Journeyman - season 1 thread - Page 17

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

I am going to miss this show. It has been thought-provoking, fun, tense, well-acted, well-written... I only watch about 5-6 primetime shows anymore and this was one of them. It would be great if another network could pick this up and give it a chance.

Nathan

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Add another one who is really going to miss this show.

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Just echoing the sentiments expressed above. My son and I got very wrapped up in the drama of watching Dan, Katie and finally Jack keeping the secret.

An excellent show that wil be much missed.

Doug

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Amen to that. I can't f'n stand that everytime an interesting, well thought out, dramatic show comes along, some network nitwit decides to cancel it. Yet they keep churning out these lame "reality" shows like a bakery churns out loaves of bread and the moronic sheepish "average person" goes ga-ga over it. It seems, someday soon, we're gonna be like the society in THE RUNNING MAN, one network, one stupid reality show after another. This strike has only made things even worse. Thank God I have so many good movies and prior TV series on DVD that I could literally watch them all in some kind of sequence and probably not have to repeat any title more than once a year or longer even.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

What a superb final (?) episode! They did a great job being a finale to a half-story in just nine or so episodes. I'll be disappointed if the show is brought back post-strike, but it's a more satisfying ending than other shows canceled after season ending cliffhanger.

Unfortunately, it seems that this sort of show is very expensive , has low ratings, and doesn't pay well, especially compared to reality TV.

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John, I'm not sure why you're blaming the network execs. They bought the show and aired it. The public didn't watch in enough numbers. What are they supposed to do? They're not canceling the show because it's intelligent, they're canceling it because it isn't meeting their profit goals.

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Mikah, That might be true. But!...They never promoted the show as much as they could have. I remember seeing NBC Monday night promos. They would say "All new episodes of Chuck & Heroes." Most of the time they never even mentioned Journeyman. Also, this trend of cancelling shows half way through a season is ridiculous. Give a chance for the show to find its audience. When Seinfeld first came out it did poorly. So did lots of other shows that went on to be hits. If I was NBC. As soon as the they knew the strike was coming. I would have held off airing new episodes of the show and waited for all of the reruns to begin. Then hyped the show and the fact that its new episodes. Maybe, it would have done better.

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Todd, right on.

Mikah, I fault the network execs because they are spineless wimps who can't make a decision based on anything other than the bean-counter's input.

Back in the days of the original Star Trek, (if I am remebering correctly), it didn't do so great at first, but they stuck with it and let it run for 3 seasons. The result was a major sci-fi franchise that, despite hiccups along the way, has done outstanding (overall) for over 4 decades now. If it were in this day and age, it probably would have been cancelled before the first season finished and we would all have lost something very special.

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But that's not the criteria for saying they failed the show. Even if they promoted it twice as much, they still could have promoted it more. Heroes could be promoted more. I think you're saying they didn't promote it a reasonable about, but the fact that they promoted it less than Chuck and Heroes simply says to me they promoted shows they thought had the higher probability of doing well.


First, I'm not sure that's true. I do know it's true that execs need shows to be profitable. They're running a business, not an endowment. I suppose Accountants became referred to in a denigrating manner as bean counters because they're tasked with looking strictly at numbers and not potential and such. However, I think keeping a business profitable is a pretty valuable service.


One problem with that example is it ignores shows that are given a chance and never improve in the ratings. There's no science to this stuff. It's your subjective feeling that if Journeyman were allowed to run, it'd pick up an audience. The people responsible for giving it that chance feel differently. Since we're not dealing in the land of objective fact, I wouldn't call them spineless wimps just because they have less confidence in the show than you. After all, they could let it run and lose money on it, and have it never improve in the ratings. Then you'd just say "Oops" and go on about your life, but they'd be in charge of (and responsible for) losing their company money.

I just don't think that's a reasonable expectation. 13 episodes isn't exactly an early yanking. But you guys tell me... if you were network exec for a day, how long would you give the show to lose money before pulling it?

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Also, comparing today to 40 years ago is ridiculous - even disappointments like Star Trek probably got something like 20% of the viewing audience in third place, which is all but impossible today.

