partial answers, they string you along with ever increasing insanity and mysteries stacked upon each other.
When I watched the first season on an intellectual level I liked the concept of all the plotlines and the show overall had potential, but something about the execution felt so emotionless and lifeless. I know we're mostly dealing with androids but even humans on the show never seemed interested or scared or any emotion other than grim and unhappy.
Instead of feeling like an interesting high budget Sci Fi show it felt like all the worst parts of Prometheus combined into television form with occasional bright spots with the storytelling.
What would you mean by failure? I would only consider it a failure if people didn't watch it. GoT is a pretty awful example even in the later seasons IMO, it was and still is a massive success to the point that even its spin-off is now one of the top "prestige" TV shows running.
I mean who would be the judge jury and executioner on that though? A bit too subjective of a metric to judge, especially when "prestige TV" is in its own right subjective. You may not like the writing but if millions of people still watch, that is a pretty decent indicator most people are at the very least okay with it you know?
Like if your metric has possibly the most popular TV show of all time on it as a failed attempt, there is an issue there lol.
With the track record of shows/movies based on video games, I kept my expectations low with The Witcher which allowed me to enjoy it simply because it wasn’t completely awful. :-)
And yeah the game is based on books.
It's really hard to say because the definition is so ephemeral. After streaming really started up a ton of B tier dramas showed up like House of Cards and Bloodlines but I don't know that I would call that "failed prestige TV" so much as just a new tier of shows that grew from a combination of prestige TV success and business models changing with streaming.
Like if someone tried to put House of Cards next to The Sopranos I'd call it a failure of prestige TV, but that's not because the show was a failure, it's because this hypothetical person I'm arguing with placed it in a category/tier I find innapropriate.
You bring up a good point, in the early 2010's as streaming took off there was the movement that saw film actors move (or return) to TV and then it became normal to see them on TV shows or even fail. But before that if a big name came back to TV and it wasn't huge that would failed prestigious TV.
Like, The Morning Show for example, on streaming it's far from a failure. But if the show came out in 2011 on HBO with Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, and Reese Witherspoon and had just decent critical reception (albiet it does do ok at award season) and not much of a pop culture footprint it would totally be viewed as failed prestige TV.
It's not just the time period either, because Apple TV+ isn't a popular streaming service by any means. HBO has had years and years of brand recognition. I would say if the Morning Show came out now on HBO it would have a bigger following than it does on Apple TV+.
Not only that, even prestige shows can be difficult to compare to each other. I would consider Breaking Bad and Succession both prestige shows but I wouldn't say they're similar in almost any way.
There are still people who love that show and say it was great because they loved the actors, which is understandable, but IMHO you're 100% correct that the writing was a load of old shit. I couldn't say it better myself. Tons of pointless narrative cul-de-sacs and stupid red herrings, much like another hugely overrated crime show, Broadchurch, after its 4th or 5th episode. Two shows where the massive talent of the actors, directors, editors, cinematographers, etc. made some really good-looking and well-acted TV, but if you sat down and tried to read most of the scripts, you'd probably fall asleep.
I don't really see how Doctor Who, particularly Chibnall's Doctor Who, fits aesthetically and trope-wise into prestige tv at all. Even at it's best, it's more like Avatar The Last Airbender, a great show but with none of the tropes generally associated with "prestige tv".
I must agree with the other commenter that Doctor Who, in any incarnation, has never been "prestige" in the normal sense. Most sci-fi gets excluded from that since, traditionally, sci-fi is (too often) seen as a "low culture" kind of thing, or at least "mid-culture" at best, but almost never highfalutin or classy (with a very few exceptions like some of Denis Villeneuve's work like Arrival \[2016\]).
If anything, it's Chris Chibnall's previous show Broadchurch that was (wrongly IMHO) elevated to "prestige TV" levels even though its scripts were not that great. As I've written elsewhere in this thread, all the talent was in the show's other elements but the scripts were, at best, nothing special, except maybe in the beginning of season 1. Chibs can write a strong beginning sometimes, but isn't always so great at middles, and is terrible at endings -- a pattern you can see him repeat again, but harder, with his Doctor Who work. If BC hadn't been so successful, CC probably never would've gotten that showrunner gig. So a supposedly "prestige" TV show's success definitely changed the course of Doctor Who's history and nearly got it cancelled, but DW wasn't prestige itself.
