- Media News -
MEDIA RESPONSES TO SOS PRESS RELEASE AND MEDIA AD IN USA TODAY
San Francisco Examiner
Wednesday, June 24
Tim Goodman
We should all show a little more respect
REMEMBER not so long ago all those stories about people absolutely fanatical about Titanic and how they'd go back again and again - how they'd stab strangers who dissed it, how families broke apart and marriages crumbled because some nut job was blowing eight bucks a day on their romance fix?
Well, you know what I mean.
Suspend your critical judgment of the content and focus in on this fact: no movie in recent memory has caused people to glom onto it like fanatical barnacles. Titanic touched people in ways that far superior movies never do. Yes, Raging Bull is brilliant, but it's not like people are drawn back to it like old lovers with unfinished business as they are with Titanic. That's rare. So the media treated the hoopla like some quaint freak show.
TV critics just yawned. That kind of it-changed-my-life-oh-my-God-oh-my-God hysteria happens all the time on television, the most popular medium on the planet.
Even now, entering the ugly summer days of rerun TV, there is fanaticism. Passions run deep. There is a visceral, loving, desperate relationship between people and their best-beloved TV shows. Art lovers and fiction fans and even those who cherish great cinema can only sit by, jealous of the relationship.
Wouldn't it be a great country if we all meditated and enjoyed the higher arts? But we're Americans and we love television and if anyone ever attempted to separate us from our sets we'd gorge on them them like fat, weak, dazed wildebeests on the killing veldt of lion-saturated Africa.
Try making fun of someone's favorite TV show - it's like working the very last nerve of a gun-toting militia goon. Those people go off like bombs. Nothing compares. Oh, you can mock Shakespeare, even, and you'll get a faint chorus of defenders. You can point and giggle at Van Gogh's life work and a few brave souls might step forward to threaten your life.
But denigrate Gilligan's Island and its contribution to culture and spend the rest of your life as an outcast and social misfit.
Such is the state of television allegiance in America. Navigating that landscape as a critic can be unexpectedly perilous. There's nothing quite like stumbling merrily into a community of somber small-screen cultists, you in your garish clown car, tooting the horn of sarcasm, blind to how fanatical those folks really are. Talk about a Town Called Malice.
I did that quite by accident last week, innocently noting that cancelled shows rarely get the Lazarus treatment, no matter how much letter writing and e-mail begging occurs. In mentioning UPN's recently cancelled series, The Sentinel, I said all 12 viewers were irate.
A joke, clearly. In the industry, UPN and The WB are referred to as netlets, or fledgling networks. Consequently, their ratings are lower than the Big Four. And while I may have beaten up on UPN in the past - with variations of the all-12-viewers line - this didn't sit particularly well with rabid fans of The Sentinel.
I'm sure the UPN publicists who suffer through that joke of mine once or twice a month are giddy at how it has come back to haunt me. Hundreds of vociferous Sentinel fans clearly missed the little sarcastic aside and have been flooding me with hateful e-mail. Not just local fans. Bitter viewers from Texas, New York, Austria, England, Canada and all across the wide world have been crafting lengthy, mean-spirited responses.
The majority never saw the full column, just a snippet posted by some diligent Usenet tattletale trying to start a riot. I wrote a good portion of the responses off as nothing more than ramblings from fascist sheep using misinformation on the Internet to further their pet causes, an annoyingly frequent trend.
Their smugness in knowing that I was getting inundated with letters was nauseating. But many got wind of the flaming and tried their best to put it out with apologies and explanation.
Fine, admirable even, but unnecessary. I can take it when you bring the noise. What was of more interest to me was the unexpected passion. No offense - and no more letters, please - but this is The Sentinel for God's sake, not Masterpiece Theater. But maybe that's the point. It doesn't have to be ER or NYPD Blue or even famous cancelled shows like My So Called Life and I'll Fly Away to get people fired up.
Somewhere, there are people mourning the loss of MacGyver or The Tom Arnold Show. People still want to see The Prisoner or My Mother the Car. I'm still in deep, prolonged depression over the death of EZ Streets and Profit.
The question - why? What is it about 30 or 60 minutes of weekly eye candy that gets us so passionate? Are we really so shallow that some concoction out of Hollywood - Land of the Lame, Home of the Unoriginal Idea - could push us so close to the edge?
