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Underlooked Televison-Who's to blame?
When it comes to television ratings are the key to success. With various conflicting airtimes, online distribution sites (such as Hulu, Joost, etc), or online show retailers (iTunes, Amazon, etc) television shows aren't picking up the ratings they should be getting. Off the top of my head I can think of four tv shows with big
storylines that due to people watching the episodes online or due to poor advertising methods; the shows were canceled. Now I'm not going to go into a huge rant over the importance or unimportance of tv ratings; however I do have some points I want to bring up. First let's take a look at the four shows that I had mentioned earlier.
1. The Black Donnellys (NBC-Universal; February/2007-April/2007)
This show chronicled the life of four working-class Irish brothers who ran a bar and were involved in the Irish mob scene in New York. The show had a good easy to follow plot which let you get to know the characters a little more with each week's episode. The show only aired seven of it's episodes on television, but due to the fanbase the season was finished in an online run in mid-2007. The show was rarely promoted on NBC except during later night television ads.
2. Traveler (ABC; May/2007-July/2007)
The show had a very strange plot where three friends went on a planned road trip. All things were going well until one of the friend's appears to have set a terrorist attack on a museum in New York city and framed his two friends. Near the middle of the first episode to the end of the series the two friends have escaped the cops and try to find out who "WIll Traveler" actually is. The series ran for eight episodes leaving off at a major cliffhanger in the storyline. ABC chose to not finish the season in webisodes like NBC did for "The Black Donnellys". The show ended in July 2007 due to low tv ratings most likely due to airtimes of the show and the season the show was aired. The show was advertised constantly on ABC to the point where the network seemed desperate to run this show.
3. Journeyman (NBC-Universal; September/2007-December/2007)
The show's plot is kind of hard to explain in words. The main character, Dan Vassar, can basically travel back in time. Dan is unable to control when or where he goes back in time. When he goes back Dan is supposed to do a certain task that he must figure out before it's too late (saving someone's life, mostly saving more people's lives, etc). The concept maybe a little hard to accept when you first read it, but the show had a large online fanbase. Unfortunately for the show, and it's fanbase, the tv ratings were low due to it's viewers watching the episodes online. During the time of the show's airing; Journeyman's episodes were some of the top sold tv episodes on iTunes.
4. New Amsterdam (NBC-Universal; March/2008-April/2008)
New Amsterdam was a VERY short-lived show about John Amsterdam. In a way; the show seemed to share a lot of similarities with another canceled NBC show, Journeyman. When John Amsterdam was younger an Indian remedy was given to him that would make him live for ever. Once John found his true love the remedy would be lifted and he would grow old and die. Although the concept may not seem all THAT similar to "Journeyman" watching both shows would bring out some obvious links between the two. Both Journeyman and New Amsterdam contained a pretty large amount of "flashback" footage from the main character's past or rather the past in general. In Journeyman the main character went back and lived the past, however, in New Amsterdam the character was "reliving" the past through his many flashbacks.
Possibly I could add a fifth and final show to the list. Although the show is not particularly canceled as of yet, the show is on a "TBA/Hiatus" status and has been for the last few months. The show in question is of course, "The Middleman".
5. The Middleman (ABC Family; June/2008-September/2008)
For "The Middleman" I couldn't figure out the best way to describe this weird show so I thought Tv.com said it best... "Wendy Watson is recruited by The Middleman as his protégée. The Middleman, a milk-guzzling comic-book-like superhero, protects humanity from the supernatural forces that lurk in the shadows". Although the show is not "officially" canceled; after a few months in "TBA/Hiatus" it can only be assumed that the show's ending is imminent.
So who exactly is to blame for the cancellation of good television? Bad advertising, online distributors, online video retailers, bad time slots? It really depends on which show we're talking about. Some of these shows like "Traveler" were over-advertised and made viewers believe they could grab most of the story through the trailers and teasers. Other shows like Journeyman, New Amsterdam, and The Black Donnellys all had a rather large online fanbase, but most of the fans watched the episodes exclusively online. The tv networks didn't profit much through the ad campaigns for their online video on-demand services so the shows were scrapped. However; let it be noted, that all three canceled shows with large internet fanbases were all aired on NBC-Universal. I wonder if that says anything about that particular network....hmmm....
I'm not saying that the new NBC-Universal lineup is bad, in fact, I like a lot of the shows that the new NBC lineup has to offer.....well ok....some of the shows. I was a huge fan of Heroes up until season two, like most of the fans, I lost faith after that. Currently I'm still a rather big fan of Chuck and hope that unlike NBC's other successful shows this show doesn't get canceled. Normally I would of made this post over to TMB or TGL, but we're going under some redesigning of the sites and not sure when we'll currently be back up online.
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