First, apologies for bringing this up so bluntly. After I reposted this I realized it was a kind of cruel time to focus on it, but I want to rant about something Terminator and "OMG FOX IS DUMB!!!#$@#$" doesn't really cut it.
It's not so much that I think Season 2 lacked the right balance of character/drama/action. (Overall I still highly prefer Season 2 to 1. I like the episodes that focus on individual characters. Season 1 didn't give us enough of WHY there was anything to know about these characters we didn't already know from Terminator 2 and could have guessed based on stereotypical stor arcs).
It's that the location of those things were not where they needed to be in the season. And I don't think that was Fox's fault. The only creative control they exerted over it (to my knowledge) was to have more episodic stories in the beginning, which I think was absolutely the right call. Some of my favorite episodes were the singletons in the first half of the season. I don't think the season suffered for them at all.
But the team approached the season arc as if there was not a giant hiatus in the middle of it. Which was a huge mistake. When your season is gonna be chopped in half, especially if you're ratings are so low, I think you absolutely need to approach it as having a mid-season climax and an exciting Spring Half intro. (And yes, Lighthouse and Adam Raised a Cain are exactly what we needed).
Around the middle of the season was where a lot of fans started realizing [i]Oh crap they're seriously gonna cancel this and this is seriously getting really good I need to grab my friends and make them watch[/i], and unfortunately it came at a time when you COULDN'T really sit your friends down and make them watch because Season 2.5 started out in the middle of a story.
I really just flat out disagree. I don't remember exactly what the ratings were in the fall on Mondays, but I think we averaged about 5.5 - 6 million viewers. On Fridays for the back 9, I think we averaged about 4 - 4.5 million viewers. It didn't drop because of the Sarah arc, it dropped because of the move. It was a very clear correlation.
If all the Monday viewers had followed it to Fridays, we'd still be on the air. But they didn't. And if they didn't care about it enough to follow after the first 13, I don't see how anything being done differently in episode 14 was going to change that.
Even so, The Good Wound had a lot of buzz ahead of time because the previews at the end of Earthlings showed that Kyle was going to be in it with Sarah. Everyone was intrigued and speculating all through the winter break. So it's kind of irrelevant if anyone even liked it after the fact. If they didn't tune in to find out whether Kyle was real or not, I don't think they were coming back regardless.
It's not like the entire season sucked and then suddenly got good at the end. Those final 3 eps had extra wow to them, but that's typical of every show on TV (or at least they all try to do that). You always build up excitement as you roll into your finale.
When you take a show and move it to a bad slot, you pare the viewership down from people who like it to just the core followers. So what I guess Fox gambled on is that the vast majority of viewers on Monday nights were core followers. Clearly they were wrong on that.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-05-18 10:58 pm (UTC)It's not so much that I think Season 2 lacked the right balance of character/drama/action. (Overall I still highly prefer Season 2 to 1. I like the episodes that focus on individual characters. Season 1 didn't give us enough of WHY there was anything to know about these characters we didn't already know from Terminator 2 and could have guessed based on stereotypical stor arcs).
It's that the location of those things were not where they needed to be in the season. And I don't think that was Fox's fault. The only creative control they exerted over it (to my knowledge) was to have more episodic stories in the beginning, which I think was absolutely the right call. Some of my favorite episodes were the singletons in the first half of the season. I don't think the season suffered for them at all.
But the team approached the season arc as if there was not a giant hiatus in the middle of it. Which was a huge mistake. When your season is gonna be chopped in half, especially if you're ratings are so low, I think you absolutely need to approach it as having a mid-season climax and an exciting Spring Half intro. (And yes, Lighthouse and Adam Raised a Cain are exactly what we needed).
Around the middle of the season was where a lot of fans started realizing [i]Oh crap they're seriously gonna cancel this and this is seriously getting really good I need to grab my friends and make them watch[/i], and unfortunately it came at a time when you COULDN'T really sit your friends down and make them watch because Season 2.5 started out in the middle of a story.
no subject
on 2009-05-21 07:12 am (UTC)If all the Monday viewers had followed it to Fridays, we'd still be on the air. But they didn't. And if they didn't care about it enough to follow after the first 13, I don't see how anything being done differently in episode 14 was going to change that.
Even so, The Good Wound had a lot of buzz ahead of time because the previews at the end of Earthlings showed that Kyle was going to be in it with Sarah. Everyone was intrigued and speculating all through the winter break. So it's kind of irrelevant if anyone even liked it after the fact. If they didn't tune in to find out whether Kyle was real or not, I don't think they were coming back regardless.
It's not like the entire season sucked and then suddenly got good at the end. Those final 3 eps had extra wow to them, but that's typical of every show on TV (or at least they all try to do that). You always build up excitement as you roll into your finale.
When you take a show and move it to a bad slot, you pare the viewership down from people who like it to just the core followers. So what I guess Fox gambled on is that the vast majority of viewers on Monday nights were core followers. Clearly they were wrong on that.