Examples of WTF/experimental weirdness on the big 3 US networks (NBC, ABC, CBs)

[George White]

As opposed to PBS or the cable stations

NBC Experiment in Television  (1969, e.g Jim Henson's the Cube, Pinter People, This is Marshall McLuhan)
Turn-On (1969 - the weird ABC pseudo-Laugh-In pulled off air)
Basements (1988, partly C4-coproduced all-star anthology of obscure Pinter, directed by Robert Altman)
The Prisoner (1967 - shown by CBS)
The Rutles (1978 - shown by NBC)
Alice in the Palace (1982 - PBS-like Meryl Streep as Alice in Wonderland, CSO aplenty)
David Lynch's On The Air (1992, and I suppose Twin Peaks, but On the Air moreso)

[Mister Six]

Hannibal got seriously weird in later seasons, once one of the characters started hallucinating on the regular. That was NBC.

[lazyhour]

As opposed to PBS or the cable stations

David Lynch's On The Air (1992, and I suppose Twin Peaks, but On the Air moreso)

Er, excuse me? How many of the On The Air cast members got turned into CGI doorknobs? None, that's how many! Twin Peaks wins. 

[touchingcloth]

GM. My NBC and ABC and CB have lost their legs, but I've got diamond hands and my WTF is performing well.

[BJBMK2]

I nearly said, "the network interruption thing by the bloke in the Max Headroom mask", but that was on a small PBS station, was it not?

[chip]

Sorry, how are we supposed to know of anything like this? We don't get those channels over here. We never have.

[George White]

Well, most of the US TV we got here was from the networks.

[Mister Six]

Oh I just remembered one - I never watched it, so I don't know how weird it was, but the Oliver Stone-backed Wild Palms aired on ABC as an attempt to find the new Twin Peaks and was based on an oddball comic strip, so I'm assuming it was offbeat at least.

Apparently the whole thing is now up in one big chunk on YouTube:

[phantom_power]

The final episode of St Elsewhere should be the ne plus ultra of this sort of thing.

Sitcoms going fucking mental in general, like Roseanne and the heart-attacks season, that sort of thing

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Sledge Hammer! having an unsolvable cliffhanger at the end of the first season.

Which was necessarily addressed at the beginning of the second season.

[MojoJojo]

Does the fourth season of Till Death on Fox count? Knowing that cancelation was coming, the writers went a bit mad

Perhaps realizing that the role of Ally (Joy and Eddie's daughter) had been played by four actresses over the course of the series (including Krysten Ritter!) while the role of boyfriend/fiancee/husband Doug had been played by only Sharp, the series embarked on an astoundingly bizarre story arc: It had Doug realize he was a character in a sitcom whose wife kept getting recast, then sent him to psychotherapy to make peace with this fact.

I've not seen it, because despite the weirdness, it's apparently better to read about than to watch. To make it even weirder, Fox showed the episodes out of order.

https://www.avclub.com/nobodys-watching-the-strange-genius-of-the-fourth-seas-1798220591

[Ambient Sheep]

Oh I just remembered one - I never watched it, so I don't know how weird it was, but the Oliver Stone-backed Wild Palms aired on ABC as an attempt to find the new Twin Peaks and was based on an oddball comic strip, so I'm assuming it was offbeat at least.

Heh, it was the first (and only) thing that sprang to mind when I saw the thread, but I decided against mentioning it as it's probably not weird enough (it's barely weird at all), and definitely rather boring and very confusing (and not in a good, Lynchian, way).

Tried to watch it back in the day, bailed halfway through the third episode.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine suggested a bunch of us try an online watchalong of it.  I was game, to see if it made any more sense than it did in my somewhat hazy 1990s...

...guess how many episodes we got through before we all gave up on it?

Yup, three.


I suppose I've made it sound quite intriguing now, like, just how boring, bad and confusing can one episode be?! :-)

Find out at your own risk...

[Mister Six]

Does the fourth season of Till Death on Fox count? Knowing that cancelation was coming, the writers went a bit mad

If meta stuff counts then ABC's Moonlighting did loads of that kind of thing. The final episode had the main characters trying to persuade a studio exec not to cancel the show.