"The instrument does not exist that can measure my indifference to that...."

[captainsblog]

Eleanor and I use that quote all the time, from an early M*A*S*H episode, but this time, the reference of indifference is to another show in another time on another network:

To the surprise of absolutely no one paying any attention at all, NBC has shut down production of ratings laggard Prime Suspect. Its woeful ratings signaled certain cancellation, and being left off NBC's mid-season schedule announced yesterday was a defacto cancellation of the show.

Reports are that it will air its entire 13 episode season order, which by my count leaves 6 episodes yet to air.

(Well, five, now. The important thing is to know what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.)

My original Suspect-ition about this series was that they were going out of their way to reinvent Jane, to the point of de-Tennisonising her and turning her into someone with another last name and another background in addition to plopping her in another country.  Over time, I lost that particular dislike; Maria Bello was- IS- just too damn good an actor to let the showrunner Bible get in her way. Nor was I all that off-put by the other main complaint I'd read about the show: It's the second decade of the 21st century and we don't need to show a Tough Woman Struggling For Male Colleague Acceptance like Helen Mirren did 20 years ago.  No, honey, in my experience in a still-male-dominated profession, I still see a lot of that horseshit and I thought they did a decent job of both conveying it and showing Jane going through the slow and painful process of overcoming it.

For me, though, and apparently the rest of the country, it wasn't enough- and here's where I think they strayed from the original Lynda LaPlante formula:

Read the title on the tin, people. The whole idea of the original series was to develop a game of cat vs. mouse, quickly identifying a Pry-me Suss-peckt and then showing (mostly) Jane smoking (mostly) him out, over the course of about 200 minutes of screentime, often split over two or even four weeks of airings.  This Jane was just plugged into Standard US Network Procedural for 44 minutes a week, rarely giving us that taste of blood in the water, deception in the air, and triumph at the end. The writers spent way too much time with non-homicidal red herrings like Jane's boyfriend's son's mother being Annoying Bitch, and her father-slash-tavern owner fitting every Central Casting stereotype of both.

Maybe this whole business would have run better on cable, where you can get close to an hour of commercial-free time to develop your story, and a block of weeks to run an arc together.    And at least it will hit the magical 13-episode run for a DVD to show up someday.

The final pity is that it's on the wrong network for CSI crossovers, so we'll never get to hear David Caruso bemoan the cancellation:

Well, Jane, I guess you could say that, you never transformed your ratings into..... Optimus Prime.

Comments

[cafemusique.livejournal.com]

My problem with the series (being aware of the name of the UK series, but never having paid attention to it) was that it was "too dramatic." I deeply immerse myself in the shows I watch, and the series was just too stressful for me to enjoy.

Maria Bello's character was the only one I cared about and it was too...too much to see her battle both the case and her colleagues. Every. Single. Week. I wonder how much of that is that, with only 44 minutes to tell a whole story, you had to fit all the conflict in and didn't have time to balance it off.

I DVRed it for the first three or four weeks, but dropped it when I realized that it felt like a chore to press play to start an episode.

I think my comments may say more about my idiosyncrasies than the reasons it didn't get the ratings NBC was hoping for, but it's how I felt about the show, FWIW.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Another thing they initially whiffed on, and then tried to fix too late, was crediting the cast, by name and face, in the opening credits. Other than Bello and Aidan Quinn, I'd not heard of any of these actors, and they wasted a similar amount of time with panoramic flyovers of the East River and Central Park. By the time they added a more conventional set of credits, so we'd know who actually was playing Reg or Jane's dad, you could basically see the drain being circled.

Little things like that help a show, at least with me. Hill Street Blues had that same time slot, 30-ish years ago, and overcame bad initial ratings by making us care more about who these-all characters were. I'd never heard of anybody in the case (except Ed Marinaro, who'd been a football star at Cornell a few years before I got there), but by mid-first season, I knew who his character, and Henry's, and Belker's (he in the icon) by face and actor name. And that helps when you're trying to build a following.