TSCC Canceled

[SylasGaunt]

http://ausiellofiles.ew.com/2009/04/fal ... eat-s.html

http://www.airlockalpha.com/news426363.html

So in short fuck Fox. Fuck them right in their never to be sufficiently damned ear.

I am officially done with this shitty network because every time I find a fucking show I like on it it gets canned and more than once on a cliffhangar ending.

[R.O.A]

I think this actually might help them out in the long run. It would have been hard to keep going with the new storyline; they wrote themselves into a hole. It does annoy me a little bit but not like the cancellation of Jericho did...

[Thanas]

Yeah, this is official. Josh Friedman has not confirmed it, but some producers have already moved on to other shows.

I think this actually might help them out in the long run. It would have been hard to keep going with the new storyline; they wrote themselves into a hole.

Not really. What makes you say that?

[Imperial Overlord]

I could try for eloquence, but "aw fuck," sums ups my feelings accurately.

[Losonti Tokash]

Fucking hell.

[Beowulf]

Damn it! The keeps sending shows I like into death-slot friday, and then cancelling them. Firefly, T:SCC. Next you're going to tell me Dollhouse was cancelled too.

[SylasGaunt]

Damn it! The keeps sending shows I like into death-slot friday, and then cancelling them. Firefly, T:SCC. Next you're going to tell me Dollhouse was cancelled too.

They renewed Dollhouse actually.

[Themightytom]

Oh great, this leaves Summer Glau free to play an emo creepy killing machine little girl in SG:U, her older firefly alum all ended up over there anyway

[Faqa]

A Joss Whedon show on Fox on Friday gets RENEWED.

That much good luck had to come at someone's expense, karmically.

BAH. Much as I'd love to bash Fox, I just can't. The show wrote it's own grave, frankly, by choosing to come slow out of the gate after the hiatus. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves and all that. And the slow, meandering self-indulgent episodes blew the show's best chance to acquire new viewers.

Did I love the show? Yes. But the ratings slump was predictable and Fox's decision to cancel them was rational.

Fuck them for moving it to Friday night in the first place, though.

Ah, well. Farewell, show. You were the smartest sci-fi on TV for quite a while. You showcased the hidden talents of an unlikely cast(let's face it, who WASN'T cynical about Summer Glau? Let's not get into Shirley Manson, for that matter). You breathed new life and a soul into a dead franchise.

*raises glass*

I await the talents of the cast and crew in other shows. The writers especially.

Why can't the people who answer Nielsen ratings love the shows that I do?

EDIT:

Friedman's response:

By now most of you have heard the news that T:SCC is cancelled. I received a call earlier today from Peter Roth at Warner Bros. and I appreciate both his personal and professional support throughout this show’s life. I know a lot of you are angry about the cancellation and want to find a place to direct your anger and to that I say do yourself a favor and find a way to move past it. Every network wants a big fat hit, especially one with a brand name behind it, and Fox was/is no different. They supported the show, they supported my vision of the show, and they gave it plenty of time to find an audience.
And what an audience we found: passionate, intelligent, kind of nuts in a good way. My only complaint about the T:SCC fans is that there aren’t ten million of them. But I prefer to be happy for the ones we had instead of lamenting the ones we didn’t.
Good shows are cancelled every year; smart shows, worthy shows, shows which move their viewers to write blogs and have viewing parties and create action figures and bury executives’ email accounts under thousands of messages. I miss Deadwood and The Wire and Arrested Development but thank God that I still have Rescue Me and The Office and a recently renewed Party Down written by ex-T:SCC writer John Enbom.
Bad shows are cancelled, too. And certainly there are those who did not like what we did and had their own vision for what a Terminator TV show should be. It’s easy to look at low ratings or cancellation as “failure” and for those who believe we’ve gone about this all wrong I’m sure today’s news will only serve to confirm a world view that I would never try to change. We’ve written the show as best we can, executed it to the best of our abilities, and sent it out in the world knowing that we worked out asses off to do something that wouldn’t be a waste of anybody’s forty-three minutes.
Thanks to a brave and talented cast, a feature crew working on a TV schedule, and everyone else who I could list but won’t because they know who they are. Mostly I’d like to thank those of you who’ve supported us and fought for us and given up hours of your life to watch our show. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. The watching.
Hope we do it again soon.
Josh Friedman

[Big Orange]

Fox are going downhill fast and their overall ratings are now starting to resemble the ratings that the defunct The WB and UPN networks had, the Nielsen system is decrepit, and advertising revenue is drying up at a rapid rate, so expensive shows like The Sarah Connor Chronicles are getting harder to put on. And these network executives are as similarily dumb as music executives, making irreparable mistake after irreparable mistake; why preemptively shift expensive shows to shitty timeslots and act all surprised when they struggle?

[Peptuck]

What I find strange is they didn't wait until Salvation had come out to make the call on canning the show. If Salvation did well, it could have stirred up more fan-interest in a Terminator TV series that would have given SCC a better shot in a third season.

That being said, "fucking hell" describes my feelings, too. Though I'm not surprised; they made a huge mistake having four full self-indulgent, meandering, uninteresting, and overall slow and boring episodes back-to-back, and too much focus on minor bit characters. The entire Sarah Connor mindfuckery mini-arc could have easily been condensed into one or two episodes instead of bloated up into four, and putting those after the break just compounded the stupid.

If the series had really kept the tightness that the first season held, it would have done much better, IMO.

Here's to hoping (on the incredibly miniscule chance) Sci-Fi picks it up.

