Which is why the show is now officially canceled – Friedman did what he wanted.

Lesson: No, you CANNOT do anything you want.

Possibly meaning shows that can bring in other revenue(DVDs, downloads, character goods, cheezy t-shirts, etc.) streams maybe just as valuable as a show that brings in big rating numbers.

Even teenagers today watch more television than teens just 10 years ago.
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/community/columns/other-columns/e3i123610bbb7b491bf3d78828c20065cc4

The biggest change is in the “fracturing” of the viewing audience. Free broadcast television is going to have to change some of its business model simply because there’s so much competition. But a lot of the competition is coming from other television options.

It will be awhile before all television is on the Internet. But meanwhile everyone at the big four is going to be looking at ways to cut costs on a show by show basis.

I have several of the last episodes of TSCC on one of my DVRS that I am yet to watch, I just refused to invest the time in the story if it was being cancelled.

If Chuck is coming back I have about five episodes of that show to see as well.

I agree the DEVIL we know might be better than the unknown Devil in a new untested show. I think broadcast TV may be at the beginning of the end of its life and likely will only get less and less viewers in the future. We the viewer may wake up one morning and find TV gone except for downloads from the net. The costs may exceed the genre as delivery system from surviving. Maybe even Movie Theaters.

As for Dollhouse, it was much bewtter in the end of the season than the first couple of shows. The opportunity to use the technology concept of the show is endless if some imagination by the writers can be opened up .

Even if, because of all the changes, Kyle is not sent back and such… *This* John will continue to exist – as a “temporal orphan”. Yeah, deal with that concept!

Nobody’s proposing WB went to Syfy and said “Make us a better offer than Fox”. That’s what FROR bans, not speculative “If the deal we have falls through, are you interested?”

Still, whatever the case, I think we can assume no more T:SCC on any channel, in any place. It was obviously not going to end up on Fox, but it looks dead anyway.

I think JF was told to give closure to the series. All he did was provide a method for how John survived judgment day. The show separated itself from T3 from the beginning. The fans can use their imaginations on how he rises to lead the resistance. Being able to scrub Terminators will probably give him ALOT of street cred. Knowing about Skynet’s time machine will help too.

JF being an optimist, tried to be vague just in case he got a 3rd season. If a 3rd season came, John would probably just spend the first few eps trying to get a chip and access to a time machine to go back to mom and Cameron. Cameron’s body and mind (she downloaded herself to John Henry’s hardware) are back at Zieracorp and he just needs a chip. See if they hadn’t spent all season breaking them, he would have had one. Or, it would be cool if her chip in the future contained both Cameron and JH and it got downloaded into a freshly minted t1001. Good luck finding the cash for a T1001 Cameron based series though.

Feel free to disagree with what I said, most of it was silly but possible. My only point is that they can keep the main characters in tact and continue the show with ease; or it can be the end. That was the beauty of the finale in my opinion.

sean, because it was my understanding that Warner signed Welling to 2 years with the idea being the 2nd year would be the spin-off.

Quantum Leap is a good example of how to let the audience see the regular actor while the characters are viewing someone else. It can certainly be done. (Isn’t Ghost Whisperer doing something similar this season?)

http://terminatorwiki.fox.com/thread/2839280/Ashley+Edward+Miller+and+Josh+Friedman+on+savethescc.com+chat+%3F!?offset=60&maxResults=20

Perhaps this is an attempt to make sure the campaigns don’t continue after Monday, after presumably everyone being told that Warner hasn’t found a buyer for the series.

Connor obviously does exist, otherwise he wouldn’t be there. All that’s changed is that he’s not the leader of the resistance. How he was born simply becomes another question, with Kyle obviously sent back later.

If that’s not the explanation, then you haven’t been watching T3 or T:SCC, because both posit a “truth” that both the show and the post-T2 movies rely upon: that the future is set, and that effing around with it merely postpones the inevitable. Judgment day keeps changing, but it’s inevitable. Sarah is apparently going to die of a radiation caused issue, regardless of whether it’s a split second one million degree sun burn or leukemia.

That’s how the show has worked thus far. Arguing it doesn’t apply to John being born is ridiculous.

Connor obviously does exist, because he’s there! He’s gone forward in time and skipped being leader of the resistance. In the hypothetical T:SCC fan’s dream where the show somehow gets renewed for a third season, John is going to have to figure out how to become influential enough that he can send Kyle back in time and make the circle complete, in an odd kind of parallel with Cameron’s attempts to save parts to ensure she gets built in the future.

