Permanent rest stop for Drive

I knew it was too good to be true. The creative genius behind Angel, Firefly (no not Joss) and the little-known Wonderfalls, Tim Minear, has once again been left high and dry by Fox.

I anticipated Drive's premiere for months before it finally aired in a two-part season premiere on April 15th. It's ratings were not great but I held out hope that once it settled into its usual Monday night at 8 PM slot that things would improve.

Disappointingly, however, the ratings did not improve and after just 4 episodes, Fox cancelled the series. I enjoyed the four episodes and was hooked by the high speed chases in the mysterious, secret, illegal, cross country road race. And Nathan Fillion is hot.

The curious thing about Drive is not that it was cancelled, good well-written television is almost always replaced by inane reality TV these days, but that fans seemed to know from the beginning that it would be cancelled.

Reading postings at Whedonesque and TV Squad on April 16th revealed that fans were cautious about becoming too attached to the show. After Minear's experiences with Firefly and Wonderfalls InterplanetSarah even likened Tim and Fox's relationship to Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. Like Lucy, Fox keeps pulling Tim's shows away at the last minute. To give Fox credit, though, they did a good job advertising Drive and, unlile Firefly, didn't premiere it on Friday night.

Much as I lament the loss of a show that I enjoyed (albeit briefly) I do wonder whether the networks made the only rational decision by cancelling a show with low ratings to avoid losing advertisers' dollars.

While I don't pretend to know how accurate Nielsen ratings are at predicting the actual viewership of a show, they do appear to be the only game in town. If the network execs are beholden to these ratings to determine which programs are revenue generating, then we shouldn't blame the network execs, but instead the Nielsen rating system for the loss of favorite shows.

Perhaps in addition to recruiting creative talent to write, direct and act in TV shows, we should also find additional ways to measure the viewership of these shows. We've seen that if Nielsen is to be believed, then the U.S. wants to watch trashy reality TV shows with no redeeming social value. This American TV consumer, at least, would rather turn the television off than watch the search for the next Pussy Cat Doll.