dear ABC: you SUCK!

in what can only be described as a move i saw coming a mile away but nonetheless desperately hoped wouldn’t happen, ABC has cancelled my favourite new show, Six Degrees.


“huh? what’s Six Degrees?” i hear you ask and, really, it’s not surprising you don’t know what it is since ABC dropped the exquisite drama like a hot potato shortly after its launch last fall. for the uninitiated:

Six Degrees was an hour-long serial examining the intersecting lives of a half-dozen new yorkers. in its cast? no less than FIVE highly enjoyable big-screen talents (campbell scott, hope davis, bridget moynahan, erika christensen and jay hernandez). in its crew? how about executive producer j.j. abrams – that’s right, the guy who brought us Lost and, even better, Felicity. the drama moved slowly, gingerly and intriguingly...perhaps too much for the average viewer, since ratings were often dismal.

but where was the promotion? where was ABC trumpeting the series or shoving its stars on talk shows to help publicize what wound up being a fascinating program that, apparently, no one was watching? nowhere, that’s where. as if that weren’t bad enough, ABC unceremoniously yanked the show off the air indefinitely last october and then just sat on it. new episodes were shot, but no one knew when they might ever see the light of primetime day. when the alphabet network finally decided to give the series a second shot, it came nearly five months after the last episode aired, without any kind of collection of reruns to help new viewers catch up, and the show’s return had zero fanfare. it was only by accident that i even found out it was coming back on.

not surprisingly, no one watched. again. so, after a piddly two weeks back on the air, ABC has axed the show for good. gone. done. no more. five episodes remain unaired. as such, countless mysteries have been left unsolved – what happened to laura’s husband and what was the big secret no one wanted her know? from what (or whom) is/was mae running, and what’s in that mysterious box she’s been guarding with her life? (personally, i think she was holding it for Felicity’s meghan.) who was josh charles gonna play? would laura and caseman ever finally hook up? or would the rampant HoYay! between whitney and laura ever turn into something more? and so on.

you’d think i would have learned my ABC lesson by now, because they’ve done this to me several times in the past and each time the news stings a little more than the last. cancelling terrific, critically acclaimed dramas before their time is something ABC has turned into an art. they did it with My So-Called Life, one of the best teen dramas ever on network TV yet one plagued by a limited (though passionate) viewership. they did it again a couple of years later with Relativity (that's the only show clip on YouTube, folks!), another character-driven but low-rated hour-long series from the MSCL producers, marshall herskovitz and ed zwick. most recently, they yanked herskovitz and zwick’s Once and Again -- featuring the sublime work of susanna thompson and her gifted co-stars -- off the air after shuttling all over its schedule to such an extent that many viewers simply couldn’t keep track of when it would be on. despite emmy nominations, critical raves and a valiant fan campaign to give it another shot, ABC said buh-bye. i still miss that show.

i swear, if ABC had also been responsible for the demise of the brilliantly nuanced American Dreams, we would be SO over. (note: AD’s death was due to the twits at its home network, NBC.)

so what amazing programming will fill the gaping hole of great left by Six Degrees? reruns of Wife Swap. i’m not kidding. Wife-freakin’-Swap! yet ABC still thinks that gem and shows like What About Brian (does ANYONE watch this?), According to Jim (ditto) and In Case of Emergency (what the hell?) deserve airtime. WTF? and they’re still squeezing every last drop of blood out of the stone that is The Bachelor, the most irrelevant one-time pop-culture hit currently still polluting the airwaves...but SD is toast. that’s just wrong. and mean.

for all these things, ABC, you suck. and don’t think that throwing me a bone with last night’s kick-ass, girl-centric episode of Lost absolves you of your programming sins. it doesn’t.

you blow.