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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.
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
"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)
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.
You mentioned a cancelled show on Slashdot!
Quiet! You'll wake up the Farscape fans!
Quick, delete the thread!
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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In the WB's case, I think it's not so much "the next big thing" they want as "the next big teenage thing." We went through the same thing with Buffy -- I remember a bunch of people saying on various forums something along the lines of, "They're crazy! I'm a 42-year-old soccer mom with lots of money and I watch Buffy religiously! I'm going to write them and tell them they're getting rid of their best demographic!" And then someone would point out that the WB doesn't give a shit about 42-year-old soccer moms; they care, with a kind of exclusiveness that borders on monomania, only about those soccer moms' kids.
In other words: Buffy, despite its considerable appeal to teenagers, quickly became a grown-up show, and the WB doesn't want grown-up shows. Now Angel's done the same. So clearly, it has to go.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Dave Chapelle - "...Wayans? There are MORE of them?!"
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!
Damn sad to see another great show go away. In case you don't know about it Angel Season 6 Petition
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.
Yeah, Willow with Xander as a side kick.
Willow the Chicklayer and Xander the Bricklayer.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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"
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.
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."
Any show with an episode about Nazis and Vampires, in my mind, has jumped the shark.
Oh yeah, Angel was a fine show until they added vampires on there...
You can't take the sky from me...