It would depend on the exact situation, of course... I'd probably be more willing to figure something out with a show that was mostly done-in-one stories - it could be relaunched on a new night with minimal disruption and would have greater rerun value if it did turn things around. The other question is what the trend is - something that's hovering at about the same number might just need a push, but something like Harsh Realm (which lost half its audience every week) gets yanked quickly.

Journeyman got a pretty fair deal. You always wish it could have gotten more, but then something else likely would have gotten less, and their partisans would be ticked.

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Just a minor correction on the Star Trek example, every season the show was hovering with the lowest ratings and it was nearly cancelled the first year. The second year, it was cancelled right before the end of the season, but this led to the historic and first major organized letter writing campaign directed to NBC and additionally, viewers protested NBC studios and put Save Star Trek bumper stickers on NBC executives cars. This led to saving it for the 3rd season and on-air announcement that Star Trek was indeed renewed.

Of course today we have the internet. But this tactic doesn't seem to work as often anymore.

I think the above poster would have liked NBC to give the show a longer run past 13 shows so Journeyman can find an audience. Since that won't happen, it would be really cool if the strike continues, it will be re-run and find an audience.

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Kudos to Falls for being able to give a decent send-off on the assumption the show never returns. It certainly would be interesting if it reappears on Fox, though, but given the dismal numbers, that seems unlikely.

Dan seems to be getting more warning of a 'leap' now, e.g. in the kitchen he knew he was about to go and Katie wanted to watch, but his sister-in-law interrupted and he scooted out the door just in time. And right at the end, presumably he had been in bed and had enough warning to get dressed, and it was a wonderful touch for Katie to finally be able to see him go.

His heart-to-heart with Katie (he understands if she wants to leave him, she decides to support him through it) also demonstrated in one scene why this show was not just a Quantum Leap knock-off -- whilst his travels and changes were the underlying 'A' story each week, his relationship with his family and the effect his travelling had on them is the arc that underpins the whole series, making it dramatically and emotionally more satisfying than QL was (and I loved QL, don't get me wrong).

Also good to see that the Doctor wasn't being creepy or anything, just ultra-cautious, and rightly so. It would have been interesting to see where the rogue FBI agent fit into all this, whether it really was part of a bigger governmental conspiracy (or at least investigation) or not.

Sadly, we probably never will. Sigh.

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I still say that the 10PM timeslot has at least something to do with it. Quite frankly, 3 hours in a row of TV is just too much for a lot of people, not to mention that the show ends at 11, and then there's people who still watch the news nightly, that's really just too late. Add that to the fact that Mondays can be difficult for some, and it doesn't help it. I know someone before has said that there's no good timeslot, but I'd imagine if it was earlier, it at least wouldn't hurt.

I mean, this would be the second year in a row that an intelligent, well-written, and well-acted show has dyed in the 10PM timeslot on a Monday night on NBC, the other being of course Studio 60.

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I just don't understand this reasoning. Something's going at 10pm on Monday, and it has to do well enough to make money. NBC's not going to have a dead hour because "it's too late". So why not Journeyman? Sure, it could go at 9 and have Heroes pushed to 10, but that's just shuffling the deck chairs. And having a themed 3-hr block of quality sci-fi-ish drama makes as much sense as having the shows scattered throughout the week.

I hope that Journeyman survives next year; perhaps Dan's next mission is to fix this But if people just aren't watching it, then what's to be done? Moving it to 25 O'Clock on Smoothsday (the mythical time and day where a deserving show can get its ratings) just isn't realistic.

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Hey guys, didn't NBC run an episode of Life in the Journeyman slot a couple weeks ago, and end up with the same ratings as Journeyman? There is something bad to be said for putting your three best shows in a row on one night -- it is just too much. Chuck-Heroes-Journeyman was a lot to take in. And unlike Chuck and Heroes, Journeyman was not being repeated on SciFi Channel.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Chuck was also getting Saturday night repeats on NBC.

