Cancellation

In a move that newspaper pundits are calling "inevitable" and "predictably swift," FOX has already gone ahead and cancelled what I named the Best New Drama this season: Lone Star. While several of the less educated viewers would be quick to jump on the "never seen it, so I'll judge it" bandwagon and say "that means it must not have been any good," the truth is far less simple.

Let me start by defending the show as a quality piece of dramatic television. The central plot arch was something we've seen before, sneaky-expert-con-man falls in love, has a change of heart and becomes sensitive-ex-con-man. So what makes a hackneyed story line interesting and intelligent? Well first, our main character is in love with not one person, but three. He's got his wife, daughter of the wealthy oil tycoon; his girlfriend, small town angel; and his father, the impossible to please, somehow ever present, "I did it all for you, son" dysfunctional role model figure. Ok, so maybe Lone Star wasn't one hackneyed storyline so much as it was three. But at least that shows an attempt at creativity that most drama's currently on the air don't even pretend to approach. I mean, there are currently no less than 12 detective/crime shows (CSI, CSI NY, CSI Miami, Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds, the Mentalist, Law and Order SVU, NCIS, NCIS LA, Castle, Chase), 13 if you count NBC's mystery-ridden LOST-clone, The Event, and at least 2 spy shows (Chuck, Undercovers) and 2 lawyer shows (The Defenders, The Whole Truth) on this season's line up alone! (And that's not even counting the summer shows White Collar or Covert Affairs, a cop and spy show respectively).

The characters were just conflicted enough to be dynamic, but convicted enough to not be overly soapy, and that made them interesting to watch. In fact, the main character, whose name I really didn't have time to learn by heart during the program's two week run, is fun to watch sheerly because of his utter unlikeablity (which isn't actually a word). The man is deeply in love with, and by the end of the pilot, married to two different women. The whole plot centers around our con-man trying to make a normal life for himself, but at no point does he plan on giving up either of his two distinctly different and fully fabricated lives. The beauty of the show was that you didn't watch to see how the con-man would pull it off, but to see which direction it started to fall apart from. Don't believe that the writers had the same thing in mind when they were creating the show? You only need to watch the second (and final) episode to see evidence of the impending downfall coming in from every corner.

So whether or not you believe, like I did, that Lone Star deserved at least its full first season to develop and grow, let's assume that I'm right for a moment and say the show was high quality programming, and critics knew it (which they did). Why would a show like that get cancelled? Easy, the same reason Firefly, Family Guy, Futurama and Arrested Development were all cancelled before they should have been: FOX executives are strategically impaired and pathologically impatient.

Comedy is easy. Tell a few good jokes right off the bat and your audience is hooked for seven plus seasons. Excellent examples of this truth of modern television include Scrubs and The Office. With drama, it's much more difficult to have such an instant hit. FOX got really lucky with House, and they seem to demand the same kind of results from every other show they air. Dramas tend to be about characters and their relationships and interactions, rather than about comedic situations and events. It takes time for an audience to become invested in the characters of a drama (I can't even remember the main character's name... I think it's John?) To have the sort of "insta-hit" ratings that FOX seems to want, they would have to set up an entire life's worth of exposition for multiple characters and stage some sort of a cataclysmic life altering event all within the course of one 45 minute pilot. In reality, they're lucky if they can establish enough of a back story to provide enough information for an episode ending cliffhanger. Two episodes is not enough time to see if the ratings of a drama accurately reflect the quality of the piece, or if it's just a bad batch of luck right at the beginning. A good drama takes time, and FOX, it seems, has none of it to spare.

More important than their lack of patience though, is that FOX apparently doesn't understand how their viewers minds work. FOX put the premiere of Lone Star up against the premiere of NBC's much better publicized, The Event, and the second hour of a two hour premiere of Dancing with the Stars. Anybody who decided to turn on Dancing With the Stars at eight (and miraculously hadn't been so inclined to quickly turn it off) was committed long before Lone Star's premiere time to what they were watching. Anyone else who wanted a drama was instinctively drawn to NBC because of the Cloverfield-esque mystery of the whole thing.  Anybody else watching TV turned to CBS for comedy. There was nobody left to watch Lone Star. And yet, FOX was somehow shocked and amazed to find Lone Star's premiere received abysmal ratings.

Now I'm sure the executives at FOX would argue that they were expecting House's viewership to carry over into the next hour. It's a trick often used by television networks to increase their ratings. They put two shows that they believe have similar viewing audiences back to back to try to keep eyes on their network for extended periods of time. For this to work though, the shows have to have some sort of commonality (30 Rock and the Office for example, both are about stereotypical characters in an exaggerated business environment). If anyone can explain to me what FOX thought they had in common between a medical drama and a con-man love story, please give it a shot.


So why was Lone Star cancelled?

Because FOX's default setting is cancel.






Alright. Overly simplistic and vilifying rant over.

The Pilot

I've been watching a lot of TV lately. It comes with the territory, being unemployed and living in my parents' basement. I spent this week glued to my TV, my handy dandy DVR box, and my laptop with the ever present Hulu tab up on my browser. I can now say that I have seen every new premiere that aired this week on any major network, as well as a few of the new summer hits and my old favorites. My understanding of television programming and the diversity (or lack thereof) of the shows currently on the air has grown significantly, and as a result, I find myself drawn to a quote from the Pilot Episode of NBC's one season wonder, Studio 60: 

"This show used to be cutting-edge political and social satire, but it's gotten lobotomized by a candy-assed broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience.... We're all being lobotomized by this country's most influential industry! It's just thrown in the towel on any endeavor to do anything that doesn't include the courting of twelve-year-old boys. Not even the smart twelve-year-olds - the stupid ones! The idiots - of which there are plenty, thanks in no small measure to this network! So why don't you just change the channel? Turn off the TV. Do it right now. Go ahead!"

Without a doubt, I am drawn towards the television series that display even a hint of intelligence in their delivery, comedic or otherwise. Somehow though, it often seems that the networks are pulled in the opposite direction. 


Every once in a while, though, a network will come out with a new show that really deserves a place in "this country's most influential industry." The problem is that shows like this take a while to get rolling. They aren't instant hits. They are often competing for viewers against shows that provide the American audience, home not-so-fresh from school and work, with mindless laughter and easily accessible but pointless drama. The shows worth watching, the shows that don't "lobotomize" us, scare networks because it means a they have to rely on faith and trust, which are two things the major broadcast corporations don't possess an awful lot of. They spend far too much of their time polling and rating to be comfortable with anything not associated with a number.

So here I am, to talk to the intelligence in the viewing public, in my friends, in you. I won't just chat about the shows I like and the shows I don't, but I'll tell you why; what element of the plot was accented by the cinematography, which character skewed so far from their developmental track that it can only mean an actor wasn't polling well with a target demographic. 

And if, in the end, I don't convince anyone to turn off Dancing With the Stars in favor of Raising Hope... well at least I'll have fun watching until it gets cancelled.