Just catching up on some schedule changes. NBC is definitely pulling Kings from its Saturday schedule, effective immediately and replacing it with Law & Order: SVU (at least for the next two Saturdays). James Hibberd reports that Kings will return to Saturdays at 8pm on June 13. That seems a long ways away and I wonder if NBC might forget about it completely by then.
Meanwhile, while we already knew that Samantha Who? and In The Motherhood were being pulled a week earlier since Ugly Betty is coming back a week earlier than originally planned, but now it looks like ABC couldn't wait that long to bail out on Samantha Who? and In The Motherhood on Thursdays at 8pm, and will be airing a Grey's Anatomy repeat instead this Thursday according to TV Week:
Meanwhile, over at ABC, the network told affiliates Tuesday that this week's planned Thursday broadcasts of "Samantha Who?" and "In the Motherhood" are being scrapped in favor of a "Grey's Anatomy" repeat.
Wow, Kings is just being beaten to a pulp. Everybody involved better look out or the network will be sending assassins after them next just to make sure that show is dead. LOL
Will all the antics going on the set of Motherhood I am not surprised that ABC is not giving it a little more time to settle. That and the fact that people are not clamoring for the show to be saved. When the recurring character, Hines’ boss, and the manny, are the least annoying thing in the show, you know there is something really wrong going on.
Samantha Who?, now has 7 episodes left. That means that it only needs 6 more for a half-season. It might be ABC’s next season’s ATJ/Scrubs. Something they have in stand-by to fill holes in the programming, but it is no longer a player. I guess it all depends on the pilots they are developing.
As I already mentioned, they should just put the remaining Kings episodes on Hulu or something. Anything else is pointless.
Kings isn’t even performing well enough to stay on Saturdays? Ouch.
Heads must surely be about to roll at NBC over the Kings disaster. They’ve spent massive sums of money on that show and its hard to imagine that they’ve made much if any of it back.
instead grey’s anatomy repeat should air a ugly betty season recap.
God I hate hearing that about Kings. Such a travesty. NBC DROPPED THE BALL!! And this is a network that wanted Rod Blagojevich on a reality show. I’ll run NBC.
Actually, how about trying out Dick Ebersol on primetime? He is the only NBC exec who knows what he is doing.
I don’t think there will be a Ugly Betty season recap because that will cost a little.
Just burn off the episodes of Kings NBC! Good thing I don’t watch Samantha Who? the show is getting a bad treatment with these schedule changes it should have just sticked with the Monday 9:30pm timeslot.
That really sucks for Kings. Admittedly, I didn’t follow the show to Saturday last week, but the odds of me remembering it returns in June are not very high.
I guess this means the planned spinoff QUEENS is being shelved? LOL!
THE KINGS IS DEAD! LONG LIVE QUEENS!
Between The Philanthropist & Kings, will NBC have the most expensive failed summer ever?
wow… kings banished for L&O…
what a surprise
It’s easy to just say that these shows are bad. Can anyone give a specific reason why these shows are failing, because when you look at ABC & NBC’s upcoming schedule, it’s the same kinds of shows especially for ABC. Maybe audiences automatically get turned off when they see the same type of packaging for the same type of shows. Southland is the one gem.
Kings is Example A of a network trying to kill a show (and don’t tell me this doesn’t happen).
Andrea, Kings was already dead when it was moved to Saturdays. The show couldn’t find an audience on Sundays. A network will not intentionally “kill” a show, particularly not one that costs as much as Kings.
Andrea whether or not networks try to kill shows (and 99.9% of the time that’s just paranoid fan delusion) I can guarantee you that NBC did not want Kings to fail and did not set it up to do so. If the episode budgets that have been touted online are right then NBC spent around $60 million on 13 episodes of Kings, I don’t care if they absolutely hated everything about the show there’s no way anyone in NBC wanted Kings to be anything but a hit unless of course they’re shooting for Silverman’s job in which case they might very well be doing back flips right about now.
Julia: They killed the show by putting it on at 8pm on Sundays, when it should be in a later time period on a different day.
Alex: There’s no such thing as a guarantee. Especially if Angela Bromstad changed the schedule on Kings as soon as she came into office.
From LA Times:
One of Bromstad’s early calls was to put “Southland” in the marquee 10 p.m. Thursday slot, and shuffle to Sunday night the lavish drama “Kings,” starring Ian McShane. “Kings,” which costs about $3 million an episode to produce, had been championed by Bromstad’s predecessors. But Bromstad had doubts that a drama about a modern-day king who struggles with moral dilemmas and family conflicts would work on network television.
“The objective now is to broaden the network out, to give it a wider appeal,” she said.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-fi-cotown-bromstad9-2009apr09,0,1010872.story?track=rss
That sure sounds like killing to me.
Andrea killing the show would have been not airing it or debuting it on Friday or Saturday not moving it to a Sunday slot with no real scripted competition. Again I will tell you that NBC had no wish to kill their $60 million project and absolutely wanted to see a return on that investment.
You don’t spend the kind of money NBC spent on Kings and then set it up for failure. Not even NBC are that stupid.
Networks don’t need to “try” to kill a show. They can just kill it by not airing the episodes. There’s no mystery to it. (See: Chopping Block.)
The original concept for Kings was “a modern day retelling of the David and Goliath story,” which morphed into “a modern day retelling of the story of David’s rise.” Either of which could have been good and popular.
And the reason they chose those was that the original directive, back during the strike, was “find the 10 greatest stories of all time that we can turn into shows without running into rights issues and without needing to do pilots.” Crusoe and Kings were two of the results.
While Crusoe had a variety of issues, I think the failure of Kings (which I personally like, btw) is that it’s not the David story. No matter how anyone tries to spin it, both the actor playing David and the storyline for David just aren’t as interesting as Silas and the court intrigue around him.
Quite often an idea that works well on paper morphs into something very different with real actors inhabiting the roles. That can be very good (West Wing is a prime example), or not (Motherhood, perhaps?)
Kings as presented would work much better if there was a real sense of tension around the fate of David and Silas. In this case the foundation story tells us that Silas will fall and David will ultimately rise to King–but the show as inhabited by these actors makes that seem a very strange, and not necessarily desirable outcome.
The odd result (and this to some extent was also true of Crusoe) is that the famous foundation works AGAINST the series. There is a constant sense of dissonance, even if one likes the show. There is no pleasant sense of recognition as familiar elements are incorporated into a new storyline.
As a counterexample, the original Shrek did a brilliant job of using what people would recognise (Pinocchio, the 3 blind mice, etc), and putting it in a fresh story with full suspense as to how the plot would go.
Maybe the real lesson to be learned from Kings and Crusoe is that there are no shortcuts to a successful series, and that the pilot process does have a purpose. The things that were right with Kings were obvious from the first episode–and so were the things that were wrong.
damn, i kept watching kings figuring that they’d burn it off on saturdays. that sucks.
This really pisses me off. I am really into Kings. And because I have a DVR it doesn’t matter when it airs as long as it airs. GRRRR!