While the launch of ABC’s V has been troubled, probably the biggest and most obvious mistake has been to adopt the multicharacter structure of the original miniseries. While a multicharacter structure makes sense when you’ve got hours to fill in a wideranging story, V as an episodic TV show arguably needed a central character through whose eyes we are to see what’s going on. While Lost was probably a bigger influence in the decision to go with a multicharacter series, than the original V miniseries, that itself was a flawed decision because where Lost managed to make a multicharacter structure work by both having a lot of characters and making them memorable, V has done neither. Where’s Lost’s characters started as enigmas, V’s mainly begin as simple types, the hardworking mom cop, the earnest priest, the disguised alien and the troubled teenage boy. There’s not much more to explore beyond that because rather than characters these are types.

The Stargate franchise is to originality, what Smallville is to canon; but Stargate Universe steals from so many places at once that it becomes hard to keep up. Its two hour pilot shamelessly borrows the structure of Lost’s pilot, beginning with the emergency evacuation, accompanied by flying luggage, and then proceeds to tell the story of how they got here, accompanied by flashbacks to the evacuation, and the character’s personal lives. In other words it’s the Lost pilot taking place in the Stargate universe. Robert Carlyle’s Dr. Rush, with his determination that the Destiny is the most meaningful thing in the universe and has a plan for them, obviously echoes Lost’s Locke. Except Destiny is the Hatch. There’s even a countdown timer that kinda resembles the Hatch timer.

But it doesn’t end there. Stargate Universe mixes that up with some of the look and plot of Battlestar Galactica, and pads that out with a cast that owes something to Lost by way of the CW, including Eli, a Seth Rogen lookalike who gets on board by solving a puzzle in an MMORPG that looks a lot like Mass Effect, talk about pandering to your SciFi channel audience, a Senator’s daughter who spends half an episode naked in the shower, and a soldier who hallucinates in Catholic symbolism, crossing Supernatural with Battlestar Galactica for pretentiousness fail.

The thing is that underneath all those layers, the show isn’t bad. It’s just uneventful. The cast works reasonably well and so does the premise. But with no aliens in sight, there’s nothing of interest except ship malfunctions. Air was a fairly decent follow up to a reasonably strong pilot, but even so it doesn’t really capture your attention. Darkness was so boring that the producers felt the need to throw in gobs of eye candy to try and keep viewers from switching the channel. And basing a show around crazy people yelling at each other only works if you manage to convince a bunch of the alpha dorks and the IO9 crowd that you’re selling brilliant drama, ala the Battlestar Galactica reboot, something that Stargate Universe doesn’t have a shot in hell of pulling off. That means Stargate Universe needs an enemy fast to survive.

Don’t get me wrong, The Office is still occasionally funny, and by the standards of NBC, where the competition is 30 Rock, a show watched by media writers and no one else, and Jay Leno, it’s not that hard to be number one. But it’s a long way from the show it used to be. Back on the early seasons of The Office, Dwight and occasional appearances by Creed brought in the crazy, realistic enough in a single office. Most everyone else just wanted to go home at the end of the day.

And somewhere along the way, The Office became a cartoon, and every character on it became a cartoon. Michael went from occasionally over the top as a clueless boss, to over the top crazy all the time with no limit. Dwight became crazier and everyone else became just as deranged as Dwight. And the rest of the cast became cartoons too. It’s gotten so that you can easily predict anyone’s line because everyone is a one note cliche. Stanley will be tired, Oscar will be wishy washy, Toby will be depressed, Phyllis will undermine women and whine about men, Angela will say something self-righteous, and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile Dwight has a lot of competition, with Andy having violent temper tantrums, Ryan going unaccountably from a put upon temp working through business school into a crazed fraud committing junkie psychopath, Angela had a very public affair with two men in the office, and so on and so forth. Only Pam and Jim have been stayed normal, probably because the writers know the backlash and the viewer loss that would happen if they didn’t. But in a way saddest of all, Michael has gone from a character trying to be a better person, to one who indulges in tantrums and wacky behavior non-stop. He’s become Homer Simpson, and that’s the opposite of character development.

