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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.
Angel will be sorely missed. Hopefully another network can pick it up, for at least a few years. Beyond that, Angel will age too much for his immortality to be believable when comparing the first Buffy episodes with the final Angel season. Or, can anyone say spinoff? The Buffy universe is way too special to end.
Ok, I don't even watch Angel, most on account a' I don't have a TV, but what is up with the networks cancelling TV shows? Are they only looking for "The NExt Big Thing"tm? I wonder if they figure that a possible smash hit will earn them more money in the short term, rather than a steady show that will earn them money at a regular rate...
I seem to recall that UPN said they would pick up Angel if they could. The took Buffy and Rozwell. Hopefully they will take Angel.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
From the site: "ANGEL outpaced "The West Wing" on NBC...".
I don't watch much West Wing (as I'm watching Angel) but isn't that a pretty high rated show? Why cancel a successful show that has really good ratings?
Despite saying that the show is a "cornerstone" of their network, not to mention the glowing ratings for the show in the last season...I have to wonder if they're doing for artistic reasons or ignorant marketing. I tend to lean towards the latter. Here's a link from a friend of mine who is also a big Angle/Buffy fan that might shed some light on the subject: Breaking News: Angel to End After 5 Seasons. Needless to say, Joss Whedon is not amused.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
I watched Angel for a time - didn't care much for the first season, but did like some of the following ones, up through the arc with Connor. Since then, I haven't followed it, but that's more about my little kid than the show. So, I've been away for a while, but will miss it as well.
I found it interesting that The WB did a press release like this. Even though it's fairly content free (well, other than the big bad news), I found it somewhat refreshing that the network would recognize the creators and stars in such a personal way.
I say good job on cancelling a show at its peak of popularity instead of allowing it to degenerate over many tired additionals seasons, like The Simpsons has. It takes a lot of guts to make that decision, but Angel will always be remembered fondly because of it. Very few shows fail to jump the shark these days.
qntm.org
My thoughts exactly. Very little appears on the WB that doesn't make me wish I hadn't bought my nice TV.
Not trolling, but I'm awfully disappointed in television as a whole lately. Sometimes I work from home, during the day and at night, and the TV is almost always on in the background. Rarely does it have anything worthwhile. The Simpsons, most of Food Network, ER and Scrubs. That's it. Even 24 is hard to watch now. Occasionally, I'll catch a Family Guy or Futurama re-run on whatever random channels they're on from week to week, but they're usually late at night anyway.
And I don't even watch that much TV; an hour or two a day, I suppose.
First Buffy....now Angel. Those were honestly the only 2 shows I have been watching the past 3-4 years. My TV only gets turned on Wednesday night to watch Angel or to pop in a DVD.
Guess this means I can finally cancel my cable cause there is nothing else on TV that seemed as well written and so well held together with past plots than these 2 shows.
Angel will be missed. Please pick it up UPN!
Given the flurry of fan activity over Joss Weldon's last show, Firefly, and the subsequent snubbing by the other networks when they wanted someone to pick up the show... the cynic in me wouldn't be surprised if this show also fades into oblivion.
UPN needs something, with buffy gone and enterprise sucking big time they need something to draw viewers. Off the top of my head I cant think of another show besides enterprise and syndicated simpsons thats on UPN...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
If you look at a lot of TV shows out there, they are ment for mass consumption - Fraiser, Friends, the Simpsons, sports, etc. Its harder for advertisers to know exactly who their audience is.
With Buffy, Angel, Dark Angel (funny they're all WB?) the audience is much more focused so they can better target advertising. This IS what advertisers want. With this in mind, I'm baffled that they can't get enough money from the advertisers to cover production costs - or at least enough to make a heathly profit from.
In a year and a half, he's gone from having 3 shows on television (Firefly, Buffy, Angel) to none. On the plus side it'll give him more time to work on the oft-mentioned Firefly Movie, but it's kind of depressing that there will be no Joss on the boob tube.
