Three months ago, nearing the end of a long, rather satisfying television season, I decided not to watch the final two episodes of Veronica Mars, and instead save them for the doldrums of summer when quality television is as sparse as a Lindsay Lohan sober day (I know, I know, I promised no more cheap shots like this, but it was so easy I couldn’t help myself. It’s not easy going cold turkey on Lohan bashing. Is there a patch I can buy for this?). I knew the show was being canceled and just couldn’t reconcile losing it so quickly. May sweeps is a bullish time for a high-end TV watcher such as myself and Veronica Mars deserved my full and complete attention, not just a clock-watching commercial double bloop due to a focus distracted by my musings on what I was going to find when the Lost season finale went through the looking glass (the FUTURE… spoiler!). My desire to keep the show alive and my respect for the quality of the show meant that I would have to wait, possibly a few months, to properly say farewell to one of my favorite shows of the last decade.

This weekend I finally sat down and said goodbye to Veronica Mars. I won’t bore you with the details of my experience; if you saw the finale you know both what happened and how good it was. And if you didn’t, then you suck and it’s your fault Jim Belushi is gainfully employed by the American Broadcasting Company. No, the point of this post is not to glad-hand Rob Thomas, Kristen Bell and the rest of the makers of Veronica Mars. This post is about saying goodbye to TV shows. Making peace with what is and what is not in our hands. And understanding that sometimes, despite the best of intentions, the good ones are not always meant to be.

I wasn’t originally planning on watching the VM finale this weekend. I was busy going to Napa, hitting the Manhattan Beach AVP Tournament, writing a script for a producer and seeing my best friend off to his last year at law school. I had a full load of non-entertainment related things to do. What changed were the three Netflix discs I received this week. I’m doing a summer of TV recapping, and at the moment I’m catching up on Wonderfalls, another female-centric hour-long that was beloved by critics, adored by a small, rabid fanbase, and canceled before it’s time. And while I went through my crazy schedule, I found an occasional forty-five minutes to glance over from my computer at the wacky shenanigans of a long since canceled FOX drama.

I watched the first four episodes, enjoying the odd comic timing of series lead Caroline Dhavernas, the welcome appearance of William Sadler and the Matthew Fox clone they got to play Caroline’s love interest. But the thing I got the most out of the first disc was this: the show isn’t very good. The pace is stilted, the storylines are oft putting and the protagonist isn’t very likeable. In short, the show kinda blew. So much so that I didn’t even bother with the second disc (something I’ve never done) and instead jumped right to disc three and the last two episodes of the show (as a completist I wanted to see how it all ended). And after the final credits rolled I sat and pondered just what the fuss was all about.

The cancellation of Wonderfalls, like Veronica Mars, Arrested Development and a myriad of other shows, was taken rather poorly by its fanbase. A website, savewonderfalls.com, was launched in an attempt to revive the poorly rated drama from certain doom. Obviously, that did not shake out on the positive end. Now, I’m all for trumping quality television. And I support radical action. But I can’t wrap my head around going above and beyond for a show that wasn’t all that good. I can respect that the show had its supporters, heck every show has at least one loyal viewer, but with the way the television industry is constructed, specifically in the way shows are made and put on the air, I can not cotton to the idea of saving a show that is not worth saving and has no hopes for being saved.

The two great things about television are that it is democratic and unforgiving. A show is made, marketed and aired. Home viewers decide to watch it, and then decide if they like it. If they do, they watch it again the next week. If they don’t, they don’t watch it ever again. It’s a beautifully simple and merciless process. Unlike film, where even if no one goes to see a movie in theaters, you can always watch it on DVD, television shows have no real outlet when for exhibition if they fail. Pilots that don’t make it to series can pop up on You Tube (like the Aquaman pilot with Ving “Deadly Dog” Rhames), but a show that goes to series and tanks (especially ones that never finish production on their first thirteen) disappears into the mist. The odds of a series, especially an off-beat one (by off-beat I mean not CSI), are exceedingly slim. It would be easier to get a greenlight for Daddy Day Camp 2, then to get a show on the air about a teen private detective that solves crimes in her high school. Now, knowing that to be true, I submit that it’s futile and patently irresponsible to attempt to keep a show on the air that the majority of the viewing audience does not want to see.

