Sit Down, Shut Up (or Why I Can’t Think of a Wittier Title)

Stuart is the only cast member who still has a positive outlook for the show.

FOX is well known in animation circle for being a somewhat “friendly” place for animation on network TV, and in a sense, it is justified. FOX has shown more primetime animation in the last 20 year than any other network. The reason is plain and simple. As a young network, FOX needed programming and decided to take a risk with an offshoot of the Tracy Ullman show. The Simpsons have since gone on to define TV comedy, not just animation.

Following on from the Simpsons were King of the Hill, Family Guy and Futurama (another Matt Groening production). Well, none of these other shows copied the success of the Simpsons (although King of the Hill lasted 13 seasons, it has been on the chopping block after more than one of them). Family Guy has the distinct honour of being the only show to have been cancelled and brought back by the same network, twice. Futurama, on the other hand, was not so fortunate, being thrown around by FOX so much that it ended up having five broadcast seasons despite only four being produced.

With that in mind, I had a certain amount of apprehension when Sit Down, Shut Down was announced. Besides the fact that American adaptations of foreign shows have been historically bad (Men Behaving Badly, Teachers, and so on), this one was going from live-action to animation, and it was being done by Mitchell Hurwitz, the guy behind Arrested Devlopment. Which, sadly, was one of the those shows that was the darling of the  critics but not everyone else (for my previous rant about critics, click here).

So imagine my surprise (and delight) when I finally got to see an actual episode. It was much better than I anticipated. The animation (mixed with live-action backgrounds) proved interesting. The characters were well thought out and despite some shallowness in the pilot, have developed quite well. I found the jokes really funny and intelligent. I didn’t even mind the rather blatant breaking of the fourth wall. Overall, I found the show seemed to improve with each new episode. Sadly, nobody else seemed to think the same way.

Premièring to (supposedly) dismal ratings, FOX shifted the show to 7pm after two weeks before finally swinging the axe on Tuesday. So, now, in this fifth paragraph, I will outline the reason for today’s post: an analysis of how and why I think the show failed.

Starting with the period leading up to the première, FOX did do some fairly heavy promotion during the ‘Animation Domination’ block of programming. Practically every ad break there was either a long or short promo piece about the show and what we, the viewing audience, could expect. The frequency and detail of the promos became greater the closer we got to the big day.

On that particular Sunday, the show premièred and we were diligently informed that there would be another episode the following Sunday. So far so good. However, on Monday, the ratings came out and apparently they weren’t up to scratch. They were lower than expected, and the 18-49 demographic seemed particularly weak. Talk of imminent death was already being heard around the internet.

Fast-forward to the following Sunday, and I was watching FOX as usual. Despite Sit Down, Shut Up being in the same timeslot as the previous week, there was one, ONE promo for the show, and that was right after the Simpsons ended. Again, I watched the show, had a few laughs then went to bed wondering what I was going to read the next day. Surprise! The viewing figures were even lower than the previous week, in fact they seemed to drag down the entire line-up (the theory of one show dragging down an entire lineup is one I find flawed at best). FOX was quick to move the show to a 7pm (?) slot, where it died a death this week before the final blow.

Firstly, the show itself. It’s not the greatest show out ever broadcast on FOX, and it was crude at times. The animation, while certainly a bit left-field, is certainly not the worst I’ve ever seen. Was it the humour? Perhaps, but there was a good mix of intelligent and fart jokes that would entertain most people.

I guess I have a few questions for the executive(s) responsible:

1. Can I have your job (after you’ve been promoted)?

2. Why did you cut all the promos the second week? What if I missed the first episode, I would have had no idea there was going to be another one; aren’t pilots normally a one-off broadcast?

3. I’m 18-49, why wasn’t there any on-line promotion? I spend less than 1 hour a day watching TV, and that’s normally taken up by a rerun of The Simpsons on the CW. The rest is spent online in one form or another. Couldn’t you have maybe put the next episode up there first, so I could watch it and tell my friends?

4. What’s with the move to 7pm? OK, maybe it was to remove the poison pill from the lineup, but there’s another problem. I didn’t see any promos for the move, so when I tuned in for the Simpsons at 8, wasn’t I surprised to see King of the Hill afterwards. I missed my new favourite show.

5. I don’t have a Nielson box. Personally, I think it’s an antiquated method of determining viewership. You should look at which show is the most pirated shared on BitTorrent. Everybody that downloads there isn’t watching your network, or Hulu for that matter.

6. So now that you’ve lost money (hopefully not too much, and hopefully not enough to cause Sony’s first loss in well over a decade), what will you do with the unaired episodes? Can we expect them on Hulu? [Adult Swim]? DVD? I can only hope, but it would appear that you may have a future cult hit on your hands, if you can take advantage of it and grow a market eager enough to pay for it.

OK, rant over. I’m not holding anyone specific to blame for the show’s failure. The cast and crew did a great job, it’s just that the viewers didn’t come in as expected (how do the come up with the expected numbers anyway?), but that’s beside the point. TV shows need time to generate a following. Heck, Cheers finished dead last among all TV shows on it’s debut, and look how long that went for, feckin’ forever, that’s how long.

I guess I’ll just have to join the game and change the rules.