Goodbye Ghost Whisperer (or, Great! A rant no one will stop to read!)

[Trazalca]

Last week I caught a 60's Minutes clip concerning a rising trend in homeowners defaulting on their mortgages. One of the key reasons given is that owning a house is, like any business transaction, an investment. If the value of what you're investing drops like a stone, then what's the point in continuing to plunk down money towards a house whose value has diminished more than 40% its original value? From a business perspective, it's a bad investment, and not worth supporting financially.

It's interesting to see that this trend could also be applied to television shows. Instead of investing money, you invest your time: as in time invested in characters, plot development and story you grow to care about year after year. The big three networks, CBS, ABC, and NBC, are currently battling the disease of not following through with the investments made by their audiences.

Take Ghost Whisperer for example. It is a show millions have invested time caring and watching, and in return, CBS cancels a show without warning, or without caring enough to set its storylines to a full satisfactory closure.

Over the last decade, many shows that people have grown to care about have been axed due to a lack of ratings, or with no faith that such shows would have a growing audience if left on the air longer.

My wife is such an audience member that, honestly, at the news of learning GW was axed, she cried. She loved all of the characters on that show, and immediately complained how there was so much left unanswered. GW did not have the benefit of Lost, where quite a few plots and subplots have been neatly tied with a bow. And thanks to the rare allowance of ABC, the writers of Lost sought fit to care for its show with unprecedented closure, and it will reap rewards far beyond its last episode. But few networks have enough faith these days in writers to allow that to happen anymore.

My wife demanded that I write a letter of complaint to CBS for their stupidity, but why? I wrote a letter once before to CBS after it canceled a show 2 years ago, and it fell on deaf ears. The bottomline driven by ratings numbers is what keeps their hearts aflutter, and nothing else matters. If a good show does great, they don't care about anything else just as long as that bottomline is met, patted down and secure.

With the economy hurting every corner of nearly every market, the networks continue to cutback, make excuses, and trim back good quality shows, even at the risk of lowering the value of their network offerings. We, the viewers, see it as stupid. They, the networks, call it just business. Is the tunnel vision of the 3 networks that bad, unable to see the bigger picture of what they are doing?

Getting back to my reference on homeowners defaulting on mortgages, my wife and I had a serious discussion on defaulting on watching anything else made by the Big Three. Why invest our time to any of them? It isn't worth it anymore. And judging by the new Fall schedules, it should not be a problem in the slightest. Nothing in their lists inspires. There's nothing to get excited about.

Plus, there's the ever growing hesitation to watch a new show, only to find it taken off the air without warning. Fool me once...

As far as shows to look forward to this fall, and this includes shows on the big three, Fox, CW, and cable TV networks, I can easily count them on one hand.

Let's see how the Big Three can keeps themselves big after this year.

[UNCLEagent]

Great post, Traz. We live in a disposable society, where little is sacred.

[Betenoire]

By your same token though CBS in this case is doing the same thing-TV shows aren't cheap to produce and when they don't they cut the losing investment. It does become a repeating cycle though as each time something like that is done fewer people will trust it in the future. And the big three have been in trouble for years as more and more people bleed away to alternative programing anyway.

And a rant is going to get my attention more than the usual amounts of spam I see when I visit.

[Hamon]

Originally Posted by Betenoire

By your same token though CBS in this case is doing the same thing-TV shows aren't cheap to produce and when they don't they cut the losing investment. It does become a repeating cycle though as each time something like that is done fewer people will trust it in the future. And the big three have been in trouble for years as more and more people bleed away to alternative programing anyway.

And a rant is going to get my attention more than the usual amounts of spam I see when I visit.

I agree with you. Mostly in cases this situation is occur.