I think whether people want to binge a show or watch it weekly is up to personal preference at this point but apparently a lot of streaming services don’t agree with me and need at least 80% of the global population to watch all twelve one-hour episodes of their brand new show in the first forty minutes of release or they decide the show is a complete, utter failure and send out the kill squad to cancel the show and destroy the sets and kill the actors.
There’s so much more nuance to whatever the living fuck is going on with television today but I don’t have time for all that, I need to talk about old beloved shows that would have been cancelled in less than a week in today’s system.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Sometimes, even in the old system of broadcast television, a show is so terrible, and does so poorly in ratings, that a network decides to dump it before it can even finish a full season. This leaves an uncomfortable opening on the schedule, so networks usually had a short-list of shows ready to go as a mid-season replacement. These were shows that the network wasn’t completely confident in, but, you know, fuck it. Whatever the show was it was better than dead air, and if it also sucked nuts so what, you were only committed to about half a season of it and then you could cancel that one, too.
Such is the humble beginnings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It replaced another show on The WB called Savannah, a show I couldn’t tell you a single thing about. Buffy’s first season was only twelve episodes, and none of them are particularly good as a whole. There’s the one with the substitute teacher who infatuates all the high school boys and then whoops! She’s a giant praying mantis for some reason. And then there’s the one where Xander gets possessed by the spirit of a hyena and eats a live pig. For some reason. Or how about the one where they scan a magic book into the computer which somehow sticks a demon into the world wide web. For some reason. You get it. It wasn’t a great time.
But it wasn’t a terrible time, either. There were some genuinely funny and heartwarming moments, the actors mostly managed to stick out the worst of the dialogue, and by the end of the season you actually cared about these characters and wanted to see more. And thankfully The WB was like, well, what the hell else do we have going on? And we got seven total seasons. Oh, and also Angel, which we wouldn’t have gotten at all if Buffy was cancelled and also that first season was pretty rocky, too, but The WB knew they already had a locked in audience so fuck it. Vampires with bumpy faces for everyone!
Supernatural
Once The WB had Buffy and Angel and Smallville and Gilmore Girls and Charmed all up and running they took a look around and went, ‘Ewwwwwww, this place is filled with gross girls.’ Wanting that sweet, sweet dick money, they decided to engineer a show that would be a hit specifically with the boys. The manliest show you’ve ever fucking seen, just like dicks and taints everywhere, featuring cool cars and a classic rock soundtrack and two brothers in their mid-twenties played by incredibly attractive softboy actors who had each already been featured on one of the aforementioned girly shows and they had Dad Angst and Mommy Angst and Dean said in the first episode there would be no chick flick moments and the show went on to be, like, 73% chick flick moments and I’ve just never seen a clearer example of how little middle aged men understand what teenage girls – or boys, for that matter – actually want, which is fucking hilarious when you’re in the Entertaining Teenagers business.
The first season of Supernatural primarily sucked, and was only held aloft by the burning lust of millions of teenage girls across the globe who all immediately took to the internet to write their smutty self-insert fan fictions where one and/or both of the brothers either saved her, or needed her to save them, and also there was a bunch of people shipping the brothers together, which, ew, so to stop this later on the creators tossed a bunch of new female characters at the brothers, and again: you people do not understand what the fangirlies want. Castiel was a fucking accident.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had a very specific vision for his futuristic space-faring civilization, and famously one specific rule that gave later showrunners headaches: the future is a utopia and humanity has risen above the tendency to be motivated by stupid little things like ‘greed,’ ‘lust,’ and ‘power’ and the entire main cast are Best Friends Forever and aren’t allowed to get into stupid petty fights because they’ve outgrown that shit, damn it, and if you can’t write the episodes like that I’m getting my lawyers.
To be fair to Roddenberry, it shouldn’t have been that hard to write plots with the team against some outside force. To be equally fair to the writers, television is and always has been, the Petty Squabbles Box. People be getting into the stupidest fights you’ve ever seen since television was just radio was just stage plays was just runes carved into stone.
Also, none of the Big Three networks wanted the show carnally enough for Roddenberry so Paramount ended up doing this wacky thing of selling directly to independent local stations across the country whose programming mostly consisted of Public Access, local news, and reruns, so getting first run syndication on a brand new Star Trek was most likely the easiest decision any of these people ever made in their entire lives. The equivalent today, I guess, would be if all the major streaming services turned your show down so you just end up posting all that shit to YouTube. Except I doubt you’d make one million dollars per episode from advertising with SquareSpace or whoever.
Parks & Recreation
Almost every sitcom ever made starts out basically terrible while the actors and writers figure out who the characters are and the funniest ways for them to interact, but Parks & Rec is one of the most blatant examples of the creators realizing they were doing everything wrong in the first season and immediately course correcting before the second.
Another mid-season replacement, initially Dan Schur was brought on specifically to make a spin-off to The Office. While this was no longer the plan long before the show became what it is, the influences are still there. Leslie Knope is sort of a female Michael Scott, there’s a heavy lean on interactions being weird and awkward, Mark Brendanawicz is there doing his best/worst Jim Halpert impression, and everyone just sort of sucks and hates each other. Is that an accurate description of The Office? I’ve literally never seen an episode.
Anyway, all of that sucked nuts and the team realized they needed to change basically everything and they fixed the characters and changed the tone and fired Mark Brendanawicz into the sun and the remaining show was Good to Great and that never would have happened if Netflix had been the one to pick it up.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 