FOX Continues To Suck

by BH

For those of you who are fans and haven’t yet heard, FOX pulled the plug on Arrested Development on Friday. Those of us who enjoy clever, thoughtful, funny television are left with a diminishing landscape.

After last season, hacks at FOX decided that the best way to get the Emmy nominated and award winning Arrested the viewer support it needed was to put it up against Monday Night Football. This, as any fourth grader will tell you, was not a good idea, and ultimately proved so. On Monday, Arrested returned to its Monday spot after taking almost a month off for the baseball postseason, airing two, back-to-back half-hour episodes. The episodes averaged 4 million viewers, which put FOX in fifth place in the 8 p.m. hour. What the hell did FOX expect to happen? They change the show’s usual broadcast night, and put the show on break for a length of time, in essence forcing casual viewers, and to some extent, die-hards, to change habits.

What brilliant programming can we expect from FOX that may replace Arrested? Over the past two years the list of shows cancelled by FOX includes, among others: The Inside, Johnny Zero, Life on a Stick, Method & Red, My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss, North Shore, Point Pleasant, Tru Calling, The Mountain, Still Life, The Jury, Cracking Up, Wonderfalls, Love Again, A Minute with Stan Hooper, Wanda At Large, Skin, and Luis. Some of these are good, some not so good. The point here is that FOX has, more than any other network, put out a lot of shit over the course of its existence, and would rather take a chance continuing to be the network that broadcasts shit instead of maybe broadcasting something smart. In Arrested Development the network had found an intelligent, funny show, which garnered numerous awards and a respectable audience. What FOX may be telling us at this point is that they’d rather appeal to the lowest common denominator with shows such as The Simple Life and Nanny 911. Screw FOX. Let’s hope Arrested is picked up by another network.