Terminated
Josh Friedman recounts the cancellation of his excellent show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:
Everyone says having your show cancelled is like a death but I’ve been dead before and at least when you’re dead you don’t get thrown off the Warner Bros. lot for haunting your old parking space. They probably mean it’s like the death of a friend or a family member but that shit only hurts when it’s YOUR friend or family member and even then it’s mitigated by age, lifestyle and whether that person was a Hollywood friend or a real one and whether that family member left you money.
Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.
Josh’s post are so long and so infrequent he’s more an essayist than a blogger. Still, we should cherish what we get. Read the whole thing.
Articles
June 4th, 2009 at 10:32 am
He’s like your favorite dessert that only your mother makes. You don’t get it, very often, but when you do… mmmmm.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:37 am
John, have you seen this link, which tells the story of how Star Wars become Star Wars from the first draft entitled ” Star Wars: Adventures of the Starkiller”?
http://mysterymanonfilm.blogspot.com/2009/05/long-time-ago.html
Even if you haven’t, do you agree with this comment: “The early drafts were so stunningly awful and so unlike the finished film, it’s such a great reminder that any bad script has the potential to reach great heights like Star Wars.” ?
June 4th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
That blows for Josh, even if it does mean we get another long-awaited blog essay out of him.
I guess maybe blackmail never occurred to him.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I read it earlier today at school so it kind of made me sad. I’m a big fan of Terminator, and I rallied like all the others to get this show a season 2.5, then 3. I guess all good shows die sometime but this was too soon for TSCC.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
And then again, there are just those of us who will not watch Fox… period. My wife and I probably would have loved TSCC, especially with the way SydneyFy (I consider the “Sy” portion of SyFy to be an abbreviation for Sydney) has been letting down its fans and you have to HUNT for good sci-fi programming.
I’m sorry about the cancellation, but if you build a luxury hotel in a slum, you’re going to have a hard time convincing your target clientele to navigate through a disaster area to get to you.
Not that most show-runners get a choice of networks.
Loved the last bit with security. When I was just out of college, I temped at Disney as one of the people you called to get drive-ons for your visitors.
One day, a major producer’s assistant called in a drive-on for a VIP, saying “if this gets screwed up, my boss is going to kill me.” Working on autopilot, I typed “don’t screw up or assistant will be killed” in the pass notes. The VIP was detained as a potential stalker.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Just when you think it’s safe to retire a few cobwebbed RSS feeds … I mothballed Lack of Faith three days ago (I swear) — sixteen months without a post, time for the attic, right? Thanks, John. Nice catch.
June 5th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Hahaha, His venom is hilarity.
June 8th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Check out this link: It tells what was wrong with TSCC.
http://movieanalyses.blogspot.com/2008/01/sarah-connor-chronicles-no-future-for.html
June 9th, 2009 at 2:08 am
Damn… what did Ex-Showrunners do before the blog?
FSR Josh’s story conjured up visions of Hank Chinaski vomiting outside his Hollywood apartment.
allthebest Josh & :cheers:
June 9th, 2009 at 10:40 am
That was a good read, but not worth the show getting canceled.
So, DVR/TiVo viewings (or iTunes?) don’t count at all in the ratings game? Because we fast forward through the commercials and don’t watch most of them, which is why they’re counting how many people are watching in the first place (to see how much they can charge Pepsi for running the commercials)?
I know a lot of people who watched this show, but almost all recorded it. Hell, we record everything we watch! Someone’s gotta create a new model for TV popularity/ranking — 100 homes with the mythical Nielsen box doesn’t cut it anymore. I thought TiVo stats counted for something.