Arrested Production

I heard the sad news last night: Arrested Development, one of the best shows on Television, has been canceled.

In a way it’s my own fault. Mine and the thousands of others like me: the on-demand generation.

Thanks to the internet, TiVo, and most importantly DVDs, I’ve become used to the idea that television shows should be there when I want to watch them, not the other way around. I’ve tried to follow shows before, but I’m not a creature of habit. My alarm is set to a different time every morning. I rarely have meals at a consistent time. Trying to watch a TV show at a specific time every week is damn near impossible.

I suspect that I’m not the only one. Now more than ever, as companies like Yahoo! forge forward into putting television content online, sitting down to a pre-scheduled show is becoming more and more antiquated. We’re busy people, and we’d like to watch the shows on our own time.

So what do we do? We buy the DVDs.

Unfortunately, TV stations get most of their revenue through advertising, not DVD sales. And certainly selling DVDs is no incentive to spend the enormous amounts of cash it takes to produce a weekly half-hour show. What they need are viewers, because viewers sell ads.

This might explain why so many intelligent shows get cancelled. I feel as though the kind of audience a show like Arrested Development attracts is more likely to be like me. I’m on the go, I don’t have a calendar, and I want to watch my shows on my own terms. So, while millions of people may in fact (and probably do) enjoy Arrested Development immensely, and are sad to see it go…Fox will always pick the sixty million brain-dead viewers who watch that new reality show What can I fit up my nose over something that doesn’t monetize until it hits DVD.

So it’s my fault, really. I need to find a way to support the shows I like without actually watching them. Maybe they need to have Made for DVD TV.