Some things never stood a chance, Then, The Audience-Alienating Premise Kicks In...

 Some shows never stood a chance. Not necessarily because they're bad, but because the very concept scared people away. They say that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes, that's easier said than done. This is the Audience-Alienating Premise: an idea that could be cool and could even make a fantastic show, book, movie, video game or comic, and may very well have, but which instead dooms the work from the very start due to the mere concept being a difficult sell. Sadly, due to how it "sounds", many people won't try it out.

Here Are Some Examples: 

• Harold and the Purple Crayon (2024): The movie is a pseudo-sequel adaptation to a children's picture book series from the 1950s-60s targeted at toddlers, the only other adaptation of which was a short-lived cartoon that aired more than twenty years prior. This alone isn't too weird, but the choice to make the movie a live-action, action-packed, and Meta Sequel Human-Focused Adaptation set in the "real world" with Harold being played by a very much adult Zachary Levi left many scratching their heads. Unsurprisingly, it was a major Box-Office Bomb and critically thrashed, with many left wondering, who was this movie for?
• M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is a Live-Action Adaptation of a popular cartoon series of the same name. Unlike other films of its kind, however, the original series wasn’t that old, which made it feel unnecessary. The original cartoon is Animesque, with a lot of supernatural elements and abilities that would be hard to translate into live-action (especially in 2010), which is why, compared to the show, the movie’s characters feel much weaker. This made fans of the series dismiss the movie as an unfaithful to its source material. It also completely changed the character’s races. Even people who weren’t familiar with the cartoon would have a hard time watching it, since it tries to retell the entirety of the show’s first season within 90 minutes, making the film’s plot feel, confusing, crowded, and poorly-paced. All these factors led to it being a critical and financial disaster.
• Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a parody of musician documentaries like (as the title implies) Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. However, the genre it was satirizing hasn't seen a big hit since the aforementioned film five years prior, making the subject matter unrelevant among general audiences. This likely explains why the film did poorly enough to be pulled out of theaters after only three weeks despite positive reviews.
• The American Society of Magical Negroes is a satire on the Magical Negro trope, centered on a secret society of black people whose job is to fulfill the lives of white people. The title alone made people uneasy and spawned memes about white people being unable to ask for tickets to the film, and many who hadn't heard of the trope thought the film was simply a black-centric Harry Potter-esque affair with nothing else going for it. All of this combined with poor reviews citing the film as poorly executed resulted in it bombing and being pulled from theatres after three weeks.
• Disney Channel's The Buzz on Maggie, while generally liked by most of the people that watched it (a select few of which consider it a legit Cult Classic while most of the others merely consider it So Okay, It's Average), is a very stereotypical Slice of Life sitcom aimed at girls that takes place in an overflowing garbage dump infested with sentient anthropomorphic flies and various other types of insects. These reasons lead to the show only lasting one season.
• Good Times: Black Again is a follow-up to the groundbreaking Good Times that takes numerous creative liberties with the original show, including a Denser and Wackier tone and a Setting Update to the 2020s. Fans of the original sitcom weren't interested in a sequel that discarded much of what made it memorable.
• Joshiraku is a hard sell for both sides of the world. The protagonists are Rakugo performers, a very old style of Japanese comedy that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone under 50 watching in its home country. If one can get past that, there's the very Surreal Humor aspect. And for American viewers, it comes with a boatload of Japanese wordplay and puns that will most likely fly over their heads. Not surprisingly, the series didn't fare well in Japan and completely bombed with American viewers.
• PuraOre! ~Pride of Orange~ is an ice hockey, Slice of Life, and Idol Genre mashup. Putting aside that hockey is extremely niche in Japan, the show has much less in the way of actual hockey action than the premise would suggest, there are about five minutes of idol performances total across all twelve episodes, The Blurays flopped by most reports, and the PuraOre! mobile game that the anime was made to kickstart lasted a mere eight months (covering less than half of its intended story) before shutting down.
• Yo-kai Watch, at least in the West. A lot of people were calling it "the next Pokémon" before it released. That's not the only reason, though; Yōkai are a pretty Japanese concept, and not a lot of Westerners would "get it", so to speak, at first. Then, even if you know about yokai and are a Japanese cultural enthusiast — therefore looking forward to seeing something like this — they localize the show and games in many of the typical fashions (like Dub Name Change). It's still got a pretty good Western fanbase going for it, though it's admittedly nowhere near as big as in Japan. The anime not doing so well led to the English dub changing casts on season 3 to accommodate budget issues; and eventually to the show outright being pulled altogether in early 2019 in favor of Inazuma Eleven: Ares.

