Is this any way to cancel a TV show?

We sort of think of television programs as friends we meet with once a week to catch up on events and happenings.  If we get really attached to a show, the notice of its cancellation can seem like a death sentence. Sometimes it comes before the show is over, allowing us some final moments with our friend before they slip away into syndication or streaming distribution rights.  Other times the news comes after the show has completed its season order and suddenly it is gone from our lives like a friend who was hit by a bus.

Recently networks have developed a new way to cancel shows that strikes me as a bit . . . weird.  It was just announced by NBC that the upcoming season of Grimm will be its last. The announcement was snuck into a press release about the premiere date of NBC’s scheduled shows.  The order is for only 13 episodes, not the usual 22.

I have watched Grimm since its first episode, but I won’t miss it or be buying the complete DVD set on Amazon.  It has been an imaginative show, something rare on network television, one that made some brilliant choices and some dumb ones.  The two leads, actors David Giuntoli as Nick Burkhart and Bitsie Tulloch as Juliette She-Has-A-Last-Name?, were both fairly wooden actors and generated no chemistry.  Nick’s partner Hank, played by Russell Hornsby, was never given any meaningful role in the plots.  The show made a daring decision to kill off Juliette, and then inexcusably resurrected her as a super-powered entity who called herself “Eve.”

However, the show was tremendously creative as refashioning old fairy tales into modern day horror tales, made plausible by the show’s distinctive make-up effects for the fairy tale beasts known as “Wessen.”  Two secondary characters, Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell) and police Sgt. Drew Wu (Reggie Lee) developed into first rate second bananas, and the addition of a girlfriend for Monroe (Bree Turner as Rosealee) provided the romance that Nick and Juliette sorely lacked.  The decision to veer away from a “case of the week” format and develop an on-going story line involving a growing conflict between Wessen “Royals” and humans helped raise the stakes and made the plotting more intricate.

What I find odd about the announcement is that NBC renewed the show only to then cancel it.  If they wanted to end the show, why order an additional 13 episodes?  Are they really counting on an increase in viewership to bring in greater ad revenue with the news that the show is ending?  If you want to renew the show, why not make a full order of 22 episodes?

CBS did something similar with Person of Interest, renewing the show and then announcing it would be a mid-season replacement with a final run of 13 episodes.  CBS even hastened the end by burning off two episodes a week. Before that, in 2010, Better Off Ted, a low rated ABC sitcom that was quietly brilliant, was inexplicably renewed despite low ratings; the network then ran two episodes a week in the doldrums of January (if I recall, they even more inexplicably alternated episodes of this and the NBC cast off Scrubs in its final season; instead of a Better Off Ted hour and a Scrubs hour, you got one, then the other, then the other, and then the other).

And then there is the seemingly growing phenomenon of networks not cancelling shows, but simply letting them run out, or worse shortening their episode order.  In 2015 the watch for the first show to be cancelled took a strange turn when the abysmally rated Minority Report wasn't cancelled but had its order reduced to 10 episodes.  The show was doomed, but Fox wouldn’t issue a death certificate.

I understand that network TV is a corporate culture where it is always best to hedge your bets, but what is to be gained by renewing a show and then cancelling it before it gets back on the air?  Why not just axe it?  Was Fox really hoping that several million TV watchers would suddenly wake up and make Minority Report a hit if they just didn’t say it was cancelled?  If, like Grimm, a show has an on-going storyline, why not make the cancellation decision in time to wrap up the plot at the end of season 5, instead of producing a 13 episode season 6? 

Of course this strategy has its pitfalls. Josh Whedon supposedly demanded to know if Angel was going to be renewed for a 6^th season because, if not, he wanted to do a series finale; when the WB network wouldn’t give him an early renewal, he ended the show.  Another season of Angel would have been nice.

The logic used by network executives escapes me.  I suppose that’s why I don’t earn a 7 figure income, have a trophy wife, and live in a mansion with bathrooms bigger than my current house.  Lucky me.