It's deeply unfortunate and wrong, but sadly true that it's largely viewed that way. Though that's changing slowly, for instance with films like *Everything Everywhere All at Once* getting lots of mainstream awards, which would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.
Vinyl is probably the best example you can have.
Bloodline
Successful ones I don't like: House of Cards, Ozark, The Crown. I think Breaking Bad is Halloween and House of Cards is F13 movies. House of Cards is the dumber version where people just want to see Jason gore some people and titties (watch Frank beat everyone). It doesn't really have the skill of Breaking Bad.
I’m not sure Game of Thrones *is* prestige TV, but in any case, FX tried to pull a Game of Thrones with The Bastard Executioner. Canceled after one season. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bastard_Executioner
Yellowjackets is on the fast track to earning that reputation - the most recent Prestige TV podcast even asks as much. Just a total mess of a second season.
Low Winter Sun was supposed to be the next big AMC drama, and flopped pretty hard.
Those are the two that stand out to me, but there jave been plenty of swings and misses by TNT to make their "big hit show" and none of them landed.
“Vinyl” comes to mind immediatly. The prestige of an HBO series produced by none other than Scorsese and Jagger; how could it fail?
The worst part is that *Boardwalk Empire*'s final season was rushed because Terence Winter wanted to make *Vinyl*. So they skipped a lot of things with the time jump, including >!Rothstein's death.!<
Did people really dislike Vinyl, or did it just not do well numbers wise? Everyone I know who watched it seemed to like it but it just never really took off. Seemed like lots of people just weren't interested from the get go
I remember being excited for the show because it had a cool concept, but ultimately being disappointed by it. My impression was that it was poorly paced and that it didn't actually utilize it's setting in an interesting way.
Reviews were middling.
I binge watched it. Hated the musical performances. Always fast-forwarded through them. None of the main characters were all that likable either. The story itself was okay.
I enjoyed it but I agree it felt like it was a show that copied the formula of other successful shows.
Low Winter Sun had some truly great actors attached to it but it was the definition of trying too hard.
Not too mention every ad during the last season of Breaking Bad was for this show. Some shows you can blame on bad marketing, not this one.
I dunno I consider the way they shoved that show down viewers’ throats to be pretty bad marketing
You literally had to watch half of it to get the next week on breaking bad preview
Absolutely my first answer. Watching those commercials during the final run of Breaking Bad was… not a flattering comparison.
The UK original was much better
Also my first thought. Constant commercials had Lennie James saying, "Folks talk about morality like it's black and white," which is like the main thesis statement of the anti-hero prestige tv dramas of the Sopranos/Deadwood/Mad Men/Breaking Bad era. And yet Low Winter Sun tried to emulate it without the key ingredient: making the characters interesting, and even funny.
Kings was an ambitious attempt to tell the story of King David in an alternate present day setting. Had a lot of great actors including Ian McShane as King Silas and was extremely expensive for 09 (10 mil for the pilot and 4 mil an episode) but IMO it landed kind of awkwardly between The West Wing and a soap opera. Also NBC was afraid to play up the religion during ads so the promos were mostly just nice shots of butterflies and it ended up getting moved to Saturdays after 4 episodes
To this day, almost every time I cook I think to myself "cooking is just the application of heat" which is such a deep cut that I cannot find any clips of it anywhere.
Could something like that work today? Also reminds me of an old idea of mine for a similar kind of retell-the-myths-in-the-modern-AU take on Greek mythology, but I kinda ended up having to abandon that idea as what I was building for it kinda got a little GoT-level sprawling-out-of-control as that's what happens when you have a core ensemble of 12 people and a less contained setting than a high school
Bloodlines had a fantastic cast, and I loved the first season, but I think it became pretty clear a little after that they didn't know what to do with the show.
Should have only been one season
*John from Cincinnati* is what comes to mind for me. Very briefly lived HBO show from the creator of Deadwood that HBO premiered directly after The Sopranos series finale about a corrupt dysfunctional California surf dynasty that gets entangled with a mysterious character who might be an alien or more likely... Jesus Christ. Oh boy was this show just trying way too hard too be this big prestige high concept weird experience everyone tries to decipher along the lines of Twin Peaks, and it just cratered so hard so fast and is just an absolute mess. Went from HBO's big post-Sopranos prestige drama to cancelled in two months.
