The Axe Has Swung: ABC Cancels 3 Shows
ABC had hoped their new Wednesday night thriller "Day Break" would attract at least as many viewers as "Lost" repeats did last season. That proved to be too difficult of a goal for the Taye Diggs drama, as ABC axed the show this week along with two other recent entries "Show Me The Money" and "Help Me Help You" - all gone from ABC's schedule effective immediately.
The fate of "Day Break" was clear from the beginning. When the show premiered, following the inflated season-finale of "Dancing with the Stars", there were 13 million viewers who tuned in to see what the show was about. By the end of that two-hour pilot episode, over 5 million of those people were gone.
Over the past four weeks, "Day Break" kept bleeding, going all the way down to 3,9 million for the final airing this week. Although the network initially planned to keep the show on air through the end of December, a decision was made to ditch the drama immediately replacing it with reruns of "The George Lopez Show" and "According to Jim".
ABC will make the final 6 episodes of "Day Break" available to loyal fans of the series on ABC.com.
Also this week, ABC dumped the sitcom they once dubbed "The #1 New Comedy Of The Season". Although "Help Me Help You" did average over 11 million viewers in its luxurious post-"Dancing with the Stars" timeslot, it quickly lost steam following the end of the current season of the reality contest.
The last episode scored truly embarrassing 3,52 million viewers. The show will be replaced with new episodes of "Big Day" which will now air two back-to-back episodes from 9-10pm on Tuesdays.
Finally, William Shatner's lackluster series "Show Me The Money" (6,4 million, down from 12,54 million who watched the premiere episode on November 14) was also pronounced dead. The news comes as a surprise following the network's decision to order additional episodes of the series last week. The game show, which was supposed to move to ABC Tuesdays as of 2007, will be replaced with reruns of "America's Funniest Home Video".
posted by Justin Van De Kamp at
1:59 PM
2 Comments:
Yeah, Show Me the Money was a total shocker of a cancellation after ABC did order 6 more episodes. It's like why even bother ordering those 6 when you are going to cancel it the following week? Makes no sense to me. Plus, the show was horrible. All these money shows are quite horrible really. They need a better game show concept and a better host to host them.
As for Daybreak, ABC shouldn't have put this great show in the worst possible spot ever. They should've left it as a Midseason replacement and started showing it in March and let it run its course through May sweeps. I think it would have fared better this way than as a season-filler for Lost which pissed off a lot of Lost fans, which is why they refused to tune in.
I have to admit I have not seen "Day Break" as yet, and due to the latest developments I may never do so.
But the drama definitely did manage to create a small but loyal following.
I guess it's another classic example of inept network scheduling.
So, what's the message? Do not mess with LOST fans!
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