Series Cancellations, TV Conservatism and The BBC

Yes, I'm returning to a current bugbear. The thing is, many folks in the UK have no idea what they would be letting themselves in for if the UK's television landscape became like the USA's.

A quick reminder of How Things Are in the land of the free: Television programs exist to create a reason for you to watch adverts. Their primary purpose is to sell advertising space. This is how the networks make most of their money. A TV show that doesn't get an audience is taking up valuable space which could be better used by a TV show that people actually watch.

It's not about art. It's not about good. It's about "watched".

Our case in point is the ABC series Defying Gravity. This was a brave attempt to write some interesting sci-fi coupled with the proven-popular mechanics of relationships and angst as seen on Gray's Anatomy. Add to this the now-popular "every episode contains flashbacks" thing, as popularized by Lost and we have a patent way to get to know the characters and their inter-relationships while we advance the plot.

The plot is a goodie: after a tragic Mars mission, NASA decides to take a Grand Tour of the solar system. In flashback, we follow the crew of the ship through training and selection. In "realtime" we follow the progress of the mission and the challenges they face. The production design is nice - very "20 minutes into the future" - and the characters are engaging and interesting. They're all sympathetic to a greater or lesser degree, so the ensemble cast works really well, and we have only one real standout villain - the control freak Mission Director back on Earth.

We also have a problem: a mysterious entity known only as "Beta" is with the crew. We know it's alien and very powerful, but nothing else. In Episode 8, after all hell has broken loose, Beta decides to reveal itself to the crew. They stand in front of an open door - some are awestruck, some disquieted, and one is wondering what the hell is going on...and we only have to wait a week to find out for ourselves.

Except that episode 8 is the last we will ever see on broadcast TV. The show was quietly - and I had to Google "defying gravity cancelled" in order to find the news - canceled with the remainder of the 13 episodes to be seen. They won't be broadcast, so when ABC releases the DVD we can buy them and watch them that way.

I was watching the show on the Hulu website, since I don't have a TV, and was therefore contributing to the ratings. However, the show is gone. The stated reason for the cancellation was that the show was "having trouble finding an audience". This means that the ratings were not where they needed to be in order for the show to be worth broadcasting. Not that it failed, or was bad, but it just didn't get watched by enough people. It may not have been watched by enough people as it was shown, so they might not have included the online viewers. I don't have the figures, so I don't know.

However, it's my case in point: in a commercial environment the success and failure of a TV show, the drivers for every decision made about it, are economic. Let's use a more familiar example: Doctor Who would have been canceled in 1963 after the first story: BBC Execs were not happy with the show, it seemed to be having trouble finding an audience too - and if they'd been looking at advertising revenue, we would never have seen "The Dead Planet" let alone an actual Dalek.

If this sounds like sour grapes because a show I was watching got canned, you'd be wrong: I was far more invested in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which was just as interesting and well written, but also didn't get an audience. Primarily, I think, because not enough things exploded.

It's possible that Defying Gravity was too scifi for the Not We and not Scifi enough for the We. It's possible that the We decided there were too many squishy organic relationship things going on and this show was clearly for [edit: Not We], while the Not We were having a hard time reconciling the presence of people in space and an alien with romance and angst. These things are not mutually exclusive, but the audience was having a hard time deciding whether it liked the combination and ABC weren't really helping with the marketing. This show should have been perfect: it should have been a show that the Scifi Nerds with Normal Partners could have watched together, but for some reason that didn't happen. It's a shame, since I think it could have happened, but the show wasn't allowed time to develop. It was on the air for two months, and I found it on Hulu totally by accident whilst trying to find Better Off Ted.

Now imagine if this were to happen to the BBC. The typical BBC season is six episodes. If the BBC were dependent on ads it might kill a show after three. ITV axed Primeval because it was too expensive, and this means that we end up in an environment where if a show is going to succeed it has to be cheap. So you can kiss Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, a third season of Being Human, another season of Survivors and almost anything else not guaranteed high viewing figures goodbye. The TV landscape doesn't have space for anything that isn't able to justify the production costs, which is why we have seen so much reality TV over the years and why so much if it is awful.

It also means that TV becomes formulaic, that there is little or no risk taking in story or script, that you simply don't take chances. Look at the output of the BBC over the last few years and compare it to ITV and Channel 4. Look at the output of NBC, CBS, ABC and compare them with HBO.

If we end up parceling out the license fee or making the BBC accept adverts, we will end up with conservative, dull, ugly TV where nothing interesting or dangerous ever happens.

The alternative to the BBC is not something we want to see, because the alternative is shit.