NBC cancels "Whitney"

[jvcarroll]

This is exactly why when I'm asked who my target audience is when pitching shows, I say I have no target audience. I want everyone to watch.

That's smart and it works for some things, but not everything.

Smash is very much a specialty show and they should have tried harder to court younger viewers from the start since those are the numbers networks look at when they decide to renew a program. I think the show really failed when they neglected to legitimately juxtapose the personal and professional lives of the cast. The show's creator designed it as an idealized version of her life and this self-indulgence doomed it from the start. And then they fired her and even though the show's quality improved, it was too late.

 

[Drtooth]

I haven't been a big fan of NBC's shows for a while now. Whitney isn't terrible. It's Friends meets Mad About You, but most of the humor falls kind of flat.

Whitney would have been funny, about 500 Pokemon ago. It was so overtly 90's. it really felt like one of those lame sitcoms they shoved between Friends and Seinfeld or Seinfeld and ER because that's the only way anyone would have watched. You know, like... uh... eh... I used to remember some of these. Oh yeah. The Single Guy and...eh... anyone alive in the 90's probably knows something without looking it up on Wikipedia.

NBC also canceled the New Normal. While I did enjoy the show, that also fell flat. Viewers would have showed up if there was enough funny.

The New Normal was Glee without the music and school setting. It's very obvious that the mother was exactly a poor man's Sue Sylvester. And who was the show even for? It seemed like it was trying to open the eyes of people who wouldn't watch it or something. Somehow, the show would have seemed revolutionary if it came out years earlier. Speaking of Revolutionary...

The one program I am concerned about getting canceled is Hannibal. I love the show. They took an iconic character and reinvented him for television. The ratings are solid, but not great. That is because NBC decided to drop it in the schedule as a mid-season replacement opposite two programs, CBS' Elementary and ABC's Scandal, that already have rather strong followings.

NBC hasn't had success with one action/drama show for some time. Something about Revolution rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's because these big hyped up drama shows get cancelled really fast and there's no way to get involved because you just know they're going to have to can them before an interesting development. Plus, remember "The Event?" They wanted to make it this big conspiracy thriller, and the best they got was "It wuz teh alienz!!!" Might as well say "A Wizard did it."

Hannibal seems like a good enough show, and I agree it would get the following it deserves if it was on a good night with a strong timeslot. Maybe once they get rid of all the Dateline Catilsday type shows (that Brian Williams thing no one was watching), there would be a better place for it. But then again, you have these action dramas that don't go anywhere, no one's going to bother with Hannibal, as it's just going to look like another genre show which never gets the development it should.

As for Smash... well, I defer you to TV Tropes.... Sounds like no one enjoyed working on it, and it only barely got on the schedule in the first place.

 

[Muppet fan 123]

It's too bad NBC cancelled 1600 Penn. Despite it's unrealistic-ness, it was a promising show with a lot of potential. Sad to see that one go.

 

[Drtooth]

I don't think they planned on it being remotely a success, in fact, it seemed like a sacrificial lamb, if anything. They pretty much burned through all the episodes as fast as they could as soon as it started. That's not a good sign.

 

[Drtooth]

Now that I think about it, CBS actually did the impossible. It screwed a show by renewing it! I honestly don't see how they're going to pull a full season of How I Met Your Mother out of their butts, when the entire show could have been resolved in one episode. I feel sorry for the writers. This season was to be the last, they wrote it to be the last, and all the sudden, last minute they renewed the series leaving them with three options to continue the show (that all sound dreadful)

• Future Ted can backtrack to other periods of time in the show, leaving the writers to cope with filler
• They can spend the entire season at Robin and Barney's Wedding 24 style, leaving the writers to cope with filler
• or they can meet the mother the beginning of the season and spend the rest of it courting the woman, leaving the writers to cope with filler, and the audience that just wanted to see him meet the mother stop tuning in after the episode.