Because of strong DVD sales and syndication popularity, the awesome show Family Guy might find its way back to Fox. Sandy Grushow, chairman of Fox Television Entertainment Group apparently called the series a late-blooming phenomenon that may have been aired before its time (according to an article in USA Today).
Dumb bitch (asshole?). He/she has to spin it so they don’t look like dumb fucking pigs who can’t judge a show on its merits. Family Guy aired sporadically at best, and was hardly given a chance to shine.
The same is true of the greatest show ever, Firefly. Fox aired Firefly without consistency, for less than 13 episodes, and put it up against Major League Baseball. Firefly was a complex, intelligent show, and requires time in order to grow a following. With programming like that afforded to it, it’s no wonder that its ratings were less than stellar.
Networks (Fox in particular) it seems are moving ever more toward cheating the viewing public (or at least, toward cheating the intelligent viewing public). A season of a television show used to be a solid set of weekly episodes from some time in the Fall to some time in the Spring. Now, we’re lucky to get four consecutive weeks before a repeat is aired, and no network will give a ratings-challenged but excellent show more than a few episodes to climb the ratings ladder.
But ratings must be inaccurate. How else can you explain the dearth of excellence like Firefly and the nauseatingly abundant crap like Survivor, The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire? Are there really so many more dumb cows watching television than there are high school graduates? Is public education so bad in the U.S. that someone with no more than a high school diploma is enthralled with crappy reality TV and would rather experience other people’s (supposedly real) misery rather than be whisked away to lands unimagined? How pathetic are we?
I certainly never get polled. I’ve never been polled about any of the recent shows I’ve thought were excellent but got cancelled. So I&rsuqo;m forced to wonder: who makes the ratings? What sub human, trailer-home-dwelling piece of Bush-electing shit chose what shows I get to watch?
For the record: I would pay substantially ($30/mo) for a single channel that brought me the best (and even better-than average) that television had to offer: shows like Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Star Trek (all of them), X-Files, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Glory Days, Strange Luck, Alias, 24, The Dead Zone…the list of good programming really does go on and on! Is there a model where ratings isn’t the driving force behind what kind of programming is offered?