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Television loves to play it safe — or at least, that’s what the ratings suggest.

Audiences know what they like, and networks quickly replicate proven formulas.

But every so often, a show comes along that says, “Forget the rules.” These are the bold experiments, the oddball gems that refuse to color inside the lines.

Pushing Daisies (NBC/Screenshot)

From space trash collectors to singing cops, these shows dared to push boundaries, defy expectations, and embrace the absurd.

While most of them didn’t last long, their ambition helped shape the TV landscape, paving the way for today’s quirkiest hits.

Let’s celebrate the weird, the wild, and the downright baffling shows that were too ahead of their time to survive — but left a lasting mark on television history.

The Pioneers of Weird

TV in the 1960s and ‘70s wasn’t exactly known for taking risks, but there were glimmers of experimentation.

George Schlatter's and Digby Wolfe's 1969 TV series "Turn-On" is one of the most notorious flops in TV history. On the night of its debut episode, an ABC affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio only allowed ten minutes of the 30-minute show to elapse before pulling it from the air, filling the remaining time with intermission-ready organ music. According to newspaper reports from the time, "Turn-On" received many, many angry phone calls. By the time "Turn-On" was to debut on the West Coast time zones, it had already been canceled. It's the only show in history to be canceled in the middle of its debut broadcast. 

"Turn-On" was lambasted for being ribald and controversial -- there were numerous gags about sex and sexuality -- but more than anything, it was just off-putting and strange. The premise was high-concept: in the show's very first scene, a pair of engineers sit down at...

One of TV's most legendary disasters, unseen for decades, is coming to YouTube. Turn-On, the surreal sketch comedy show that aired one episode, is being released in full by its co-creator George Schlatter. The Hollywood Reporter has the news that veteran producer Schlatter is releasing Turn-On's pilot and its never-aired second episode to the Clown Jewels vintage comedy channel on YouTube on October 9. Schlatter has also filmed new intros for the episodes, giving context on the times when the show was created, and behind-the-scenes information from the show's production.

In late 1968, TV producer George Schlatter, riding high on his hit Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, pitched a new conceptual television show packed full of short clips, rapid movements, and controversial topics.

The show was picked up by ABC for a run of 13 episodes, with additional episodes purchased after advertisers saw the first episode, for a total of 17 shows. Three episodes were shot in their entirety before the initial airing.

The half-hour first episode premiered on February 5th, 1969 at 8:30 Pm on the east coast, where it took the place of the primetime soap opera Peyton Place. Tim Conway was recruited as the first celebrity guest and the writers included Albert Brooks.

The show seemed poised for success. But 10 minutes into the broadcast, between the first and second commercial breaks, a programmer at Wews in Cleveland stated that the remainder of the program would “not be seen this evening….or ever.

One of the most notorious TV shows of the medium’s first half-century is getting a second life — after its first one ended almost as soon as it began.

Producer George Schlatter is releasing the two completed episodes of Turn-On, a 1969 sketch comedy show that saw only one of those two air — and get pulled from one ABC affiliate within 10 minutes of its debut, something that hadn’t happened before and hasn’t since. The two episodes will be available Oct. 9 on YouTube via Clown Jewels, a channel dedicated to vintage comedy.

Laugh-In creator George Schlatter and Digby Wolfe, a writer on the show, created Turn-On, whose hook was that it was the first “computerized” TV show. Filmed rather than taped in front of an audience, the show featured a rapid-fire series of sketches on a blank white set, brief bits of animation and, for the time, a number of risqué subjects and lines.

A review of tonight's "Mad Men" coming up just as soon as the other couch is full of farts... "Oh, believe me: there's always a hierarchy." -Roger "Mad Men" was so busy dealing with the politics and tragedy of 1968 that season 6 didn't have a lot of time for the pop culture of that year. Perhaps as a make-up, we get "The Monolith," an episode whose name evokes the mysterious black object at the center of "2001: A Space Odyssey," and whose plot involves a fear of man being replaced by computers, much as the Hal-9000 in that film sought to kill off the human astronauts (and also had more personality than either of them). And Lloyd, the computer engineer responsible for installing Sc&P's new technological marvel, even tells Don, "It's been my experience these machines can be a metaphor for whatever's on people's minds." "Mad Men" is often a show that,...