Shark Bytes

I'll admit that the second season happened when I loved all things Cyberpunk (and this was before everyone knew the term cyberpunk). I liked season 2 better. The first season was like your typical 80s show. You got your charming heroic leader who always has a trick up his sleeve (Harrison). His wisecracking token minority best friend (Norton), the eye candy (Suzanne) and the difficult but enigmatic one (Ironhorse). Sure there was dynamic character interaction but it was in the Trek formula and the same formula for shows of the 80s like the A-Team and Knight Rider. Everyone was likable and you knew they would be friends forever type of team. I sort of feel like they tried too hard to make the characters interesting in the first season. The scientists were stereotypical "I'm a geek and I'm proud and am gonna be as eccentric as I can be 'cause it's fun". How many people name their wheelchair let alone a name like "Gertrude". I'm glad in the second season, Harrison became more serious and grim and less geeky Dr. Who eccentric.

I guess TPTB never heard of the saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

S1 was a nice scifi show, S2 was a black hole of suck.

When they killed Ironhorse!!! Ionhorse's death is the most shocking scene ever.

I watched the second season just because I thought they were going to bring him back. I had a big crush on him.

Granted, the second season wasn't that bad. I liked the post-apocalistic setting, and some of the stories but, the feeling of companionship among the "heroes" was lost and that ruined any credibility of success. Without Ironhorse and Norton to help them, those losers wouldn't have survived.

I can't believe there were times when things like spoilers didn't exits for me. Oh, the good old times!

IMO it seems most television networks are always just looking for the next big thing,once the flair wears off they drop it and rarely look back.
I am a huge fan of the WOTW series and having seen both seasons I'd have to say the Second Invasion was much better.
It painted a more realistic picture of how America could look in economical turmoil. Corporations running the world and leaving the average citizen to live in a polluted wasteland.
The network probably canceled the show because they didn't like the stigma of the negative outlook on our Country not because of the change to the show itself. I mean we all like Norton and Ironhorse, but with Kincaid, Ardix and Denis Forest's great performance as Malzor we had nothing to complain about.
There was always a situation and the team always showed up to deal with it not just talk about it.
Television networks always cancel shows related to a poor looking America, they don't want us to think to much and possibly make changes in your lives that include X-ing out the system or at least just to stop and take a good look around, remember they want you to watch the commercials too right?
I mean look at Max Headroom, that show was great and it predicted alot of things that we take for granted today, but at the same time it was knocking the very medium it was being presented on and the countrys state of being...so it too was ultimately canned.

David Durand wrote;

I wish there were a DVD of season 2. There probably never will be given the general fan reaction, but we can dream...
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You can find the 2nd Season on YouTube here;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8YTUU45zy8

I must be one of the rare people who liked the 2nd Season better than the 1st.

If they had started the series like they started the 2nd season it would have lasted a little longer.

The Blade Runner/cyberpunk atmosphere of the 2nd season fit the aftermath of the 1953 invasion better than the first.

It didn´t really jump.
The first season started in the 80s and looked & felt like a 80s show.
The second season started into the 90s and
looked and felt like a 90s show.

I missed the credits of the first episode of the second season, so the outcome was a complete surprise to me. But having seen that the entire premise and tone of the series had been summarily dropped, I saw no reason to continue watching.

I never really found out what happened. The series was doing well for a little syndicated show; it had good buzz going into the second season and was showing two or three times weekly on the LA station (I can tell you they didn't do that during the second season!). Did Mancuso Sr need a project for Mancuso Jr? Or did he just not care for Strangis & Strangis?

In any case, if you want your own show, why not develop one instead of turning an existing show into something unrecognizable? The characters that died were the lucky ones. Sure, it wasn't the smartest or slickest, but it was edgy and fun and the actors had feeling. The second season looked like it would be another dull, depressing, postapocalyptic slog ... and with aliens who weren't even very alien. No thanks. And I was looking forward to seeing where they were going with the new alien race. So much for that.

The end of the Advocacy, the killing of Nortan, and general change the premise of the entire show. The show was fine as is. It should not have been changed.

I KNEW this show was going to have problems when someone said during the opening episode that there was no proof there was life on other planets.

Hey guys, Earth had been invaded by the Martians ten or twenty years ago!

It was eventually decided that everyone had found the invasion so shocking they had "forgotten about it".

You make sense of it.

I don't think any show has such a universally agreed upon shark jump moment as WOTW. The second season, especially the deaths of TWO out of the four main characters and a sudden leap into a bizzaro world! Confused and disturbed don't even begin to describe how I felt watching this trainwreck... I'm STILL disturbed by the death of Ironhorse. I don't think I've EVER seen anything quite that disturbing on television. If it had been a gritty show like NYBD Blue or the Sopranos or something - sure! But a light fluffy 80's sci-fi show??? A main character blowing his own brains out??? A show watched religiously by school aged kids everywhere??? I was a tween with a HUGE crush on Ironhorse and I swear I wept! I just sat there stunned and then ever so slowly started to freak out. I'm almost thirty and STILL have the scene in my head! I honestly watched the second season only because I kept thinking, "This'll be the ep where they explain how this is just all a messed up dream or something. He's not dead. He's NOT dead!!!!" Don't even get me started on how they slutted up Debi and added the Highlander. I hated him as only a mourning tween in love could. "You're not Ironhorse! Die! Die!!!" LOL. I can laugh at it now, but it really wasn't funny. They HAD to have known what kind of really young fanbase they had. There was NO excuse for that.

I enjoyed the first season a lot, but first loved the show because of the second season, which I watched first. I understand the pain of people who saw their show essentially swapped for a different one, but I liked the dark tone of the second season a lot. It didn't have the humor and genre flavor of the first season, but I think it was pretty unique in creating a kind of SF world that was not common on TV in those days (or now).

I wish there were a DVD of season 2. There probably never will be given the general fan reaction, but we can dream...

I think it really jumped at the end of the series, because the "evil leader fooled us all" series ending was stupid even if you accept the discontinuity between seasons. I don't think the break between 1 and 2 is really jumping the shark because the change was so radical that it doesn't really count...

2 words...

Adrien Paul!

They killed Norton. period. bottom line. end of discussion. the shark rose up and ate this show -- and it deserved to be eaten, after pulling that.

The Harrison Blackwood season and the Kincaid season are two totally different tv shows bearing the same name. I think I understand what they were trying to do with the Kincaid character and the state of the world at that point, but it just didn't work.

DAY 1
WTF does this idiot program have to do with "War of the Worlds"? Except the name?
They tried to capitalize on the name but it was quite obvious that it had nothing to do with HGW's WOTW.
After 10 minutes, I never watched it again.
10 on the Puke'o'rama scale