10 GREAT TV Shows You Can't Watch Anymore

These beloved TV shows have all but been written out of digital existence...

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HBO Max

There are many reasons why TV shows become hard to find. Sometimes demand isn't high enough to warrant a re-release, sometimes certain licenses run out, and the studio doesn't feel like forking over the money required to renew it, or - in the case of our current hellhole of a reality - they're wiped from existence to balance the checkbook. 

The parasites up top have never had more means of destroying art than they do now, and they take advantage of those means frequently and maliciously. Many fantastic TV shows are simply unable to be seen anymore due to either negligence, cold financial calculation, or even just mind-numbingly complicated legal nonsense. Regardless, they are all examples of why pencil-pushing lawyers and MBA sociopaths should never be the ones in charge of our entertainment. 

Your best bet for watching these 10 fantastic TV shows are either rolling the dice on malware-infested pirating sites, or increasingly expensive DVD collections. And for a few of them, even that latter option isn't available. 

10. Police Squad

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Paramount Television

Just because a TV show didn't last very long doesn't mean it isn't worth preserving. Case in point, the criminally overlooked Police Squad. 

This laugh-out-loud spoof of cop dramas, despite being nominated for an Emmy within its first few episodes, was subsequently cancelled in that same period. Executives ostensibly took issue with how much attention the viewer had to pay to get half of the jokes. Having been decreed to be far too intelligent for the average ABC viewer, the show was taken off the air after only six episodes. 

The creators of the show then went on to turn the same idea that birthed Police Squad into the critically acclaimed Naked Gun movies. Masterful gambit there, ABC.

Anyway, because it only had six episodes, and the Naked Gun films took the idea and ran with it farther than the show could, there hasn't been much of an effort to bring it to streaming. There are both DVD and Blu-ray box sets available online, though, which any discerning Frank Drebin fans should probably jump on when they get the chance.

 
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Contributor
Contributor

John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?