OT: heck, remember when the choice wasn't whether you could watch Science Fiction on TV, but what kind? Friday nights were nerdvana for a while. Farscape, Dark Angel, Invisible Man, G vs E, etc, etc.
Now? Frickin' remakes of Dark Shadows. Sad.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Once upon a time I was almost addicted to Star Trek, but after liking TOS in historic times, I got quickly bored of TNG (maybe 3 seasons), DS9, Voyager and Enterprise (roughly 1 season each). Babylon5 was only sci-fi recently that seemed mostly worthwhile, thanks to actually having a plot that spanned it's entire runtime.
Fundamentally I see the problem as basically this: The series go for 'eternal' runtime (just take a look at X-Files), they can't really shake the status quo (like actually having a plot or something that actually affects the environment much).
Me? I'm just going for anime these days, even the most successful ones have FIXED duration, and probably thanks to that usually great plots as they don't need to worry about the next season..
(Ok, some do get extra seasons but it's the exception, not the rule)
-- pending
who have never been excited about the show.
If you have ever been to the Warner Brothers Television site it's always had zip about Angel. But plenty of crap about worthless shows like Celebrity Justice. I know they don't make the show, but they could at least have a link?!?
And if you go to "The WB's" chat site, you'll see that the Angel forum has more posts than any other forum - including the "The WB General" forum. Are they just blind to the fact that the show generates more invested fans than any other property they own?
I also know that many people (myself included) only watch that turd-of-a-show Smallville because it's on right before Angel. I hope they're prepared to watch it's viewership decline.
Finally, I think Joss Whedon put it best in his paraphrasing of Robert Frost:
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn."
Forget Farscape, what about Firefly?!??
(another show by the Angel director, with fan base that took out a full-page ad to try to get it back, canceled after 11 shows.)
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
You are so right...giving us a mind fuck is what they do best...and it would be worth it to have everything go to shit...and then if it gets picked up by UPN or someone else, they have even more of a plot to work with.
The point is, there is NO reason to focus on the ratings. The ONLY thing that matters is whether they make money. If they don't make money for their shareholders they are not doing the job they were hired to do, regardless of how many people are watching.
That means that popular shows will often be killed because they aren't attracting the right kind of viewers or because they are too expensive to produce, regardless of the total number of viewers they bring.
That show is doing the same thing, I read somewhere. It started out as a teenage drama and now it has mixed demos. It's a good show if u don't pay attention to blatant directional flaws... :o It has some good spinoffs from the comic world...but, you need to have read them to get the inside joke.
Then again, they are saying that TV is losing it's precious 14-24 demographics all over. They are just in less numbers than they were two years ago.
There is one line in the announcement that makes suspicious something else is going on. "David Boreanaz continues to be one of the finest, classiest and friendliest actors we have had the pleasure to work with and we hope that the relationship furthers from here." I wonder if someone that the WB has a "close" relationship with, like say Kevin Williamson, has expressed interest in having Boreanaz in one of his series and the WB decided to "free" him from his contract. So now we're going to get some kind of Dawson's Creek crap with Boreanaz casted as the teacher. All part of the WB vision.
I just bought the Firefly set - $40, 13 shows, a bit over $3 per episode. Let's imagine it takes $3m to make an episode. You only need to sell 2m discs to double your money. And this is 2m discs worldwide - not just to Americans who prefer tripe. Truthfully, if I could "subscribe" to a show like firefly for even $5 an episode, I would (I would want to have a DVD to keep). 20 minutes of my time (commercial breaks) is worth a hell of a lot more than $5 so even at $5/ep. it would be a steal, and probably make the studio money.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I don't know what it is with the networks. They have no understanding of what is good.
