Goodbye to the “Terriers” Show

My choice as the best new show of the season, Terriers, has been canceled. This isn’t exactly a surprise, but when the ratings went up a little bit for the finale, I was hoping the network might use that as an excuse to bring it back for another season. No such luck, though; the improvement wasn’t enough. It’s sad, but the show will at least make a good single-season DVD boxed set, and I suggest buying it and watching it all the way through.

This is the poisonous icing on the cake of a disappointing television season; one of the few shows that actually seemed to know what it was doing — as I said in an earlier post, other new shows have potential, but this show was actually living up to it — flopped. While other shows that were almost nothing but potential (like The Walking Dead, a show that constantly alternates good moments with cringe-worthy ones) became big hits. It’s not a season where achievement and solid professionalism are rewarded, let’s say.

The mildly ironic thing about the failure of Terriers is that when it was picked up, it was announced as part of an FX network plan to do more accessible, commercial shows. And it certainly was an accessible show, in my opinion; that’s one of the reasons I liked it. But it just didn’t take off, proving once again that you can’t predict anything: a show that was conceived as a commercial, mainstream alternative to edgier programming became a cult flop, embraced by conoisseurs and avoided by the mainstream TV audience it was supposed to appeal to. FX and the producers can be proud of having made such a good show, but I doubt they thought they were making a niche product. There’s no telling how these things will go down.