9 Aaron Spelling TV Shows That Didn’t Spell Success

Kindred: The Embraced might be the best Spelling production based on a supernatural role-playing game… by default. Inspired by the tabletop RPG Vampire: The Masquerade, the eight-episode followed the leader of a vampire society in San Francisco. Supernatural shows were hot in the late 1990s, but Fox defanged this one after eight episodes.

Despite spooky-good reviews from TV critics, UPN’s All Souls survived for just six episodes. The series starred Grayson McCouch as a doctor starting work at a Boston hospital haunted by paranormal phenomena. And the result was, in the estimation of Variety’s Steven Oxman, “potentially the scariest network show since The X-Files.”

Years before Ryan Atwood arrived in The O.C., this Spelling production depicted another clash of classes in Southern California, with Keri Russell and Charisma Carpenter playing high schoolers. The teen drama flunked out of NBC’s slate after 10 episodes, despite appearances by 90210 stars Tori Spelling and Brian Austin Green.

Airing just six episodes, the primetime soap 2000 Malibu Road was a very short drive indeed, even with Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Beals playing two of the four women living together in a beach house. Costar Lisa Hartman Black noted that CBS had scheduled the series against Spelling’s hit Melrose Place and the producer was probably between a rock and a hard place.

With daytime veterans like Yasmine Bleeth, Casper Van Dien, Ingo Rademacher, and Jack Wagner in the cast, this so-called “Dynasty for the new millennium” should have soared to soapy success in primetime. But the drama, which followed an aviation magnate’s family, had NBC calling mayday after just 11 episodes.

The questionable acronym of the title — “Burglary Auto Detail–Commercial Auto Theft” — should be an indication that B.A.D. Cats was indeed b-a-d. The action drama followed a pair of racers-turned-cops, and Michelle Pfeiffer got an early screen credit as their LAPD colleague. ABC hit the brakes after just six episodes.

Costars Bill Daily and Debbie Reynolds were likely relieved to see the sun set on this ABC comedy after eight episodes. “If you can imagine a bad Love Boat, that was it. It was embarrassing,” Daily told columnist Jay Horning. And Reynolds said to columnist Marilyn Beck, “It was so awful I decided I wouldn’t do any more TV.”

Lasting just 13 episodes in 1989, Nightingales was a medical drama that seemed more interested in its nurses’ sex lives than their profession. And it showed so much skin that the 189,000-member American Nurses Association organized a letter-writing campaign to protest the NBC show, asking Spelling’s team to depict nurses more respectfully.

The biggest letdown of Spelling’s career has to be Life With Lucy, an ABC sitcom that starred television legend Lucille Ball but captured none of the success of her previous work. Ball played an accident-prone grandmother, but as Spelling observed, her slapstick antics had viewers concerned for the then-75-year-old actor’s safety, and only eight episodes made it to air.