... is saying "Bring Back Sherrif Lobo"

You know what show I loved? Sports Night. I wasn't alone. A lot of us loved it. We loved the witty banter, the sense that it was more "workplace" than "comedy".

For two years it tried very hard, and even dealt with the near death of one of its cast members, but it just didn't work out. Even a cover story in TV Guide (when it still mattered) calling Sports Night "the best show you're not watching" didn't help. It ended, its fans lamented that what they considered a smart, witty show that never caught on, wrote blog posts about it, and then moved on.

In the past few years a number of "smart, witty" shows have developed small but devoted fan bases but not caught on, and as such have been canceled. Almost every time, a "save this show" cry goes up from the fan base, and they try to pummel the offending network to get the show back on air. This goes all the way back to Star Trek which was (I think) the first show to be saved by a petition from its fans, so we're not talking about an Internet-only, twitter-based, social media phenomenon here. People have been defensive about their favourite shows for years.

One of the most recent examples was Jericho, a post-apocalyptic show starring Skeet Ulrich. It got off to a slow start, but refocused in the middle of its run and that's when its cult really developed. Low ratings, however, had set in and the show was canceled, the "last" episode being a cliffhanger.

The fan base was incensed, angry, inundated CBS with peanuts (don't ask) and email and letters. There were stories all over the Internet and mainstreak meadi about it. "Fine, fine," said the network, "Midseason, you'll get some episodes that will wrap the plotline up, and then we'll take it from there."

So Jehrico came back, and the Internet won, and it told two friends, and they told two friends....and then the ratings were about the same, CBS looked at the investment against the returns, and then cancelled it again.

So the lesson is: You can love something, really enjoy it, but it can get cancelled, and most of the time for very good reasons. Jericho in the end had creaky plots, huge plot loopholes, unsympathetic characters, and relied too much on an energy that the show could not sustain for too long.

But the lesson has not been learnt, it would seem. Just this spring there were campaigns to save Chuck, Dollhouse, Pushing Daisies, My Name is Earl, and Samantha Who? just to name a few off my head. Some have been successful, and some have not.

It appears that the actual lesson is the following: No show should be cancelled. Ever. There might be someone watching.

Look, I love some of those shows as well. I've enjoyed Earl, but I also noticed that the past two seasons have come close to "Jumping the Shark" in the very classic sense: its used to be a show about someone trying to fix his past and become a better person; now it's about someone trying to fix his past, and the wacky adventures of his friends and family who get progressively weirder with each episode. While I'd love to give it another year to see if it will pull out of its slump, the fact is that it will probably not, and I'd rather have some imperfect seasons (like Arrested Development) than have it stay on far past its prime.

"Fine then, we'll do a movie," says the fanbase (as some have said for Pushing Daisies). Great. One word: Serenity. "Oh, we'll do the movie, and we'll all go and bring in new people, and it will make so much money and that'll show them and they'll put our show back on," except that even with your Internet, word of mouth, and free publicity for "a little show that could", you STILL had a gaping hole in the ground where the bomb of a movie landed.

Face it: shows get cancelled. It's not an aversion to quality, or a hatred of intelligence, it's simple economics: for the money that it costs to buy this show, against the ratings and the advertising dollar, is this show worth it? "Sure we can make a dollar with it, but can we make a dollar and a cent with something else?" And if the answer to that is "Yes," then Pushing Daisies gets the axe after two seasons, no matter how much whimsy you stick in it, because that whimsy is just an hour of your time, but a couple of million dollars of someone's money, and there's not a lot of that to go around.

I have my Sports Night episodes on DVD, and I watch them from time to time. I have great memories of those stories and the characters and the writing. But I also see a lot of seams, a lot of really clunky moments, and a lot of things that if I watched it in a slightly different mindset would cause me to change the channel. As much as I loved it, I could tell that because of its tone and rhythms it would take a long time to get its audience.

So, did it need another season?

No. In fact, it needed LESS episodes. And I'll explain why in my next post...