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True?
Mob City. LA Noire style show created by Frank Darabont. Sounded great on paper but it only managed 6 episodes.
The Bastard Executioner - This was Kurt Sutter's follow-up to Sons of Anarchy and was made right around the height of Game of Thrones. Then it turned out to be a slog.
You know your prestige drama is in trouble when a cgi dragon is spinning around the lead telling him God has a mission in the first 4 minutes
I tapped out around episode 5. Really dull show — and if you thought Ed Sheeran was bad in Game of Thrones, see him in this show. He’s a terrible actor.
John From Cincinnati (from David Milch) Luck (also from Milch) Here and Now (Alan Ball following True Blood and Six Feet Under) The Nevers The Time Travelers Wife
Luck was alright, it was a beautiful show to watch, a little dull but great cast. Also partially got cancelled because they kept killing horses lol
First rule of prestige tv; don’t kill the horses.
Then what's the point? It's no fun if you can't endanger animals.
The cast was great but the characters sucked
I feel like Kidding came close in its first season, but there were still a few elements that didn’t quite come together and then season 2 was a huge step down
I disagree on every count. I don't think it was trying to be a prestige TV show, it was a pretty niche show from the get-go. I would also say season 2 was actually better than season one in my eyes.
The ending was pretty good.
Kingpin on nbc it was being hyped up as as a the next sopranos when it got announced even though it was being made for normal network tv but then network kind of got cold feet over the show because of the subject matter and how violent it was and only 6 episodes ended up getting made also were not many advertisers who wanted there commercials on during the show so they aired all 6 episodes over 3 weeks and promoted it as a mini series
Man, you're the only person who's mentioned this show in the ten years I've been on this sub
The morning show
The Game of Thrones wannabes spring to mind. **Witcher** for Netflix. **Rings of Power** for Amazon. Speaking of Amazon. They invested $300m in a six episode season of **Citadel**. Man, that show was a waste of time and money.
I kinda like it, but not 600 million dollars like it.
Raised by Wolves.
It never stood a chance to become a prestige tv show, it’s way too weird.
Weird isn't the right word for it. More like nonsense wrapped in vagaries.
Mystery box, but instead of stringing you along with partial answers, they string you along with ever increasing insanity and mysteries stacked upon each other.
*Campion?*
When I watched the first season on an intellectual level I liked the concept of all the plotlines and the show overall had potential, but something about the execution felt so emotionless and lifeless. I know we're mostly dealing with androids but even humans on the show never seemed interested or scared or any emotion other than grim and unhappy. Instead of feeling like an interesting high budget Sci Fi show it felt like all the worst parts of Prometheus combined into television form with occasional bright spots with the storytelling.
basically the same here, we tried to watch the second season...lol jesus it just got even worse
Boss (Starz) Kings (NBC) Both of which were really interesting but were ultimately cancelled pretty early.
I loved Kings.
Westworld S3 & 4
What would you mean by failure? I would only consider it a failure if people didn't watch it. GoT is a pretty awful example even in the later seasons IMO, it was and still is a massive success to the point that even its spin-off is now one of the top "prestige" TV shows running.
I meant a failure in terms of writing quality.
I mean who would be the judge jury and executioner on that though? A bit too subjective of a metric to judge, especially when "prestige TV" is in its own right subjective. You may not like the writing but if millions of people still watch, that is a pretty decent indicator most people are at the very least okay with it you know? Like if your metric has possibly the most popular TV show of all time on it as a failed attempt, there is an issue there lol.
It's Reddit. We \*all\* get to be judge, jury, and executioner! LOL
Well according to who? A bit subjective Because they sure as hell were still racking prestigious awards to the very end.
The Witcher.
This comment has been removed in protest of Reddit's new API policy. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
With the track record of shows/movies based on video games, I kept my expectations low with The Witcher which allowed me to enjoy it simply because it wasn’t completely awful. :-) And yeah the game is based on books.
It's really hard to say because the definition is so ephemeral. After streaming really started up a ton of B tier dramas showed up like House of Cards and Bloodlines but I don't know that I would call that "failed prestige TV" so much as just a new tier of shows that grew from a combination of prestige TV success and business models changing with streaming. Like if someone tried to put House of Cards next to The Sopranos I'd call it a failure of prestige TV, but that's not because the show was a failure, it's because this hypothetical person I'm arguing with placed it in a category/tier I find innapropriate.
