Star Trek: Enterprise is being cancelled
And this makes me sad. Enterprise is, in my opinion, one of the best shows on television. It is creative, smart, and, most importantly, wholesome (well, most of the time). It is certainly the best incarnation of Star Trek since ‘the Next Generation’. The last episode is in May. UPN is canceling it. I think the reason they cited was ‘poor ratings’ or ‘lack of interest’ or some such nonsense. Well, I’m not denying UPN’s numbers regarding the show’s ratings. What I’m talking about is the reason for the low ratings. UPN, I assume, blames the show – this is a safe assumption because, if UPN thought the show was any good, they would not be canceling it. However, the problem is not the show. The problem is UPN. Of all the television networks out there right now, UPN has got to be the most pathetic excuse for a network I have ever seen. In one city I was in, UPN didn’t have its own channel. No, they leased time off of one of the local cable channels – so there was not UPN most of the time. And what’s worse, the channel that they leased changed from time to time, and it would often take me months to find them again. This makes it very difficult to actually watch a show on UPN – all the desire in the world is for naught if you cant actually locate the show you desire to watch. I remember when UPN first came into existence. Star Trek: Voyager used to be on the local fox channel – same night and time every week. Then some moron over at Paramount said ‘hey, you know what would be cool? If we had our own television network. Then we could run all six of our shows on our own channel’ [this is hyperbole; I have no idea whether or not they had only 6 shows]. And, so it was written: Voyager would now only be seen on UPN. Great. We could never find UPN. Its location was unpredictable, as was Voyager’s time slot. As a result, I have not seen most of Voyager (although, I had stopped watching by the second season anyway… I didn’t think the show was very good. Friends of mine say it got a lot better, but I wouldn’t know since I don’t have the desire to play ‘guess the time-slot and channel’ with UPN!!).
In addition, UPN also has another annoying habit – they like to preempt Star Trek for every basketball game in existence. Now tell me, how do you propose to build up a loyal audience for a show if you never have it on at the same time for more than three weeks in a row, if you keep changing the channel it’s on, if you preempt the thing every time there is a basketball game on that I guarantee you Star Trek fans couldn’t care less about? You don’t. I tried to catch Enterprise last night, and the idiots over at UPN thought that I wouldn’t mind if they preempted the first 15 minutes of Star Trek for a juvenile basketball game that had run into overtime. You know what? Those stupid games wouldn’t run into overtime if the clocks actually ran in real time. At 10;00, the clock read one minute and twenty-eight seconds to go. Through some miraculous phenomenon that would no doubt amaze Einstein, that 1:28 somehow stretched into 15 minutes. I thought that sort of time dilation could only occur near the event horizon of a black hole… But that’s beside the point. The point is that UPN has killed Enterprise through its own behavior and idiotic, self-destructive policies.
UPN moves Star Trek around, preempt it for every sports game they can find (apparently, the temporary sports audience is more important to them than a permanent Star Trek audience), they don’t have a regular UPN channel in many markets, and then, they finally decide that the ‘official’ (only so long as there’s no basketball on) night ant time for Enterprise will be Friday night at eight o’clock pm. This last stroke of brilliance puts Enterprise head to head with the SciFi Channel’s highly rated Stargate SG-1. SciFi does not preempt SG-1… ever. SG-1 has none of the built-in deterrence (that UPN has provided for Enterprise) that would prevent the show from developing and keeping a loyal audience. In light of its own idiocy, how does UPN honestly expect Enterprise to draw the kind of ratings they are looking for? If UPN really and truly believes that the show is the problem, I do not expect them to survive as a television network. I honestly don’t know how they’ve survived this long.
My great hope is that Paramount will sell Enterprise to the SciFi channel and that SciFi will continue to produce the show for the next five years or so. Enterprise is a good show, and in the right hands could develop quite an audience. Unfortunately, it has been in the hands of a company that almost couldn’t have sabotaged its ratings better if they’d done it deliberately.
In addition, UPN also has another annoying habit – they like to preempt Star Trek for every basketball game in existence. Now tell me, how do you propose to build up a loyal audience for a show if you never have it on at the same time for more than three weeks in a row, if you keep changing the channel it’s on, if you preempt the thing every time there is a basketball game on that I guarantee you Star Trek fans couldn’t care less about? You don’t. I tried to catch Enterprise last night, and the idiots over at UPN thought that I wouldn’t mind if they preempted the first 15 minutes of Star Trek for a juvenile basketball game that had run into overtime. You know what? Those stupid games wouldn’t run into overtime if the clocks actually ran in real time. At 10;00, the clock read one minute and twenty-eight seconds to go. Through some miraculous phenomenon that would no doubt amaze Einstein, that 1:28 somehow stretched into 15 minutes. I thought that sort of time dilation could only occur near the event horizon of a black hole… But that’s beside the point. The point is that UPN has killed Enterprise through its own behavior and idiotic, self-destructive policies.
UPN moves Star Trek around, preempt it for every sports game they can find (apparently, the temporary sports audience is more important to them than a permanent Star Trek audience), they don’t have a regular UPN channel in many markets, and then, they finally decide that the ‘official’ (only so long as there’s no basketball on) night ant time for Enterprise will be Friday night at eight o’clock pm. This last stroke of brilliance puts Enterprise head to head with the SciFi Channel’s highly rated Stargate SG-1. SciFi does not preempt SG-1… ever. SG-1 has none of the built-in deterrence (that UPN has provided for Enterprise) that would prevent the show from developing and keeping a loyal audience. In light of its own idiocy, how does UPN honestly expect Enterprise to draw the kind of ratings they are looking for? If UPN really and truly believes that the show is the problem, I do not expect them to survive as a television network. I honestly don’t know how they’ve survived this long.
My great hope is that Paramount will sell Enterprise to the SciFi channel and that SciFi will continue to produce the show for the next five years or so. Enterprise is a good show, and in the right hands could develop quite an audience. Unfortunately, it has been in the hands of a company that almost couldn’t have sabotaged its ratings better if they’d done it deliberately.
posted by Rumorlore at 4:30 PM
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