Where were you at 11:00 am on Monday, December 6? I was sitting at work, trying to get through an especially painful Monday. I thought to myself “Lets see what the twitter world is buzzing about while I’m stuck in this dreary office.” And with one tap of a touch screen I had learned that my favorite new show of the season had not been renewed for season 2. A couple weeks ago I wrote a plea to save Terriers (can be seen here SAVE TERRIERS) At the time I knew the chances of renewal for the show were slim. Its why I wrote the article. Despite knowing then that today was a real possibility, it did not make the news any easier to take.
Where are we left in our Terriers world? Terriers was able to succeed where so many other short lived shows before it failed. They composed a finale to the show that satisfied our knowledge of how most of the characters resolve whatever issues they face but still leave room for our minds to explore what comes next in the world The friendship that we lived and died with as the season progressed was a s strong as its been. For the mean time, Ocean Beach is safe from the evil powers that want to turn the beautiful town into an airport. Gustafson is back to his job on the force and sure to receive praise after getting help from Hank in cracking a case. Our duo even got to beat the crap out of Zeitlin for a little bit (Britt punching him in the face “on principal” had to be one of the series best moments) Britt and Katie come to an agreement that Britt will be a father to the child even if it is not his. What we are left with is Hank driving Britt to jail. They stop at a light and Hank tell Britt they can run away to Mexico. He could take a left ant Britt would be free of jail or he could go straight and Britt could do his time. It was basically left as a metaphor for where the show was. They would either get renewed or cancelled. Whatever happened, that would not and will not change the crazy ride that came before.
Now the question remains, Where do we go from here? A lot of people in this situation would curse out the network and flood them with angry emails. In most cases I would join in on the rally cry, especially on a show that I felt so strongly about. However, this is the rare case where the network is not at fault. The bottom line is that not enough people watched Terriers. Its as simple as that. FX was very classy about the whole situation. Very rarely do you see a network actually hold a conference call to express the reasoning and the sorrow they had in cancelling a show. FX did just that and spelled it out everyone. They really wanted Terriers to succeed and even though they view it as a huge success from a creative standpoint it was far from it from a ratings standpoint. The ratings could have been double what they were and they would still fall short of other shows on FX that were not even that successful. In the end FX put it the best by saying "I don't know if subtlety is something the American public is buying in droves today…We wish there was a perfect intersection between what is good and what is successful." So in the end the issues don’t are not with the network but us as a viewing society. In a entertainment landscape driven by reality TV and a shortening by the day attention span, a well crafted, subtle story that takes time to tell really never had a shot.
RIP Terriers :(
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