Is there anything that Dollhouse can’t or won’t lose to? Dollhouse managed to get beaten by a cable SciFi TV series, getting trashed by Stargate Universe. Which is sad when you consider that not only can’t Dollhouse beat the CW’s Smallville, even though FOX has more affiliates and better distribution, while the CW is actually on the way out. But Dollhouse can’t even beat a SciFi channel series, and when cable shows beat you, that’s a signal that it’s time to go.

Kevin Reilly obviously made the wrong choice by renewing Dollhouse instead of Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which for all its faults was not being slapped around by the SyFy channel. I hope keeping Eliza Dushku slash Seth MacFarlane happy was worth blowing millions just to lose to the SyFy channel. At this point the only thing for FOX to do is to pull the plug early. There’s no reason that the unwatchable disaster best known as Dollhouse should keep going, while Drive and Wonderfalls were tossed out the window at the first sign of low ratings.

Yes the die hard Whedonettes will whine and complain, but they’ll whine and complain anyway. And as for Seth MacFarlane, yes he’s programming all of FOX Sunday, but really what are his alternatives. Hugely bigoted and derivative cartoons are not exactly going to fly on ABC or NBC or CBS, even if they would have him. It’s either FOX or Comedy Central, and they have better content that MacFarlane couldn’t compete with in a thousand years. Canceling The Days of Ou… Dollhouse sooner, will open up room for another series, which might you know actually not suck.

Yup, the one Joss Whedon show that FOX and whoever should have canceled, but didn’t, Dollhouse is back. Dollhouse’s season finale pulled in a 2.8. Dollhouse’s season premiere pulled in a 2.7. How low those numbers will go by the time that Dollhouse burns through its 13 episode order, and Kevin Reilly has to choose between not wasting more money or pleasing Eliza Dushku’s boyfriend, is anyone’s guess. Dollhouse’s 18/34 demos haven’t dropped any, but they’re still as good or bad as Smallville or Brothers. Considering what FOX is spending to get a 1.0 demo, you’d think that FOX was so desperate it was the CW.

Kevin Reilly stupidly made the choice to cancel Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which managed to pull in a 3.8 for both its season opener and season finale. By contrast Dollhouse had dropped from 4.7 to 2.8 in only 13 episodes. If that match keeps up, FOX may be stuck with negative viewers, 13 episodes in. And considering the not particularly promising stuff that Epitaph One suggested we have to look forward to, that might actually happen.

It’s hard to know who exactly to blame for this mess. Kevin Reilly deserves his share for killing a great SciFi TV series for a very bad one. Joss Whedon’s obsessive fanboys and fangirls who reflexively praise anything the man does, regarding of quality or content, and if you think I’m being mean or exaggerating, remember that there was a Save Dollhouse campaign going, before a single Dollhouse episode had even aired. That’s like running a Four More Years campaign for a candidate who wasn’t even elected yet. There’s Eliza Dushku making her final bid for relevance, before she has to buckle down and play someone’s wacky best friend on a sitcom. And finally there’s Joss Whedon whose output has actually gotten worse over the years, and who really doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing with Dollhouse. Maybe if he had exercised some quality control back during the Buffy and Angel days, or when making Serenity or Dollhouse, he wouldn’t need a die hard fanbase to promote him, his work would actually be a popular, and not in a viral webseries kind of way.

It’s not clear what Dawn Ostroff’s thinking was behind moving the CW’s highest rated show, Smallville, into the Friday Night Death Slot of Doom, but that’s just what she did, and just what she got. The Smallville Season 9 premiere, and this is a premiere mind you, pulled ratings in the neighborhood of 2.5, which when compared to the Season 8 premiere of 4.3 is down a whole whole lot. Smallville’s ratings did decline over Season 8, but even Season 8’s finale pulled in well above 3 million. So while 2.5 is not the worst case scenario kind of drop, it’s certainly bad news.

The really baffling thing is that moving Smallville to Friday night would have made sense if it was a contractually obligated series that the CW didn’t care about, or if it was some long shot show. Instead the CW spent a lot of money to bring back Smallville for another season, only to then dump it on Friday nights, a time that the CW should not even be scheduling programming for, considering how bad their ratings and overall situation is. The theory that Dawn Ostroff wants to kill Smallville and replace it with another Gossip Girls clone, like The Vampire Diaries, is crazy, but it’s the only theory that makes any kind of sense.

