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
Being a BSG fan, I found it hard to get excited about Caprica. I somehow found that I wasn’t too excited about the idea of a prequel, especially given the TV people’s habits of “breaking” the premise of their more popular predecessor. I seem to recall someone saying that Star Trek Enterprise (a lousy show in my own opinion anyway) really nuked the fridge when it brought in the Borg. How long would it have been before Caprica did something equally heinous, if they hadn’t already?
That said, it pisses me off no end to see our local networks playing silly buggers with genuinely great series. The debacle of BSG on Channel 10’s standard definition was ridiculous, and I didn’t have HD TV at the time it was screened there. Ultimately I resigned myself to buying the DVD’s and came to love non-stop BSG.
Sometimes, FTA doesn’t deserve the good stuff they get. Worse- then they commit to utter crap like Cops LAC, Rush, So You Think Australians Can Dance Anywhere Near As Well As Americans (turns out, no they can’t), There’s Something About Raymond, Two and a Half Drug Addicts, and more.
I still think Go! made a terrible mistake in putting Fringe in their lineup. Putting a great show on and not interfering with it? Not arbitrarily canning it or changing timeslots? Buying up the following season? MY GOD! THEY’RE BREAKING RULES PEOPLE.
I love Tivo. Bring on free, unmetered downloads of shows I’ve missed, and I’m set. I never watch shows according to the network’s whims. I watch it on my own terms.
They did that with Veronica mars. An absolutely awesome show, that they wouldn’t stop moving. I think that I when I gave up on tv networks. Give me a boxed set to do with as I like and not have to depend on someone to program into a regular and normal timeslot
I’ll admit to a personal love of sitting down and watching an entire season in a sitting. With a family that’s not so possible now. My 4-tuner PVR is my strength… I can record almost everything I want and cut the ads out, and then watch it at home or sync it to my iPad for viewing wherever. My co-dependent love of Twitter makes it hard to consume some TV in any way other than live (e.g. Q and A, MasterChef, et al), however for series like Fringe, Mad Men or Breaking Bad if I’ve missed an ep then having recorded it is a valid catch-up.
The other benefit of a PVR & an Ice-TV subscription – if the networks bounce a show around the schedule, on the whole the recording changes for me in line so (in theory) I never miss an episode of a series.
I loved Caprica and it was very annoying to have it disappear. The other show that vanished was Warehouse 13. Was it for similar reasons?