What?! They didn’t even give it a chance! I HATE YOU FOX!!!
I wrote a letter to Fox… does anyone happen to know the correct person/address to send it to?
Rupert Mudoch
Ninth Circle of Hell
not sure of the ZIP code, though
I had a PIT thread going about them cancelling the show, feel free to chip in on it.
– IG
If I read the weekend’s newspaper correctly, Fox ordered an initial run of six episodes of Drive – and canned the show after airing only four of them. Huh?? It seems to me that they should at least have showed all six, because they already sunk the costs into the show.
Folks, no one was watching.
The premiere, heavily hyped for months and on a day when it had little new competition, was last in its timeslot. Fox just cut its losses.
It’s a bummer it works this way - but it’s dollars and cents for the network. Despite the development costs involved, if they can get more people watching reruns of Are You A Dipshit Trivia Challenge or whatever, that’s what they’ll go with.
I read on Fox’s website that the 2 hour season finale was going to be presented this summer. Fox has amazing talent for killing series, before even giving it a shot!
House reruns got twice as many viewers in that time slot.
Why would they show something that gets less money?
…to give it a chance? Three episodes is not enough to see if it will take off.
If it’s not your dime, that’s easy to say. Every episode that didn’t get a significant number of viewers costs them big bucks in lost advertising. It’s their job to figure out whether a show is going to thrive or not, and sometimes the first few airings is enough to predict long term trends. Not perfect, but that’s the way the industry runs now.
We will never see another Cheers, where the network gave it a season or so to find its audience. In any case, FOX lost me as a years ago.
Four
and the ratings went down every episode.
At the end, it had lost 1/4th of the viewers. Of the very few people who watched, 25% didn’t want to watch any more. It wasn’t about to take off, it was about to lose even more audience.
Much as I would have liked to see the show continue, I can’t really blame Fox in this case. They promoted the daylights out of this show. They gave it a great timeslot, just before ‘24’. And it totally, utterly tanked. Not only did it get last in its timeslot, but it helped 24 get its lowest ratings of the season.
I think the premise was the problem. I tried to get people to watch it, and when I’d explain what the show was about they’d just look at me and say, “That sounds lame.” And so it did. And frankly, while I love Tim Minear and Nathan Fillion, the show left me lukewarm at best. A few of the other side plots were just annoying, like the woman trying to keep her husband from contacting his military base or the three obnoxious women in the van. Plus, it was hard to keep stretching my belief like that - so many of the setups seems preposterous (they built a fake interrogation room in a warehouse, because they knew Fillion’s truck would break down right there? And they couldn’t have convinced him to bring back the ‘mean’ Tully with something a little less contrived?"
Anyway, unlike Firefly, it was heavily promoted, started low in the ratings, and showed no signs of picking up an audience. It wasn’t pre-empted, the episodes were shown in order, and we got a nice 2-hour pilot to explain the whole thing. And it still tanked.
Fox did the right thing this time.
I don’t know - I give NBC some credit in being patient with The Office and 30 Rock, both of which started out very rough but got better quick. And Fox actually did pretty well supporting Arrested Development despite the low ratings, because they liked the show.
It is amazing that a show about an illegal cross country scavanger hunt/ race, with all the ominous overtones could have been so boring.
Not only that, but it’s really a one-season premise: so, somebody eventually wins the race. Why do we care? If it goes more than one season, it will feel even more contrived than it already was - and the audience isn’t COMPLETELY stupid about that.
Not only was Drive not pulling in viewers, but it was dragging down the audience for the show that followed – 24. That’s the real reason for pulling Drive from the schedule. May is sweeps and the networks use audience measurement to set ad rates for the coming year. 24 is one of Fox’s mainstays. They want the numbers to be as high as they can for that show.
I misread the thread title as ‘… canceled Drivel?’. I only opened the thread because I thought that would be a highly unusual thing for Fox to cancel.
Can it be that I’m the first person to suggest 90210?
As to the OP, this is exactly the reason I taped the entire first season of 24. Looked like a great idea, was worried it either wouldn’t pan out in the long run or Fox wouldn’t give it the chance to do so.