The one thing that the CW and Ostroff have insured is that Smallville’s 9th season is its final season. On the other hand with the general ratings freefall, this may actually not be the end. The Brothers premiere pulled in numbers nearly as bad as Smallville. And that was on FOX, which unlike the CW, people who aren’t teenage girls actually watch. Meanwhile Dollhouse right after it, couldn’t even manage a 3, turning in at 2.7 million viewers. That’s actually down from a 2.8 at its own season finale. Compare that to the canceled Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles whose finale pulled in 3.8 million viewers. So despite Smallville’s decline, it’s still ahead of the Dollhouse crapfest, when you compensate for network discrepancies and promotional power.

When you name your show Bored to Death, you’ve either given up trying to promote it or you’re Jonathan Ames. In this case Bored to Death delivers exactly what you might expect, boredom. Starring Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman, Bored to Death could be mistaken for a Wes Anderson movie, a really bad Wes Anderson movie. The running gag has Schwartzman, as a listless Jonathan Ames sinking deep into self-pity, drinking lots of white wine, smoking pot and deciding to advertise himself as a private detective on Craigslist. If you think the latter has the makings of an exciting story, you’re wrong. You’re not wrong that it has the makings of an exciting story, because it does. You’re wrong because Bored to Death can’t deliver on that premise or on anything else. If you really enjoy the thought of a morose self-effacing and generally pathetic Jason Schwartzman getting talked at by various slightly more interesting characters, the best of which is his dope and Viagra addicted editor played by Ted Danson, while he tries to interject something that would make most reasonable people want to punch him in the fact, then Bored to Death is perfect for you. Just leave your wristwatch at home and stock up on the caffeine.

When AMC decided to remake The Prisoner, it was dubious whether the series could even exist without Patrick McGoohan and the trippy 70’s background. AMC’s Comic Con Prisoner promo demonstrates that it can exist, though the trippiness factor seems to have been cut down by a lot, in favor of a straight mano a mano drama. It’s hard to go wrong with Ian McKellen as a villain, though to his credit Ron Howard somehow managed that feat in The DaVinci Code, but it’s also hard to see the miniseries remake as anything but generic. The promo shows off the good, but it doesn’t seem to capture that vibe of paranoia, that claustrophobic sense of Kafkaesque insanity in a post-modern world where madness becomes a sane reaction to an insane world, that the original series did so chillingly well.

Ben Silverman, the golden boy who was supposed to save NBC, finally got fired. And all he had to do was destroy NBC to get fired. There were the disastrous remakes of classic shows such as Knight Rider and Bionic Woman that scored high ratings on their premieres and then sent audiences fleeing en masse from the tidal wave of the suck. These were shows that should have killed, but instead were built to bore. I could hardly get through the Bionic Woman pilot without falling asleep or wondering what the hell was going on. Knight Rider was a little better but not much. Then there were the ridiculously literally shows, Crusoe, Kings, Merlin, that had no actual audience on NBC, though they might have performed on AMC or A&E. Then of course there were the Australian sitcoms that translated to America about as well as a kangaroo running for office would. There was the unwatchable Office spinoff, that turned out not to be a spinoff, with the unwatchable Amy Poehler as the lead. And does anyone really need to mention the horrifying idea of giving Rosie her own variety show in Prime Time, an idea that would have been terrible even back when people under 60 actually watched Variety Shows? No I didn’t think so. Good luck Ben, and good night.

Or it would be MST3000 fodder if Mystery Science Theater was still around. But who needs robots to do your jokes for you. Meteor is wonderful as a terribly lame miniseries that’s also unintentionally hilarious. Between the misplaced cast composed of people who are much better than this, the ridiculous science and the writers deciding to fill most of the show with ridiculous soapy plots, including a doctor looking for her son, a psycho cop terrorizing his partner’s daughter and a research assistant trying to escape convicts in Mexico, Meteor is hilariously perfect.

Just picture an overweight and clueless Jason Alexander screaming, “You don’t want to be tossing nukes around blindly” at the military, or the LAPD psycho cop who rather than killing his partner who turned him in, goes on kill everyone but his partner, or Stacey Keach completely miscast as a warm country sheriff, glaring at everyone in sight with barely restrained fury, and delivering a heartwarming speech to the townsfolk in the same tone that he would use to threaten them all with violent deaths, Meteor is unintentionally wonderful entertainment.

