I keep reading about how the writing/direction of the show contributed to the decline in ratings/viewership. I just wanted to compare it with another favourite show of mine, The Walking Dead. Like Grimm, it has its fair share of critics, especially with the development of its characters, plot holes/inconsistencies, and many more. I think as early as season 2, many were already complaining about how boring the show was becoming, that it was too long and dragging/depressing. Rick's wife was also disliked, and many cheered when she died. There was plenty of criticism against Rick as well, even with Carl. But despite all the faults of the show, it still remains as popular as ever. So what gives?
"Bad" is in the eye of the beholder, but since it's unlikely that the actors, set designers and other production team members suddenly lost all their talents and skills, if you decided the series was going downhill the people you would most likely want to blame for it would be the producers, because they're the ones deciding which writers and stories to use.
Quote:So we're here to help. There are a bunch of reasons your show might have been canceled, but these seven are the most likely.
Reason No. 1: The show almost immediately flopped
TV guide stuff
Mulaney was canceled in 2014 almost immediately after it flopped. Fox
Talk to anyone who works in network television and they'll tell you the same thing. There is still some invisible line below which a show can't drop if it wants to be renewed, especially if that show debuts with horrible ratings right out of the gate.
"As much as people try to say it's about this and it's about that, it's still about the ratings," Kevin Biegel, the co-creator of Cougar Town and creator of Enlisted, told me.
The problem is that the point at which the ratings have gotten so low that it merits instant cancellation differs from show to show. Every show comes to the air under a different set of circumstances, with a different budget, and with a different baseline for success.
"A LOT MORE PEOPLE ARE COMPETING FOR A LOT LESS EYEBALLS"
The clear-cut flops are usually obvious — look at Fox's short-lived sitcom Mulaney, which debuted on a Sunday in 2014 to only 2.3 million viewers and lost half of the audience that watched Family Guy right before it. A show with such horrible numbers in such a high-profile time slot was never going to last, and, indeed, Mulaney was canceled quickly.
But not every case is so immediately obvious. For one thing, ratings have dropped so precipitously across the board that properly assessing them can be difficult.
"You will see these things like a 50 percent spike in the ratings of a show, but it's almost meaningless because the numbers that you're talking about are so small that them jumping 50 percent feels like noise in the data. It takes very few people to make that jump," Killen said. "A lot more people are competing for a lot less eyeballs."
So that means networks increasingly turn to other metrics to determine a show's fate.
Reason No. 2: The show struggled in the ratings, and the studio wouldn't reduce the licensing fee
Here's something many TV viewers don't understand: The TV shows you watch every night aren't technically owned by the networks that air them. They're leased.
Take a look at how this all breaks down:
tv_shows_graphic_static
Obviously there are as many variations on this graphic as there are television shows. But this is the baseline most everybody in network TV is operating from.
The chain of ownership goes something like this:
The production company or studio makes the TV show. The studio technically owns the show, and it collects almost all revenues generated by the show. This setup wasn't such a big deal when the only secondary revenue stream was the syndication market, but now that there are myriad ways (streaming, international distribution, DVD sales, etc.) to make money from a show, it behooves most studios to do their very best to produce as many episodes of the show as possible.
However, in the current economy, the studio still needs to find a way to amortize at least some portion of the show's production costs (even cheap TV shows are pretty expensive to produce). And that means finding a network to air the thing. (Occasionally the studio will also sign up a production partner, which makes things even more complicated.)
The network pays the studio what's called a licensing fee, which is essentially an agreement to pay a certain amount of money, per episode, to air the show a certain number of times. In exchange, the network gets the ad revenue generated by those airings. (The network and studio will sometimes split the ad revenue, but let's keep this simple for now.) Because the network isn't directly paying production costs, a huge hit can be a real moneymaker.
Now that you've read about it, here's that graphic again, this time in motion.
