Canceled Favorite Television Shows: Like Losing Old Friends

So which of your favorite TV shows have been canceled?

  The executives who think they know what we want to watch better than we do canceled some 60 shows last month.

  A short list of some of the more popular ones includes The Conners, House of the Dragon, FBI International, FBI Most Wanted, Magnum PI, S.W.A.T., Yellowstone, Young Sheldon, NCIS Hawaii and The Equalizer.

  Granted, losing a favorite TV show isn’t the end of the world. It doesn’t come close to losing a championship game, a loved one or even a pet.

  But that doesn’t make it insignificant. We come to love certain shows. We feel as if we know the characters personally and look forward to seeing them every week. We know their personalities, their quirks, their strengths and weaknesses. We tend to think of them almost as friends.

  That’s never been truer than it has with some of the classic series. A few that come to mind:  M*A*S*H, The Fugitive, I Love Lucy, All in the Family … 

  The Fugitive was a must-see at our house during my teenage years. It told the story of a doctor wrongly convicted for killing his wife. After escaping en route to death row, he spent years trying to hunt down the real killer while law officers tried to track him down. We felt terrible for him – his plight was so wrong – and cheered when he was exonerated. 

  I Love Lucy, starring the late Lucille Ball,was the country’s most watched show for years. Lucy was forever getting into one hilarious jam after another. My favorite episode was “The Chocolate Factory,” in which she and her friend Ethel had jobs wrapping chocolates moving along a conveyor belt. It moved so fast that they were stuffing chocolates into their mouths, their shirts, even their hats. I watched a clip while writing this, and it was funny as ever.

  M*A*S*H and All in the Family were more recent classics. M*A*S*H, which stood for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, featured humorous and occasionally tragic episodes involving a M*A*S*H unit during the Korean War. It was one of the highest rated shows ever.

  All in the Family was about a working-class family headed by a loud-mouthed bigot named Archie Bunker.  One of the worst things you could say to someone is that he or she sounded like Archie Bunker. 

The show’s often controversial subjects included the Vietnam War, infidelity, rape, religion, antisemitism and more, yet it was often funny and occasionally hilarious.

  This year’s cancellations included three of my favorite series – FBI International, FBI Most Wanted and NCIS Hawaii. (Yes, as a matter of fact I am a sucker for police procedural dramas.)

  FBI Most Wanted and FBI International were spinoffs of the original FBI series. All were or are (FBI hasn’t been canceled) produced by Dick Wolf, who seems to have produced about half of the series on television – three FBI shows, three Chicago shows, four Law and Order shows and more. His newest, yet to premiere, is titled Chicago Pope. Talk about staying current!

  My favorite of the three series I regularly watched that were canceled this year was NCIS Hawaii, one of six spinoffs of the original NCIS series starring Mark Harmon. It was canceled because it was expensive to film in Hawaii and because the network wanted to revamp its lineup.

  Call me cynical, but to me “too expensive to film” sounds like a euphemism for replacing it with something cheaper to film, and probably not as good. NCIS Hawaii had a loyal and a growing fan base, which generated a significant backlash against CBS for canceling it.

  I was among those posting complaints. The prospect of losing my Monday evenings with Jane, Kai, Whistler, Jesse, Lucy, Ernie and Sam did not sit well.

  The same was true of FBI International. After four seasons, Wes, Cameron, Smitty, Amanda and company had come to seem like old friends.

  Ditto for Remi, Nina, Sheryll and Hana on FBI Most Wanted. It and FBI International were among the ten most watched network shows last season, but were canceled for financial reasons. Translation: Expect something cheaper to replace them.

  As if all these weren’t enough, Lester Holt left last week as the longtime anchor of NBC Nightly News. Another “old friend” gone.

  Life is change, of course. Nothing stays the same forever.

  But that doesn’t stop us from wishing some things would. 

                                                    ***

  Warren Buffet’s resignation as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway last week recalled a story about what may have been his only visit to Idaho. The person who told me the story was a limousine driver who drove him to Sun Valley for a conference in 1999,

   When he mentioned along the way that he was getting hungry, she asked him where he’d like to stop. 

  “McDonald’s,” he replied.

  He also told her he’d like to go somewhere to do some shopping.

  “Okay, where would you like to shop?”

  His response:  Kmart.

  This was a man who was once the richest person in the world. He could have eaten at the Sun Valley Lodge. He could have bought the Sun Valley Lodge.

  Some people who get rich become insufferable snobs, but the onetime richest man in the world remained the down-to-earth person he’d always been. Here’s wishing him the best in his retirement.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday and is posted n woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.