Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [129]
Noooooo!!!
Come on. You're kidding around. It can't be.
Did my scrotum deceive me?
“… picking up the show for season three.”
Well, apparently, yes it did.
The show was canceled. Things had come full circle, All Washed Up being not only the original title, but now, coincidentally, my new career status.
The main reason for the cancelation wasn't a secret: it was the viewers. More specifically, there weren't any. At least, not enough to set the ratings on fire, and certainly not enough to make a very expensive series like ours worth the financial outlay.
Networks live or die by “the numbers;” they'll all tell you that, and our numbers must have kept dwindling, I guess, killed either by the move from Mondays at 9 P.M. to Mondays at 8 P.M., or by the move from Mondays to Wednesdays, or perhaps by being taken off the schedules for three weeks to allow for a major sporting event; or even by being subsequently moved again, this time from Wednesdays to Fridays, and then from Fridays to Saturdays. All in the space of fourteen episodes! It's hard to figure out the logic behind this. Maybe the guys at the network were embarrassed by the show. It's possible. And especially by their new, renegade host who—confound him!—kept giving his honest opinion about places he didn't like, rather than sugarcoating it in the usual bland PR blurb. Maybe they simply had to keep the series out of the public gaze, like a loud and difficult uncle who gets drunk at weddings and starts telling dirty jokes to children, then cancel it ASAP, or risk never being able to shoot future travel shows in the places he'd criticized ever again. Honestly, I have no real idea what went on; it's a mystery to me. All I know is, there's a simple equation that executives are taught at television-making school: No Audience = No Advertisers = No TV Show.
That's the hay and rags of it.
Yet, though I understood the reasoning behind the decision—and I did; it was all very logical, simple mathematics, nothing personal—it still felt for all the world like someone had just ripped my newborn baby's head off and was using it to play volleyball.
I continued sitting on the floor, hugging my knees, dazed, stymied, giving my Mystified Look one final surprise airing, only this time it was for real.
“Pah, that's okay, never mind,” I bounced back, evincing exemplary calm in the circumstances. “I'm always very philophosical about such things.”
Philophosical?
The fact that I stumbled over the word betrayed the true depth of my distress. Truth is, I wasn't philophosical about any of this. Nothing like. I was seething mad.
“But I did it for you,” I wanted to scream down the phone. “I gave up a year of my life—and one of my organs, let's not forget that—for you. And now what? You betray me? What the hell is that about? You Judas! It's a perfectly—pleasant—little—show. No less a person than the TV critic of the New York Times said so. How can you give up on us now? Oh, and another thing,” I ranted silently in my head, “if what you say is true, and you care so much about the numbers, how come I never appeared on Conan O'Brien?”
Then I realized that this last bit wasn't in my head, I'd said it out loud. Oops.
I don't know for certain how many viewers Conan has, but let's say fifty (He's on late at night.) Surely, if all the people who caught me on there were tantalized enough to tell their friends and they all tuned in to our show to see what the fuss was about, wouldn't that have boosted our meager audience significantly? I bet it would.
The Thumb agreed. It probably would have helped, yes, but… well, it just hadn't worked out. He couldn't explain why. Clearly, somebody had dropped the ball. Sorry.
From here, we turned our attention to the future. I let him know that I was thinking of writing a book about all of this: about my year in the wilderness. Or as he would call it: television.
For some reason this led to a surprisingly awkward moment. I could imagine his eyes rolling to the ceiling in paranoid exasperation. Oh, God, please no, not