It's the licensing fee that is often misunderstood by TV fans. Theoretically, a studio that wanted to guarantee that a show reached a certain number of episodes could drop the licensing fee to zero to entice a network to keep airing it, but that would set a dangerous precedent. After all, the studios can't make every episode they produce a complete revenue black hole.
What usually happens is that a network crunches the numbers to arrive at a licensing fee it can live with in a borderline ratings case, and the studio eats the added expenses in hopes of making that money back somewhere down the line.
For a likely example of this type of scenario, look to The Mindy Project, which was produced by NBCUniversal and aired on Fox. Its ratings performance was poor, but not so poor that it merited instant cancellation. However, since another company entirely owned the show, Fox wouldn't reap any benefits from Mindy's entry into the syndication or streaming markets, which almost certainly explains why the network canceled it in 2015. (It was later picked up for multiple seasons by Hulu, which has lower viewership thresholds to clear.)
But this approach also applies to shows that are bigger hits, like the recently canceled Last Man Standing. ABC aired the show, but 20th Century Fox owned it. Even though its ratings were solid, ABC canceled the series after its sixth season, likely because it wasn’t going to see substantially larger profits from subsequent episodes.
This is why networks airing shows from studios that aren't their corporate siblings is becoming increasingly uncommon.
Reason No. 3: The show struggled in the ratings and wasn't owned by the same corporation that owns its network
Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. keeps dropping in the ratings but also keeps getting renewed. ABC
Again, let's look at The Mindy Project. Though its ratings were lower than those of New Girl — another Fox comedy that was just renewed for a shortened final season — they weren't so much lower as to suggest that one show should be favored over the other. Except New Girl was renewed, while Mindy was shipped off to Hulu. Why? Because Fox Television, the corporate cousin of the Fox Broadcasting Company, owns New Girl, while NBC owns Mindy.
TV reporters will often talk about a network "owning" a show, and this is what they mean. New Girl is technically aired by Fox and owned by Fox Television, but because the two companies are part of the same corporation, the money all ends up in the same place. The distinction is minor enough that simply saying Fox "owns" New Girl is more or less accurate. Indeed, in the case of Fox, the same people, Dana Walden and Gary Newman, run both the studio and network.
Since the real money in television is in the syndication and streaming markets — more on this in a bit — many networks are in the game of asset management, or, rather, making sure enough episodes of certain programs are produced to make them financially worthwhile somewhere down the line.
For a good example, look no further than ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The show is far from a ratings powerhouse, but its continued existence helps out both ABC Studios and fellow corporate sibling Marvel. That money eventually comes back to Disney, the parent corporation of the network, the studio, and Marvel. It will be returning for a fifth season, despite terrible ratings. (That said, such an arrangement ultimately didn't help ABC's other Marvel series, Agent Carter.)
RELATED
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s unexpected season 3 renewal shows how TV’s rules are changing
Before the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules were abolished in total by the Clinton administration in 1993, the number of shows that could be produced by a corporate cousin of a TV network was limited. Now, however, there's no limit to the number of shows a network can "own." And the number rises a little more each year.
So why would a network ever purchase a show from (or sell a show to) a non-corporate partner? Well, certain shows work better on certain networks. For example, Fox Television produces Modern Family, but it licensed the show to ABC, which has a stronger record with family comedy. There are also third-party companies, like Warner Bros., which have no real ownership interest in any of the big four networks and sell equally to all partners.
Reason No. 4: The show had poor ratings and no syndication or streaming potential
Last Man on Earth
The Last Man on Earth made it to three seasons in part thanks to its performance on streaming platforms. Fox
If you look at the annals of TV history, a show that's already made it to season three is much more likely to make it to season five than a show that's only made it to season two. Why? Syndication.
Syndication is the lucrative after-air market for TV shows, the long afterlife the most successful shows enjoy once they've finished their initial runs on standard broadcast television. Before the rise of cable, most production companies and studios lost revenue on TV shows until they entered syndication.
