THR.com is reporting that production on the MRC produced Valentine and Easy Money, telecast on CW's Sunday night, has been shut down:
The independent producer, which in May inked a time buy-type deal with the CW to program the network's Sunday night, has put the two scripted series for the block, "Easy Money" and "Valentine, Inc.," on 4- to 6-week hiatus....
A rep for MRC said the hiatuses were planned to give writers time to catch up on scripts, and crews and casts were informed of the dates on Friday.
Read the rest here.
Sure, that's the ticket, hiatus and then return to let the writers catch up on scripts, when until now MRC representatives were all sunshine and roses about their show's woeful Sunday ratings. And why was the third MRC produced Sunday show, In Harm's Way, spared? It did just as badly. We'll see if we can find out.
And while it was just about as close to a TV prediction lay up as we could possibly get, we had Valentine and Easy Money pegged as the most likely shows to be cancelled in our Renew or Cancel Index.
The next installment of the Renew or Cancel Index arrives Tuesday night. What show will be next marked for cancellation?
So if they do cancel them, what happens? Is there a clause about MRC getting to back out, I wonder?
Julia, that is the question! From what we understand, MRC is on the hook for 13 episodes in each slot, but we can’t confirm. Purely speculative, but I guess In Harm’s Way gets some slack for the 7pm time slot. A year ago CW had “Online Nation” in that slot, which (believe it or not) performed worse than In Harm’s Way.
pushing daisies is probably next on the list so sad no offense but hopefully you guys will be wrong on that one.
Valentine was one of the weakest new shows I’ve watched so far this year but Easy Money has potential and I loved the pilot.
idk Steinmiller, for whatever reason i liked valentine, i agree that Easy Money has the most potential out of the sunday line up
After thinking about it, I’m going to make another (relatively uninformed) guess why In Harm’s Way is continuing.
It’s an unscripted show whose episodes may already be either completely or mostly finished, so the incremental expense involved in airing the episodes is small, so they might as well go ahead with them.
Valentine and Easy Money are scripted shows that had only a portion of their 13 episodes finished. Finishing the production on the other episodes is a significant expense that would need to be weighed against what would be lost by just not completing them.
MRC did absolutely no publicity for these shows. No wonder they failed.
I agree with Bill’s assessment on why In Harm’s Way has thus far been spared.
Andrea, the problem with absolutes is they are, well, absolute. I spent a lot of time sitting in traffic last week listening to the radio and the Sunday night MRC lineup was advertised fairly heavily. I heard the ads for Valentine and Easy Money many times. Obviously radio advertising didn’t drive viewers, and I’m not saying the shows were promoted well(no idea), but to say there was “absolutely no publicity” is not true…
Maybe the problem is that the target for these shows isn’t the same of the others CW shows…
People who wanna watch dramma series goes to CBS or NBC, not CW.
xx
B
Ben, people who want to watch comedies also go to any net but CW…
relatively speaking, people who want to watch TV also go to any net but…
Robert,
I’m being hyperbolic. In my own little world of New York City
, where shows like Dirty Sexy Money are routinely advertised on the sides of buses and inside subway cars and platforms, as well as billboards, I haven’t seen any MRC show ads.
I did not have high hopes for this partnership, but I am quite interested in seeing how it plays out. Will the CW end the partnership? If they do, what will they show on Sunday nights? I like the repeats of the Monday night shows, myself. There is just too much on Monday nights for me to get it all, so I enjoyed being able to catch GG and One Tree Hill Sunday night. How did the repeat ratings compare with the MRC shows?
I just checked out the ratings, and the repeats did higher numbers. Wow!
Why do they say there is a 4 to 6 weeks hiatus when new episodes are scheduled to air
http://www.imdb.com/tvgrid/2008-10-14/2000/?start_date=2008-10-19&start_time=2000&channel=&x=13&y=11
the hiatus is with production of any new episodes. episodes that have already finished production, like the episodes scheduled to air this weekend are not affected by the hiatus.
thanks
i don’t know way they shuting dawn this shows.