I mean it. Every show I see that I get really excited about, only shows a few episodes before it just POOF dissappears off of the TV, usually forever. A short list of examples:
Sifl and Ollie
Mr Show with Bob and David
Twisted Puppet Theatre
TV Funhouse
Is my taste too extreme? Is it the puppet thing? Why do the shows I love get yanked?!?!
I feel your pain.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
If the shows don’t make money, they usually get axed. Sometimes, they are only contracted to do a short run.
With all the puppet shows on your list, I’m surprised Greg the Bunny isn’t on it.
Did you know that there’s a DVD of the unaired Season 3 of Sifl and Olly? It’s true, it’s true!
I’ve thought about this a lot. I think the problem is that, in order to make it onto the “love” radar, a show has to make it onto the “hate” radar for other people. Usually the intenity of the love and hate are proportional.
I loved SportsNight. Loads of right-thinking people hated it. The shows that make for the most profitable TV tend towards the bland so as to keep from activating the hate response in as many people as possible.
Unfortunately, in order to engender the kind of evangelical “true fan” response of, for example, the denizens of the Buffyverse, you’re going to have to turn some people off. Network TV is a constant balancing act in this regard and the lowest common denominator is usually safer and more profitable.
Or putting it another way…
Programs that are not mainstream (too “smart”/edgy/cutting edge, etc.) generally do not attract a large audience.
Even a show like Police Squad failed because viewers who weren’t watching closely didn’t get it.
Mr. Show had a decent run. Like three or four seasons.
Not horrible.
It’s because the company which keeps track of viewership gives those machines out to the wrong people.
I’d love to see Brimstone brought back, but now that John Glover has moved on to Smallville, I’m not holding my breath.
MASH was on for eleven or thirteen seasons.
The Simpsons are on the thirteenth or fourteenth.
Babylon 5 had five.
True, but one could debate weather the simpsons is still a great show.
True, but there are other threads for that.
I think quite a few good shows get taken off the air because they are too surreal (Mr. Show with Bob and David or Family Guy) but also are quite intelligent, in a strange way. Family Guy, for instance, made allusions to numerous other shows and movies (like the blaxploitation rip-off of “Back to the Future”: “Black to the Future”) and quite often that won’t go over well. It requires a large pool of shared history (although, to be fair, in the case of Family Guy, it was a shared television watching history). Most of my friends, as we are of the early-twenties age group, don’t get a Family Guy reference to The Incredible Hulk, so they simply tune out most of the rest of the show until they don’t watch it again. I mean, Family Guy is seriously the Finnegan’s Wake of cartoons; you need working knowledge of the last thirty years of pop culture to get most of the jokes.
You know, I don’t really know why I called pop culture references “intelligent”…
Some shows which are deemed intelligent are also very low-brow (to use the term loosely). While there are quite a few jokes in both The Simpsons and Frasier that people won’t get, there are more jokes everyone can relate to. I mean, I don’t think Frasier has been on the air so long because of the wry subtle “Harvard” wit; I’m sure it has a bit more to do with the slapstick and Lucy-esque misunderstandings.
I don’t know; I may just be talking out of my ass.
Good shows cost money. You need to pay for good writers, good set, good actors/voice actors.
Family Guy cost $1,000,000 per episode. While not much if you look at something like Friends, it still was a lot for an animated show. It had a large audience but not enough for Fox to deem is worth spending $1,000,000 on.
Other shows like Farscape had the same problem. They needed new costumes and grand sets every episode. The audience was there but the network didn’t think it was worth it. They would rather spend $10,000 on a show that gets 50,000 viewers then a show that costs $20,000 and gets 75,000 viewer. The second show get more people watching, but the first give you more bang for your buck.
Also, networks are for the most part pure unsaturated evil.
In the sense that both are tedious and neither is at all funny, yes.
To each his own and all that, but I tried watching Family Guy again based on all the raves on this message board, and it’s like a black hole for funny. It didn’t make me sad, necessarily, so it’s not the opposite of funny. But it just left me feeling hollow, like the last thing I wanted to do was laugh. Even to the point where I was starting to forget what funny things were like.
Doctor Doctor
Bread and Circuses. Or, as Twain put it, “My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”
That’s the problem with artistic expression in a free-market economy: What “the masses” want, the masses get.
Unfortunately, this system is also the only one that functions in practice, and that is self-sustaining. You know, survival of the Fittest, Might makes Right, Whoever has the Gold, and all that.
Ya’ ever get the feeling the “someone” is sitting on a cloud right now, laughing his metaphysical ass off at us?
What’s the debating term for setting up a question with an assumption that may or may not be true? Like “When are you going to stop beating your wife?”
There are lots of great shows that last quite a while. MusicJunkie named three. I’d add Masterpiece Theater, ER, The Sopranos, Law and Order. Guess it depends what you mean by “great.” Personally, I hate the Simpsons, Seinfeld, and South Park, but a lot of people find them wonderful.
Once and Again
sniff
I thought “Golden Years” was an excellent summer replacement series, back when there used to be such things. I was mortally wounded when the final episode never aired.