No matter how you look at it, television is in a very sad place these days. Networks clamber for 'quality shows', giving away the best prime time time slot to whatever they want to succeed, or anything they want to kill. If a show is good, really good, it gets to keep its time slot. If the show is bad, really bad, it loses the time slot and gets cancelled.

The heart of the problem here is that the line between 'good' and 'bad' is awfully skewed. TV producers dont see eye to eye with their viewers, and they rely on an outdated ratings system to justify what stays and what goes. Using this system, if a network wants to kill a show, they can put it against another show on another network that gets ratings. The ratings of the ill-begotten show go down, and voila, a reason to cancel. A legitimate one, that the fans cant complain about. Shows dont get a chance anymore. You're either a hit, or a miss.

Television is just as much an art as the other forms of media. Art doesnt happen in a day. It takes time to develop. Shows these days are hardly given a season to make it big. Like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the legal drama Justice, the medical drama Medical Investigations, or the sci-fi-esque Surface. While these shows weren't perfect, they had their own charms. Justice and Studio 60 didnt get a full season. Surface and Medical Investigations, shows from last year and the year before, were never picked up for a second season. Cliffhangers were left with no answers.

This is a particular problem after a period of time when all shows were serial dramas, and not episode-to-episode, as with the 90s TV format. So what happened exactly?

The networks aired shows like Lost, House, 24, CSI, and Law and Order. People watched these shows, because they were good. So the networks tried to work from here, and leech off the success. Then come shows like Heroes, Prison Break, Daybreak, The Nine, Any Legal Drama Here, and the other CSIs. Some of the shows are good, like Heroes, and Prison Break. Some of the other legal shows were good, and people seem to like the other CSIs well enough. What about the bad shows? Daybreak and The Nine, of this currently passed TV season, are my main focus here. They get cancelled, because no one watched. As far as we know. Trust those faulty Nielsons to run our TV lives, why dont we. So the networks step back and think what to do next.

Well, people liked Ugly Betty, so lets go with a line of sitcoms. No one watched Daybreak or The Nine. They dont want gritty, complicated shows.

No one watched the shows because they sucked! Networks have to get their heads out of their asses. People dont watch shows for 2 reasons. They suck, or you **** with them. Dont cancel the good shows, Networks. Let them have 2 seasons, not just one. They might need some more time to settle in. Shows used to have more time than they do now. These days, its instant hit or you're out. No three strikes. Just one. If something doesnt happen soon, to change things, TV might never stop going down, deeper into that dark and twisty place.