Monsters of Television

Shows jump networks. Most recently, Scrubs and Medium changed networks after their original nets passed on renewal. While I can’t speak to Medium‘s transition from NBC to CBS, Scrubs retooled itself as a med school show, with some of the old regulars hanging around, interacting with the new interns. The vibe never really took off for me (I’m told it got better after the first few episodes, but I didn’t stick around to find out) and it was cancelled.

Shows also get uncancelled. Futurama and Family Guy being the most prominent examples. Cancelled by Fox, the shows managed to live in syndication and DVD sales, motivating new pick-ups by either the old network or a new one. To what degree these shows maintain their quality is debatable (I liked early Family Guy episodes, but found its return episode to be dismal; Futurama has been hit or miss, depending on the movie or the episode).

Finally, one last bit: When Lost was on the air, a joke was that the final season would be a zombie season. While this joke, in a very metaphysical way, may’ve turned out to be true in the final season, it wasn’t like the final season just went through the motions, or that Jack devoured Hurley’s brains. Which might’ve been cool, actually…

What does all of this have to do with Law & Order: Los Angeles (or LOLA as seems to be the popular shortening)? Well, LOLA finds itself in the weird position of be a spin-off of a institutional franchise that itself was just cancelled, feels like a slightly re-tooled version of that cancelled show, but, above all, feels like a reanimated corpse of that cancelled show. Read more »