Firefly was too complicated. Network execs are PHBs, they don't like complicated. They want shows that their children (who usually are homozygous recessive for the PHB gene) can understand, shows about clothes, and having sex with the wrong people, and cars, and football. A show about a bunch of space-smuggling horse-riding misfits who were on the losing side of a failed revolution and eke out their living by breaking the laws of the oppressive winning side while trying not to bend morality too far, and trying (and often failing) to remain loyal to their ideals and one another - that's all about tone and nuance. The only tone network execs understand is shrill, and "nuance?" What's that, a new brand of shampoo and conditioner? Compare Firefly's "Objects in Space" to an episode of Friends some time. Everyone on earth would say "Objects in Space" was a far superior work - except the ad executives who run the media. It's synergy, bay-bee.
And I can't understand what it is with viewers - are we so deprived of sci-fi that we will accept anything at all?
I see you saw this story. Maybe I'm not being fair; Battlestar Galactica : The Sex Files was a half-decent remake, slightly better in some ways than the original (less B-movieish), but stiff and cold and rather superficial, really (adding in the whole Last Samurai old-tech beats new-tech angle,* and that hoary old pod-people/Manchurian candidate storyline, I mean, really). How SciFi could greenlight an expensive retread like Battlestar Galactica and kill Farscape is beyond me.
(*By the way, read up on Saigo Takamori some time, the guy Last Samurai was vaguely based on; his troops used guns. There was a kamikaze group in the earlier Boshin war who fought with katana against rifles and cannons, but they were mopped up pretty damned guickly.)
FOX: Cancle anything that dosen't suck.
UPN: Take anything good and make it suck
WB: Drop anything that makes money.
News outlets: Screw doing research let's just report the marketting hype as fact.
I have a TV here and for entertainment I'm posting on Slashdot...
Now I know why.... Oh well still have Star Wrek, KeenSpot, OSDN and Anime DVDs.. (Not Henti you pervert...)
I don't actually exist.
Regardless of past sins (like last season), I think that this season of Angel has really turned out well. I was skeptical about the idea of them taking over W&H, but it looks like Joss actually knew what he was doing with this one (unlike Season 7 of Buffy). The 100th episode was awesome, I thought, especially the ending, which was well done. Right now, the characters are all going through a lot, and they're all changing. I think it makes the show interesting. I want to see more of where these new characters go. 8 episodes doesn't seem like a whole lot of time left to explore that. Hell, there's a veritable conflict brewing between Buffy's Slayer Corp and Angel's W&H. I want to see more interaction between those two camps! Damage was a fucking great episode. But no. The WB needs to make room for yet another shitty comedy or Charmed reruns. Buffy's gone (after a rather sub-par showing in its last season), Angel is gone after this season ... the number of non-Simpsons shows on TV that I'm willing to watch is rapidly dwindling in number. Next thing you know, Fox is going to cancel 24 in favor of "Afghani Idol" or something.
Under the current advertiser driven model that is true. But why does the current advertising driven model have to prevail? Why couldn't a production company make a show that is not even intended for broadcast at all. Instead, it could sell directly to the viewer. This works for movies and plays. Theater and Movie companies make money by directly selling the performance/content to the viewers. Just cut out the advertisers altogether and make things people will pay to watch. It's worked for Hollywood and Broadway for A LOT longer than TV has been around. I'd sign up for Firefly in a heartbeat.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
But it would do nothing for the broadcaster...
A very good point here. If shows like Firefly had never made it onto TV (and then gotten cancelled) in the first place, how many people would have heard of it? It wouldn't have sold nearly as many unless there was a way for people to see some of it for free. hm.... Now where are those official bittorrent links?
As a side note, that $40 you paid for the Firefly set (worth every penny for me too), did NOT all go to the studio that put it out. They get maybe half that, which changes the economics of it obviously.
Simple fact is, we're probably moving towards paying to watch good stuff created like HBO. Maybe we need a subscription channel for geeks?
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
All of which usually guarantees that most shows never get a chance to develop a following. Which doesn't usually if it's the usual "Hey, let's make a sitcom starring Paris Hilton! Or maybe Betty Ford!" crap. But really creative shows have almost no hope of lasting.