The finale will air on Sunday, when we’ll discover what happens with the professor’s assistant, who winds up in yet another car crash, killing yet another protective older man with her, the psychocop who went to the isolated cabin where Stacey Keach’s daughter and two girls she met along the way through an act of selfless sacrifice, to spend time in a hot tub, and of course whether Jason Alexander’s Nate can stop eating donuts long enough to blow up the meteor and save the world. Sure in comparison to another World Go Boom miniseries coming to TV this summer where the gravity turns off when a white dwarf hits the moon, Meteor doesn’t seem that crazy, but it’s good old fashioned entertainment. And no matter how stupid it might be, it’s still twice as smart as Transformers 2.

The SciFi Channel seems to taken one lesson home from Battlestar Galactica’s very limited success. To take existing properties and reboot them to make them much “darker”. Luckily Stargate Universe shows that they’ve taken the lesson home by turning out all the lights during shooting. Sure it’s not what “darker” was supposed to mean, but it’s close enough. Next up is an Alien Nation reboot or remake with Tim Minear. Tim Minear is a talented guy, but he doesn’t have a great track record of making shows work on his own. Still the results will probably be interesting, certainly better than the series which moved too far away from the grit and grime of the movie version of Los Angeles and into alien spirituality that grated more often than not.

Of course with a likely Vancouver locale and moved to the Pacific Northwest, the rebooted Alien Nation may look as gritty as Eureka, but we can still hope that Tim Minear makes it worth the watching. I can’t say the same for Quantum Leap, a series deeply embedded in the 80’s, which ran off the performances of Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell. But at least the SciFi Channel or the SyFy Channel hasn’t tried to reboot Sliders. Yet.

But you can’t help but wonder if it isn’t the imminent prospect of District 9’s release and the accompanying hype surrounding it, that has helped the SciFi Channel or the SyFy Channel or the GhostWrestlingandIP Channel make the decision to go after an older more affordable property with the same theme to remake as a series. Alien Nation, unlike Battlestar Galactica doesn’t have much of a fanbase. (I’m sure it has a fanbase since anything that was ever on TV, particularly if it involved Science Fiction has a fanbase, just not a sizable one), its only real advantage is cheapness. To reboot it Tim Minear will have to break through not only Alien Nation’s own cliches, but the cliches of similar shows, such as Earth Final Conflict, and of course look original compared to District 9, which goes all multispecies on us.

I believe he might be able to do it. But how will it look under the vanilla arm of the SyFy Channel and shot in Vancouver on a small budget with actors of the caliber of talent that fill Eureka is a much different question.

In contrast to a lot of the negative feedback on a possible Cell miniseries, I don’t think it is such a bad idea. It is fairly hard to screw up a concept as straightforward as “cell phones make everyone who uses them into a zombie.” I’ll grant you it’s possible. George Romero has lately shown us that it’s possible to screw up even simpler zombie movie premises by overlaying them with MySpace and War on Terror posturing, but assuming the producers use some common sense, and don’t overburden us with too much soapiness, even the destructive powers of the SciFi Channel can’t entirely kill the idea of cell phones turning humans into a zombie hive mind. So long as they come up with a better cause for the whole thing than some terrorist virus.

Cell though might work better as a TV series, than as a miniseries. The plus side of reworking Cell as a TV series is that a world gone zombie storyline works quite well on a TV series basis, and it’s probably only the gore and the lack of imagination that prevented a zombie TV series from being made. I don’t count Babylon Fields, since while it was a zombie TV series, it never actually got made, and its zombies were something more complicated than even Cell could cover. I think Babylon Fields was the real predecessor to True Blood and would have made for a much smarter and much less campier TV series, but there’s no use crying over spilled zombie milk.

A TV series would have to change Stephen King’s original story in many places, which is a plus, as the book could have an editor or four. It has its moments but King hasn’t been able to write a good ending in a long time, and Cell is no better, though it’s certainly better than the endings for Insomnia or Dark Tower VII or pretty much anything else he’s written, besides From a Buick 8. A miniseries though will probably follow the story a little too closely, especially if King has enough oversight, and a glance at The Shining miniseries that he praised as the most authentic version of his work should remind you of the consequences of that.

