Why wasn't anybody watching it? I don't get it, it was good!
I checked out the first episode and neither the characters nor the premise grabbed me. The 1970s styling was fun, the music was fun, Harvey Keitel and Michael Imperioli were fun, but that just wasn't enough. For me to stick around, I'd need some reason to care about the main guy and why was he in the past, and that just wasn't there.
I don't have a Nielsens box anyway, but just for the record...most of the time when I bail on a show early, it's because they didn't answer that all-important question, Why Should I Care? If I hang around for a series, they've answered that question and then if I bail it's because the writing, acting or some other crucial element is badly done.
I don't know what this show could have done to grab my interest. A more charismatic lead actor, perhaps? The actor just came off as a dull lump. But even that probably wouldn't work. I just dislike cop shows - there are way too many of them already. I do like shows set in historical time periods, but more distant time periods would be more interesting. Not anything after 1960. How about a cop show set in the 1920s? That would be fun. Also, I really dislike the way sci fi shows are required to have a cop-show element nowadays. Why can't we have sci fi without the crutch?
There's a fatal curse that strikes down most US imports of UK shows. It hasn't hit The Office, but most others die within a few weeks of being put out on air due to the fact that they can't really recapture the magic of the original.
Most new shows die regardless of where they came from. Maybe the track record for imported ideas is worse than average, but I wouldn't know why that would be. Viewers neither know or care where the ideas come from, and a lot of the ideas aren't particularly original to begin with, so there's nothing "imported" about them - they're the kind of stuff anyone could have come up with. If you listed the premises for imported show ideas vs ideas Hollywood came up with on their own, would anyone really be able to tell there was anything different between those lists?
Maybe imported ideas
are doing worse than average. The new slate of fall pilots doesn't have many among them. Why bother paying for ideas that don't pan out any better than the ideas you can think up yourself?
The ratings dropped quite a bit when they moved from being after Grey's Anatomy to being after Lost.
Ah, the
Lost deathslot. Nothing can follow that show because a) it looks bad by comparison; b)
Lost is so intense that everyone is still recovering from the shock afterwards; and c) we're all on the internet yakking about it and not in the mood to watch any more TV right then.
