10 TV Shows That Were Doomed From The Start
3. My Mother The Car
Running on NBC in the 1965/1966 season, this weird little fantasy sitcom featured Dick Van Dykes kid brother Jerry in the lead role, that of family man David Crabtree who, while searching for a station wagon to act as a second car, impulsively purchases a 1928 Porter touring car, which turns out to be the reincarnation of his deceased mother (the car).
Pursued by an evil classic car collector determined to add his mother (the car) to his collection, Crabtree and his mother (the car) engaged in weekly wacky adventures for around 24 to 25 minutes a pop over one season of 30 episodes. That's a surprising amount of wacky adventures.
The series was only ever a bad joke and upon the broadcast of the final episode, the joke was on My Mother The Car. The storyline had criminals fleeing a jewellery store robbery performing a home invasion on the Crabtree household. Held hostage and conspicuously failing to escape, the Crabtrees suddenly found nothing, tragically. The episode was interrupted in order that NBC could show a special news report on the NASA space programme and when the special had concluded, My Mother The Car was considered so unimportant that the network simply didnt bother to continue broadcasting the finale. For all anyone knows, those thieves are still holed up with the Crabtrees to this day.