It’s not exactly a revelation that the CW doesn’t have much of a future, which is really where any discussion of Smallville has to begin. Dawn Ostroff first wrecked UPN and then went on to wreck the CW. At this point the CW’s ratings are in the toilet, it has no workable online viewing strategy, and its high profile attempts to remake 90210 and create an All Gossip Girls network has failed badly. Smallville, the network’s highest rated series, is headed for Season 9. Its ratings have been declining too, but they’re still above the rest of the network. Which is sad when you consider that they’ve been below 4 million for a while now. The question for the CW is whether Smallville is worth spending insane amounts of money on in order to get a Season 10. The CW has tried the spinoff strategy before, but as turns out no one wanted to watch any of the spinoffs. That just leaves the inevitable, Smallville can’t continue forever. There isn’t enough budget and the show is essentially now Superman, just without the costume. It might somehow claw out a Year 10, but it’s not too clear that even the CW will make it to then.

No I don’t mean because he told a rape joke about Sarah Palin’s 14 year old or 18 year old daughter. That was actually a lucky break for Letterman because it’s probably the only joke he’s told in the last 5 years that anyone even remembers. But with Leno gone, and Letterman needing a nationwide scandal just to win a single ratings night from Conan, of all people, maybe it’s time for him to move along the old folks trail to Branson, Missouri. The arguments for are pretty obvious.

Network TV is dying. The ratings are way down and that means the only way to salvage this is with a youth demographic and clips that play well on social media. And that’s where Conan easily beats Dave Letterman any day of the week. And will go on beating him. But winning a battle over late night TV stopped mattering around the time people got other entertainment options at 11:30. Conan and Letterman are fighting over a shrinking viewership, and this is Letterman’s last chance to go out on top looking like a winner, instead of getting kicked to the curb by CBS the way the equally graying Dan Rather was, to make way for the late night equivalent of Katie Couric.

While the endless CSI and Law and Order generic spinoff series may make it seem like the TV detective show is a good bet, the demographics listed in the Variety report tell a different story. Lately of course new launches of TV detective shows haven’t gone too well. Whether it’s Women’s Murder Club or Raines, the shows have fizzled and there’s a reason.

“Women’s Murder Club” clocked in as ABC’s oldest series demographically with a media age of 57. That’s practically Murder She Wrote numbers, itself a long running and high rated detective show on CBS that had to be booted off because its demographics were just too high. Women’s Murder Club to no one’s surprise has been canceled by ABC. But the TV detective story doesn’t quite end there.

NBC’s oldest demographic series is Monk, another TV detective show, ringing in at 58. Canterbury’s Law, a lawyer slash detective series, ringings in as FOX’s oldest skewing demographic at 55. It too was canceled. The pattern isn’t too hard to spot.

In 2003 CBS had a median viewer age of 52. Today it’s 54. No network wants to be the next CBS, yet at 50 ABC is almost there. And the TV detective series too often plays to the PBS Inspector Morse demographic, an older viewership that networks don’t really want anymore. And that’s bad news for TV detective shows.

The problem arises from cross demographic programming. TV networks killed the detective action series in favor of the detective investigative series because it rated better across gender lines. One hour series rate better with women than with women. Detective shows rated better with men. The sort of detective shows on television are an attempt to cater to both sides of the table and produce neutered detective shows that are more about relationships and autopsies than shooting the bad guy. And those are not the shows with a good lock on younger viewers who bore easily. And while detective shows skew to a female and older audience, the young males turn on the XBox 360 and explore Azeroth.

To get them back, networks need to revise their programming model radically and move away from a conservative watered down approach that results in TV shows that no one but grandma watches. If TV networks were less conservative in their programming strategy, paradoxically they would have more room to cater to a wider demographic of viewers, without constantly and futilely chasing after younger viewers.

