16 ’80s TV Shows You Definitely Forgot Existed

We forget about shows all the time. Remember Warrior Nun? Remember Fate: The Winx Saga? We don’t either, and we even watched one of them. The 1980s was an experimental time for television; the medium had matured into the dominant medium of the time, and all kinds of short-lived shows, often spun off of recent films or with sci-fi concepts, hit the airwaves for a few months here and there. Even if you were sitting there watching TV at the time, it would be hard to remember even a small fraction of them.

The shows listed below aired sometime between 1980 and 1989, with many of them being canceled before they were even allowed to finish their first season, leaving episodes unaired. Entries include a spin-off of one of our favorite sci-fi films of the 80s, a progenitor to one of HBO’s biggest shows, multiple shows about super-powered vehicles, and more. These aren’t so much “can’t miss” as they are “can’t find,” but they’re still worth remembering just for how utterly bonkers so many of them were.

Once you’ve waded through our list of these forgotten ’80s televisions shows, check out some of our other galleries, including ’80s movies you might have forgotten, best action movies of the ’80s, best science fiction of the ’80s, the often forgotten and trashiest horror of the ’80s, and of course the totally rad but forgotten cartoons of the ’80s. You’ll be surprised just how much crossover there is between some of these lists. For example, RoboCop is both a great sci-fi movie and a very questionable cartoon, and Starman worked better as a movie than it did as a television series.