television history

One of the agents who surrounds Alf at the end of Consider Me Gone is revealed to be working under cover as part of an alien rights activist group. He helps Alf escape with the Tanners back to 167 Hemdale before the other agents have a chance to take him into custody. The agent (who I'll call...

Nowadays, with access to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu/Disney+, Max, Amazon and their abundance of content, we hardly think about how we access the content (films and shows) we consume. Yet 50 years ago, that was an entirely different story. With the exception of the educational PBS and...

FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT USING READER MODE, START WITH THE INTRODUCTION ON PAGE 7 Inspired by several other Doctor Who production history TLs on here. The POD is that Hartnell goes on for five seasons instead of three and a bit. THE TENTH PLANET "A serial which isn’t particularly brilliant or...

Younger folks might not know this, but there used to be a popular science fiction franchise called Star Trek. It began with a TV series that aired from 1966-1969 on NBC. It was about the mostly human crew of a spaceship going on adventures in space two hundred years into the future. Although it...

This is an alternate history if ABC decided to affiliate with two popular market-leading stations NBC is affiliating in Nashville and West Palm Beach. Although most of the market-leading NBC stations (WSB-TV in Atlanta) were wooed by ABC, how they have worked if two of the market-leading...

Welcome to an alternate history on how the 1994-1996 broadcast television realignment worked differently, and today we're going to cover the first two days, with contributions from others. In 1994, spurred by an affiliation agreement between ABC and Scripps-Howard Broadcasting that saw ABC...

There are countless examples of TV shows that started out strong, but whose later seasons and/or endings proved very polarizing, or even outright hated. Your challenge is to take one of these shows and improve its later seasons, its ending, or both, whichever applies. Note: This only applies to...

Hey everybody!!! The following ATL is an attempt to build a TL that reflects the full extent of how pop culture has affected the culture world we live. As such, please feel free to add your favorite PODs for film, sports, television, video games, and other forms of entertainment... POD...

IDEA: Imagine the fates of the series of Star Trek and Doctor Who are switched. One will continuously run non-stop for 4 decades, to be revived again in a film 7 years later, and complete revival in the 21st century, serving as the backbone for a network. The other series will run for 3...

Watchmen has officially joined HBO’s 2019 lineup. Here’s everything to know so far about Damon Lindelof's new series. What’s the story? Based on the graphic novel of the same name, Watchmen is set in an alternate history where “superheroes” are treated as outlaws. And while Lindelof (The...

Hi everyone, good to meet you all. I'm active on Quora, and there was a recent question posted: In an alternate universe where all the successful 1970s and 1980s TV pilots failed, and the ones that failed instead succeeded, how would this have affected the TV stars' careers? For example...

Ronald D. Moore, along with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, are working on a new series titled For All Mankind. Described by Deadline as a “space drama,” the series will explore a reality in which the mid-century space race “had never ended.” See: In the 20th century, the United States and...

Allen DuMont worried. He would have paced, in fact, but he had fallen far to ill with the worst flu that he could remember in quite some time to be able to do that. So instead he laid in bed unable to sleep as his emotions raged inside him. “Why now, of all times, for this to happen, when I had...

In OTL, during the early days of television, there had been cases throughout numerous countries in Europe and worldwide, where episodes of already broadcast programmes and series were routinely wiped from the tapes they were recorded on. The rationale was that these tapes were expensive. With...