On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 4:26 PM, televisiongirl <[email protected]>wrote:
> FOX's Preston Beckman chimed in on why it failed: > > http://maskedscheduler.blogspot.com/2010/09/lone-star.html > I read that this morning. Not too impressed with his analysis (if you can call it that). He seems to write something like this everytime Fox cancels a show popular with some critics. He believes that approval from elite critics actually hurts the ratings of shows with "regular" people. So I guess the failure is not the fault of Fox executives, but the elite critics whose praise caused a backlash in the heartland. He writes: "This show was problematic but we took the gamble knowing full well it would either break out or crash and burn....no middle ground here". He does not give much explanation for what he thought the upside was, though presumably someone at Fox must have thought it was a decent show to begin with - indeed, we know the President of Fox thought Lone Star was as good or better than Mad Men, and would pull major league ratings if marketed correctly by the geniuses at Fox. But I guess we can just blame that failure on the critics too. As I have noted, I liked the show, buy my life will go on. What irritates me about this analysis is the seeming acceptance of a system where judgments about the viability of a program can and should be made after two airings (indeed, he seems to think that it would have been reasonable to cancel it after a single airing). I am prepared to accept the fact that in the contemporary scene a program aimed at an audience that Beckman seems to think is not smart enough to appreciate "quality" shows must make its living on narrower band cable and not broadcast primetime. But it was the Fox executives, not the critics for the NY and LA Times, who decided that they could make a lot of money selling soap around Lone Star on FOX and not FX. Why is Beckman dumping on critics instead of the people who made what he seems to think was an obviously stupid decision? -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
