Go on, say something funny

It’s a common scenario for television shows, moreso this year than ever before. Station programmers seem to have less patience than Lindsay Lohan does with her drugs counselor – almost nothing is allowed to settle into a timeslot & attract an audience. If something seems comfortable – QUICK! Put that horrible other underperforming show on at 2:30am & bung in a repeat of Two & a Half Men! It’s ludicrous.

We’ve all become so used to it now that PVRs work overtime, searching the guide each week for where a show might pop up next. Search features are integrated into online TV guides to help you find where that show you love got dumped. I kid you not. Low ratings usually signal the death certificate for any show.

While Strictly Speaking & Caprica are only the latest to have suffered the cancellation fate, it’s not without good reason. As a prequel to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, it lacked cohesion (in Australia at least) as BSG got shafted off FTA when One HD arrived. No real link, & anyone interested will have downloaded it & seen it already. It was also very dry, without a much of the action of it’s parent. Strictly Speaking suffered the fate of a misplaced host. Andrew Hansen is nice enough, but being a member of The Chaser (& one of the looniest at that) meant you could never take him seriously. this was intended to be a serious show, as much as the contestants attempted to turn it into a stand up comedy audition. To be fair, 390,000 isn’t spectacular ratings either at 8pm (if you’re a fan, you may get to see the remaining episodes of Strictly Speaking on iView or ABC2).

If it was such quality, you wouldn't be cancelling it, right?

Shows like Cops LAC & So You Think You Can Dance should have been humanely destroyed episodes ago. Some shows push on, oblivious to the dark shroud about them. It’s painful stuff. One can only imagine how the cast/crew involved in these shows feel when this happens.

No one really wants to see a failure of an Australian TV show. Unless we’re all watching. Then it’s great to have seen it’s demise. What stand out as fodder for the cannon or misplaced destruction in your TV history?

 

Image Sources: ABC; Twitter