• This was likely a major reason for Arrested Development becoming an Acclaimed Flop during its original run (though it was Vindicated by History, and eventually Un-Canceled by Netflix)
• Blockbuster is a sitcom on Netflix about the last Blockbuster in existence. While a show revolving around employees of a video store seemed like a good idea on paper, not many people were willing to give it a chance due to the setting being in The New '20s, as they felt it would've worked better had it taken place during The '90s and The 2000s when Blockbuster Video was at the peak of its popularity. Needless to say, it only lasted one season.
• Comedians Unleashed was a very short-lived stand-up comedy show produced by Animal Planet made to capitalize on the rising popularity of stand-up specials, with the theming that all of the jokes revolved around animals. It wasn't a clip show with comedian commentary or something like that, but comedians on stage performing rehearsed sets only about animals. Even by just the pilot episode, it's clear that there's not enough material to make a single quality set, let alone to make an entire series. Comedy fans were turned off by the lack of variety, while animal fans were disinterested in a show that didn't actually have animals. Despite airing the pilot seven times in hopes of finding an audience, it suffered horrible viewership and was eventually quietly cancelled.
• This is why Cop Rock failed in 1990. It's a crime drama... and a musical! Though musicals can be a hard sell, the successful ones try to provide semi-plausible reasons for for characters to burst into song—notably, Fame had ended only a few years prior, was a massive success, and took place in a setting about musical theatre already—or take place in a kind of heightened reality where it doesn't feel off for the characters to do so, like most animated musicals. Rock, on the other hand, just had musical numbers coming out of nowhere and performed by law enforcement, criminals, and victims alike. The results were so jarring that the final episode produced ended with the characters discussing how strange the premise was to begin with.
• Ferris Bueller, the TV show based off Ferris Bueller's Day Off, would have an interesting idea of continuing Ferris's escapades. However, the first episode establishes that the movie is loosely based on TV!Bueller's life and proceeds to destroy a cardboard cutout of Movie!Bueller to denounce it. Fans were insulted that this show tossed out their favorite movie and replaced the cast; non-fans weren't interested in watching a TV show of Ferris's day-to-day life since they haven't experienced the movie. With both types of viewers tuning out, the show got canned after 13 episodes.
• Nick Studio 10 aired in 2013 and never came back after it ended, due to outcry over the idea of random skits and gags interrupting shows like SpongeBob SquarePants and The Fairly OddParents! without any warning.
• Nick Jr. launched an adult-oriented block called NickMom in 2012, focused not on programming for preschoolers and young children, but for moms,  Combined with the fact that Nick Jr. is already a sister channel to another child-oriented channel with its own reliable nighttime block, Nick at Nite, ratings started off poor and went into a free-fall, even after Nick attempted to pivot away from the adult comedy and syndicated shows they had rights to and were already showing at Nick at Nite. After a half-hearted attempt to keep the block running on reruns as a "loss leader", Nick would eventually pull the plug in 2015.
•  Night Sky was a little much for people looking for an escape. The first episode is light on the science fiction and VERY heavy on the drama of two aging, forgetful seniors. This probably hit many elderly viewers and folks who care for their aging parents a little too close to home to bother continuing with the story. The planned second season was canceled due to the poor viewership.
• The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer is a 1998 Period Piece series taking place in the mid-19th Century, following a Black English nobleman who gets kidnapped and sent to America on a ship, involuntarily becoming the valet to Abraham Lincoln... and it's a Sitcom which plays the premise entirely for laughs. The series was blasted on sight for its racially insensitive and simply juvenile premise — the titular Desmond Pfeiffer being played as The Straight Man to a White House, not helped by how it was part of UPN, a network renowned for African-American-centric shows. Following immense protest by African-American activists for the show,, UPN declined to air its pilot (due to supposedly having especially tasteless jokes) and aired only four more episodes before pulling it entirely due to low ratings, with the unseen five episodes (including the pilot) never seeing the light of day and the show never being released on home media or syndication.
