10 Horror TV Shows That Wasted Incredible Premises

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.