Extreme (1995 TV series)

Extreme is an American television adventure drama that premiered on ABC on January 29, 1995 following Super Bowl XXIX. Starring James Brolin, Extreme was centered on a search and rescue team which operated in the Rocky Mountains.

Although thirteen episodes were ordered and the network had enough faith in the series to give it the coveted post-Super Bowl timeslot, Extreme could not find an audience and ABC cancelled the series after seven episodes aired. The final episode aired on April 6, 1995, and the remaining six episodes were never aired in the United States.

The failure of Extreme forced a reconsideration of post-Super Bowl programming strategy by the major networks.^{[citation needed]} NBC chose to commission a special episode of Friends to air immediately following Super Bowl XXX the next year and the experiment was such a success that other networks subsequently often chose to air one of their established series after the Super Bowl, with particular attention paid to season premieres of popular reality competitions like Survivor and The Voice.^{[citation needed]} The practice of premiering new series following the Super Bowl was not been fully discontinued; Fox debuted Family Guy in 1999, American Dad! in 2005, and 24: Legacy in 2016 while CBS launched Undercover Boss in 2010 and its reboot of The Equalizer in 2021.^{[citation needed]}