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Don't forget. Journeyman was going up against CSI:Miami.

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I thought it was funny when I read in the paper today that the FBI was reopening the D.B. Cooper case after all these years! Maybe Dan really did come back at some point!

--John

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I saw that news item too, and felt that Journeyman has indeed affected the zeitgeist!

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Then again, didn't Prison Break first tap into the DB Cooper legend?

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Yep. DB died at Fox River. It was very sad.

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NewsRadio did it too, admittedly. The radio station owner was revealed to be D.B. Cooper at one point.

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My wife and I saw the feature on D.B. Cooper on network news last night and we both thought of Journeyman at the same time.

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Did anyone else see the Candorville comic strip on the 1st:
Candorville, by Darrin Bell » Archive » Candorville: 1/1/2008- Journeyman Canceled

Neil

Re: Journeyman - season 1 thread

Will miss this show too, some of the ones still on need to go and some of these good shows need to come back....

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Heroes was well established enough by season two that people were going to watch whether it was promoted or not. Chuck and Journeyman could have used the help.

What I want to know is why NBC even stopped bothered to make next episode promos to run at the end of the last few episodes.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out why Journeyman failed. I can understand why Studio 60 couldn't make it. It was too jarring to go from the much more serious Heroes to the lighter Studio 60, especially since the only break in between was the next week's preview. I believe Studio 60 would have benefitted more in the ER slot, following the sitcoms. Or at least, it would have been a better match thematically.

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I think you're giving the lead-in effect way too much credit. Studio 60 failed for a number of reasons, but the lead-in probably wasn't one. A lot of people were turned off by a show that was supposedly about comedy geniuses that seldom showed them being very funny.

Journeyman... Aside from how knowing whether or not a concept will connect with an audience is a crapshoot, it was a show that used a big idea to tell small stories. That can be underwhelming to a lot of people, even with how well the show did it.

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It is never only about ratings. It is about ratings, cost, and how much of a lead-in audience a show retains, loses or builds on. Journeyman was a wonderful show that lost a substantial percentage of its lead in audience, drew marginal ratings and cost a freakin' bundle. That's three strikes. With any two strikes, the show might have survived. If all of a network's shows on a given night are low-rated, there's less reason to ax any one of them unless it is substantially underperforming the others. A lower-rated show that is cheap to produce and therefore cheap to license can be a better deal for a network than a more expensive one the draws higher ratings because the extra ad revenues could be more than off-set by the added cost.

Each situation is different. One reason for the "lack of ads" (although frankly I remember seeing lots of promos for the show) could be that the decision to ax Journeyman had already been taken and they were just burning off the last of the episodes. If so it would have been stupid and irresponsible (to the shareholders who own the network) to spend extra money promoting the series. (BTW, whenever someone complains about "greedy corporations" I always suggest that they check the stocks in the mutual funds in their pension plan, IRA or 401(k). There's a good chance the complainer is a shareholder in several of those "greedy companies". Making him or her a "greedy owner". )

Regards,

Joe

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I'm not saying that the lead-in/lead-out was the only problem. It's just that the Heroes/S60 combo wasn't as well matched as Heroes/Journeyman.

And I agree, S60 should've had a little more comedy in it, considering it's premise. But, the main reason it failed was becaue it was too smart for network television. It pretty much predicted its own demise from the start.

As for Journeyman, it was a fairly solid show all around. Granted, if they had delayed any of their answers anymore than they did, then even more viewers would have started leaving.

Basically, the point I'm trying to make is, it's harder to see why Journeyman got canned than Studio 60.

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The special effects cost a fortune. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand. The show almost certainly cost more per ratings point generated (hence more per ad dollar generated) than Studio 60 and certainly more than shows that weren't cancelled. If I'm running a business and need to cut expenses, who do I lay off? 1) The guy who is very unproductive and earns a very high salary, but is admired and well-liked, or 2) the guy who earns less and is very productive, but not as well-liked? If you answered 1) you are probably a business owner or a network executive. If you answered 2) you are probably a TV fan.

Regards,

Joe