Poor ratings are the only valid reason for canceling a television show. And as much as I might like a show, I cannot complain of its cancellation if I’m the only person watching it. Television is a business, and a poorly rated show is bad for business. Take a show that that is original, daring, well written, fiercely acted and brimming with potential. The only problem is that not enough people are tuning in to warrant its continued expensive existence; it airs 7 or 13 or 22 episodes and is canceled. Instead of decrying the network for its evil slaughter of a quality piece of entertainment, we should be grateful we even got to see it at all. Four episodes of Wonderfalls, fifty-three of Arrested Development, sixty-four of Veronica Mars, whatever number for whatever show that you loved and lost, you should be happy the show entered your life at all. Does it suck that it was canceled? Absolutely. But it’s simply the way the medium works. It’s fair, it’s just and it’s nonmoving.

Television shows are given every chance to succeed. When embraced by the viewing public they can be worth billions of dollars to the networks. They can bring in viewers for other shows. They can make stars out of nobodies. They can become iconic. Every pilot given a series order is given so because the network believed it had a shot to become iconic (yes, even crap like According to Jim). The shows may get marketed poorly (like Hidden Palms), or put in a shitty timeslot (like the J.J, Abrams dramedy Six Degrees), or get tampered with to the point where they had no shot at being successful (take the recent Traveler, for example), but in the end it is always the viewers that determine if a show stays on the air.

A poorly rated show can survive its first season on critical reception alone (see: Felicity, Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, Everwood, etc). A poorly rated show can survive its second season on minimal ratings gains and a lack of competitive pilots in its genre. But no show, no matter how good, can survive past a third season without good ratings. Period. After forty episodes, if a show has not clicked with viewers, it will never click. There have been shows that took a while to get hot. Cheers was 82nd in the ratings in its first year, only to be a top ten show by season three. But viewers don’t wait three full seasons to decide to start watching a television show. It just doesn’t happen.

This is why I cannot complain about the cancellation of Veronica Mars, Arrested Development, Wonderfalls, Sports Night, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, et al. They were all given ample chances to succeed, and none of them did. CW prexy Dawn Ostroff worked every angle to bring Veronica Mars back for a fourth season, but the math never warranted it. They paired the show up with the network smash Gilmore Girls, and VM couldn’t retain enough of the audience. They paired the show up with advertisers to stem the production costs, but that didn’t take. Posters were put in schools and in malls. Guest stars were brought in (Harry Hamlin, Patty Duke, Kevin Smith, Joss Whedon). Nothing worked. The CW even asked series creator Rob Thomas to alter the serial format of the show and do stand alone mysteries in an attempt to bring in new viewers. The shows were bad and the new viewers never showed. The show was lucky it was on the air for as long as it was, and it’s a testament to its quality it made it past the first season at all, let alone the second. And the same goes for Arrested Development. Fox desperately wanted that show to be a hit. It would have given them artistic credibility and their first real chance at a Best Comedy Emmy. But it didn’t take. America as a whole just did not care for the Bluth family.

And we’re just gonna have to live with it.

Television shows come and go. They are transitory by nature. You enjoy them while they are there, mourn them for a time when they are gone, and then find a new show to love. This season alone I lost three of my top shelf favorite shows (Veronica Mars, The Loop & The OC), and saw the abrupt cancellation of no less than seven shows I enjoyed (Studio 60, The Class, Six Degrees, The Winner, Raines, Kidnapped, Andy Barker P.I.). Last year I lost The West Wing, AD and That 70’s Show. And this coming year I’m gonna have to say goodbye to Scrubs. Such is life as a TV watcher. You let the good ones go. You let them go because they were too good for their own good. Perhaps if Arrested Development had been dumber, Veronica Mars less complex, Wonderfalls less irritating, Firefly less overtly geeky, they would all be gearing up for their fall premiere. But if that had been the case, we would not have loved them in the first place. It was those exact qualities (brains, complexity, wit, defiance) that made them worthy of our time.

