View From the Bushes

The other night I was watching TV and I got the premiere of "My Name is Earl." I have to say that I really enjoyed it, but already I'm uneasy. I've been through this cycle before: I hear about a show and it sounds good, so I start watching it from the beginning. I get hooked. The critics love it, and eventually so do I.

Then there's the glorius honeymoon where the show still enjoys the full support of the network and new episodes are released every week, but before you know it the hard work of making a show last sets in and the first problems begin to appear. You start reading phrases like "it doesn't hold on to enough of its lead-in audience" or it gets bumped for a special "Dancing with the Stars: Disco Madness." Before you know it, critics start calling it "the best show no one watches," which might as well be the signature on the death warrant, but you continue to hope, and then seemingly against the odds it is renewed for a second season.

But of course, because the network has such little faith in the show and reality shows are so cheap, they don't re-run the show at all during the summer (many shows were only discovered by the public during the summer. I think Cheers and Gilligan's Island both fall into this category), so by the time the new season rolls around, no one remembers the show, except me. After two or three episodes its future is so bleak that you're just hoping they'll air all the shows they actually filmed, but most of the time even that doesn't happen, and the show quietly dies. I guess the point of all this is that I'm afraid to love again.

Pining for the warm accepting embrace of my television
Ross