I’ve been a bit remiss on commenting on recent TV.
And with the networks being as quick on the trigger as they are, I totally miss out on the chance to recommend things before they’re bounced all over the schedule and/or pulled completely.
Case in point: Drive.
The two-hour premiere left me feeling distinctly “eh” about the show. But I caught that third hour (of course, on a different night from the premiere) and found that the show had started to find its stride. The characters set in, enough of the plot was exposed to see the pleasing and vaguely creative curve it taking and the rhythm of the regular run-time started to kick in. Hour four was even better.
There will be no hour five. Fox has pulled the plug on it. They, of course, cited low ratings. (Which, for Fox could mean anything lower than what 24 pulls in.)
Here’s the thing, though… they’ve got another nine episodes (according to a Reuters article, at least) of the show already in the can.
This is not unlike what happened with ABC’s Daybreak which was brought in (and then quickly dropped) when Lost went on its break early in the current season. Daybreak got burned off online. And, as seems to often be the case with quickly canceled shows, the best episodes were the un-aired ones. (Not that Daybreak is the best example–the show had a good number of problems and should have been tweaked and tightened a lot more before it ever hit the air.)
The simple fact is that it sometimes takes a show some time to shake out the bugs. Actors get to know their characters better after a few shows. The show runners know better where the strengths and weaknesses of their staff writers fall. The producers get a better idea of who the key demographic actually is (as opposed to who they want it to be).
Over the years, there are very few shows I’ve seen that shouldn’t have made it past four on-air hours. Of those that are among those very few, most are game shows and reality TV shows. And of the oh-so-very-few that I firmly believe should have been axed right quick, some of them stayed on the air for a long, long time (Yes Dear and Life According to Jim come to mind).
While I may not be terribly picky about what I watch on TV, I am picky about what I watch regularly and even more picky about what I think is actually good TV. Las Vegas is entertaining, but it’s never been good TV. Every season, it seems there are fewer and fewer shows I feel compelled to keep watching. Of those that I do, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that half (or more) of them will be dropped from the schedule before mid-season.
I look at the current network TV line-up and I see a bit of a wasteland. Not that TV has ever been a place populated with kings and paragons of knowledge and virtue, but the landscape is most certainly different from what it was in the heyday of my original television watching days. I remember more shows taking chances and I remember more networks taking chances on shows.
Yes, shows have always been pulled–and some quite quickly–for as long as networks have looked at their bottom lines via ratings. But the ratings game has changed a lot more in the past two decades than the marketing babble has. The effectiveness of advertising as a whole has dropped (thanks in no small part to everyone who time-shifts their viewing with TiVO, watches their shows online or otherwise puts themselves in the position to skip that nearly twenty minutes per hour that isn’t show).
Networks today are so numbers-conscious that they lose sight of the bigger picture.
They forget that the numbers are only part of the story.
Or, maybe, the number are the story. Maybe it’s just not the story the networks think it is.
If nothing else, the Web has proven that there is a market out there for alternate distribution routes. I’ve watched all of Daybreak online. I probably would have watched it in real-time, too, but I’m not the typical viewer. Many viewers today are used to getting things when they want them–as can be easily seen by the popularity of TiVO.
Maybe the networks need to re-think how they run shows to begin with. They’ve certainly been trying half-heartedly to do that for years.
But that’s another story.
The point here is, a show has to be such a wiz-bang success right off the top these days that the more subtle fare rarely has a chance. Those more subtle shows (like Lost and Heroes) that do manage to hit it big are flukes.
I’m going to miss seeing Drive on TV. It was just getting fun… and looked like it could have gotten good. Maybe I’ll get to see the rest of it–on my own terms, of course–if they dump episodes to the Web. Or maybe it will go the way of shows like Push, Nevada and never be heard of again except in the bios of the people involved in it.
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