10 TV Shows Made With INSANE Restrictions
These TV shows had to deal with some major nonsense.
The world of TV sure is a tough racket, given that it's typically produced with less money and tighter deadlines than the world of film, despite often corralling a larger number of people to get the job done.
And so, restrictions are just an inherent part of the game - few showrunners get all the time, money, and tools they want, and ultimately have to work within a system defined by constraints.
But even so, sometimes these restrictions cross the bounds of reasonable and straight-up require the creatives to get, well, creative.
Inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the very subject, these 10 TV shows were all produced with ridiculous requirements on the part of the bigwigs in charge.
Perhaps the network had overwhelmingly particular content demands, the storytelling was steered by product placement deals, or executives had extremely conservative ideas about what was appropriate.
Whatever they were, these restrictions represented serious challenges for the showrunners to overcome - if they did at all - to rise to the occasion and deliver quality programming regardless.
In some cases the shows soared in spite - or perhaps even because of - the ask, while others ended up being depressingly short-lived...
10. No Tights, No Flights - Smallville
When Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar first pitched the Superman origin series to Warner Bros., they did so with the proviso of "no tights, no flights," meaning that it would never show Clark Kent (Tom Welling) wearing his Man of Steel costume or flying.
Initially the intent was to ensure the show focused on Clark Kent as a person and allow him to exist outside the shadow of his superhero alter-ego, but by the time Smallville wrapped up its 10-season, 218-episode run, fans felt that the rule had become a creative shackle.
In later seasons once Clark was a fully-fledged adult and effectively Superman in every way that mattered, to deny fans the chance to see him flying and wearing the iconic Superman grab just felt like a needless imposition - a case of Gough and Millar sticking to their word through a misplaced sense of stubbornness.
While there absolutely were rare moments where Clark flew and the series finale ultimately showed Clark ripping open his shirt to reveal the Superman costume underneath, for the most part, it felt like Smallville was embarrassed of two core tenets of its central character.