DanielSonenberg.com

I posted a few weeks back about a show on ABC called Day Break, starring Taye Diggs (that's him in the pic). If I were truly a savvy blogger I'd hyperlink to the post, but instead, I'll let you dig for it with the brand new danielsonenberg.com search bar. Isn't it exciting? While you're searching, you can also look up that other post, from further back, when I said I was giving up television for good. Yeah, well, we see how that turned out. I am nothing if not human (and occasionally deeply in need of mind Novocain). Anyway, I watched a couple of more episodes of the show and got hooked - it's like 24 meets Groundhog's Day - high concept, very intense, great acting and writing, overall just a solid show. Well, I knew something was up a couple of weeks ago when I went to abc.com and saw that the next episode "had not been scheduled yet." I mean, this show was slated to run consecutively until Lost, which is more popular but not as good, made its triumphant return in February. Anyway, I went back to abc.com yesterday and discovered that all mention of Day Break has been scrubbed clean from their website. It's as if it never existed. Of course through google and wikipedia and all that I was able to ascertain that the show had been canceled due to consistently declining ratings. Apparently the last episode they aired only drew 3.9 million viewers (yeah, I'd be really bummed if one of my compositions "only" reached that many folks). So they just pulled the plug and flipped the bird to viewers like me, who had gotten hooked into a serialized drama, every episode of which had already been shot and paid for. In the can, so to speak. Apparently there were initially whispers about airing the eps on-line, but there were some sort of "music clearance" issues, so now Day Break has simply been disappeared. Is it just me, or is this deeply callous, insensitive and even immoral behavior on the part of the network? I mean, why would I ever, ever invest in another new show on ABC, now that I know that they don't give two squats about my happiness? I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. And the thing that kills me is, there's this other show called Big Day, another 24 knockoff, but this one idiotically about a single wedding day, stretched out over a whole TV season (stop reading for a moment and contemplate the inanity of that). Alex and I tuned in briefly because it stars Wendie Mallick, who was absolutely brilliant on the very funny show Just Shoot Me. But Big Day is truly awful, a clear misfire. I mean, I understand there is something called taste when it comes to humor (as every friend upon whom I’ve forced a viewing of “A Charlie Brown Kwanzaa” has reminded me), but this is not about taste. This is just an ill-conceived program with terrible writing, no comic timing, and no real interest whatsoever. It feels like watching a comedian out and out bomb at a comedy club. And yet this show, this STINKER that no sane person could possibly enjoy (unless they liked Gods and Monsters, I suppose), doesn’t get canceled by the American Bonehead Company? Grrr….