Not all that long ago, it was taken as gospel that Ron Moore was the biggest genius to hit TV Science Fiction since JMS. Of course that was when the SciFi Channel was running ads for Battlestar Galactica’s final season that pretentiously mimicked the Last Supper. Then the season finale came around at last and most people finally got it, even the die hards, that Ron Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica was worthless self-involved pretentious junk. Around the time that all the starships set sail for the sun and the survivors decided to commit suicide by giving up their technology in a prehistoric earth, the shark was jumped. And Ron Moore’s rep went with it. Now Caprica is being studiously ignored, and in a well deserved way too, as it seems that Ron Moore can’t turn in a show people actually want to watch, without someone else’s IP to play with. Case in point, Star Trek, Roswell and Battlestar Galactica itself. And then there’s Virtuality, Ron Moore’s brand new spanking original series debuting in the FOX Friday Night deathslot, but not just at any time, but in June. Kiss that spaceship goodbye. Not only are the promo photos being mocked over wheelchair dude in space and the outfits, but it’s clear that Ron Moore’s halo of pretentious invulnerability is gone. Maybe he shouldn’t have flown all those ships into the sun after all.

Yup they did it again. Cancel the show that actually has a fan base and a hit movie coming out, keep the senseless muddled show that only exists because you’re in the Joss Whedon business. Dollhouse had managed to drop down to 2.8 million viewers for its finale in only 13 episodes. Down from 4.7 million viewers.

By contrast Sarah Connor Chronicles pulled in 3.8 million viewers for its finale, and 3.8 million viewers for its season premiere. There were plenty of drops in between, but it’s clear that Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles had a much larger fanbase and a larger viewership.

There might have been some justification here if at least Dollhouse was pulling in the kids, but with a 1.0 18-34 rating, it sure isn’t doing that either. Canceling both shows might have made some sense, renewing a failure like Dollhouse while canceling Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles, which had steadier ratings and is sure to get a boost from the Terminator Salvation release is a completely incomprehensible decision.

This can happen when a network doesn’t get one show, but gets another show. But who exactly “gets” Dollhouse? The only way it can be justified is if FOX bit the bullet and ordered 13 more episodes of Dollhouse to stay in the Joss Whedon or Eliza Dushku business. Neither one of them seem like they’re worth 13 million bucks.

Looking so far at the shows the networks are bringing on board for the next season, the dominant word is conservative. Not in politics, but in risk taking. And the other word would be boring. First there are the conservative renewals, NBC bringing back Chuck or FOX bringing back Dollhouse are hard to defend decisions, except on the grounds that network heads don’t seem to be able to make decisions anymore. And with falling ratings, you’ve got to hang on to something. That’s particularly true for FOX and NBC. Then you’ve got CBS ordering the usual mix of dramas no one will watch, that and a NCIS spinoff, which is set to become the new Law and Order or CSI megafranchise killing television by replacing itself non-stop. If two seasons ago there was too much risk, now all the risk is gone. Just the usual two parts dramas, one part reality show and the occasional sitcom in between.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the Lost Season 5 finale yet, sorry I just spoiled ya. But as it turns out, Locke was actually dead for half the season anyway, and word down from Terry O’Quinn is it’s permanent. Which is really kind of a shame in more ways than just the obvious. Like few other shows, Lost has shown an ability to create strong memorable characters and then dispose of them without a second thought. Locke was a key figure in Lost, not just for plot mechanics, but in the human equation. His grin on rising from the wreckage all around him only to realize he was not paralyzed anymore was one of the key human moments in a show that decided to not only make him expandable, but turn him into a pawn and make his entire journey meaningless.

With Disney slash ABC finally getting on board the Hulu train, we have the very curious phenomenon of seeing three networks encapsulated by one outlet, a single broadcast website. What if anything does that mean for the future of TV networks is the interesting question. With NBC, FOX and ABC, three of the big four networks, airing many of their shows through one outlet, we have a virtual screenshot of the death of the network. CBS, which naturally skews older, is still holding out and trying to make a go of TV.com. But despite all of Hulu’s extensive programming and embedding capabilities, it still looks like a single channel when compared to YouTube’s insane torrent of content. While YouTube is now trying to compete with Hulu by embedding its own library of compelling shows such as Party of Five, Full House or Zombies of War IV, YouTube’s real strength is in its ability to project itself as an endless amount of channels. Meanwhile Hulu despite its successes is unable to project a true multi channel environment, something that will become a real liability when the stakes for network survival get tougher.