As we enter yet another new season of television, with the networks attempting to put their best foot forward in regards to programming, we will see many shows come and go. There will be hits, misses, mid-season replacements, surprises, disappointments, and the like.



But the fall series that do make it into the American living room are not the only series developed and shot. The annual dawn of "pilot season" creates a rush similar to that of 1800s California, with actors from all over the world migrating to the west in hopes of achieving success and fame. Most do not make the cut, and amongst those who do, only few wind up cast on a show that makes it to prime time.



With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the sitcoms and dramas that you won't be seeing this television season.



The Cocks Family

After a mysterious chemical spill on a government site mutates a family of cockroaches into human form, the roaches must hide from government agents by assuming the identity of a modern suburban family, and acclimating themselves to things like driving SUVs, coaching soccer teams, and ordering coffee drinks with fancy names. The safety of their offbeat secret is consistently endangered by well-meaning but intrusive neighbors, a light-hearted homosexual boss who always needs "hugs", and a live-in father-in-law whom the mutation has given the uncanny knack to say the wrong thing at the wrong time.



Special Agents: Specially Abled

Ripper Hardfeatures thought his career was over when a botched FBI operation left him confined to a wheelchair. But that all changed when what they called a "special" wing of the agency was created for wheelchair-bound agents. Now, equipped with the hottest technologies money can buy, the hard-nosed and no-nonsense Ripper and his sharp-tongued wheelchaired rookie sidekick Julie Sarcasm take down drug dealers in international waters, a legion of spiral-staircase thieves, and corruption inside the hot-air balloon circuit; all while constantly fending off strong sexual attraction for each other.



Could You Commit Suicide?

This intense new reality show challenges clinically depressed contestants to see how serious they are about actually offing themselves. Challenges include being tied to the railroad tracks with taut-but-escapable rope, being placed in a room full of nooses, and being given a job in a razor factory and then being told, mid-work day, about the sudden unexpected passing of a close loved-one. The winner receives one million dollars and a lazy Susan filled with various mild anti-depressants.



My Racist Dad

After being downsized by her corporate job, Annie Nelson is forced to move back to the house she grew up in. Almost everything is just as she remembered it, especially her racially intolerant dad, Allan Nelson. As part of his conviction on the misdemeanor charge of swearing on a municipal sidewalk in their town, Allan has been forced by the town to hire a Puerto Rican house cleaner and to adopt an adorable dog that, Allan discovers one day, can speak, but only Ebonics. Annie is constantly embarrassed by Allan's off-color comments about people of different ethnicity at home, in the supermarket, and, in one episode, over a loudspeaker he doesn't realize is on.



What Will My Husband Do Next to Almost Make Me Want to Divorce Him?

Mary Ann Higby is the weather person at a local television station. But that's just her day job. By night she is the wife of a toll collector who just can't seem to stop having friends over for poker night without telling her; bending the truth in order to avoid getting in trouble for something that turns out to be a much smaller deal than it was made into; and winding up in situations where it sort of looks like maybe he's cheating on her, but in the end it's a wacky misunderstanding. As if Mary Ann didn't have all the stress she needs already, she also has an attractive teenage daughter who won't stop dating bad boys, a boss who for some reason doesn't know his job as well as she knows his job, and a talking Van Gogh reprint that only she can hear and whose advice is not always sound.



The High School Diary of Chastity Lovedreamer

When a young and hopeful high school senior accidentally falls into a combine and is killed while visiting a friend's farm five days before graduating valedictorian, her tear-stricken father, fired from his well-providing job due to his inability to cope with his misery during working hours, finds the journal she'd been keeping since freshman year. Through flashbacks, imagined reenactments of the entries, and visits from the one-eyed and stuttering boy whose love for Chastity went unrequited for four years, a father gains a closeness to his daughter never before achieved.



Sadly, due to the cutthroat manner of the television business, these shows and many like them will never make the air. It is almost tragic to consider that this sort of thing goes on every year in the industry, and that there is really no way of stopping it. Someone's show has to not make it on the air, leaving us to only wonder what might have become of the Cocks family.