I think RSH knows enough to know that’s how it works, he’s just not wording it clearly.

You may lack the particular imagination to see how, but there’s always a way in sci-fi. It’s notorious for bringing the dead back to life.

We’re dealing with John Henry, the twin brother of Skynet. If Skynet can build Cameron or the advanced T-1001, so could Henry with the proper resources in the year 2027ish.

The reason John Connor never existed in the future is simple. RSH is right and you Fanboys will not accept it. Here is the break down as I see it.

John Connor jumped over J-Day to the year 2025-ish, as evidenced by Allison being 16 or 17 in the final scenes. Her mother was pregnant with her in “Alison from Palmdale” in the year 2008/2009.

JC never existed, he is not the leader of the Resistence and therefore can never send Kyle Reese back to battle Arnold in 1984 or father John Connor. I know we get into the whole “Time Paradox” travel situation but you Fanboys cannot pick and choose to support your denial.

Friedman sabotaged this series by making it impossible to bring back the Cameron character. While Summer Glau has a huge fanbase, it is Summer Glau as Cameron that made this show and this is what I think pissed off Friedman. Glau as Allison will not cut it.

No Cameron, No show

~Lanie~

But that actually enters into what I sincerely believe, despite being told I’m wrong so many times, that the ending of T:SCC S2 wasn’t a “We’re taking the show in a new direction” thing, but a “We know we’re doomed, so this is the the end of the show. Look at the questions we’ve left you!” type thing. I genuinely believe JF made it believing there was no chance of renewal at that point, at least, not of that show.

I know you’ve said some fairly insulting things about the guy, but I don’t think he’s involved in evil conspiracies to destroy TV networks, hurt his own fans, or any of this other BS. I think on one level he’s proven he’s fairly talented, enough to show that he couldn’t have made this ending without knowing its limitations. At the very least, I don’t think he’d make an ending where the John Connor dynamic is absent, where Cameron – who was very much the center of the show and deliberately so – is suddenly non-existant, and which, if continued, would actually put up the costs of the show (those episodes set in the future are very expensive compared to the “bunch of actors walk around in a WB generic log cabin set and talk about how unhappy they are” type episodes), unless it was intended as the end of T:SCC.

Which, of course, raises the question of what it is Josh actually talked to Fox about bringing for a hypothetical season three. But to believe it was a continuation of season two and the already-filmed season two ending is to believe that Josh actually went to Fox and said “We’ve got some great ideas. We’re going to push up the prices, and we’re going to have an entire season without Summer Glau, or maybe we’ll have her, but she’ll just be some ordinary human teenager John wants to get it on with. How does that grab you?”

And even if Josh was the evil monster you and Nick C are making him out to be, that, frankly, is not believable. I suspect any talks would have centered around a reboot. It’s hard to see what the new version would have looked like, because I’m not entirely certain JF knew where the faults were in the first version. But in any case, the “frackin’ barn” was burned down. He did it. All that was left was to build an entirely new one. With blackjack, and hookers. On second thoughts, forget the barn.

Getting back on topic: Dollhouse is teh awesome. Well, from Episode Six onwards.

The second is that Whedon is not short on hustle. He promises everything, delivers on about half, and makes an effort on most of it.

All he needs are viewers. Although viewer passion means nothing, Whedon is an example that producer passion still means a lot.

Viewers are not going to grow for Dollhouse unless it drops its initial main concept. Viewers don’t tune in to see a completely new character each week. Even on “Quantum Leap,” it was the same character every week. Echo doesn’t even know who she is from week to week.

An extreme example of this are passionate TV series fans. Passionate TV series fans are the most boring people on Earth. They despise variation – sometimes even on their own show. They strangle creativity.

TV viewers want the same characters in the same setting doing the same things each week – only slightly different each time. You can’t even cut a character’s hair – see Felicity for an example.

i am a realist i think this show is done
i agree it will die a queit death tomorrow and not be on the schedule
and if it is i will buy that lotto ticket
But that other stuff -we wont know and its speculation and conjecture
and just so you know from what i hear the movie messes up the terminator cannon as well….

And no, this is not a rewrite of canon – if what I said happens, namely that John’s stint in the future will be brief, that he’ll return to the past quickly.

This is the last I’m going to say about this. You’re clearly too set in your ways to consider other options. And I thought I was stubborn.