Buffy sort of crept in under the radar. Joss Whedon had more or less abandoned the concept (which was pretty much trashed in the Kristy Swanson movie) because he couldn't make anybody understand that he wasn't aiming for High Camp. But then a new network struggling to find material that people would actually watch bought a dozen episodes. Whedon was so sure that they'd never order any more that he did a show mainly to please himself. Which is actually the only way to make a decent tV show.
I enjoyed the show immensely, but I'm basically glad the Bufferverse has retreated from view. (Yeah, there will be comic books and novelizations, but who pays attention to those? And I can't see anybody putting up the money for a Buffyverse movie.) It was fun at first, but as time went on, the whole Buffy-Angel thing started taking itself way too seriously. Angel was always that way, and Buffy was that way most of the time in the two last seasons. Maybe serious is the wrong word -- it was always about life or death issues. Perhaps I mean solemn. And cluttered. And disorganized. I still haven't figured out what that axe was supposed to be!
I think that is a bit simplistic. It's a more complex relationship where TV sells to advertisers, the attention of a percentage of the viewing population and said population agrees to watch in a particular timeslot if the show is any good and at the same time watch the ads.
For a particular percentage of a specific demographic they will pay $X. When Buffy moves from 14-25 to 25-45 it moves from $X to $X-y. Unfortunately Sarah and her co-stars aren't interested in taking less money for their performances or they don't want to move out of the prime timeslot to a late evening one so the show is cancelled cause $x-y isn't enough to make money out of it.
if you want to watch the shows you want to watch, pay for them ... the best way to pay for your shows is directly, through pay channels: HBO, Showtime, etc, etc.
Fine but there is no mechanism for me to tell the studios or stations what I want until after the fact. Then I presumably get the choice of how much am I prepared to pay to keep Buffy on air and the benefits of intermediation rapidly become apparent. I'll just watch whatever comes on and if I don't like it I'll do something else.
"i would also love to see Sci-Fi pick up Firefly, that show was headed for greatness. Alas it was on Fox and they cut it to replace it with "Fast and the Furious" the TV show.... Movies of the Buffiverse would rock."
Eh? You are right in spirit but wrong in facts. SciFi passed on FireFly already, as did all the cable stations it was offered to. Fox didn't exactly replace FireFly with "Fastlane" either since that show has also been cancelled. There's food for thought, Tiffani Amber Thiessen on Angel Season 6... I'm just saying! And if you didn't hear, Charisma Carpenter is rumored to be up for WONDER WOMAN. I guess the timing is right since she'll be posing for Playboy later this year.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
A Willow spinoff wouldn't work. Believe me, I love Alyson Hannigan but I don't think she could hold her own as the lead role. (Does anybody else want to scream "Blow your nose!" when she's talking?) Faith couldn't pull it off either... Eliza Dushku is mega-hot but anybody who has watched her new show should agree that her acting is often painful. Xander... please. Couldn't possibly build a show off that character. Tony Head has the best acting skills of them all but let's face it, Giles spent most of the battles knocked out. Now that he's even older, how exactly is he going to kick ass in true Buffy/Angel style? It'd be like watching Star Trek Generations all over again... a bunch of old farts scrabbling around on rocks.
:)
;)
On the topic of Buffy characters, I wouldn't mind seeing Amber Benson and Emma Caulfield pop onto the set of Angel. Heavenly helpers and all. But I suppose they already played that with Cordy. *shrug* And did anybody else feel guilty watching the preview for Eurotrip when Michelle Trachtenberg yanks off her shirt? Although I suppose she's old enough now that I don't have to feel *too* guilty.
But back to the subject, the end of Buffy and Angel is the end of an era. Two of my all-time favorite shows down the tubes. Sad.
But I have to admit, I'd have sacrificed them both anyway to get a few more episodes of Firefly.
-FF
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.