• The drama/musical Viva Laughlin (the U.S. adaptation of The BBC series Blackpool) got horrid reviews and was canned after only two episodes, even with a singing, dancing Hugh Jackman. Like Cop Rock above, a musical television series was already a bit of a hard sell (even as a Jukebox Musical as opposed to Rock's original numbers). Compare it to Glee from only a few years later, which performed both contemporary and classic hits to keep the audience excited, and could also use the sales of those covers to make up for any underperforming ratings. Furthermore (and again like Cop Rock), audiences struggled to suspend their disbelief that casino investors, businessmen, and gangsters would regularly break out into song.
• The Will was a reality show pulled after the first episode. A huge advertising push ensured that everyone would be disgusted with the premise of a group of people competing to be the sole heir of their rich benefactor's estate before it even premiered.
• Fight Of Gods wouldn't be so alienating if it didn't include different real-life religions' gods. This is one reason why Steam once got banned in Asia  although Valve had removed the game from Steam four days before the ban. A lot of people aren't into it because of blasphemous implications. Fortunately, the controversy benefitted the game in the West, but the game's sequel, Fight of Animals, went for a Lighter and Softer route by basing its characters on pseudo-muscular animal memes, to a better reception.
• Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA X attempts to include a story mode, unlike previous games. However, this has been criticized by fans as being a poor move that turned away many, since a major part of Vocaloid's appeal was they were interpretive Blank Slates that can be used for anything by anyone, which a story mode in an official Hatsune Miku project greatly goes against, on top of getting in the way of what most people play the series for to begin with, that being the challenging rhythm gameplay. Even those who found the story mode to be interesting, however, were turned off by the story being little more than a basic Excuse Plot that fails to properly flesh out the world and characters in any meaningful way, on top of having almost none of the pre-existing Project Diva lore from previous games. The addition of a story mode and its execution is considered by many to have played a large part in X's underperformance in sales and why later Project Diva games would just stick to the rhythm gameplay going forward. Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! repeated the concept of a Hatsune Miku game with a story mode to much greater success by emphasizing Vocaloid's interpretive nature; the game focuses on an original cast of characters who each have their own personal interpretations of the virtual singers, rather than attempting to assign them canonical stories and personalities. This allowed for deeper story arcs and a more significant amount of Character Development, solving the issues fans had with the previous attempt.
• LEGO Horizon Adventures: The game's high concept immediately attracted confusion from the very start: a LEGO Adaptation Game of Horizon. The game was also less of a traditional LEGO adaptation game by eschewing many elements found with the typical formula, including extensive character customization, instead functioning more as a direct, if heavily simplified and more overtly comedic remake of the action-RPG gameplay already established by Horizon, games that were still "recent" and fairly accessible. The game was ultimately released in November 2024 to mediocre reviews and sales, largely due to the most common question of "Who is this even for?" being unanswered.
• Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- is a KanColle-esque Card Battle Game featuring a Cast Full of Pretty Boys with wacky personalities, except said pretty boys are religious depictions. It's safe to assume this game doesn't look too good to people outside Japan due to blasphemous implications, and the servers were terminated at the end of August 2020, less than two years after it launched.
• Pooplers involves you being a baby... against 3 other babies... slowly covering the floor... in poop. With obnoxious sound effects all throughout. Unsurprisingly, it flopped hard.
• Spyro: Shadow Legacy: A Spyro RPG with a mostly dark tone (in the same universe as the classic games instead of being a reboot)? Not hard to see why this game has been mostly forgotten and got largely poor reviews and sales.
• Avengers Arena: Taking cult favorite teenage heroes and putting them in a The Hunger Games/Battle Royale scenario played completely straight, so as to prop up Smug Snake gimmick villain Arcade as a legitimate threat (twenty years too late), by having a lot of teenagers die. The amount of vitriol it generated before and during its release is rather amazing. The sequel, by the same writer, had the surviving kids infiltrating the Masters of Evil with the book's premise being that one of them will turn evil. It sold so poorly that it was cancelled after 10 issues (the story was planned for at least 12).
• Awoken is a parody of the Paranormal Romance genre, specifically "Twilight meets the Cthulhu Mythos". When asked if it was an audience-alienating premise, they responded with "That's the joke."
• This is the most likely reason why Lisi Harrison's Monster High book series flopped for young readers but older ones would most likely be turned off by a novel series based on a  girls' toy line. And fans of the franchise disliked that it was In Name Only.