[Starglider]

That being said, "fucking hell" describes my feelings, too. Though I'm not surprised; they made a huge mistake having four full self-indulgent, meandering, uninteresting, and overall slow and boring episodes back-to-back, and too much focus on minor bit characters. The entire Sarah Connor mindfuckery mini-arc could have easily been condensed into one or two episodes instead of bloated up into four, and putting those after the break just compounded the stupid.

Perhaps the writers were taking the attitude 'it worked for Lost'. Heroes also got away with far worse.

Ending on a major cliffhanger is definitely the worst part of this, even nine more episodes would have been extremely useful for wrapping things up properly.

[Shroom Man 777]

Fuckers.




Robot Rivers.

[Singular Intellect]

I was fully expecting it, but that cliffhanger ending had me hoping till the bitter end. Fuck.

[Anguirus]

io9 seems to think there is a chance that we might get some TV movies to wrap up the storyline, a la Alien Nation. I'm certainly upset at the death of the show, but part of me thinks two or three movies might actually be better than a whole other season story-wise, IMHO.

That said, it's still an outside chance.

I'll toss an obligatory "fuck you" to Fox. Hope Dollhouse is worthy of its second chance.

[Vympel]

That being said, "fucking hell" describes my feelings, too. Though I'm not surprised; they made a huge mistake having four full self-indulgent, meandering, uninteresting, and overall slow and boring episodes back-to-back, and too much focus on minor bit characters. The entire Sarah Connor mindfuckery mini-arc could have easily been condensed into one or two episodes instead of bloated up into four, and putting those after the break just compounded the stupid.

Yeah, that arc just went on and on and on and on and on. I lost interest and watched the episodes weeks apart, and still couldn't believe I was sitting through it.

Hoping for some TV movies to wrap the storyline up - they can't leave it like that.

[Peptuck]

That being said, "fucking hell" describes my feelings, too. Though I'm not surprised; they made a huge mistake having four full self-indulgent, meandering, uninteresting, and overall slow and boring episodes back-to-back, and too much focus on minor bit characters. The entire Sarah Connor mindfuckery mini-arc could have easily been condensed into one or two episodes instead of bloated up into four, and putting those after the break just compounded the stupid.

Perhaps the writers were taking the attitude 'it worked for Lost'. Heroes also got away with far worse.

Difference is, those shows weren't on FOX.

Friedman took way too big a gamble when he tried indulging in the Sarah Connor mindfuckery. He really shouldn't have done that with a series already on the ropes on a network known for axing shows at the drop of a hat. It would have been better if they'd at least spread it around and worked on integrating it with other episodes instead of creating a four episode block that essentially amounts to "Sarah Connor is crazy." A season-long series of occasional hallucinations and Kyle Reese appearances would have worked much better.

Not to mention they should have axed "Desert Cantos" and the majority of "The Good Wound." Those episodes were obviously boring and had little plot value, and should have been dropped at the script-writing stage; the only redeeming quality of "The Good Wound" was Kyle Reese, and like I said above, he could have easily been integrated into multiple episodes to better get across the idea of Sarah's insanity.

At least, that's what I would have done.

[Thanas]

As for the possibility of TV-movies, I doubt that is going to work. For once, the show is geared towars and episodic format and second, the expenditure of new sets may be too great.

[Havok]

I also don't see why they would bother with TV movies when there are going to be theater movies coming out.
Also, doesn't the new movie invalidate the show anyway? Or is it ignoring it as the show did with T3?

[Oskuro]

I'm also of the opinion that a couple D2DVD movies would be great to wrap the story. The first season was awesome because of the content density per episode, if they pull that off in a couple 2 hour movies, they could pretty much wrap everything up (while getting rid of superfluous stuff only fit as series filler).

Anyway, I'll just conclude by saying: Spoiler

ROBOT RIVER! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[Thanas]

I also don't see why they would bother with TV movies when there are going to be theater movies coming out.
Also, doesn't the new movie invalidate the show anyway? Or is it ignoring it as the show did with T3?

The latter is the case.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I want to say I'm surprised, but the moment it was announced that Fox was moving it from its decent time-slot, to the Friday Night Death Slot of DOOMtm, T:SCC's chances of not being totally canned up the ass by Fox went straight to zero. Fox hates good sci-fi, who knew?

[Majin Gojira]

I want to say I'm surprised, but the moment it was announced that Fox was moving it from its decent time-slot, to the Friday Night Death Slot of DOOMtm, T:SCC's chances of not being totally canned up the ass by Fox went straight to zero. Fox hates good sci-fi, who knew?

Honestly, I think either Fox is at war with itself--with one group of execs that keeps pushing for Sci-Fi show and one that pushes against them--or thinks that a scifi show can only be time tested if it can repeat the X-Files success.

[Havok]

I think I said this in another thread when TSCC got moved to Friday night... Why would a television network that has spent millions of dollars promoting and developing and making a show that is designed to appeal to the 15-35 demographic, move it to a night and time when 15-35 year olds are looking to do anything but stay home and watch TV? I don't get the logic there.

[Oskuro]

I don't get the logic there.

I guess there isn't one. These decisions are probably made by the numbers, with no consideration about the actual product. I can easily picture a budget management meeting where different shows being refered to by their cost/benefit ratio and future projections, not by the content, target audience, or even actual quality.

To me, that's the problem with the commercialization of artforms, you can't measure its worth objectively, as it is subject to the personal tastes of the audience, but that doesn't stop them from trying.

Also, instant gratification, the bane of the capitalist mentality. Anything that doesn't pay off inmediately is shunned and discarded.


Again, I do hope they get a couple movies to wrap things up. I was liking the chemistry between characters a lot, and to be honest, for a Terminator-based show it was surprisingly not groan-inducing, unlike T3 or T:Salvation.