Why would John return? Because future scenes were expensive, that’s about it. I do not believe the war could be won without John leading from the very start. I also do not believe, or want to believe, that John Connor would need John Henry. So that’s why I feel John would make a return (for story purposes). Without John Connor as general, Skynet wins. Without John, Weaver and Henry will not survive.
I would be immensely bothered if the Resistance was doing just fine with Kyle or Derek in charge.

In a comic book format they could have John developing and working his way up the ranks. There’s no budget concerns there. I’m also sure in T4 that John keeps much of the past to himself and Kate, instead of blabbing on about being the messiah and being targeted by machines from the future. He just uses the knowledge to his advantage.

I did find the comments from Brian Austin Green to be interesting. John simply does not exist, in any form in this future. So Savannah won’t know him, not Martin Bedell, not Lauren Fields, or potentially an old Jesse that survived. John may know a few personal stories about Derek and Kyle that still happened in their childhoods to convince them.

But there’s absolutely no doubt they made it very clear when Derek turned to his squad and said, “Anybody ever hear of a John Connor?” that he just was totally unknown in the future. Which means by definition he never did anything involving setting up the Resistance, or being trained by his mother – and by definition he doesn’t exist in that future prior to his arrival, otherwise he would be meeting HIMSELF at some point.

Now one could argue that that was always the time line. That he disappeared sometime after T-2, ended up in the future, did all the stuff he was supposed to do, etc. That would make him the one and only Connor.

But that makes T-3 utterly non-canonical. And again, T-3 IS canonical because it’s referenced in T-4. So Friedman is rewriting the canon. And it also violates T-1 because Connor is specifically supposed to be the guy who set up the Resistance, Derek himself said in “Goodbye to All That” that the other guy helped Connor set up the Resistance. And no 16-year-old kid is going to set up the Resistance, especially one that already exists. The Connor from the series isn’t remotely in a position to do that without futher personal development.

Canon is that Connor survived Judgment Day – not skipped over it – and that he set up the Resistance from his bunker with his wife, Kate Brewster.

It’s a rewrite of the whole concept. And why? What’s the advantage? Why not keep the time line singular and straight? What advantage does Connor get being in the future without further years of personal development (other than that he gets to be younger, presumably, when he takes over the Resistance, if he does)?

It makes no sense. It’s just hubris on Friedman’s part that he can re-do Cameron’s concept.

It was an alternate time line – I thought everybody knew that. The whole point of that stuff about Derek never having been tortured by Fischer is part of the whole alternate time line stuff. In fact, I believe BAG explicitly said the finale puts John in an alternate time line.

And we don’t even know if Savannah Weaver survived Judgment Day to know him. The last we see of her, Catherine Weaver is telling Ellison to pick her up after Weaver goes with John to the future.

Excuse me, but where did you get *that* from? It makes no sense. No one thinks that.
John existed 1984-2009, then disappeared (because he jumped time) until he appeared again in whatever year he is now. It IS about no one knowing him (well, except Savannah). I thought that’s everyone’s view, this is the first time I see someone thinking something different.

Right, like I’ll be successful…

In T-4 Connor has to convince the existing Resistance that he’s capable of leading it. That alone is against canon to some degree because in all the movies, especially T-1, Connor is described by Reese as “the man who turned it all around.” He can’t be the “savior of mankind” without being the guy who created the Resistance, and he can’t do that when the Resistance already exists. In T-4, at least I think, apparently the Resistance exists but it’s fragmented and he presumably makes it more successful over T-4 and the subsequent movies. I can just buy that. But as a 16-year-old kid that simply can’t happen.

It’s purely an alternate time line concept that requires rewriting the whole concept – and Friedman is not up to that task. And even if he was, it wouldn’t play with the Terminator fans who want to see a continuation of existing canon. And it would confuse anybody not familiar with the canon if they then see any of the movies, including T-4 and the subsequent movies.

It’s just not a good idea.

As for John Henry, it was my impression that he did not go into the future. John and Catherine Weaver did. John Henry bugged out with Cameron’s chip in the present. I may be wrong, I might have to re-watch that scene, but my impression is that Sarah remained behind, stepping out of the time bubble, Cameron did not go through despite being in the time bubble due to her exposed metal (which, by the way, makes HASH of Friedman’s explanation for Cromartie’s head going through in episode two of season one! LOL! Talk about inconsistency!), and John Henry disappeared before the Connors and Weaver got to the lab.

