The Wikipedia article doesn’t say.
Maybe it’s been added since you posted, but I see:
According to the articles I found on Lexis-Nexis, the program lost around 60% of its audience during its run, making renewal cost-prohibitive.
I wonder why?
Well, it wasn’t very good.
I thought the show was damn good. I was upset when it was canceled, but, what can you do? It’s a shame.
I really enjoyed it, too. An episode would regularly end with a feeling of, wow… for me. I was often captivated by the horror of war, the choices good people had to make when put in barbaric, dangerous conditions, the toll it takes in both physical and, more importantly, mental terms on the participants… I could go on, but you get the idea.
J.
I never could bring myself to watch it (even though I love war movies, etc.)–it just seemed a bit too painfully close to current suffering over there.
I’m with you. I liked it too and was upset that they cancelled it. The characters were stereotypical conflict movie types, but the writing was very good.
(Emphasis mine)
That’s why I didn’t like it. I think you can have a show about a current war, but it’s not going to be easy, and one of the difficulties you’ll face is that it’s harder to buy into stereotypical characters when the real deals are walking around. Stereotypes in a movie about WWII are one thing, because you realize there’s a degree of abstraction and the characters are symbols. It’s harder to buy that about symbolizing people you know personally.
Consequently, I DIDN’T feel the writing was all thatgood, for that very reason; too many characters seemed drafted (ha!) from the Hollywood Central Repository of War Movie Characters.
A few months back I read Thomas Ricks’s “Fiasco,” his acocunt of how the Iraq War went SNAFU, and to this day the part I remember most clearly was, whem mentioning a young soldier in a firefight, a sudden statement that she “wanted to be a modern dancer.” It was just tossed in there and didn’t connect to anything else but was amazingly effective, because it humanized this person, who otherwise would just have been another rank-firstname-lastname mentioned in a book that’s full of them. “Over There” threw some of that stuff in but I still found the characters too cookie cutter, and, consequently, the entire show just a bit too predictable for my liking.
Of course, it’s purely my opinion, and it may not be why it was cancelled.
That could be part of it. This was the first attempt ever to air a TV drama about an ongoing war – one that is also a divisive political hot potato, any discussion of which can heat up tempers on both sides. Just imagine one of the Big Three airing a Vietnam drama in 1969! The exec who raised the suggestion would be taken out and shot!