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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.
the WB Network announced today that they are cancelling Angel as of the end of this season.
"They will be using the timeslot for another unfunny pile of shit from the Wayans brothers."
--saint
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
So, while we're on the subject, anyone remember this show called Farscape? /Gets a flaming arrow through the window, see a screaming horde descending on the house
"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." - Joss Whedon (on Angel's cancelation)
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?
You mentioned a cancelled show on Slashdot!
Quiet! You'll wake up the Farscape fans!
Quick, delete the thread!
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
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.
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.
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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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.
Oops... didn't get the url right for the Season So Far ratings...
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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.
Start the new season with the same cast and about 20 demons. Then, week to week, a demon is voted off the show and killed.
There's only one way to save ourselves: cancel all programs. Everything!
Display nothing but a "Technical Difficulties" announcement on all stations!
-kgj
-kgj
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.
They did: its called "Angel"
Sad. Angel is one of only three shows I actually go out of my way to watch. It's always had a good mix of drama and humor. I also enjoy the fact that it has an overarching plotline, which rewards loyal viewers.
It's nice that they told Joss early so that he could wrap up the series. But it never feels like TV shows are cancelled at the right time. Either a show gets cancelled just as it seems to be hitting a good stride (Futurama), or it gets dragged out until it becomes a tired self-parody (Friends, and to some extent, The Simpsons).
Maybe after it finally wraps up, fans can look back on a very satisfying conclusion. But I tend to think that it had a couple of solid years left.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
All you yung'uns think that a cancelled tv show is sucha tragedy! Why back in my day we were happy to see shows cancelled, like laverne and shirley, leave it to beaver and happy days - bah, good riddance!
I propose that you all stop wasting your time with all of this moaning about TV watchin' and get busy doing something productive! Like posting to slashdot.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Time to sign the petition.
:)
A show on Spike and Willow would be nice though.
cheers,
pol
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
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.
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.
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
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.
Oh, those TV execs -- they're wily ones alright, but I see their plan. Take a show they don't trust enough to give another season, take it off the air so people start to miss it, then pump millions of dollars into a big motion picture production! Ya, that's really gonna happen!
Ya, sorry folks, it ain't happenin'.
--Leo
Spike is a good character. It's just a shame he talks like Dick Van Dyke.
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."
Actually, that's the way its been since the first season of Buffy. The overall season always has a general plot. But there are always at least a handful of stand-alone episodes that don't fundamentally push that plot forward, or only give it a minute or two to remind you that there are still unresolved issues hanging over everyone's heads.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
Very little appears on the WB that doesn't make me wish I hadn't bought my nice TV.
I always didn't think that enough negatives wouldn't not work. weren't you not flaming, or just unsupporting the decision??
(j/k, I do totally agree with you. I think).
I'm already embarassingly overinvolved in this thread, but what the hell. Spoilers blah blah blah.
When we left Spike 'neath the Hellmouth, he was going all pillar-of-fire. As it turns out, his whaddayacallit (I was going to say "essence," but that gives an illusion of concreteness that really isn't there) was trapped in the medallion he was wearing. Somehow, the medallion (owned by evil law firm Wolfram and Hart) was mailed back to Angel. Angel, for his part, has just been given the position of CEO of Wolfram and Hart (read: Hell, Incorporated).
Angel opens the package, and Spike materializes. Sort of. He's not precisely corporeal, and he's attached to Wolfram and Hart's main offices somehow, so he can't leave.
He narrowly escapes being sucked into Hell, and then another package arrives. When it's opened, Spike gets his body back. This triggers some sort of clause in the Prophecy (which up until now we've assumed means that Angel will someday become human) because now there are two vampires with souls, and both of them are champions. Somehow, this fact is dragging the world towards some sort of apocalypse.
It's been kind of fun to watch the show explore the rivalry between Angel and Spike. Tuning in wouldn't be too bad an idea.
Moderators: There is no -1, Idiot Fanboy. But there should be.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
Angel is another one of those shows that, at one time, WAS a great show. In my opinion, Angel "jumped the shark" after loosing Cordelia's character. NOTE I say loosing Cordelia's character, not loosing Charisma Carpenter from the regular cast. I'm also including all of last year when Cordelia was possessed by her demon baby (even though that satan/rock beast was cool). I hadn't realized how much of the weight of the show Cordelia was carrying until she was gone.
But I do want to say that I think Angel has done great things technologically and cinematically. They were one of the first shows to be presented in widescreen, and were one of the first -- and are still one of the only -- shows to be presented in High Def. No matter how far downhill the show has gone, nobody can take these kudos away.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
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.
This sort of stupidity makes me glad I am a Nielson family this week.
Keeping track of what I watch has brought home to me how little I DO watch. Angel is one of the shows I watch.
The great thing is this datum will be entered into Nielson's computers - that Angel has a person making damn good money watching it, and NOT MUCH ELSE on WB.
Since most of television today is either
a) "Reality" shows (HEY KIDS! LET'S STAB EACH OTHER IN THE BACK TO GET AHEAD!)
b) Sit-coms (HEY KIDS! LET'S HIT THE LAUGH TRACK EVERYTIME SOMEBODY SAYS SOMETHING! THAT WILL MAKE IT FUNNY!)
c) CSI (HEY KIDS! LETS MAKE A SHOW ABOUT SCIENCE THAT GETS IT WRONG ON EVERY SHOW)
d) Law and order (HEY KIDS! LET'S PULL SHIT THAT NO REAL JUDGE WOULD TOLERATE!)
After all, you now have NBC (All "Law and Order", all the time), CBS (All "CSI", all the time), WB (All Pokemon, all the time), and UPN (All crap, all the time.) Yeah, I *really* want to run out and buy a HDTV.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
Perhaps some of you have heard the logic that goes along the lines of:
In a buyer/seller arrangement, the buyer can make demands upon the seller. After all, the buyer can always just not buy the product. The seller will usually pander to the buyer as long as the seller gets the price that he wants. Note the term price. When you watch network television, you aren't paying a dime to the network. It's free. That means that you're not the buyer.
Who does pay money? Advertisers. They are the buyer, the network is the seller. You? You're the product.
This cancellation should be a good demonstration of this proposition: the buyer wants teenage eyes watching the TV, so the seller will arrrange for shows that will get as many teenagers as possible to watch it. So there we are: "your" show gets cancelled, you non-teenager, you. In turn they put on something that is likely to capture the (perceived) average teenager.
This isn't a cynical post, it's just a working through of logic, and a possible solution: if you want to watch the shows you want to watch, pay for them.
DVD sales potential has changed some of the thinking of the networks, but still the best way to pay for your shows is directly, through pay channels: HBO, Showtime, etc, etc.
I like being a customer (or a collaborator, see open source). It's why I'm willing to pay for good work. Try being a customer, you'll get what you want more often.
Another problem with the cancelation is that another FINE HDTV show is gone. Reality shows dont broadcast in HDTV and Angel takes total advantage of the aspect ratio and the high quality picture. Right now only CSI, Alias and Smallville can even hold a candle to Angel in HDTV quality.