10 Horror TV Shows That Wasted Incredible Premises
Hang your heads in shame at these legitimate crimes against television.
Horror arguably provides a blank artistic slate like no other genre.
As a genre, horror provides a cinematic platform for events inconceivable to a resident of the real world. The most unexplainable of paranormal events, the most psychotically evil of killers and the most devastating of infectious outbreaks, are brought to glorious life before viewer's eyes in gloriously horrifying detail.
Television series rooted within the horror genre have even more leeway to dazzle their viewers. Increased screen time provides for a larger amount of time to develop engaging characters, ensnare viewers within the tendrils of various plot lines and deliver revelations that land with the most devastating of impacts.
As such, horror shows that operate on what appears to be a bona fide goldmine of a premise fall into the most reviled of categories amongst horror fans. It is one thing doing one's best on a premise doomed to fail on the merits of a sub-par foundation, but imploding on a premise that Stephen King would be proud of? That is an utterly unacceptable status quo amongst horror fans and incidentally, the tragic core reason behind the infamy of some of the more egregiously sub-par horror shows to date.
A poor workman blames his tools; one would imagine that in a world where hammers start mouthing off at their owners for their alleged shortcomings, said hammers would not reside in toolboxes for very long. The same can be said for the merits of these offerings' premises on various critics' Top Ten lists.
10. The Strain
While he might claim otherwise, The Strain is a notable offering that celebrated director Guillermo del Toro would seek to brush his involvement with under the carpet.
Fantasy horror drama The Strain is not the worst show ever conceived by any means. While operating on considerably played-out genre tropes, the series' combination of wince-inducing gore and engaging storylines means that it is not terrible by any means. Rather, The Strain exists as the perfect example of an outing languishing within realms housing series falling into the "distinctly median" category.
After a plane-load of dead passengers morbidly trundle into JFK International Airport, the show's plot morphs into an intrinsic notion, combining the best elements of outbreak blockbusters such as Contagion, supernatural elements of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the unashamed gore of a certain Mr Quentin Tarantino. The Strain is a legitimately groundbreaking new take on combining such alien premises, and the fact that it that it falls as flat as it does is agonizingly unexplainable.
For some ineffable reason, viewers find themselves unable to empathize with or get behind the characters at the heart of The Strain's plot, and any lingering quality from the show's first season disappears rapidly as the second installment debuts. Syfy's offering stands to this day as one of the more frustratingly disappointing examples of premise wasting in recent memory.