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Sarah Connor Chronicles — Why It Died
brumgrunt writes "Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of network. The two were never going to get on. Plus: how the Terminator name proved more hindrance than aid."
The reason it died, is because the first season and a half were mediocre, and it only really ramped up to 'being good' right towards the end of season 2.
As slow starters go, it's not really any suprise it's canned.
Movie 1. Robot from the future comes back in time to kill someone but another human is also sent back in time to try to save them.
Movie 2. See 1 but there is another robot sent back instead of a human.
Movie 3. See 2.
TV series, see 3.
Will the killer robot kill the hero this week? Will the hero robot kill the killer robot this week? And the plot never changes. The killer robot doesn't take out the rest of humanity. It doesn't even try to kill his grandparents. Great-grandparents. Etc.
A better example than Lost would be Heroes
Do you not remember television from 10 and 20 years ago? I grew up watching a lot of TV. When I try to watch a rerun of Knight Rider, Different Strokes, Dukes of Hazzard, Three's Company, or just about anything else I used to like, I can barely believe that these shows were actually successful.
Cripes, TV today is waaaay better than it has ever been. Yes, there is a lot of crap out there and some if it is very popular (and thus profitable), but I wouldn't write TV off just yet.
I wasn't always a fan of Babylon 5, but you have to admire the coherency of the plot. Straczynski designed the plot for the first 4 seasons before he even started making the first.
He actually had the main plot threads laid out for all five seasons several years before the show started filming. The uncertainty of the show being picked up for a fifth season forced him to rush the end of the fourth season a bit, so he had to fill in a few episodes for the fifth season. If I remember correctly, the fourth season was supposed to end with what became episode 17 or 18, so most of the fifth season was part of the original plan.
I observed that as the ratings went down, so did the amount of clothing she wore. There was a preview near the end where she strolled through the shot in a bra and panties.
(Do terminators even wear undies? Seems kinda pointless.)
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Quite. It was known during season 1 that Carleton Cuse, Damon Lindeloff, and J.J. Abrams (The main writers and producers of Lost) had worked out the ending to the series already. The only season that began to meander around was season 3 because the network had not finalized an end date. Once that was negotiated it was right back on track and it is amazing how few plots holes exist in the epic storyline of LOST...which has only one more season remaining.