The Merciless Networks

I love watching TV shows when they're good so I'm all for new shows being presented to us in the hopes of finding the "next best thing," but today I read a comment that put the whole thing in perspective.

This woman was watching this new show, Heist, and just found out it got cancelled:

Re: NBC shelving Heist, Elizabeth writes: "You've got to be kidding me! Is it just me, or are all the good new shows being canceled? It's getting to be not worth it to give new ones a try."

I couldn't agree with her more. I mean, why bother start watching a new show when chances are it won't make it past a few episodes or, in the luckiest of cases, one season?

When we watch a TV show, we get emotionally invested with the characters' lives and storylines. When a show is cancelled it can be very disappointing, even heartbreaking. So why bother investing so much of ourselves in a show that maybe won't make it?

Sadly, oftentimes a show strikes a chord only with relatively few viewers, and a fan-fave is born. The audience might be small in number, but its interest in the show is huge (cases in point, Arrested Development, Once and Again, Family Guy). Nonetheless, the show doesn't survive the harsh reality of TVLand and gets cancelled, leaving all those fans from sad to devastated (I remember how much it hurt when they canceled Once and Again, a great show).

Point is, the networks might do themselves a disservice by canning shows too fast to make room for new ones, because not all shows are Desperate Housewives. Some actually need a little bit of time to grow into full-fledged, high rated series, but they are not given that chance.

I have actually adopted a double standard: if a show is on a premium channel (like HBO or Showtime) I will usually give it a try, because their shows are either very good, and hence last, or are shown for at least one or two seasons anyway (satisfying even a small but rabid audience). If a show is on a network, I gauge the cast, the premise, and the first reviews by the 'experts,' and if it looks like it won't make the cut for the network in the long run, it doesn't make the cut for me in the shortrun, and I don't even check it out.

And that can backfire, since I didn't watch the first episode of Desperate Housewives. I only started watching it after the reviews started coming in and sounded great. Now I love the show, but I wasn't first in line to check it out, like the networks surely expect us to do.

So, I ask again. Is it worth it to check out all the new shows that come out every fall (and spring) when the chances of them surviving are slim at best?

Hardly.