Arrested Dev low on ratings

[takyris]

Bummer. At least Fox gave it a few seasons to try to build an audience, and they did move it to what they seemed to think was a less competitive timeslot. I don't watch enough live TV to know how well they advertsied for it, but I don't see Fox as the bad guy here. This was a really funny show that, unfortunately, did not do as well ratings-wise as reruns of Prison Break.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Well written comedy must go over a lot of peoples heads.

Oh well at least there are two seasons on DVD. Now I am down to 2 shows that I make an effort to watch.

 

[mojo1701]

The one thing I don't get is why both Season 1 and Season 2 DVD sets cost the same. Season 2 has three less episodes.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

They are both pretty cheap though.

 

[GrayLinnorm]

Fox isn't doing its fans any favors by making them wait a whole month for new episodes, then not run any more after only one week. Fox really, really, really, really needs to ditch the baseball playoffs, which have done more harm than good. They started The Simpsons earlier than they have in years, and they STILL couldn't put the Halloween episode on Halloween (MR N is right). And why couldn't Fox put Arrested Development on Halloween when baseball season was over? I really don't think Fox is doing as much as it can to support Arrested Development. If they're pulling the show because it's hurting their precious Prison Break, why don't they just switch time slots? Who wants to watch reruns during a sweeps month anyway? (I shouldn't be too hard on Prison Break as it will be gone at the end of this month --- another victim of Fox's stupidity.) I'll bet Arrested Development could get the ratings The War At Home is getting if it was between the The Simpsons and Family Guy. Too bad the second season was unceremonially cut short before Family Guy returned (And I don't think The War At Home would get a googolth of its ratings if it had to stand by itself). They could have tried running Arrested Development after American Idol but they didn't. They could have started it on September 12, before the rest of its competition, but they didn't. The sad part is that someone will see Arrested Devolpment on DVD and say "Why can't more sitcoms be this funny?" I just hope the last episode will give a final FU to Fox (remember when Michael complained about a customer who cut an order of 22 houses to 18?)

 

[takyris]

Gray, the problem here is that Prison Break's reruns are doing better than Arrested Development. Baseball did a lot better than Arrested Development. If you're a network, your goal is not to make audiences happy. That's a means to your actual goal -- making advertisers happy. And advertisers really only care about how many eyes see their commercials.

So while Emmies are great, if your show is getting beat by reruns of another show, if your show is getting beaten by UPN or the WB... it needs to be gone.

I don't like it. I'm not advocating that. But that's how the current ratings system and advertising system works.

 

[Dimwhit]

There's a flipside, though. takyris. If a network gives a show poor timeslots, puts it on hiatus regularly, and moves it around a lot, that show is far less likely to do well. So Fox has AD, which is hailed be critics...why wouldn't they make a better effort with it? Put it on a night with another show that does well. Don't move it around. I think that's the biggest beef people have. I understand it's a business, and if a show doesn't have the ratings, you have to kill it. But networks lately (esp FOX) have a tendency of killing a show long before bad ratings finally kill it.

 

[takyris]

There's a flipside, though. takyris. If a network gives a show poor timeslots, puts it on hiatus regularly, and moves it around a lot, that show is far less likely to do well. So Fox has AD, which is hailed be critics...why wouldn't they make a better effort with it? Put it on a night with another show that does well. Don't move it around. I think that's the biggest beef people have. I understand it's a business, and if a show doesn't have the ratings, you have to kill it. But networks lately (esp FOX) have a tendency of killing a show long before bad ratings finally kill it.

Look, I'm sad that it got cancelled, too, believe me. But I'm having trouble seeing the evil of Fox here.

They didn't move the show in order to screw it over. They moved it to a less competitive timeslot, or at least, they tried. Perhaps they had research saying that Monday Night Football watchers probably wouldn't be watching Arrested Development no matter when it was on.

A lot of people see a network move a show before cancelling it and decide that that means that moving the show is a sign of getting ready to cancel it, when in fact, it's an attempt to SAVE a show that isn't going to survive where it is right now.

They didn't move Arrested Development all over the place -- they moved it once. And then they took it off the air during baseball season rather than moving it all over the night into weird places where nobody would know where to find it. As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. All I wish they'd done differently is put more advertising in there to let people know it was coming back -- and from what I've heard, Arrested Development's type of comedy is really really hard to squash into a five-second commercial clip.