Sorry. None of this works, nor can it be made to work without a lot more work than I can conceive of Friedman or the clowns he calls writers being able to do.

Also if he comes BACK from the future, then why send him there – especially one in which he is completely unknown because he doesn’t exist? It’s quite clear to me that the intent is to try to play the T-4 concept with a too young actor, and allow Summer to play Allison (who nobody particularly cares about compared to Cameron).

If they wanted to make sense, they should have sent him into the future to meet HIMSELF AND CAMERON, THEN be told important things by his future self, and be sent back by himself WITH Cameron to the present time, thus allowing Cameron to “jump over her death”. That might have made some sense to me in that then he can defeat Skynet in the present by having been told how to do it in the future by his future self. At least that’s a closed time loop!

See, I really can write this stuff better than freakin’ Friedman! LOL!

Plus, I don’t think he’ll stay in the future for long and become the leader and such… I think he’ll find John Henry, do the mission with him, then return to the past with Cameron’s chip.

Clearly the concept of someone “filling in” for someone else resonates in both shows.

The problem with Human Target is that the premise is difficult to pull off well. I liked the original series, but it failed quickly. Also I think a part of the audience will have difficulty with the premise. In the original series, they used complicated technology to make Chance look like his clients. I don’t think it went over well. If they try to do it like the old Mission: Impossible series where they had one of the team able to pretty much imitate anybody, they might pull it off.

I think they’ll need to minimize the technology stuff. They’ll also need to minimize the idea of using a different actor to play Chance imitating the client, since that screws up the ability to connect to your lead actor. You’re watching other actors half the time. Same problem Dollhouse has – nobody to connect to.

This is going to be a very hard show to do well. Really they need to not over-emphasize his ability to imitate his clients, but rather have him choose clients that it’s really reasonable he could imitate. Otherwise the audience is going to have a serious problem suspending disbelief.

But we’ll see. Given the ability these days to make actors look like anything but you still know who the character is (take Hellboy for example), it could be made believable that one person could imitate many other people.

Having decided to abandon Virtualities but go ahead with Human Target, I think Fox needs the Dollhouse audience to make Human Target work. There’s some superficial overlap in concept (the lead character in Human Target, based on a DC comics series, is a private investigator who takes on the identity of someone who has been threatened “from busboy to King.” He solves the case through sleuthing while in the identity of the person in danger, and the 2002 graphic novel explored the psychological impact of always living someone else’s life).

I think Fox needs the Dollhouse fans to want Human Target to succeed–which they’re much more likely to do with Dollhouse renewed. Then both become examples of edgy Fox programming on the very 21st century topic of identity, rather than one looking like a replacement for the other. And the lack of Virtualities will probably get no press at all, since Dollhouse’s renewal becomes the big story.

So it’s a branding decision, and I agree that they can probably make some money off of Dollhouse and so it earns a second shot–but I think protecting the investment in Human Target may also have played into it.

All pure speculation, but sometimes the business decisions are about more than the numbers for just one show. FWIW.

(By the way, if I’m right on this it means I was completely wrong in thinking that Fox wouldn’t have room for both Dollhouse and Human Target, obviously. It becomes a synergy decision. But I do think broadcast synergies still have more impact than potential hulu viewers.)

I’m skeptical about the cost-cutting resulting in a poor product. We’re living in a decentralized time, where consumer entertainment spending is growing more and more fragmented and spread between many alternatives. At the same time, technology has opened up some remarkable capabilities in terms of what you can achieve on a limited budget.

What you have is an untenable situation for people who CAN’T cut costs, but you also have a much greater ability TO cut costs than ever before.

Take a look at Whedon’s own Dr. Horrible, or some of the stuff produced for the web, like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UPMEmCqZo

I’m of the opinion that people need to become more agile in the entertainment business, more creative about how they control spending. It’s going to become increasingly difficult to draw huge audiences to one product amidst the competition, so you fragment with the market. Meet niche demands, do it for low cost. This is what the network seems to be doing with Dollhouse.

After I heard TSCC was due to be canceled I started a Facebook group to help save it and within the last two weeks 500 people have joined. There are fans from all over the world and they are all shocked that FOX is threatening to cancel the show, as am I.

I hope that the executives at FOX don’t think Dollhouse is an adequate substitute for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Bill may be right that the studios can afford to cut out a lot of unnecessary costs. They should perhaps start with executive salaries given the poor performance.

