A few years ago, I began to realize that following television was very different from being a fan of most other mediums. There is no chance that when you go to Loews to see a movie it is going to stop fifteen minutes before the end because the studio decided to pull the plug, or that the new album you bought is going to cut out in the middle of a song because it was just costing the record company too much.
Yet this is a common occurrence in TV land; programs are routinely cancelled before they can reach whatever peak they were hoping to reach. I’ve come to see my relationship to the television shows that I follow passionately as incredibly masochistic, which likely has more to do with my Irish-Catholic upbringing than anything else. The vast majority of shows that I follow strongly resemble abusive relationships.
There are so many programs that I begin to watch and get immediately sucked in, but I know that there is no chance in hell that I’ll get a satisfying resolution out of them. It happened last year with the debut of “Pushing Daisies,” an off-beat dramedy on ABC that was cancelled this year. After watching the pilot I knew that the show wouldn’t last long, but I was willing to go along for the ride while it lasted.
This is fine while living in the grey area between cancellation and renewal, when you’re able to hold out hope that maybe this show will buck the trend and get to live out its life without network interference. But that only happens in the rarest of instances.
More often than not, that is not the case. Most shows are cancelled with strings loose and storylines unresolved, which only goes to throw salt in the wound.
Now, I’m not completely naïve, I understand that there is a bottom line that network executives need to look to, and that there has always been a push and pull between commerce and art. My pet peeve is when networks don’t give the show a heads up before it is cancelled, they don’t even grant it the courtesy of trying to craft some sort of conclusion and to resolve as much plot as possible.
In these cases, it is often other mediums that come to the rescue. Joss Whedon’s “Angel” lives on as a comic book and his other series “Firefly” was able to be made into a feature film, Serenity. The past couple of weeks have seen announcements that two recently cancelled series, “Veronica Mars” and “Arrested Development,” will both be heading to the big screen to complete the story they were prevented from finishing.
As much as the premature cancellation of a series may sting, it has yet to dissuade me from taking chances on new series, even those quirky shows that will be lucky to make it through the entirety of their first season. When I’m no longer willing to take a chance on those shows, then it is probably time for me to stop trying to follow series.
Make sure that Dan doesn’t get cancelled; send him a message at dnewman@staff.georgetownvoice.com
