The five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It doesn’t just apply to having to flush your poor goldfish down the toilet, couch potatoes of ever variety go through the same emotions every time a TV show is cut down in it’s prime.
So why is it that some poor shows are allowed to limp forlornly in to their next season? Main characters having jumped ship long ago, story lines becoming more and more ridiculous, nobody watching them but extras trying to catch a glimpse of themselves. Sometimes the networks need to realise the right time to stop trying to flog that dead horse.
America’s Next Top Model
ANTM gave us a few good years – we all looked forward to the makeover episodes, and I refuse to be told that the infamous ‘Be quiet, Tiffany’ rant is anything other than television gold.
Tyra’s ego was hilarious for the first few cycles, but it just seemed to grow and grow with every season until she ended up getting more screen time than the actual participants, and no female judge managed to last more than a few seasons. She even ditched Mr and Mrs Jay, and ‘noted fashion photographer’ Nigel Barker when the ratings started to fall, which should have been the final nail in the coffin. Give it up Tyra – there’s only so many times you can lecture girls on how to squint attractively before your audience stops paying attention.
Supernatural
This is a big one – the moment this gets cancelled, thousands of teenage girls will take to their Tumblr accounts in protest before quietly sobbing in front of homoerotic incestual fan fiction. The stars have signed on to take it up to ten seasons, which is more than enough. It’s better to let it go out with a bang than to let it trail off halfheartedly when either Jensen Ackles or Jared Padalecki decide that they want to move on. Besides, how many times can you realistically cheat death?
Awkward
Whoever came up with the idea for Awkward was obviously not one of the awkward kids at school. Jenna is an extremely pretty sixteen year old girl with clear skin and good figure who is involved in a love triangle with two equally hot guys both fighting for her affections. Oh, but she runs a blog, which obviously makes her your average teenage nerd that girls can relate to. There’s a chance I’m slightly bitter about this.
Waterloo Road
The prime example of a show that has gone on for far too long, the show isn’t even set in Waterloo Road anymore. The entire school and half the pupils moved to a boarding school in Scotland a few series ago, for no good reason at all. Waterloo Road has been cursed with awful subplots for the past few years, and if this was a real school then it would have been shut down long ago, due to the fact that one of the pupils dies there almost every term and literally all the teachers are sleeping with each other. Poor Rose Kelly has one kid that eloped, one who’s in jail for murder, one who died of cancer and one that got hit by a truck, it’s no wonder she’s an alcoholic.
Two And A Half Men
When Charlie Sheen is the only thing keeping something together, you know you’re in trouble. Now both Charlie and Jake have jumped ship, we are left with the least funny element of the show intact – Jon Cryer – and Ashton Kutcher. You can’t have Two And A Half Men without the half, and Angus T. Jones himself urged fans to stop watching the show. He may be a slightly crazy bible-thumper these days, but he’s got a point.
The X Factor
We love to hate it, but that love is dwindling fast. If it’s not some cocky teenager or generic boy band, it’s a middle aged dinner lady who’s decided it’s finally time to follow her dreams. The winners get their Christmas single, and if they’re lucky they get a debut album with one big song. After that, it’s back to working in the chippy and wishing that you hadn’t dropped out of school for it. It’s time to cool it with the singing competitions for now, then maybe bring them back in ten to fifteen years. The same goes for…
The Voice
America, UK, Australia, it doesn’t matter what country it’s in – nobody watches this show once the chairs stop spinning. It was made to be a classier alternative to all the other Cowell-based singing competitions, only focusing on the talent and the depressing back stories. As if anybody watches these shows to discover new talent. We want the inbred nutters warbling along to a Whitney Houston song and we want it without having to sit through the harrowing tale of how it was their great-auntie’s dying wish for them to audition for a televised karoake session.
We especially don’t want to see Tom Jones trying to casually slip the fact he knew Elvis in to every sentence.
Glee
A show about psychotically chipper high school students that break into song every three minutes should never have made it to air anyway. There’s literally not one character that the audience ever feels anything remotely close to sympathy for. Sue Sylvester is Glee’s saving grace, and that’s probably just because she’s constantly on the verge of duct taping Lea Michele’s mouth shut.
True Blood
Vampires? Sure, you can make them scary or sexy, or possibly a little bit of both. Entertaining! Shapeshifters? Well OK, guess it makes sense that there are other supernatural beings, and it ties in with the story. Witches? If you say so, fans of the books would probably want them to be included. But no more, otherwise this is going to start to sound like a bad Goosebumps book. Ghosts, werewolves and fairies? I give up.
Forget Sookeh and Beel, True Blood needs to be cancelled and Lafayette and Pam should be given their own spin-off series where they share an apartment and spend their nights drinking synthetic blood cocktails and giving each other makeovers.
16 And Pregnant
MTV briefly arrived at the ‘Having unprotected sex at 16 will result in kids and disrupt your life’ moral, but then sailed straight past it and crash landed at the ‘Having unprotected sex at 16 will result in kids, a tv deal, and your gateway to becoming a pseudo-celebrity’ moral. There are always ways for air-head teenagers to chase fame, but do we have to drag the ones with kids into it?
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