7 TV Shows That Met Their Fate During the 2008 Writers Strike
Pushing Daisies
This “forensic fairy tale” — a whimsical story of a pie maker who resurrects people, including his childhood crush, with one touch but kills them with another — only eked out nine episodes before the strike. ABC renewed it for a second season, but it returned to far worse ratings.
Eli Stone
Starring Jonny Lee Miller as an idealistic lawyer — whose hallucinations can be attributed either to a brain aneurysm or to divine intervention — this ABC drama also lost momentum during the strike and got the ax after its second season.
Dirty Sexy Money
This one-percenter primetime soap suffered the same fate as the two other ABC shows above, despite a talented cast including Peter Krause, Donald Sutherland, Seth Gabel, Natalie Zea, and Lucy Liu.
The 4400
The CW is developing a reboot of this sci-fi drama about the sudden and mysterious reappearance of 4,440 souls who had gone missing in Washington state over a 40-year span. USA canceled it amid the strike, leaving fans on Season 4’s big cliffhanger.
Journeyman
Another sci-fi drama, this NBC show starred future Grey’s Anatomy star Kevin McKidd as a reporter who realizes his mysterious time-traveling ability puts him into the orbits of strangers in need of a destiny adjustment. NBC canned it after one 13-episode season.
K-Ville
Before Anthony Anderson was a star of Black-ish, he co-headlined this FOX drama alongside Rogue’s Cole Hauser, the duo playing cops keeping order in a post-Katrina New Orleans. Because of the strike, only 11 of the 13 episodes ordered for the first season were produced.
Girlfriends
This sitcom — starring Anderson’s Black-ish costar Tracee Ellis Ross as one of the titular four friends — was robbed of a proper series finale when The CW axed it at the very end of the strike. Fans of the eight-season comedy, therefore, were with no sense of closure.
A decade ago this year, the primetime TV lineup was dominated by reruns and reality shows as 12,000 film and TV writers went on strike from November 2007 to February 2008 to fight for their fair share of profits.
By the end of the three-month walkout, numerous scripted shows had bitten the dust, and many more had hemorrhaged viewers. There’s no telling whether the following shows might have lasted longer had it not been for the strike, but we can only imagine their chances would have been far better.
Click through the gallery above for shows like (recently rebooted!) The 4400, Pushing Daisies, and more!
