The Decline and Fall of NBC: A Rant

I read an article today on IMDb about how NBC is continuing to fade away as they failed to place even one show in the Nielsen top ten this week. Well, jolly good I say! I like to think that this is much-deserved comeuppance for all the poorly-managed, meanly-served and high quality television shows NBC has screwed over in the past.

"Examples, please?" you say? Well, my favorite example is also my favorite show, "The West Wing." After six seasons of critical acclaim (okay, maybe not the fifth season, but bear with me), NBC ousted the show from its Wednesday night slot to Sunday nights, aka the place where television shows go to die. Unsurprisingly, viewership dwindled and NBC soon had a network-created reason to pull the plug on the show. This was infuriating enough (as many critics and talking heads alike rightfully pointed out: it was just starting to get good again!), NBC then widely advertised a farewell retrospective to be played before the final episode. Unexpectedly and about a week before this retrospective, NBC axed it too and ended up playing the pilot episode directly before the series finale. "West Wing" gets no love from the network it brought millions of viewers, a record number of Emmy awards and some much-needed class to.

Along a similar vein, "West Wing"'s Aaron Sorkin then pitched a new show, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," about all that was wrong with SNL and NBC eagerly won a bidding war to get it on their network. After only a few episodes, it was clear NBC had lost all faith in the show and it was put on hiatus for five months. Having successfully scared off any viewers who might have been watching it the first place, NBC then canceled the show but semi-graciously (and rather ridiculously at this point) aired the remaining episodes through the summer months late on Thursday nights. Ironically, those summer episodes were by far better than the original few aired by NBC, proving that had the network simply allowed the show to get its groove, it might have had another great dramedy on its hands. Mais non.

"Scrubs" has been similarly mistreated by the peacock network as it has been jumped around in various timeslots and has been put on hiatus more times than are plausible for a show that hasn't been canceled. NBC kept a death grip on the show for the last few seasons as everyone from the star, Zach Braff, to the creator, Bill Lawrence, stated that they very much wanted to leave and were sick of making the show. Instead, NBC stubbornly kept the show on the air (sort of, in between all those hiatuses) before finally releasing it into the wild this year. (Unfortunately for Braff, Lawrence and everyone else who wanted off, ABC picked it up for another, primarily unwanted, season.)

So I'm a little bitter.

In any event, I have been personally boycotting the channel for two years and I'm glad to see the rest of the nation has taken up the cause as well! (Probably unknowingly, but, hey, a girl can dream.)