Driven Away.

[tablesaw]

Drive has been canceled, and I'm going to miss it. Generally, I haven't mourned Minear's shows. Wonderfalls was very deeply flawed, no matter what the front-page polls of TWOP would have you believe. And The Inside was worse: a trainwreck of development that shouldn't have gone on the air in the first place. But Drive was solid. Not the greatest show, it was probably never going to be a breakout hit, but a strong showing in the vein of Prison Break. Nice special effects, good actors, fun characters, an overarching "mystery" that was very upfront about its own absurdity.

According to Variety, though, the show was ratings poison. Not only did the premiere underperform, the shows on Monday apparently sucked people away from 24. I don't really understand how that happened.

I don't think that the shows by Whedon and his former associates are going to be faring well until networks get a handle on how audiences time-shift nowadays. ("Time-shifting" is what industry people call watching a TV show other than when it's live on air. I don't generally like to use jargon, but considering the number of ways a person can watch a TV show not live, the vague term is really useful.) Most of the people I know who were in high school or college during the Buffy years tend not to actually watch TV anymore. Usually, I feel like I'm the only one of my friends who enjoys watching TV live, even though I usually sleep through it and have to time-shift anyway. But there Whedon devotees seem more willing to wait a few weeks and then check out that show they heard about online, or to Tivo and let it sit for a while. All of this is bad news for anyone putting a show on ratings-jumpy Fox.

Two weeks ago, an article said, "Fox's new drama Drive, about the contestants in an illegal, high-stakes road race across America, seems to have less long-term potential than all the other serialized rookies, but that doesn't matter, because it's a Tim Minear show and will probably be canceled in four to five weeks." Too bad he was being generous.

In other news, I used a "staff appreciation" gift card to buy The Venture Bros.: Season 2. Good TV never blows up and gets killed.

Comments

[acroarcs.livejournal.com]

Once I saw the numbers for the first week, I figured it was only a matter of time. A very short time. I never thought it was very good, but as you point out, it was a solid show that knew what it was and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I enjoy watching things live, but there's a sort of class system I have. The top tier gets watched live whenever possible because I love the show, I watch with others, or both. This is Friday Night Lights, Battlestar Galactica, Veronica Mars, Heroes, The Office, and The Amazing Race. When everything's in season, though, that's too much commitment and some of that ends up timeshifted anyway - not to mention the permanent underclass of timeshifted shows. American Idol is in a gray area in between, in that I watch it live or really not at all.

Anyway, that's a long way to say that you aren't the only one who likes "live" television. But I'm also not in that contingent of waiters you're talking about, as I guess I'm one of the test viewers these days except on those things from college that I'm just getting caught up on now.

[amythyst.livejournal.com]

DAMMIT. Every time I like a show, EVERY TIME, it gets cancelled. It makes me want to stop watching TV altogether!

[westwasp.livejournal.com]

Fox is especially bad about this sort of thing. I'm not particularly mourning Drive... it wanted to be Lost and Prison Break rolled up together with Fast and Furious, but couldn't get me to care about the characters. That and the slow reveal was way too capricious to give any arc to the stories.

What bothers me is the way that shows disappear, never to be heard from again even though there are finished, unaired episodes out there. I was especially annoyed they couldn't bleed off the rest of the Point Pleasant episodes I know they had in the can.

I am a fan of the TV, at this point mostly just Heroes, the Office, Grey's Anatomy, and when it comes back, Prison Break.