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NBC recently announced the TV shows that it was canceling from this season. Now everyone is eager to see what disappointing replacements are awaiting for us in the fall. But as a Septi-Verse reader, you don't have to wait that long, you can be disappointed right now as I use my psychic powers to reveal:
ABC Who wants to watch Who
Wants to be a Millionaire? You'd better.
Things didn't go very well when ABC recently placed this ad in LA newspapers looking for Michael J. Fox's Spin City replacement:
Wanted: ABC needs male actor to play lead role in established, high-rated sit-com. No acting talent required. Drug, hooker problems a plus. Send resume, cover letter, and criminal record to ABC, NY, NY.
ABC executives think that they hit pay dirt with Who Wants to be a Millionaire? They realize that it would be more cost effective to have the show run two and a half hours a night and have even dumber people on the highly annoying and rated game show than to pay actors on their sit-coms or dramas. Every prime time hour that wasn't filled by 20/20, was choked full of Regis and "Is that your... FINAL answer?" In December, just a a nation was collectively considering suicide as oppressed to having to watch someone use a life line to figure out when the War of 1812 took place- Television genius Ben Stein repels into the Millionaire studio and slays the evil Regis, freeing us from his horrific reign as television game show tyrant.
NBC Our plots are so thin that you can see through them.
Once more, cost effectiveness is the word for this next season. Because the cast of Friends demand so much money per episode, NBC teeters toward bankruptcy. NBC cancels most of their shows, opting for more made for TV movies with high special effect budgets, but amazingly low writing talent budgets. Dateline NBC becomes a nightly event, since news programs are surprisingly cheap- segments can cost as little as an SUV and some bomb making materials.
CBS Welcome to the Retirement Home.
Sometime last year, the CBS Network determined that
the average age of their viewers is somewhere in their mid-eighties.
Knowing that, the network has an easy time developing new shows aimed at
the Geritol set. With shows like: You Youngsters Have It Easy,
Those
Darned Whippersnappers!, the Where the Hell is my Social Security
Check Variety Hour, and Who Wants to Change My Diaper? all of
the rest-homes in America are set ablaze. The really good news is
since their entire viewing audience is senile, they only have to make one
episode per show.
FOX Smut. Period.
Egged on by the bad publicity of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, and the appeal of "reality programming" such as When Animals Attack, Fox unveils a whole new line of "reality game shows" after one of the kids from Battle of the Child Geniuses snaps and goes on a shooting spree in the studio. Such new shows as Who Wants to be Mauled by a Grizzly Bear, Let's Make a Swarm of Killer Bees Really Angry, and Who Wants to Kill a Millionaire? take Fox's Wednesday line-up to incredible new lows.
WB The new home of white, heterosexual, teenage, upper-middle classed angst.
In an attempt to increase more diversity among their viewing audience, the WB "network" creates a new show called Mominatrix. The show, about a working mother balancing her career as a dominatrix and raising her 5 adopted ethnic children, is so mind numbingly bad that it causes people to lapse into comas. The entire WB Friday night audience, almost twenty people, never regains consciousness.
Every other moment of WB programming involves good looking white teenagers (played by actors in their mid-thrities, thanks 90201!) getting involved in "real-life" situations and facing issues that all "real teens" have to deal with. In fact, the simulation is so real, that average teens across America scramble to get their own theme song written by Paula Cole.
UPN Please, please watch us!
UPN tries several new shows to garner a piece of
the Nealson pie, but no one really pays attention to it, leaving executives
despondent and wishing for one more season of that Borg-chick in her slinky
clothes.
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