Fortune Favors The Bold

The obvious thing to look at when procrastinating work is TV ratings… so one thing I didn’t know is that the much beloved Don’t Trust The B____ in Apt. 23 didn’t start its season on-time. Its first airing this year was late October, and debuted with a tepid marketing effort. That’s not something you do to a show that you want to succeed, right?

They also only showed 8 episodes (of a 13 episode order) last year, so the plan was to deduct that from this season’s full order and then air the remaindered season 1 episodes in the middle of this year’s airing sequence. And this has caused glaring, awkward continuity errors, as well as a general sense that the show is creatively stalled (because it looks like June is still in the getting-to-know-Chloe phase in its second year; these episodes were produced when that would have been an appropriate premise).

ABC pulled it off the schedule entirely yesterday, with 8 episodes this season left to air, and that usually means a show will be not be reordered. There are complicated reasons why that near-term schedule decision is a good idea, and Apt. 23’s ratings were really weak, but overall this just shows a lot of bad faith from the executives at ABC. It’s one of the few shows on TV run by a female (who gets zero buzz because she’s not having a meltdown with Charlie Sheen or Katherine Heigl and she doesn’t look like Tina Fey), the marketing and scheduling of this show was rather dreadful even by 4th-place-network standards, and ABC is obsessed with its chintzy reality show franchises as it experiences a flight-from-quality. It’s hard to let go of the idea that this extremely clever show has promise. One thing I almost surely know, it won’t get a real chance.

But Chuck Lorre can shit in our mouths at will, dude has 90 shows on the air and they’re all creatively and intellectually bankrupt. I don’t need every show on TV to be like BBC’s Sherlock but I find it literally painful to sit through his nonsense. CBS has a shameful army of Nielsen-equipped idiots rolling through its schedule. If these network execs can’t figure out why that’s bad, or if they keep needing to swing for the fences every set of upfronts, network television is doomed. Not, like, stock-price-doomed, more like, we’re-all-gonna-kill-em doomed.