Syndication is when a show's reruns air in non-primetime hours on local stations, or at any time of the day on cable. Consider a show like Seinfeld, which continues to air in reruns to this day. The studio that owns that show (in this case, Sony) gets a per-episode fee when selling the reruns.
The standard number of episodes required for syndication viability used to fall between 88 and 100 episodes, depending on the era in which the show was produced. But there are numerous shows that've bucked the trend by going into syndication with far fewer episodes (particularly shows for kids), and the number has decreased even more in this content-hungry era.
"THE THING THAT STILL MATTERS IS IF YOU CAN PROVE THAT PEOPLE ARE WATCHING YOUR SHOW AND THEY'RE THE KIND OF PEOPLE THE NETWORK SEES AS VALUABLE TO THEM"
And since the rise of cable, the possibilities for a show to make money after its first airing have opened up even more. In addition to syndication and cable reruns, studios can now sell their shows to international markets, they can sell shows on iTunes or Amazon, and they can sell shows to streaming services like Netflix or Hulu. (And those are just three of the more obvious examples.)
With so many different platforms, and thus so many ways to bring in cash, it's no wonder that corporations like to own both the networks airing the shows and the studios producing the shows. That way, they can collect both ad revenue and after-air revenue.
But, again, this only works if a given show survives long enough to air a manageable number of episodes. Sure, Netflix and Hulu have lots of one-season shows in their ranks, but because of the licensing fee — a per-episode thing — studios usually make less money on shorter-run shows than they do on shows that made it to 100 episodes. (There are exceptions, of course, particularly for beloved cult series.)
And though they're only a small part of the network decision-making process, the number of plays on a streaming service like Hulu can make a difference in a show's fate.
"A couple years ago, networks discounted those numbers. Now they're looking at them going, 'Oh, okay,'" Biegel said.
And streaming services also appeal to advertisers, who like their young audiences — and inability to skip ads.
"The thing that still matters is if you can prove that people are watching your show and they're the kind of people the network sees as valuable to them, as far as advertisers wanting to reach them, that's what's going to make or break them," Biegel said.
Reason No. 5: The show got poor ratings and was expensive
This is much more likely for a show not "owned" by the network. Think back to Fox's Almost Human, which was canceled in 2014. A solid-enough ratings performer, the robot cop show was, nevertheless, bedeviled by high visual effects costs. Since it was owned by Warner Brothers, there was no real reason for Fox to keep it around, and the show lasted only one 13-episode season. (This also bedeviled Last Man Standing, which boasted a hefty salary for star Tim Allen.)
Production expenses tend to be more of an issue with older shows, but it's a constant concern. Even a show that's "owned" by its network will be under harsher scrutiny come renewal season if it's wildly expensive to make on a per-episode basis.
Reason No. 6: The show got poor ratings, and nobody liked it (at the network)
Though fans and critics alike would love to believe they can extend a show's life just by being passionate enough, there's very little evidence to support this theory.
"To be really honest, most network shows are very, very expensive. ... It's hard to justify spending $40 to $50 million on a show that people write nice things about but nobody watches," Biegel told me.
However, it does help if a show is well-liked by network brass and has no notable naysayers among the executive suite.
"IT'S RARE THAT YOU FIND A SHOW THAT EVERYBODY IS TOTALLY BEHIND"
But this doesn't happen as much as TV fans might like to believe.
"It's rare that you find a show that everybody is totally behind," Biegel told me. But sometimes, he said, there's a show that the network takes on as its baby or special pet project.
For a good example, see NBC's recent Broadway-set Smash. Reportedly a favorite of network president Robert Greenblatt, it earned a second season, even though its first-season ratings slumped a little more with every week. But even the favor of the people deciding its fate is unlikely to buy a show more than one extra season. Smash failed to catch on after two seasons and was summarily canceled in 2013.
Reason No. 7: The show just got too old
CSI
CSI died of old age. CBS
This is the toughest cancellation reason to get a handle on, because so much of it is dictated by numbers that aren't publicly available. As you'd expect, the salaries for everyone involved in a show's production go up as that show ages — just like you might get a raise if you stay with a company and perform at a certain level year after year.
