NBC’s ‘Guys with Kids,’ ‘Up All Night,’ Fox’s ‘Touch’ join cancellation spree
While some shows are doing the happy dance of renewal today, and some pilots are glad to finally see the light of day at all, this is also a time where some shows end up rocking themselves back and forth in the fetal position, in an effort to try and stop the tears.
Let’s start off this dirge of TV death today with the only show we’re even remotely surprised to see here: “Guys with Kids.” Don’t get us wrong when it comes to the actual ratings for the show they were terrible, and we’re pretty sure that some Bravo reality shows, “The Vampire Diaries,” and reruns of “Duck Dynasty” all had higher ratings. But this was executive-produced by golden boy Jimmy Fallon! There was a belief out there that NBC would throw the show a bone, if for no other reason than out of paralyzing fear of doing anything that could cause a disturbance in the Fallon force, especially with the “Tonight Show” turnover coming up at some point next year.
Now, we turn to the yawners. “Up All Night” was something that NBC was so desperate to save that they even tried to turn it into a sitcom after the fall, but a few months later that they came to a conclusion: You aren’t going to get the “virtually no one” who watched the first half of season 2 to encourage enough friends to watch the new version. With that, a rare Lorne Michaels project bit the dust early on its run.
In even (somehow) less surprising news, Fox’s “Touch” has also been shown the door. To be fair, we feel almost bad for Kiefer Sutherland, mostly because Fox pulled a “Firefly”-like maneuver on him, airing the show all over the place, not even airing all season 1 episodes in that time frame, and then sticking the show in an awful time-slot with nearly no promotion. Then again, “Firefly” was also about a million times more awesome.
In case you missed it, some of the following shows were also in attendance for the NBC pity party (which we figure NBC itself may actually be showing up to at some point).
Photo: NB