If you watch as much TV as I do, you’ve probably been down this road before: You’ve invested so much emotional capital in a show, any show, that now you feel waiting months for it to come back on the air is torture of the cruelest kind. And yet you keep on dreaming of the next season; that maybe you were right in giving the series the benefit of the doubt when others declared it as exciting as Lindsay Lohan’s career; that somehow it would slowly find its identity and, fingers crossed, flourish and spawn rabid Tumblr fandoms that would rival those of Sherlock. But then your show gets canceled — abruptly, rudely, permanently. What do you do?
My recent experience with 666 Park Avenue illustrates this, the shorter lifespan of a 21st-century television program. Just as I was getting into the supernatural drama — filled with pretty people living in a pretty Manhattan building, dealing with their pretty people problems, including ghosts — ABC, its home network, pulls the plug. A casualty of the ratings game, along with military caper Last Resort, it will bow out after the 13th episode.
Blame Ryan Murphy
Though this ill-fated romance was not a first, the disappointment still stings. The shared fate of Awake, about a cop who leads an Inception-like existence, and The Finder, a Bones spin-off, should’ve made me more cautious about getting involved with untested televised entertainment. But here I am again, wondering why The Secret Circle and The Killing were not renewed while Glee and Two And A Half Men keep chugging along after being around for what seems like an eternity. It’s all Ryan Murphy’s fault.
I guess there really is no magic formula when it comes to a show’s staying power. There was a time when a long life was equated with a worthwhile one. While I’ve witnessed shows make their exit at the peak of their success — The OC, for example — I’ve also seen what can happen when a once-promising series exhibits longevity but jumps the shark, running past the point where they are no longer quite as good, as innovative or as relevant. Smallville, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl fall under that category.
As Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd noted in 2009, HBO’s Sopranos, which only had 13 episodes per season, “validated the short run — what might be called the budget-minded British model.” Since then, it seems, it became less unusual for creators to design a series with less than the standard 22 episodes, such as Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, whose debut season had seven. On the other hand, E! Online shares my cynical view and heaps the blame on network executives who, syncing their supposed greed with the public’s shrinking attention span, opt to “care more about instant income than nurturing a long-term hit show.”
‘Carpe diem’ approach
My approach to viewing Underemployed, MTV’s latest original series about five Chicago twentysomethings a year after graduation, has been more or less carpe diem. Although the cable network has proven that it is capable of producing good scripted content — see Awkward and Teen Wolf — I’m managing my expectations with this one, following the short-lived Hard Times of RJ Berger. I’ve watched six out of the show’s nine episodes in one sitting and it does come across as one of the most ambitious and likeable productions MTV has tried to pull off.
“There is a kind of existential difference between a show that’s canceled after six or nine or 12 episodes because of low ratings and one designed to run only six or nine or 12 episodes in the first place, however many people watch it,” continues the Los Angeles Times’ Lloyd. “The first is deemed a failure; the second, whether it is any good or not, gets to say its piece; if it fails, it is a failure of art.” The lesson I’ve gleaned is this: It is best not to get too attached to a TV show. If you must watch, savor each episode and treat it as though it might be the last.
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