still frustrating and disappointing and annoying and, yes, downright tragic.
But I'm dealing.
Thursday was an awful day in TV land: the morning after that hideous episode of Lost, the day Freddie was picked up for a full season and the day that Fox slammed the final nail into the coffin of Arrested Development. The show has been pulled from Fox's schedule for the rest of November, will return briefly in December and will be pulled again in January. At which point it will likely never return. And the number of episodes ordered for this season has been reduced from 22 to 13.
After three, oops, two and a half seasons, the funniest show on television is destined to become a part of TV history. Yes, some high quality shows have faded faster (even some on Fox: Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Profit, Undeclared, etc.), but no, none of them were better.
From a network perspective it had to be done: since moving to Mondays this season the show has delivered miserable ratings and its hour long airing last week was especially poor — more people watched Seventh Heaven (which, oddly, was cancelled on Thursday, but the announcement was only made to hype this season as its final one), a 9 p.m. airing of Girlfriends on UPN rated higher for the evening in viewers age 18-49, and, probably worst of all, lead-out Prison Break (one of Fox's only current "hits") saw its ratings drop.
But it hurts that this show is off of Fox's schedule while Stacked, Reunion, Killer Instinct and The War at Home remain. (At least for the moment... the only one of those shows likely to survive until January is The War at Home, already picked up for a full season, just like Freddie.)
It also hurts that this comes during a supposed renaissance in TV comedy. With the loss of Arrested the network comedy landscape is pretty barren. Since combining incessant voiceover with a parade of white trash cliches is NOT actually funny, the best half hour on network TV is now about Chris Rock's childhood. Which is cute but overly familiar. But I guess this is why the TV gods created cable and shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Extras, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Weeds.
And as for Arrested Development, we'll always have DVD.
2 comments:
Arrested Development was a very good show and it pisses me off that it was cancelled. But no, it was not better than Undeclared.
Yeah it was. And now it always will be.
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