Giving Series the Proper Closure Is Good Business

While they probably won’t match “The Fugitive” catching the one-armed man or Bob awakening from his eight-year dream on “Newhart,” “Home Improvement,” “Melrose Place,” “Mad About You” and “The Nanny” will bid viewers farewell this spring, presenting series finales timed to boost ratings during the May sweeps.

That kind of closure, however, will elude fans of the new shows like “Brimstone” and “Cupid,” which have already been canceled.

Let’s face it, TV programs are ultimately products. If enough people don’t buy (that is, watch) them, something else replaces them on the shelves.

Yet people interact with television in a different way than they do with antiperspirant or nasal spray. They bond with shows and rapidly get drawn into their fictional worlds.

Thanks to the Internet, these fans now mobilize with astonishing speed, creating far-flung communities to share this viewing experience. Despite hovering near the bottom of the Nielsen standings, the cancellation of “Brimstone” by Fox and “Cupid” by ABC almost immediately spawned electronic campaigns to save the shows.

Even CBS’ “The Nanny,” chased out of its time slot this season by ABC’s “Dharma & Greg,” has backers pushing for another year. The self-proclaimed “Oys in the Hood Project” is pleading with CBS not to abandon what the group’s press release calls “the funniest sitcom since ‘I Love Lucy.’ ”

“Our main goal in doing this was asking them to keep the show on one more season so they can bring the story lines to full resolution,” said Christine L. Davis, who is spearheading the effort. “We’ll do what we can. At the very least, [those on the show] will know that they were loved.”

Networks can easily try to dismiss such fans as oddballs who don’t represent the average viewer. A few hundred or even thousand ardent voices raised in protest don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy TV world of theirs, where top prime-time series attract audiences of more than 20 million per week.

Still, discontinuing a product some consumers truly love raises issues simply from a customer-service standpoint. Does it make sense for a program to abruptly vanish, leaving viewers dangling and unsatisfied? Will those same people as willingly bond with another series after such a disappointment?

While die-hard fans will doubtless lament a favorite program’s absence no matter what happens, producing an episode or made-for-TV movie wrapping up the story line would at least provide a sense of finality.

Not every program lends itself to a wrap-up, but some clearly do. Take “Brimstone,” featuring Peter Horton as a slain policeman hunting down 113 souls, escapees from hell. Removing the show after 13 episodes means leaving a lot of nasty souls floating around out there.

In similar fashion, “Cupid” goes away with no resolution to its thematic riddle, whether the character played by Jeremy Piven is in fact the mythological Cupid or merely a well-intentioned nut case.

In covering the TV business one hears all the reasons not to do this. It’s expensive, costing more than a regular episode, since people would have to be paid while the script is written. If no one was watching the program before, why should they now? It’s best to cut losses and move on, letting the cast and crew scatter to seek new jobs.

The television business keeps evolving, however, offering unprecedented opportunities to networks and studios. Completing a series might make the episodes more attractive overseas, where limited series are common. Perhaps the final episode could be marketed as a home video to recoup some of the costs.

More intangibly, most producers would welcome having a chance to bring some finality to their vision after having been told by the network, in essence, that their baby is ugly.

In addition, the network would send a message to the audience for these shows saying, “We get it. We care.” As it is, networks seem to convey the sentiment, “Hey, we’re running a business here. Get a life.”

Small wonder that networks are invariably made out to be the bad guy when a series gets canceled, just ahead of Nielsen Media Research. The most impassioned loyalists often find conspiracies behind a program’s demise: The network didn’t promote it enough; the time period stank; the Nielsen ratings are inaccurate.

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The last complaint may well be true, but until everyone has microchips implanted in their skulls, measuring the habits of 260 million people will always contain a margin for error. The current system is all networks and advertisers have to go by, and at least more precise than an Internet chat room.

The general futility of their efforts seldom deters those behind series-saving drives. Indeed, enthusiasts of CBS’ “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” and the syndicated “Forever Knight” have continued to lobby for their exhumation long after the shows were laid to rest.

“Personally, it’s a way of letting my opinions be known to the networks,” said Jennifer Wilbanks, 30, of Lompoc, an online supporter of “Brimstone.” “It’s the same reason I occasionally vote for a candidate that is going to lose: just to get my voice heard.”

This is a common refrain--that the voices of fans aren’t getting heard, that the faceless suits in fancy executive suites don’t care about them.

They’re only half right. The suits often really love programs they wind up dropping, but given how tenuous these jobs are, the instinct for self-preservation provides a strong incentive to look for a quick fix in places where they’re not delivering advertisers enough eyeballs.

Steven S. Hood, a 26-year-old college student at San Jose State and organizer of the Internet push on “Brimstone’s” behalf, doesn’t understand what he sees as this lack of patience.

“Shows like this take time,” he said. “Any show with an unusual premise isn’t going to get the ratings it needs initially.” As for the idea of producing a final episode, he said, “We’ll take what we can get.”

Yet if people like Hood and Wilbanks feel powerless in this equation, they shouldn’t. Falling smack dab in the middle of the 18-to-49 demographic, they represent just the sort of viewers networks desperately want to reach. A service-minded business, in fact, might heed the words of Paul Simon, doing what they can trying to keep such customers satisfied.

Several more series will bite the dust when the networks set next season’s lineups in May, and many viewers will monitor this process with more than casual interest. While folks who fret about the fate of a TV show may seem a little goofy, programmers should consider this: Would the local grocer remove products people like, without explanation or apology, and still expect them to come back to his store?

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Discontinuing a product some consumers truly love raises issues simply from a customer-service standpoint. Does it make sense for a program to abruptly vanish, leaving viewers dangling and unsatisfied? Will those same people as willingly bond with another series after such a disappointment?