You can’t. They’re network programmers. They have no souls or emotions. Your cries of anguish will not be heard.
I tried to give AD a chance. I really did. I watched the whole first episode. And at the end, I asked myself, “This is supposed to be funny? Huh?”
I literally never found a single thing funny about the entire show. And yet I have several friends, whose tastes otherwise are remarkably similar to mine, who think it’s absolutely wonderful.
So I suspect the reason the show never took off was because there were more people ike me than people like you. Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with either liking or disliking it, just that apparently the latter group vastly outnumbers the former.
I rented one of the discs of the first season of Arrested Development, and we watched every episode. I liked it. I laughed fairly often. But after I dropped the disc off, I found that I couldn’t be bothered to rent another one, and even though we have a PVR, I never bothered to set up a recording for the show.
I don’t know why. Part of it may be that none of the characters are particularly likeable. It might also be that, while I find the show funny, I don’t find it particularly compelling. I don’t find myself pining for another episode to watch, or thinking at all about the show any time other than when I’m watching it. It’s not particularly quotable, so we don’t talk about it at work the way we talk about the Simpsons or Family Guy. It just flies below the radar.
I feel the same way about Malcolm in the Middle.
That’s what I was getting at. Pre-empted by baseball, reruns of other shows, etc. I practically had to mark my calendar to remember when to catch it. I don’t think it’s just Fox, but TV in general these days. Gone are the days when a show would run for 36 weeks straight (including reruns) in the same time slot. It seemed worse than usual with AD, but maybe it’s because I was always desperately seeking it out.
I’ve probably missed a lot of great shows over the past few years because of networks’ schizophrenic scheduling. Whenever the heck Scrubs comes back, I’ll need a billboard to remind me that it still exists.
This Bernie Mac fan has been hoping for an exception to that rule.
But who am I kidding? Look at this season’s Family Guy premiere, where Peter listed the twenty or so shows that all had to die so FG could return. And they all did. I don’t know who’s smoking what at Fox.
I tried to watch it a few times but the shaky camera technique pushed me to the edge of motion sickness and I had to change channels after a few minutes. Did they do that on every show, through out the entire show?