This all leads to my thoughts on the successful campaign to bring back CBS’s nuclear fall out thriller Jericho. I watched the premiere, laughed at the notion of Skeet Ulrich carrying a network drama and promptly judged the show as mediocre. I never watched it again, but apparently many people in the fall did. It was a modest hit with the potential to break out. However, CBS pulled it from the schedule for four months, a big no-no for serialized shows (just ask Lost), and on its return the audience shrunk faster than the second weekend box office for The Matrix Revolutions. CBS promptly canceled the show, and that’s when the nuts started arriving. Fans of Jericho swarmed CBS offices with bags of nuts, an in-joke from the show, in an attempt to prove that Jericho was worth saving. After a few metric tons of nuts showed up CBS gave in and renewed the series for an eight episode second season. This was a mistake.

Jericho’s ratings will not improve. The show is too insular for it to be a breakout hit, and the mythology of the show is on the verge of becoming too dense for new viewers to wade through. Plus, hello, Skeet Ulrich is the series lead. If Jericho was as good as these crazy nut senders would lead you to believe, than the drop-off from fall to spring would not have been so severe. Lost was still a hit after taking three months off, last season. 24 and American Idol continue to do well despite having a nearly seven month layoff between seasons. Good shows that people like do well regardless of the timeslot or disparity between new episodes. Take Moonlighting, a show that never aired more than 16 episodes in a nine month season, yet won a slew of Emmy’s, made a star out of Bruce Willis and aired for five years.

CBS flinched at the overwhelming viewer response because they haven’t had a show worthy of such an act in decades. Nobody is freaking out if NCIS gets canceled, know what I mean? Aside from How I Met Your Mother, Jericho is the only young skewing show on their network, and young viewers are quite easily made mental (just ask the Fox Network); heck the campaign probably started because people were so shocked that CBS was airing such a hip show and didn’t want that to end. Similar campaigns worked for Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls in seasons past because their network didn’t have a good enough replacement, and because their target demographic was the exact same people leading the charge. Campaigns for Wonderfalls and Firefly didn’t work because FOX had replacement junk at its beck and call. They go through shows like Mandy Patinkin goes through TV series’. Jericho will fail on its return and CBS will never again bring back a struggling show with a tenuous plot concept. The Nuts-heads have effectively ruined the chances for any future big three drama that is even minutely difficult. Way to push your chips in for the star of Chill Factor, dicks.

Let these shows go, kids. No less than 60 shows are set to debut in the next four months, and that doesn’t even include cable. Pushing Daises, Bionic Woman, Private Practice, Chuck, Journeyman, Viva Laughlin, Moonlight, Reaper, K-Ville, The Sarah Conner Chronicles; these shows need our help now. Forget the Jericho’s and The Nine’s and the Andy Barker’s and the What About Brian’s. They had their shot and they blew it. Nobody wanted them around. It’s time to give the new kids a chance. Because maybe one of them will turn out to be the next Arrested Development or Veronica Mars. Maybe your favorite television show of all time hasn’t even aired yet. Isn’t that more worth your attention? Let’s not bemoan the loss of shows that had multiple chances to succeed, and instead enjoy the new batch of pilots and put all our efforts into keeping the good ones from failing.

I will miss Veronica Mars for some time. But in the end, maybe it’s just for the best. When the Ben Stiller Show was canceled Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo became movie stars, and head writer Judd Apatow became Judd Apatow. Bryan Fuller failed on Wonderfalls but is getting a second chance with the infinitely better (and more precious) Pushing Daises. The failure of Sports Night led to The West Wing. Bill Lawrence bombed on Spin City and came back to give us Scrubs. Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Michael Cera are all top-lining movies now. And I look forward to seeing what will become of Kristen Bell and Rob Thomas. I predict they’re going to be giving us quality entertainment for many years to come. Their show may be dead, but the mark left by the show on the industry will linger for years to come.

And that’s the real lesson for why good shows get canceled before their time. So that the makers can go on to make better shows. Speaking off, if you’ll excuse me I need to go catch the new David Duchovny tittyball show on Showtime, created by Tom Kapinos, a guy who used to produce a little show called Dawson’s Creek. From the ashes of poorly written teen angst cancellation, to the phoenix-like rebirth of soft-core Duchovny cable porn. TV, it’s a beautiful thing.

The Verdict: Renewal is a waste, bring on the newbies.

Bangarang!