MAD ABOUT THE SHOW: Despite losing half its audience since it premiered in mid-July, AMC has renewed Mad Men, its first foray into producing its own original dramatic programming. According to a Hollywood Reporter story, Mad Men – the story of a group of young advertising execs in the industry’s early ‘60s “golden age” – made a decent showing (for cable) with 1.6 million viewers when the show premiered on July 16, but viewership had dropped to 841,000 viewers for last week’s show.
Well, at least I won’t have to blame myself for killing yet another show. I loved the first episode of Mad Men, and I have the rest sitting unwatched on my TiVo, waiting for an idle weekend (which will probably never happen unless my wife and kids are whisked away with the nanny to Disneyland by Steve Jobs and I have an emergency guiltectomy). Frankly, I was going to wait until the DVD box set gave me a compelling reason to sit down and burn through the first season, and I doubt if I was the only one of the disappearing viewers who were thinking this way.
Congratulations to AMC for acting on the hunch that their show had an audience that was simply too busy, lazy or impatient to tune in old school for weekly instalments; I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on this one, and ignoring the possibility that they were just going all Kevin Reilly NBC with this and refusing to kill their sickly firstborn out of pride. I have a feeling I’m not the only one who’s going to be happy when this quaint old broadcast format version of television finally goes the way of buggy whips and antimacassars.
THE MONEY’S ALL ON THE (SMALL) SCREEN: According to a Slate piece, the big networks are walking funny and sweating hard now that the bills are coming in for some of their big-budget fall shows, in what’s starting to look like the network equivalent of the movies studios who blew through millions making money-losing spectacles like Cleopatra to compete with TV shows like Gunsmoke that were made on pocket change.
The pilot of Pushing Daisies, ABC’s supernatural dramedy, has been praised for its slick, cinematic look, but it came at a cost, with director and executive producer Barry Sonnenfeld (Addams Family, Men In Black) scaring the life out of producer Warner Bros. by going wildly overbudget, which saw him barred from helming further episodes – a cost-cutting order that’s apparently infuriated ABC programming head Steve McPherson.
NBC’s Bionic Woman has apparently already gone over budget after just five episodes, and CBS’ vampire detective show Moonlight – also produced by Warner – has also been told to cut costs by avoiding night shooting. The show’s vampire will apparently be the first ever to own beachfront property and ride around in a convertible; rumours abound about some sort of NASA sunscreen with an unusually high SPF factor.
