Rock Center RIP

[pinkytoe]

I was sad to hear that this show was being canceled due to low ratings. It was one of the only non PBS shows I regularly watched. Oh well...one more reason not to watch TV.

[bUU]

I never watched it. My impression was that it was offered as an incentive to Brian Williams to stay with NBC, and was never considered by anyone in the network, except perhaps Williams himself, to be a viable program. There's only so much money a network is willing to waste for its stars.

Television is competing with far more convenient means of receiving news, these days. There are so few people watching news on television as compared to 30-40 years ago (http://www.journalism.org/node/1336) that they only thing keeping the programs that exist going is the fact that they're comparatively inexpensive to produce, and there is not yet a clear means of making more money presenting some other programming during those time periods. Parenthood is going to do far better Thursday at 10PM than Rock Center did, and I doubt that Williams was willing to take the pay cut and visibility cut appropriate for a move of Rock Center to Saturday at 10PM (especially since CBS already realized that that's the only prime-time hour that a program like that can be profitably run).

Kudos to NBC, though, for not filling the spot with mindless reality crap. Rock Center was effectively replaced (if you track back all the shuffling) with the reimagined drama series, Ironside, starring Blair Underwood.