…in case people missed the reference I made before, from Season 3 Community:
Yeah but there is some good male eye candy..Jamie Bamber..oh yeah and white wigs:D
They’ve tried. And while it may be cheap, easy, and fast, it isn’t cheap, easy, fast and profitable. And it’s that last thing that’s most important.
Recently, Mental, Persons Unknown, and Defying Gravity were all co-produced internationally, and pulled because they didn’t make enough money, it was cheaper to not show them at all than to waste air time with those programs. Rookie Blue & Flashpoint were made in conjunction with Canada. The television business is first and foremost a business and they’ll air anything in any format if they think it will turn a profit.
Yeah, how is Flashpoint doing in the U.S.? I’m kinda curious if an obviously Toronto-set show (as opposed to shows filmed in Toronto or Vancouver but ostensibly set in the U.S.) can do well in that market.
This seems to be the best place to ask this: why do Brits call it “series” while Americans call them “seasons”?
This concept was recently the subject of satire in a recent episode of Community, in which Troy and Abed became huge fans of a British comedy and were traumatized when the series ended with all the main characters committing suicide.
I suppose the trite answer is that there’s no particular reason for the two TV cultures to use the same word, so they use similar but different words. As I understand it, in the US “series” is also used sometimes, to mean the entire run of a show, leading to some confusion with the British usage.
The other point is that US TV has historically been much more season-oriented, with a more set calendar than has been the case in Britain. Here, we do have TV seasons in the sense that we have times of the year at which many shows will start, but it has never been set in stone. Shows run for unpredictable numbers of editions, they might start at irregular times of the year, the whole thing is more fluid.
When US TV finds a successful format they run with it, and flog into the ground (and yes, Friends, I’m looking at you) for as long as people will watch it. A battery of writers is employed to lick it into shape and keep servicing it. Most British shows are conceived and written by one or at most two writers (rarely more) and the networks’ expectation is 6-8 episodes and see if it is received well enough to consider commissioning a further 8. Most of the show will be in the can before transmission begins. It is rare for a show to be axed part-way through its run here - it has to be really dire to that to happen, and it’s usually allowed to limp home to its end.
The only one I can recall off the top of my head is Brighton Belles, which was our stab at a remake of The Golden Girls. It was pulled part way through its run, and the remaining episodes were used to fill a graveyard slot a year later. It’s a bit more common for something to be moved to a later hour/different day if it isn’t doing well, rather than pulled entirely.
It does actually happen in British TV too, it’s just that nobody remembers the shows that got pulled. Celebrity Wrestling, anyone? (a real show)
Neither is a huge hit, but I think they do as well as they need to for how much they cost. I know my sister really likes Rookie Blue and I don’t think she has any idea it’s set in Canada. It’s just a city cop show to her.