"EVERYBODY GETS CANCELED EVENTUALLY, AND SOME OF US VERY QUICKLY. IT IS WHAT IT IS."
For every show, there is a point where, even if it's successful, any other benefits are cast aside because of how expensive it gets. That's why renewals for shows like Bones (which concluded its 12th and final season this spring) or CSI (which was finally canceled in 2015, after 15 seasons) come down to the wire every year. Even though they reliably draw good numbers for their respective networks, the financials must be balanced so that the studio can continue making money on production. Eventually everything gets too expensive, and the show goes away.
The same happened to ABC's Castle in 2016. Even ABC Studios' plan to cut two cast members (including female lead Stana Katic) couldn't reduce the budget enough to make the network pick up the show (a case of a studio and network being owned by the same company but ultimately disagreeing on a show's fate). After eight seasons on the air, it was just too pricey.
"It's just the nature of the beast that everybody gets canceled eventually, and some of us very quickly," Killen told me. "It is what it is."
On the plus side, any show that airs for several seasons is (or was) likely a hit in some regard, and that means it'll likely have enough advance warning to plan a series finale — or its creators might even make the call to end the show themselves. This is the happiest end-of-show scenario. Nobody involved can quite afford to keep making it, but everybody wants to give it a victory lap to celebrate.
Still, that might not assuage the sadness of fans who wanted a show to continue forever. But have hope: All long-running shows are practically guaranteed to live on in cable reruns, the catalog of a streaming platform, or some other corner of our great entertainment ecosystem. In other words, they will be with you always.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/16/15...everything
IMO with each episode intended to be based on a fairy tale. The concept should have made for a never ending amount of episodes. The problem is the back stories are as important as the main story. Even though there was no limit to main stories. The back stories started to run into trouble. The story of the keys being the reason for conflict started to get old. They moved on the Diana combined with the Royals being the catalyst. They did a reboot and brought in HW against BC. That was a mistake. It eliminated the need for Nick the Grimm. They just could not assimilate his purpose into the story line.
The other things I saw is they could not make up their minds as to who the characters where. The biggest problem is the women where never allowed to over shadow the men. They also wanted to promote gender typical roles. While trying to show the women as independent. That is where the conflict started. Take Adalind she started off as a very crafty hexenbiest. Someone who seemed to be scheming on everyone, even Sean. When it started to been seen that Adalind was better the Sean, they turning her into someone being used by Sean. With Juliette Even though they made her a professional. They never let use forget she is Nick girl friend first. Her purpose was to support Nick. This was made really evident when she became a hexenbiest. Most of the comments are how Juliette did not support Nick and help him accept her. Even thought it was Juliette who was going through the change.
Taking a look at how the show ended with Nick and Adlind forming this stereotypical family is a unrealistic out come. It is unrealistic considering Adalind is a hexenbiest with magic. Diana also is and extremely powerful hexenbiest. It has always amazed me how anyone would think the Adalind and Diana character would ever work in a family situation. This idea that they would just not use their abilities is like someone rejecting who they are be it cultural and religious. It reminds me of those who object to people using happy holidays instead of Merry Christmas.
Even Eve who was designed to be extremely powerful was always shown assisting a man. Bitsie described the character as someone that did not need a man. This ideology lead to Eve not even being interested in men. the same was true with Trubel. It is though the writer can not combine a strong independent female with a character that has a sexual appetite. When they do show sexuality outside of a relationship. It is as a weapon. It is the stereotype that women use sex to get what they want.
