Canceled ‘Adventures in Television’: Was the Hook Too Quick?

ABC’s hapless “My Adventures in Television” certainly has lived up to its name (its second), and in the process has become a case study in how a network series fails.

Most recently scheduled for 9:30 p.m. Wednesdays, it was removed abruptly from the ABC schedule Monday and replaced with “Drew Carey” reruns.

This echoes its original debut as a replacement sitcom on the fall schedule, when it aired only twice under the name “Wednesdays 9:30 (8:30 Central)” before ABC pulled it for low ratings, changed the name and rescheduled it for after the May sweeps to work off its remaining four episodes amid the new “reality” and game shows that dot the summer listings.

The last original episode was scheduled to air July 3, but this time it looks as if the hook will be final, illustrating once again how a television sitcom with bright prospects becomes perceived as a failure and is quickly discarded.

Ironically, “Wednesdays” was a look at the backbiting world of network TV, as seen through a fresh-faced executive (Ivan Sergei) of fictional network IBS (nice initials!).

Rival exec Mike McClarren (James McCauley) tells David Weiss (Sergei) there’s “only one thing you need to know about this business: Everybody is lying.” Weiss swears that won’t be the case with him, but on his first day on the job, he does just that to Lori Loughlin (“Full House”), who is on a fictional IBS sitcom--and whom he winds up sleeping with. She later tells him she hasn’t had sex with a network exec “this season.”

The comedy was seen by about 7 million viewers on March 27 and April 3.

ABC quickly decided it wasn’t going to grow from these perceived low numbers, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“Wednesdays” (the confusing original title quickly was considered symptomatic of the show’s inability to connect with viewers) failed, as do most new network shows, but not in the eyes of Peter Tolan, the show’s creator, who also produced “The Larry Sanders Show” and “The Job.”

“We had a great time,” he says.

And in the eyes of some, the show isn’t that bad. “I thought it was funny and insightful and a little goofy, and I was going to keep watching it,” says Michael Niederman, chairman of the television department of Columbia College Chicago.

There were even some television critics around the country who considered it promising.

“I like the idea of trying to do a television spoof on television,” says USA Today television critic Robert Bianco. However, Bianco also says the comedy “failed for all the reasons that sitcoms fail all the time. It wasn’t funny enough, and it was silly where it should have been sharper and smarter. It was indifferently cast, other than John Cleese [as the head of IBS]. It had no strong voice and no point of view about what it was satirizing.”

And it had absolutely no chance to address its weaknesses. In the current ad-starved economy, no TV network can afford to grow a series slowly. Part of this show’s bad luck was in appearing on ABC, the “sick man” of TV programming. ABC finished the recent season in third place behind NBC and CBS with a 9.7-million-viewer average, a loss of almost 3 million viewers from a year ago. The top creative executives were sacked and next fall’s mission will be to avoid being overtaken by Fox and dumped into fourth place.

“They’re desperate at this point,” Tolan says. “And desperation leads to shows being on for two weeks.” (ABC, more intent on trumpeting its fall schedule than talking about a canceled series, wouldn’t comment.)

Niederman notes that ABC is just the most extreme example. With cable, the Internet, DVDs and more competing for viewers’ attention, all networks usually can’t wait for a show to find an audience, even if it might eventually be there.

Coming up with some guidelines a sitcom should follow for success isn’t foolproof, because there are too many variables, says Chicago-based sitcom and sketch comedy writer Michael Fry.

“I can tell you five or six things that I think should be in a great sitcom, but there are sitcoms that have applied these things and still get canceled,” says Fry, a former writer for “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “The Parent’Hood.”

“It’s such a fickle marketplace. And television is a purely sponsor-driven medium. You can put together a terrific sitcom and get great reviews, like ‘Sports Night’ by Aaron Sorkin, and still get canceled.”

Some felt what doomed “Wednesdays” was that much of the humor was insider jokes about an industry every viewer thinks he knows, but whose actual workings may be unfamiliar.

For example, one joke was made at the expense of a young television network head named Jordan Levin. But there is such an executive, who runs the WB network.

“When I interviewed Peter Tolan,” says Eric Deggans, TV critic for Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, “I mentioned the joke about Jordan Levin. And I understand his point that viewers will understand that it’s just some young guy who’s promising. But it wasn’t that funny.”

Tolan admits the show “may be” too insider for a mainstream audience, but Bianco disagrees.

“It could have been any office comedy, which was more of the problem than anything,” Bianco says. “Nobody looked at ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and said that was too inside about TV news, because it worked.”

Fry says the series showed an underbelly of Hollywood he thought viewers were too uncomfortable watching.

“People do not understand, nor really want to know, about all the dirt that’s behind the shows that they depend on to cheer them up,” he says. “It’s like seeing a clown smoke a cigarette.”

Still, Niederman felt “Wednesdays” had that intangible something that could have meant success, which he finds interesting given the show’s abrupt fate.

“In trying to look inside that world,” he says, “the only thing I can guess is sometimes people don’t like jokes being made about them. So having TV executives decide the fate of a program about TV executives maybe wasn’t so good a scenario.”

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Allan Johnson writes about television for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.