Issue 3.2: Television: Nowhere Man/Marker/Legend (1995)

When Fox made it clear that it was possible to expand the number of networks on American television beyond the "Big Three", United Television and Paramount tried to do the same. UPN started out with a few interesting shows and headlined their second year with a group of shows that were "Dramatically Different".

Nowhere Man (1995)

One of those shows was Nowhere Man, in which Bruce Greenwood's character has taken a photograph for is art studio that basically ruined his life. First it goes missing, then his best friend is killed and his wife claims she doesn't know who he is. Bruce tries to make sense of it all when he realizes the government "officials" are after the negatives and are going to kill him once they get them. He mails himself copies of the photograph to various places around the country and tries to unravel the mysteries found in that picture to help keep his sanity and prove his own existence after having his life become "erased".

This was an interesting setup in the era of the X-Files when the underlying narrative of a show could be stretched and a mystery slowly revealed. Unfortunately, the show didn't last and ended so abruptly that I didn't know what had happened until I decided to write this article (I love Wikipedia).

Marker (1995)

Marker was another show that had an interesting premise. A man (played by Richard Grieco) who thought his father wasn't worth knowing is bequeathed responsibility to cover his father's karmic debt. Instead of being upset about being saddled with another man's favors, he decides to learn more about his parent through his father's "markers" -- special coins given to those who helped the protaganist's father in the past. Filmed in Hawaii, the show had a tropical look and an open-ended premise.

Legend (1995)

Legend was an action-comedy set in the American Wild West in which Richard Dean Anderson plays a ne'er-do-well, hard-drinking writer (Ernest Pratt) who is constantly mistaken for the heroic, tee-totalling, goody two-shoes character he writes about (Nicodemus Legend) in the first-person, by those who want him to save the day. It's a good thing it didn't last, or else we would not have a solid Kevin Bacon-style connection between Anderson's follow-up series StarGate SG-1 and Star Trek in the person of John deLancie, who plays Legend's partner and personal inventor in the style of The Green Hornet's Kato, James Bond's Q, or James West's (Wild, Wild West) Artemis.

Originally I was going to mention Two and VR5, but decided to stick to UPN shows. As such, I'll probably do another trio of short subjects in order to highlight these (occasionally deservedly) short-lived shows. Also, in researching certain details, I came across a few UPN shows I would have liked to have seen more of before their demise like The Burning Zone, The Sentinel and Jake 2.0.