But my suspicion is that, as usual, management will cut the quality of their product while retaining management perks and BS.

Although again, I don’t know how they can produce worse crap than they already do.

Anyway, the one thing you can count on is that things will get worse everywhere and at the worst possible time, so none of that will be a surprise.

As for folks who’d like us to publish how much show’s cost, so would we! We’ll never get good numbers for that, and can only guess.

As for folks piling on the “see I told you Live+7 and Hulu.com and sunspots all mattered, suckers!” bandwagon, I don’t think Robert wrote that at all (although he is welcome to correct me), and I certainly don’t feel that way.

It’s always been all about profits, it’s still all about profits. But now it may be somewhat more about the expense side of the equation than the revenue side.

Personally I think they should go the other way and take MORE risks, but that’s just me.

I think he’s also right about the parent companies looking at the overall financial picture rather than just their network’s financial picture. But that’s also part of the “huddle down” reaction.

I also think the networks are “on the bubble” the way the music industry has been with the rise of P2P and the fragmenting of the music people listen to. They just don’t know what’s going on and have no idea how to deal with it. They’re dinosaurs watching their eggs get eaten by fast moving mammals.

Read this piece for an example of where these guys are coming from:

Sony Pictures CEO: “I’m A Guy Who Doesn’t See Anything Good Having Come From The Internet. Period.”
http://current.com/items/90049647_sony-pictures-ceo-im-a-guy-who-doesnt-see-anything-good-having-come-from-the-internet-period.htm

If that isn’t a guy who is stuck in the 1970′s, I don’t know who is.

I know there are a bunch of female viewers who just soak up Sarah Connor like a drug, but sorry, there’s no market for that on broadcast TV.

Chad: The problem with each of your concepts is that they either lead no where or they can’t be properly realized within the few seasons most shows have to tell their story. If Connor does nothing, it’s uninteresting. And we can’t wait another ten years for him to grow into the leader of the Resistance – besides which that happens to be what T-4 is about and again, there’s no intention to marry the series and the movies that closely because it affects audience perception for both and it’s too hard to keep them synched. Besides which, there’s really no way Connor at sixteen is going to be taken seriously by the Resistance because HE NEVER EXISTED IN THAT TIME LINE! If he tells them the whole story, they’re going to treat him like Connor treats Wright in T-4 – disassemble him and find out what he’s really about!

Connor could return to 2009 but then why bother sending him to the future in the first place? There had to have been a reason for that (if the writers simply weren’t throwing everything against the wall at that point, which frankly I think they were). John Henry is back in the present day with Cameron’s chip but no Summer Glau body – which is a fail right there. Weaver is gone – because Shirley Manson ain’t coming back to the show, I got that message clear from her appearance at WonderCon. (Of course, they could replace her.) Allison isn’t nearly a replacement for Cameron, and the Summer Glau fans have said that and I think Summer would agree although she’d never say so.

And any attempts to solve these problems would require a massive revamp that probably would jump the shark in episode one.

And that’s why I think Friedman really did sabotage the show. I just can’t see any way to solve the problems that finale introduced. Unless of course, as I said, his intent is to rewrite the entire Terminator canon. Which is just stupid in my view.

And I don’t think WB would be interested in that. Too much risk. The show already failed massively on TV. Who the hell is going to trust Friedman to rewrite the whole of James Cameron’s epic?! They’ve got a big enough risk just with McG refreshing the thing in the movies.

And McG IS treating T-3 as canon, because otherwise you wouldn’t see Kate Brewster in T-4. How do you square Allison/Cameron with Kate Brewster IN THE FUTURE? Alternate time line? It’s the only way. But that invalidates everything that’s been done. At least Abrams had the sense to make his “alternate dimension” look like this one on Fringe. He can play with it without having to invalidate anything.

No, that finale was a major disaster. And that’s not even bringing up the hideously bad “sex scene” between John and Cameron that completely ruined the fan anticipation brought about by the spoiler clip at WonderCon. That, too, was a middle finger shoved at the fans.

I really felt the finale opened it up. John can stay and see a war lost without him leading at the onset. Or he could develop into the leader and scale the ranks in the Resistance.
John could return to 2009 with another fighter, or even a rebuilt Cameron courtesy of Weaver/Henry. Allison can replace Cameron, who may have been erased, etc.

I still think Friedman’s lying about not knowing. TSCC will die as quietly as possible on Monday as Fox focuses on the returnees and pilots.