The most compelling two hours of television in recent memory was Monday from 8 to 10 PM: “Drive” and “Heroes.”
“Drive” literally hit the ground running and didn’t slow down. Incredibly compelling, expertly directed, confidently written, well-acted, Kath and I were immediately pulled in. I mean, sure, the fanboy in me loved the notion that Captain Malcolm Reynolds was married to Winifred Berkel, but there was way more to the series than. WAY more.
By the third episode, I knew. I knew beyond question:
Fox would cancel it.
Why?
Because it’s Fox, the network that wouldn’t recognize a quality show with both hands and a flashlight. If Fox were airing “Heroes,” they would have canceled it by the fourth episode.
After the third episode, I turned to Kath and said, “You realize Fox is going to dump it and we’re never going to find out how any of it ends.”
Sure enough, they just dumped it. One more episode will air next Monday, and two more already in the can will never be broadcast.
They’re idiots. It’s that simple: Idiots.
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SER said: FOX has HOUSE and AMERICAN IDOL and THE SIMPSONS and 24 and BONES. Granted, I can understand the thinking that a successful network can afford to take chances that a struggling one can’t, but it seems that it’s more often the case that networks in the latter situation do.
Well, House and Bones are great shows, but are also fairly standard shows where the hooks are the emotional hang-ups of the title characters. Both Gregory House and Temperance Brennan are emotional basket-cases, although House has more of a snarky sense of humor and Temperance has a tighter bond with her co-workers.
The thing is, House and Bones are easy to explain. The details of the show make it more popular. Drive was not that easy to explain. I don’t think Tim Minear is cursed or anything. It was just a tricky show.
I said it before…If there were so many folks upset about Firefly’s cancellation their fox boycott mattered numerically…Firefly wouldn’t have been canceled in the first place.
I had never heard of Firefly in 2002. Never heard of Serenity when it was released; it wasn’t until I saw a DVD-trailer (and I remember thinking the fight choreography in the bar looked good and it was a sci-fi film) that I put it on Netflix and liked it, went back and saw the series, loved it.
In fact, a lot of folks I work with (albeit, I work in a ridiculously nerdy place) also discovered Firefly years after it was already cancelled.
So where do cases like me & mine factor into your market-perfection metric?
Okay, I noticed my name was used in this thread even though I hadn’t posted here yet. So I thought I’d chime in.
I have a bit of pop-culture blindness. Outside of comic-books, I consume very little in terms of entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, I watch a handful of T.V. shows (BSG, Doctor Who, Heroes, Law & Order CI, South Park, Scrubs, My Name is Earl, The Office, and Psych). And I’ll see maybe three or four movies per year, tops. But other than what’s going on within my narrowly focused interests, I generally don’t pay much attention to the world of entertainment.
So the fact that I didn’t know about Drive doesn’t mean a lot.
Still, I think people need to understand that merely because a show was promoted doesn’t mean it was promoted well. And just because you can’t think of anything else Fox could’ve done doesn’t mean they’d exhausted all avenues.
I can list a host of shows that had inauspicious beginnings but went on to become hot properties. Seinfeld. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The X-Files. The list could fill this blog and then some. So just because a show was tanking doesn’t mean pulling the plug was best. Unless you think NBC should’ve pulled the plug on Seinfeld!!!
The point is, sometimes you have to put some muscle behind a show and eat some losses if you want to create a hit. Otherwise, all you’ll have will be the low-cost, fast-turnaround stuff that is increasingly filling the airwaves such as the dross we call “reality shows.” It’s easy to get flashy, titillating crap to catch on, but harder to get a good show to do the same. It’s worth it, though, because without the work you’ll never find the next Seinfeld/Buffy/X-Files/what have you.
Did Fox do all it could to promote “Drive?” Dunno, because I wasn’t paying attention. I’ll say this, though: if a network isn’t willing to invest a tad of thought and creativity into promoting a show, it’s wasting it’s time greenlighting said show in the first place.
The last two episodes will be broadcast back to back on July 4th. Boy, THOSE will get great ratings!