All That Viewers Ask for Is a Little Closure

Would you start watching a movie if someone said they couldn’t promise you’d get to see the last 10 minutes? Read a book that might not have a final chapter? Buy a CD that ends in the middle of your favorite song?

If that sounds crazy, consider what the networks will do as the new TV season (insert sound of trumpets blaring) officially begins next week. Executives will ask people to commit to shows, embrace them, make an appointment to watch them.

Then they will abruptly cancel said shows, with no sense of resolution or closure for those viewers who bond with them. To some, the feeling is akin to having the show plucked away in the middle of the story, whether it was “Prey” in 1998, “Brimstone” in 1999, “Now and Again” in 2000, or Fox’s “Dark Angel” and ABC’s “Once and Again” a few months ago.

This upsets people. In fact, it causes die-hard fans to go a little nuts, based on the “Save our show” campaigns that percolate on the Internet--especially those involving series with a science-fiction component. (Attend a “Star Trek” convention, you’ll figure it out.)

People devote considerable time to these efforts, raising money to place ads in the trade papers and doing quirky things like inundating networks with artifacts from the show, from bottles of Tabasco sauce on “Roswell” to plastic eggs--a hallmark of one of the villains--on behalf of “Now and Again.”

OK, so some of these folks need to get a life. Yet just because they care about a TV show more than might be healthy doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong. Moreover, the fact that they will spend money on their cause suggests there is an untapped market out there that has yet to be addressed.

Despite all the technological innovations of recent years--from video on demand to DVD players to personal video recorders like TiVo--no one has figured out how to cash in on the passion that exists for canceled TV shows. A core group is clearly willing to pay to see these series reach a conclusion, only to have the product yanked from the shelves.

Most producers would welcome the chance to tie up the loose ends. In fact, “Now and Again” creator Glenn Gordon Caron said he still has “nutty ideas” about doing a graphic novel or movie or something to wrap up the show, whose stars, Eric Close and Dennis Haysbert, have moved on to roles in the CBS drama “Without a Trace” and Fox’s “24,” respectively.

Caron said he never intended to leave fans hanging with the first-season finale, produced with “a cockeyed optimism that the show would be back.”

“I was stunned with how rabid the fans were,” he added, citing the difference between the snail mail that dribbled in when he produced “Moonlighting” and the way Internet chat boards light up today as soon as the credits roll.

Of course, drawing conclusions from the few thousand souls conversing in chat rooms can be misleading in a business in which a program regularly consumed by millions of people is still deemed a failure.

In addition, the series that usually inspire such obsessive behavior when canceled are becoming somewhat endangered by recent viewing patterns, where the trend has been toward shows that offer self-contained episodes, like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “Law & Order.” Not only are these programs hits, but they also repeat better than serialized programs like “ER” during the summer and in syndication--a major economic consideration.

As an example, take Fox’s “24,” which barely performed well enough to earn a second season. Because of its heavily serialized nature, Fox opted not to repeat the episodes this summer, instead running a Labor Day marathon on its FX cable network and releasing the first season on DVD.

Beyond the issue of repeatability, network executives worry that serials deter some potential viewers--scaring off those who are busy, affluent and don’t want to feel as if they have to dutifully catch every episode to keep up.

“People are so time-stressed,” said Alan Wurtzel, president of NBC standards and research. “This environment simply magnifies some of these hurdles, which in the past might not have been all that significant.”

What the Internet campaigns demonstrate is the powerful ardor that can be generated among those who are willing to make a commitment--people who not only plan leisure time around shows but also form online communities to pine for them. The question is, will they do so as readily if networks continually disappoint them?

Margaret Williams, who works at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, S.D., does not sound like a crank, and she is 41 years old, meaning advertisers still acknowledge her existence.

She is, however, a big fan of “Dark Angel.” And she is still angry that Fox canceled it in May without any payoff--perceiving the network as being unresponsive to its audience. Williams maintains she hasn’t watched Fox since.

“We’re not a bunch of dumb sheep out here that will watch anything,” she said. “I want to let the networks know we’re not going to watch substandard shows.... I don’t want to watch people eating worms. We want quality.”

Network officials try to be sympathetic, but they operate a business in which the percentages say cut your loss on low-rated programs and try again. Even producers, while flattered to see their babies showered with adoration, aren’t always sure what such campaigns accomplish.

“You get sort of cynical, and you want to say to people, ‘Please don’t waste your energy,’ ” Caron noted.

It’s easy not to sympathize or identify with people who become so enthralled by a television show, but they’re out there, maybe living next to you. And while the networks can dismiss them as lunatics, they doubtless speak for others who don’t complain as loudly but would probably like reassurance there will be a final chapter before they open a book or commit to a TV show.

So are networks hurting themselves in the long run by letting loyal customers, people who sat through a season’s worth of commercials, end the experience with a bad taste in their mouths? Because until technology solves this dilemma, just thinking about it as a consumer, does wanting to know how the story ends really sound like too much to ask?

Brian Lowry’s column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at brian.lowry@latimes.com.