It is inevitable that the show would end because of this conflict of wanting to address the current perception of women and their place in the world. While not stepping on the old gender ideology that society tries to hold women to. Some simple changes could have helped. They should have left Adalind as the crafty hexenbiest that Sean called on when he needed something done. They should have had him hire her instead of controlling her. Juliette should have from the time she was captured become part of the team. The cases where she had expertise she should have been allowed to take lead and Nick to follow. They could have still had the break between Nick and Juliette when she became a hexenbiest. There was more then enough reasons. The biggest being Nick's guilt of being the cause of the change. It could also be that Juliette as a hexenbiest choose to go it alone to learn what it really means to be wesen. This could have then lead to her learning about HW and going into training. As a member or HW she have been made a leader. Make her equal to meisner. Being as powerful as she was. She should have been able to command Nick and Sean.
Having ADalind once she had a child choose to no longer be a hexenbiest for hire would be find. To even have her go from being independent to wanting to compromise so she could include Nick into the life of her son. But to make her dependent on Nick was wrong. She is a lawyer and a hexenbiest with magic, why would she ever be dependent.
(09-17-2017, 11:31 PM)syscrash Wrote: [ -> ]The cases where she had expertise she should have been allowed to take lead and Nick to follow. They could have still had the break between Nick and Juliette when she became a hexenbiest. There was more then enough reasons. The biggest being Nick's guilt of being the cause of the change. It could also be that Juliette as a hexenbiest choose to go it alone to learn what it really means to be wesen. This could have then lead to her learning about HW and going into training. As a member or HW she have been made a leader. Make her equal to meisner. Being as powerful as she was. She should have been able to command Nick and Sean.
Considering the nature of their relationship from the beginning, where she was left too long on the outside and was used more as a "prop" when Adalind victimised her, I doubt this would happen on a show called Grimm. You're right about HW making Nick redundant almost but then they kept Nick independent and still had HW rely on Nick even though they were a world wide organisation and didn't need him. The writers could have have changed the DNA of the show but the last season, particularly the last three episodes showed why the show was called Grimm.
Something similar happens on Agents of SHIELD. It's an ensemble cast where almost everyone one plays an active role, they have individual arcs, the main character (Coulson) feels like he's a supporting act to the "Daisy show" because he's often in the background compared to the others (similarly to how some view Nick) but the writers ALWAYS circle back to Coulson taking the reigns in saving the day (he doesn't do it alone but there's no mistaking that the focus lies heavily on him even if his appearance is as ordinary as they come compared to those powered or especially gifted in some form or another), none more so than in the last episode of S4.
As fans we want to the story to go a certain way because we see that as a natural progression but not all shows are so inclined to move completely away from the main character and it would never have happened with Nick. It didn't matter how uninspired he may have seemed as a character compared to the others, they all still revolved around him as the center of the show.
What they could have done was make HW an overall controlling group. Then make Grimm in charge of their own jurisdictions. The same structure the BC was promoting. It would help answer the question of are there other Grimm. How do they work. The tried to do this with the resistance. But that story was a throwback to aristocracy rule. HW could have been a replacement for that. It could have also been used to explain how Grimm's like Kelly where able to survive. They where paid by HW to be Grimms.
I do agree shield became all about Daisy. Like the Eve character they did not know where they wanted to go with the character. One minute they are the hunter the next they are being hunted. They start with the character's powers being over the top to then becoming a victim. Writers seem to have a problem of maintaining the balance of predator and prey. The also seems to be a problem when dealing with characters that have powers. They constantly want to showcase the powers. But with each episode they need to make it bigger and better. This causes and out of balance situation which means the villain have to also increase in power and abilities to create a believable threat. The problem this make the other character seem out matched.
Grimm was never a prestigious show but I do think bad writing doomed it. A show with bad writing can only survive if the spectacle overshadows the bad writing. Grimm simply wasn't that flashy of a show, something I liked about it, to hide the bad writing. I agree about what they did with the women in the show being a contributing factor as well.
Everyone here knows I constantly bash GoT. I being completely sincere when I say the writing on that show isn't any better than Grimm's but the spectacle is still amazing. I don't think it's a good show but viewers don't want to miss the spectacle and discuss it the next day because it would make them feel left out. It being on HBO which is known for prestigious adult television helps as well and makes the writing seem adult rather than juvenile which it really is.
