Yup. Bloody TN “We Know Drama” T has cut the series. We now have no third season to look forward to.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/04/television.witchblade.reut/index.html
I find that really damn annoying. I had just put it in my slot for second-favorite show after Buffy, and they kill it. Boy would I have some choice words for these guys …
I know a lot of people who were working on that show. Production was always a huge mess. Undescribable! Really, I’ve never seen so many really experienced film people say “this is the worst show I’ve ever worked on!” I’m sure the decision had nothing to do with the popularity of the show. There were some very serious production problems.
Part way through the shooting season (in the spring), they shut down production altogether – the crew was advised that they may scrap the entire season. There were rumours that they were going to fire and replace the entire crew and/or possibly re-cast a key role.
I was really surprised to see them filming again in June.
The rumours that they would wrap up after this season were pretty ripe.
I really liked to watch the show, but behind the scenes its been falling apart from the start (and quite expensively so).
Could it have to do with the star’s personal problems? From what I heard they caused major delays in production of this season…
The second season didn’t feature particularly strong scripts. It was mostly “Ancient evil arises, torments Yancy Butler for a while, then she sticks a sword in it.” Repeat. There seemed to be very few episodes – the season seemed to have barely started before the season finale.
Way too much annoying usage of the MTV-style fast cuts. The main character was not particularly sympathetic. Their notion of how homicide cops work, act and dress was ludicrous.
Liked it the first season, watched it by habit the second season. On the whole, I won’t miss it.
That was a huge part of it (don’t wanna get too detailed, let’s just say that her health was such that they had to reschedule quite a bit), but there were other elements as well starting at the top and working its way down ina snowball effect.
FTR, Yancy is a very, very nice person. In fact, most of the cast was quite cordial and easy-going.
Honestly, some of the crew were convinced the show was jinxed. ie/ they needed to film on a road that never has traffic, and on the day of shooting there were cars parked end-to-end along the whole stretch of it.
Finagle from what I understand (most of the people I know who were working on the show bailed out like rats off a sinking ship, so I dunno about what was going on after awhile) – a lot of the scripts had last minute rewrites because they were technically unfeasable for a TV show, and also because they had to accommodate the huge production delays. Episodes were filmed out of order because the time period scheduled for one episode would just pass on by with no filming happening – so they’d go on ahead to the next one, and hoped they could shoot the skipped episode at the end of the season. They fell so far behind, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started hacking intelligent scripts to bits just to get them done.
Not to play devil’s advocate or anything, but did Witchblade ever have decent ratings? I mean it’s not like there’s a great deal of competition on TNT, but you figure they’d still want it to bring in a certain amount of money, no?
It did well, as it said in the story I linked to. I, having no friends in the TV production industry, obviously lacked any inside skinny, so this is all news to me.
Too bad. Even the first season was better than the second, I will still miss it.
(BTW: I also thought the show was better than the comic)