I think some of the best shows on television have been cancelled prematurely. Some of these shows go on to be somewhat of cult classics (My So-called Life, Freaks and Geeks) and some of them were just horrendous and never deserved to receive air-time in the first place. And then there are those that are gems that just got lost and forgotten in the mix.
One such of these types of shows was one of my personal favorites, Samantha Who? which ran two seasons before having the plug pulled.
Starring Christina Applegate, the show is about a woman, Samantha Newly, who wakes up from an eight-day coma with no memory of anything that happened before getting run over by a car, including forgetting her semi-crazy parents (Jean Smart and Kevin Dunn) who she hasn't spoken to in two years, her live-in (ex)boyfriend Todd (Barry Watson), and two best friends, Andrea and Dena (Jennifer Esposito and Melissa McCarthy, respectively). The more memories she reveals about herself, the less she likes the person she was before the accident and the more she tries to make herself a better, reformed woman.
What made this show so great was that each episode outdid the last one. Every time you thought that Samantha couldn't possibly discover anything worse about herself than what she had already discovered, she did. From helping her mother dump her father's car into a lake to sabotaging her best friend's relationships to causing the extinction of a species of butterfly, there was no stone left unturned by her in her evil path. And every time the "new" and improved Samantha tried to make things better, she, of course, made them much worse in the appropriate comedic fashion.
There were, of course, times when the show made cheap, slapstick type of jokes, but it never felt like they had to put on the "clap" sign for the audience to get a sympathy laugh, so I can overlook the occasional cringe factor. Most of the time, it was witty and engaging to watch her discover all these terrible things about herself, mostly because it isn't me who has amnesia, and it isn't me who didn't pass along the message about the job interview to my boyfriend in order to go on vacation. This show is made for people like me who enjoy watching other people mess up their lives and basking in the simple joy that at least it isn't happening to me.
The only gripe that I have with the show is that it's riddled with underlying moral messages. And by "underlying", I mean in-your-face obvious moral messages that are revealed to the audience by the completely unnecessary voice-over narration. I have never been a fan of narration, I think there are better ways to tell a story, but as far as this show is concerned, the narration isn't too annoying most of the time. And at least there are good-looking men (Barry Watson has grown up a lot since his Seventh Heaven days) to combat the fact that the show was about a woman trying her hardest to take the moral highroad after thirty years of taking advantage of everyone she encountered. I only wish that we didn't have to take the highroad with her every episode.
Overall, Samantha Who? is a fun, quirky little show that entertains and teaches
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