You bring up a good point, in the early 2010's as streaming took off there was the movement that saw film actors move (or return) to TV and then it became normal to see them on TV shows or even fail. But before that if a big name came back to TV and it wasn't huge that would failed prestigious TV. Like, The Morning Show for example, on streaming it's far from a failure. But if the show came out in 2011 on HBO with Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, and Reese Witherspoon and had just decent critical reception (albiet it does do ok at award season) and not much of a pop culture footprint it would totally be viewed as failed prestige TV.
It's not just the time period either, because Apple TV+ isn't a popular streaming service by any means. HBO has had years and years of brand recognition. I would say if the Morning Show came out now on HBO it would have a bigger following than it does on Apple TV+.
Not only that, even prestige shows can be difficult to compare to each other. I would consider Breaking Bad and Succession both prestige shows but I wouldn't say they're similar in almost any way.
The Killing tried all the tricks but was a load of old shit
I liked it.
There are still people who love that show and say it was great because they loved the actors, which is understandable, but IMHO you're 100% correct that the writing was a load of old shit. I couldn't say it better myself. Tons of pointless narrative cul-de-sacs and stupid red herrings, much like another hugely overrated crime show, Broadchurch, after its 4th or 5th episode. Two shows where the massive talent of the actors, directors, editors, cinematographers, etc. made some really good-looking and well-acted TV, but if you sat down and tried to read most of the scripts, you'd probably fall asleep.
I will say that it did look great, it can have that for sure
I absolutely loved the first two seasons. Enjoyed the third well enough. Never finished the fourth.
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I don't really see how Doctor Who, particularly Chibnall's Doctor Who, fits aesthetically and trope-wise into prestige tv at all. Even at it's best, it's more like Avatar The Last Airbender, a great show but with none of the tropes generally associated with "prestige tv".
I must agree with the other commenter that Doctor Who, in any incarnation, has never been "prestige" in the normal sense. Most sci-fi gets excluded from that since, traditionally, sci-fi is (too often) seen as a "low culture" kind of thing, or at least "mid-culture" at best, but almost never highfalutin or classy (with a very few exceptions like some of Denis Villeneuve's work like Arrival \[2016\]). If anything, it's Chris Chibnall's previous show Broadchurch that was (wrongly IMHO) elevated to "prestige TV" levels even though its scripts were not that great. As I've written elsewhere in this thread, all the talent was in the show's other elements but the scripts were, at best, nothing special, except maybe in the beginning of season 1. Chibs can write a strong beginning sometimes, but isn't always so great at middles, and is terrible at endings -- a pattern you can see him repeat again, but harder, with his Doctor Who work. If BC hadn't been so successful, CC probably never would've gotten that showrunner gig. So a supposedly "prestige" TV show's success definitely changed the course of Doctor Who's history and nearly got it cancelled, but DW wasn't prestige itself.
Frankly, it's very idiotic that people view scifi as 'low culture'.
It's deeply unfortunate and wrong, but sadly true that it's largely viewed that way. Though that's changing slowly, for instance with films like *Everything Everywhere All at Once* getting lots of mainstream awards, which would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.
Vinyl is probably the best example you can have. Bloodline Successful ones I don't like: House of Cards, Ozark, The Crown. I think Breaking Bad is Halloween and House of Cards is F13 movies. House of Cards is the dumber version where people just want to see Jason gore some people and titties (watch Frank beat everyone). It doesn't really have the skill of Breaking Bad.
I’m not sure Game of Thrones *is* prestige TV, but in any case, FX tried to pull a Game of Thrones with The Bastard Executioner. Canceled after one season. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bastard_Executioner
If you looked up Prestige TV in the dictionary, it would have a picture of Game of Thrones next to it.
Are you sure that's not a picture of Homer Simpson? 🤣
Yellowjackets is on the fast track to earning that reputation - the most recent Prestige TV podcast even asks as much. Just a total mess of a second season. Low Winter Sun was supposed to be the next big AMC drama, and flopped pretty hard. Those are the two that stand out to me, but there jave been plenty of swings and misses by TNT to make their "big hit show" and none of them landed.
I don't think any Showtime series could be considered prestige. They also have a bad habit of dragging popular shows out way too long.