5 memories of 5 forgotten TV shows

Youth, wasted

Earlier this week, I posted the second episode of my novella, The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter. All eight episodes will go live every Thursday throughout Substack Summer, leading up to the thrilling SEASON FINALE!

Each Sunday during the serialization process, I’m posting an essay that’s about TV in one way or another. This week, I am remembering old shows so you don’t have to. Pick up the clicker and adjust your frosted tips as we revisit the late 90s.

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1. Earth: Final Conflict

Remember Childhood’s End, the novel by Arthur C. Clarke? Remember V., the TV show from the 80s?¹ These were stories where aliens arrived on Earth, and seemed peaceful at first, but it turns out they ulterior motives? Maybe? Earth: Final Conflict was a variation on that theme. Based on a concept by Gene Roddenbery, creator of Star Trek, E:FC ran on syndication for five seasons, all but ignored by the culture at large.

E:FC starred Kevin Kilner, a compellingly bland actor of the era, as a cop looking into the Companions, a race of aliens with giant foreheads and outfits that resemble Scandinavian pajamas. The Companions seem benevolent, gifting humanity with new technology, but they possessed secret plans, plans humanity wouldn’t want to hear about . . .

At least I think of? I don’t remember much about the show, as it wasn’t particularly memorable, plus it wasn’t even my idea to watch it in the first place. My dad watched it, every Saturday at 4pm. He was a huge Star Trek guy from back in the day. He even wrote an essay for his army newspaper called “I Am Spock,” basically inventing the I-never-saw-myself-represented-until brand of cultural criticism thirty years before BuzzFeed.

Mostly I just played my Game Boy, occasionally looking up at the TV, laying around in my Bugle Boy jeans.

2. Strange Luck

This show aired on FOX for like 2 seasons, maybe even just one, in the leadup spot before The X-Files on Sunday night. It starred DB Sweeney as journalist Chance Harper (I still remember the name all these years later!) as a guy with, well, strange luck. He’s always stumbling across some dastardly going-on and saving the day.

My mom hated X-Files but liked Strange Luck because DB Sweeney once starred in a movie about figure skating called The Cutting Edge, which she loved. Figure skating was her shit. She would have liked Strange Luck even better if Chance Harper were a figure skater instead of a journalist.

3. Deadly Games

UPN was an upstart TV network that Viacom tried to start in the mid-90s. It fizzled after only a few years. Retrospectively, it looks like a trial balloon for the streaming era we’re now in, where every rink-dink channel offers a subscription for $7.99 a month, with each launch propped up by venture capital. But UPN sunk due to low ratings, which has a certain dignity to it.

UPN aired two types of shows: adventure shows, like Star Trek: Voyager, and broad urban sitcoms, like Shasta McNasty. It was very, very strange—as if BET and the SyFy Channel teamed up. Deadly Games was an adventure show wherein the villains from a video game came to life and started wreaking havoc in the world. A young programmer and his friends tried to stop them, one villain per episode.

Honestly, all I remember about the show, beyond the premise, is this one part where the young woman the programmer has a crush on wears a black bra. Formative experience for adolescent Adam, lemme tell ya. This is what we had to work with before the internet.

4. Dark Skies

One of the many X-Files clones of the 90s, though this one was weirdly ambitious, as it aired on NBC. It took place in the early 60s and portrayed a secret alien invasion, and government conspiracy to cover it up, since the Roswell crash of 1947.

It was a forerunner to Mad Men, really, as it was about the same era and the same process of Squaresville, America slowly morphing into Freak City. Both my mom and dad liked this one. My dad for the aliens, my mom for the haircuts from her own youth.

5. Time Trax

Another villain of the week show, this time with a time travel theme. Super criminals from the future get sent to the late 20th century for…some reason? Either way, a cop has to go back in time as well to capture them. Does the future at least have healthcare if it can also afford time-traveling cops?

The hero’s main weapon was this penlight deal that could stun criminals and open doors. It inspired to buy a penlight with my allowance money, which I promptly used to shine in my eyes and nearly blind myself. My took it away. Still hasn’t given it back, come to think of it.

1. NOT the novel by Thomas Pynchon, mind you.