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WB Cancels Angel
Ray Radlein writes "Despite a 36% increase over last year's comparable ratings, the WB Network announced today that they are cancelling Angel as of the end of this season." Unfortunate since this season was stronger than the last. " The link also makes taunting mentions of movie plans.
Or, can anyone say spinoff? The REALLY REALLY need to do a series about Willow...
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
This is really quite sad. I always thought the show was great. It had the correct blend of humor and action, and I liked the characters more than in Buffy.
Unfortunately, they did a major format change (they went from the underdogs to in charge of a mega-million evil corporation), and most of the original characters are gone.
But it was still one of the better shows on TV.
Hopefully they will have a chance to end the series with some sort of of finality, unlike Farscape.
They take a decent show with a devoted following off the air and replace it with something to catch an audience that will last for maybe half-a-season; such as a reality show or another lame comedy
Its basically what Fox did with Futurama; even though it had high ratings and a good viewer following, they kept manipulating its timeslot and pre-empting it over and over. Then they finally cancelled it because its 7:00pm Sunday timeslot (that was pre-empted by baseball or football four out of five times) didn't garner enough ratings for it.
At least we can look forward to WB presenting us with "Showgirls: The Series" or "Lawn Care Crisis: The Reality Show"
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As the name implies, being the highest rated doesn't always mean that a show is going to stay. Two things can affect a show at that point to make it be cancelled.
Costs. This is what actually happened with Buffy that forced the move to UPN. Although it was a very highly-rated show for WB, the per episode cost had gotten to be in the (IIRC) $2.2 million range. If we assume that, say, Everwood generates $1.2 million on a budget of $300,000, and (in this peculiar example), Buffy generates $2.9 million, then we realize that ratings aren't what it's all about.
Who is watching? This feeds into the above, because certain fan-bases aren't as profitable as others. Way back in the day, CBS cancelled "The Beverly Hillbillies" because (despite high ratings) the only people actually providing the high ratings were older, rural people (Surprise!), and advertisers don't like them as much. Now, I would assume Angel's target and bulk of viewership is a younger, teen and twentysomething crowd, but I might be entirely wrong.
Or it could just be "creative differences". Maybe Joss is a bastard to work with. Maybe some new exec came on board who has a different, not so sci-fi direction for the network. Maybe Boreanaz had made some secretive noise about being sick of playing the same characters for 7 some-odd years. But more likely, I'd peg it to one of the above theories.
Angel was one of few shows worth dow... watching. I totally dig the combination of humor and darkness.
I guess the only good thing about this is that they can go out with a bang. C'mon writers, let's fuck us good in the last few episodes. Have Angel yearn for the Angelus years. Kill off Lorne. Kill off Gunn. Push Westley back into the darkness, and have him take Fred with him.
Boom, sooner or later... boom.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I think some form of Pay Per View will prevent this from happening in the future. At present, Broadcast TV shows are payed for by advertiser who pay for "eyeballs" i.e. a lot of people within a certain demographic. This creates a powerful incentives to seek the lowest common denominator. Even cable shows suffer from this effect but to a lesser extent. But, if we could deliver shows to individuals at different prices, quirky shows with small but loyal audiences who were willing to pay a relative premium could survive.
You see, there's this little trick I've found for browsing Slashdot: Don't click on stories you're not interested in.
The pitfall is, you lose out on the opportunity to make fun of people for caring about things you find boring and trivial. But you save hours upon hours of time, which you can put towards important things like blogging, or trying out yet another test release of Fedora Core, or any of those other things that you personally enjoy but 99% of the world finds pointless and trivial.
Give it a try.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I'm an Angel fan, but this was really no suprise. Some thoughts...
1) The writing for Angel recently hasn't been up to par with the Angel/Buffy tradition. The recent story line where they brought back that EVIL lawyer from the first season...meh. If they're not saving the world, then it ain't a Buffy/Angel story line.
For me, a recent low point arrived in the Cordelia return episode (two weeks ago). Angel tells her "It's not like I made a deal with the devil here" and then immediately turns to make lunch-date arragnements with a red-skinned, horned demon sporting a goatee. Give me a break.
2) All the actors in the Angel/Buffy series are talented and it would be great to see them move onto other projects. Actaully, yesterday I was thinking to myself that it would be cool to see James Marsters (Spike) have a role in some drama (not even a blockbuster - even a small, indie film). Now that they're not locked into the rough schedule of filming a TV show, it'll be possible.
Why isn't Nicholas Brendon (Xander) a star yet? Ditto for Amber Benson (Tara). It's a conspiracy, I tell ya!.
3) There are still dozens of hours of entertainment left for people who got to the series late:D I missed the first few years of Angel, so now I'll just watch it in syndication (did the same with Buffy on FX channel).
4) If everyone goes out and buys up all the Angel DVDs, maybe they'll resurrect the series (or a spin off) like they did with Family Guy?
5) Charisma Charpenter is going to be in Playboy later this year. Coming soon: Cordelia the Animated Series on SpikeTV. 'Nuff said.