Back to Grimm, it tried to become something it wasn't ready for at all. The introduction of HW and BC made it feel as if the show wanted to have some sort of global feel where it's only local in reality. Nick and company worked best when taking care of neighborhood problems because they weren't capable of doing more. The scene of Nick going to HW's base felt all types of wrong. I view Nick as more Daredevil than Iron Man. Nick making a huge difference in the world outside of his reputation as an atypical Grimm was laughable. They utterly failed in the attempt to broaden the scope of the show. A few posters have already pointed out how Nick only took on BC when it became personal rather than because of the danger they posed to the world or even Portland itself.
I agree about the need to make powers bigger and better is a huge problem as well. Juliette becoming super powerful certainly didn't help. She was shown capable of taking care of all of their enemies on her own. She just needed someone to point her in the right direction. Seeing the others in battle with her only felt like they would get in her way. Wonder Woman needed more help than Juliette did in a fight.
It was especially galling when you consider that Nick's reputation as an atypical grimm was already world-changing. He was regularly blowing apart the traditional schisms and antagonisms between different kinds of wesen, between wesen and grimms and even between wesen, grimms and royals.
What happened was the the show fell prey to the irresistible urge TV seems to have to make their shows "relevant," and tell stories "ripped from the headlines." It seldom results in very good TV, and in the case of a series that started out as an escapist fantasy, the result was even worse.
It almost seemed like the created the HW vs BC story line to give Eve something to show how powerful she was. This is shown by them starting off by her taking out over 20 wesen in less then a minute. It was after that it seemed like the writers set the bar so high they had no place else to go. Even that event suffered from a lack of budget that would have allowed them to show how she took out that many wesen. For her to continue to cause that much damage would have taken a lot more special effects then they where budgeted. That is why until the end we say her doing push up. opening doors and morphing facial body parts. All things that take very little special effects.
The only large special effect they did with Eve was the fight with conrad. Lets compare season 5 with prior season. The beast fight that must have cost a fortune. Even the fight with Alicia's husband must have cost a lot. I also think one thing that might have changed what they did. After the Alicia fight scene Bitsie has said she liked it but it was a lot of work and she was sore for days. Then you had the fight with Nick where again she got hurt. After that one I think that was the end of the fight scenes she was willing to do. But buy then the Eve story line had already been planned.
That was just speculation on my part. But watching season five it just seemed like what they did was not what they planned. What does not make sense is how Bitsie showed she was working out for the part of Eve. Yet there was nothing physical for her to do. That is also why I think the planed physical was more then she was willing to do.
The other thing that makes me think the HW vs BC story did not go the way they wanted is after one season they completely dropped. The key story line, the Royals story line both went over several seasons. The entire zestora story line had no point nothing in the past lead up to it. They implied that Diana and by extension Eve had a connection to the other world. They never explained why. There where comments suggesting that the contract had something to do with the connection. But nothing in the show even tried to imply that connection. They seemed to just drop that line of thought. Might be the backlash of ADalind signing a contract to sell her child to regain her powers. To continue talking about the contract would have made it hard to project the she is a good mother making Nick want her to raise their child.
In a way the way the show was going I am kind of glad they ended the show before the completely destroyed it trying to find something that worked. Like is said the HW vs BC supporting the Eve character which could have also showcased the Trubel character. was a good idea. It could have even be used to setup for a spin off and to explain what a grown Dianna, Kelly and the triplets life would be. The HW vs BC story line made more since then Nick as a cop trying to solve problems with wesen.
(09-18-2017, 10:52 AM)syscrash Wrote: [ -> ]Bitsie work out regiment for season 5 was not for any physical fight scene that were planned for her to do. If so, they can use stunt people. Her work-out for season 5 was so she could look more FIT for her new style of wardrobe, Black Tight Leather outfits.
This is not an opinion or speculations. It came right out of Elizabeth Tulloch mouth on the interview she did and are readily posted on You Tube. I guess we can chalk up another case of opinions being distributed in these posts as facts.