Fall TV Update

My daughter has always been one who was willing to try new foods. When she was six or seven she would take a bite of something and exclaim how good it was. She would proceed to tell her older brothers that they should try it too. She would keep eating and almost always by the mid point of her serving one noticed her starting to pick at it. Eventually at the end of the meal a good portion of the new food she had treated like the greatest thing since sliced bread would still be on her plate.

When I asked her about this the answer was inevitably a variation on " It was good Daddy, I just got full."

I think that in a sentence sums up not just what I find with most new shows that I originally like and have high hopes for but how the great proportion of people end up when it comes to new shows. What starts out as exciting and promising soon just turns into another vegetable dressed up to look more new and different than it really is.

In the fall I felt that The Last Resort, Vegas and Revolution were well on their way to success. Interestingly the show that I had the least hope for seems to be the only one I am still with, the only show whose ratings are successful.

The Last Resort was the show that started out with the biggest bang. It's original episode was explosive but eventually it became soon apparent that the series just could not maintain the bar it had set. When the show had to develop a plausible plot line about the crew of a nuclear submarine forming their own nuclear armed nation entity it just could not be done. Soon enough ABC was preempting the show and the shows ratings faltered even more. Being placed against the X Factor and The Big Bang Theory it was felt that an audience, a different audience could be carved out. It just did not work. With low ratings and high expenses per episode ABC has cancelled the show and the three episodes sitting on my DVR have been erased. There is no need to invest in a show that is doomed.

Vegas the CBS entry seemed like a sure thing and in fact it is doing well in the ratings and with Dennis Quaid and Michael Chilkis there is no reason to think the show will not be around well after this season. The show with all its promise however has lost this viewer. The payoff of a slight advance of the long term storyline that one receives each week while sifting through a tedious murder mystery is just not worth it. The series might well have been a different show on a cable network. It is not that one needs to extra blood, violence, sex and gore of the cable version, it is just that the weekly story-lines might not have to be so prevalent in a cable series. For that reason this show has lost this viewer.

Revolution continues moving strongly toward it's mid season break. This weeks episode was a little contrived, coming through a Philadelphia subway tunnel suffering from a lack of oxygen the main characters experienced hallucinations but the payoff at the end of the episode was well worth it. A great choice this week too with the featuring of some Led Zeppelin music as well. The ratings have slipped a little recently and one wonders if the show will continue to maintain if not expand it's audience, NBC needs to be sure to not have the upcoming break go too long as viewers have short memories but this series still offers something worth watching each week. As show after show falls off my radar as the season digs in Revolution remains strong with The Walking Dead as the only two series that are must see each week.

The experience of these three shows does however explain in a nutshell why it is so difficult to launch a series and have it be successful on network television. It is a terribly divergent culture, incredibly competitive and with viewers with more options and shorter attention spans than ever before. Instead of bemoaning the number of series that fail perhaps we should stare with wonder that any ever succeed at all in gaining a loyal viewership.