Channel J: The Worst Luck

The first seven actors out of work this season…

I imagine money is an issue more than ever these days, and shows that would’ve been allowed a slow start a decade ago must now be culled to keep the ad revenue flowing.  It is a lot easier to charge a premium for ad space during a show with twenty million viewers than a show with two million viewers, and with average show length declining so that more ads can be run, ratings are more important than ever.

That said, some shows are clearly a lost cause, and that was the case for Lucky 7, the first series of the 2013-14 season to be cancelled.  Its pilot was seen by about four and a half million viewers according to Nielsen and its second episode lost almost half of that number.  Two and a half million viewers is good if you’re a network like AMC; Breaking Bad did less numbers than that for most of its run and it lasted five seasons.  On a network like ABC, two and a half million viewers is an embarrassment.

Lucky 7 was the story of a group of employees at a convenience store whose lottery pool finally bore fruit.  After winning the lottery… actually, that’s as far as the series went.  The first few episodes were going to revolve around the trials and tribulations involved in getting the money.  This group of employees all had their own problems, financial and otherwise, which would potentially be solved or complicated by the lottery win.

It is unknown how many episodes Lucky 7 was picked up for, but I assume it got the standard thirteen episode order.  However, it seems to me like the series should’ve been picked up as a summer replacement instead and aired as a miniseries with the potential to be picked up for a second season if the first season performed well enough.  I can’t see the show having any kind of lasting appeal beyond the initial premise, since many real life lottery winners end up squandering their money quite easily and find themselves in a worse situation than before.  I suppose, by necessity, a second season would’ve continued the story as the group of convenience store workers become broke, former lottery winners who are struggling to eke out a living and growing more desperate to return to the kind of rich lifestyle they briefly enjoyed.  It would probably resemble a cross between 2 Broke Girls and Corner Gas, except as a drama, of course.

My biggest disappointment with Lucky 7 was that the subplot surrounding the staged robbery of the convenience store would’ve made for a decent enough crime drama by itself and it overshadowed everyone else’s storylines.

The third episode was apparently going to deal with Denise’s suspicions that her husband was cheating on her and Leanne’s paranoia would’ve increased to the point that she thought she was being followed by someone who knew about her past.  Still, not enough effort was made to make sure that every character would be interesting enough to help carry the series, and I find myself only mildly interested in who the “cable guy” was that Denise’s husband was always texting.

They are cancelled

To CBS, five and a half million viewers isn’t enough to carry a comedy series, and so We Are Men became the third series to be dropped this season, having also been canned after two episodes.  The premise was that four guys having women troubles ended up hanging out together, and the pilot featured the four men acting like immature teenagers and reminded me of Harold & Kumar (in fact, Kal Penn starred in the Harold & Kumar movies and in We Are Men).  It was supposed to be a comedy but I wasn’t laughing.  About the only thing I liked about it was that there wasn’t a laugh track, so I didn’t feel like I was stupid for not sharing the same sense of humour the writers did.

The second episode showed that the series had potential and was funnier than the first, but I guess it never found its audience and thus was pulled after two weeks.

If you ask me, a much better show featuring four guys who sometimes hung out together happened to be one of the best anime shows of the year.  Angela has already summed up Free! – Iwatobi Swim Club in her recent anime post, but I would like to add that Free! was much more of a comedy than We Are Men was despite its intentions to be a slice-of-life drama.  I know it’s like apples and oranges comparing Free! to We Are Men, but then I do like the flavour of apple more than the flavour of orange so I guess I already have experience comparing apples and oranges.

I’m so disinterested in this show that I deleted the image from my hard drive after uploading it to the blog

But speaking of animation – and there’s a reason I left this for last – the second series to be pulled from schedules this year was the FOX animated series Murder Police.  It looks like it was going to be an animated series about a police precinct that would’ve made the Keystone Cops look like Sherlock Holmes.  A group of inept and corrupt detectives was going to be led by a character of an ethnic background, I’m assuming Spanish or Mexican based upon the character’s name, Manuel Sanchez.

And that’s all that I know about the series.  I assume the episodes weren’t good enough to air on FOX or they didn’t have room on the schedule because Murder Police, originally lined up to be a mid-season replacement, has already been pulled from the schedule after having aired none of the thirteen episodes ordered and instead is going to be shopped around to cable networks.  Good luck with that.  There’s no disappointment here, I had no interest in the series from the start.

Then again, I’ve not been interested in animation on FOX for quite some time now, so when the news about Murder Police’s cancellation arrived, my first thought was “Wait, what got cancelled?”

Sadly, I imagine The Michael J Fox Show might not last as long as NBC was counting on.  Last week’s numbers have shown that the series has fallen below four million viewers and yesterday’s numbers reveal that it’s fallen further to three and a half million.  Despite a promising start and being one of the funniest new shows on television, it appears that the audience isn’t there and that maybe a full season order was a little premature.  I wouldn’t mind if
it stayed on the air and the network gave it a chance, but that would be overly optimistic of me.  Instead, it looks like it may end up being the fourth show to be cancelled this season.

So far the axe of early cancellation has not fallen upon a show I actually like and instead has culled shows that I could easily live without.  (In fact, I prepared for this article this morning by streaming the cancelled shows for a couple hours.)  But judging by the ratings being reported, it’s only a matter of time.  At least shows like Lucky 7 were given a chance to fail.  If you ask me, Murder Police was the unluckiest of all.

Edit: Just before I posted this article, NBC announced the cancellation of their very low-rated comedy… Welcome To The Family, after three episodes.  I imagine this means that The Michael J Fox Show is being given a little bit more time to prove itself.  They also announced the cancellation of Ironside, the less-than-successful remake of a 60s and 70s cop show, thus making them the fourth and fifth shows given the axe this season.