Yeah, maybe. Go away and let us snack on our sin, wallow in our vices.
People who dismiss television are ignoring a social phenomenon. It gives us something that we obviously crave. Escapism, perhaps. Relationship. Continuity. Education in the best moments, mindless entertainment in the worst. Common ground. A blue light that fills some kind of void that a decade of $100 therapy sessions couldn't patch up. It's an electronic security blanket, to be sure.
Think about it. If people across the country - many countries - can get worked up by a relatively obscure little show, the cumulative effects of more popular shows, their issues, their jokes, their cancellation, could be astounding.
We love that damned box, that bastard machine, and all of us, apparently, need to be a little more respectful of its power and influence.
Atlanta Journal & Constitution
Wednesday, June 24
"New Life for Sentinel?"
Fans of UPN's The Sentinel, which was not on the fall lineup announced last month, are pushing hard to persuade the network to keep the show in production -- at least as a backup series for next season. The Sentinel was dropped after a cliffhanger episode that won't be resolved under UPN's current plan. Fans have set up an Internet location to communicate their frustration: http://world.std.com/~sentinel/index.html.
TV Gen - Daily Dish
Tuesday, June 23
Susan Campbell Beachy
Dr. Quinn and Sentinel Fans Bankroll Ads
Disappointed fans of recently canceled TV shows are moving beyond letter- writing campaigns: They're putting their money where their mouths are. Last week, fans of UPN's The Sentinel bought a $2,000 (sic*) ad in USA Today, asking fellow viewers to contact the network about bringing back the show. Not to be outdone, a group that calls itself the Coalition to Save Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman has chipped in to buy a $3,030 full-page ad in today's issue of The Hollywood Reporter, a showbiz trade magazine.
According to Kris Voelker, who hosts the Coalition's web site, fans of the Jane Seymour series responded enthusiastically to a request for donations posted on the site. "Within three or four days we got over $7,000," she says.
Written in the style of a news report and bearing the headline "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Abducted: Motive Remains A Mystery," the Reporter ad says that "When questioned about the disappearance, the spokesperson for the HMO, CBS Corporation, charged that Dr. Quinn's patients were 'too old, too rural, too female, and too poor' to pay the bills, thus they were removing her license to practice on Saturday nights."
The ad, says Voelker, is not aimed at CBS bigwigs, but at "friends of Dr. Quinn. We're trying to gather some support from people who might want to jump on the bandwagon with us."
While the ads are unlikely to change the minds of network execs, they've demonstrated the fund-raising power of fan groups. Perhaps someday they'll collect enough to buy networks of their own.
(* - that was $5,000 - TV Gen have been advised of this error).
San Jose Mercury News
Monday, June 22
Ron Miller
Mercury News Television Writer
Sentinel fans lobby for its return
FANS of UPN's The Sentinel, which was not on the fall lineup announced last month, are pushing hard to persuade the network to keep the show in production -- at least as a backup series for next season.
The Sentinel was dropped after a cliffhanger episode that won't be resolved under UPN's current plan.
"Fans of The Sentinel have united in an effort to try to get the show back as a mid-season replacement series," fan Laura K. Wynne e-mailed me recently. "We refuse to accept that this is the way the series is going to end."
Wynne said a "Support Our Sentinel" location has been set up via the Internet, which fans can reach through this URL: world.std.com/~sentinel/index.html.
Though I'm hesitant to encourage fans to hope overmuch, it's always possible that a huge viewer response might move UPN at least to order a formal wrap-up episode for The Sentinel. Still, contracts with the talent probably are about to run out, so hope dims with each new day.
Having watched network behavior for a couple of decades, I have to tell you that few executives ever worry about frustrated viewers, when the series that has been ended abruptly was a low-rated one. I remember how irritated fans of ABC's Soap were when the network canceled it in the middle of a cliffhanger in 1981. Pleas for a wrap-up finale failed to budge ABC. And my unhappiness was acute when CBS canceled Under Suspicion with the detective hero, Rose Phillips (Karen Sillas), apparently dying from a gunshot wound on the sidewalk. I still don't know whether she's alive or dead.
I know producers who say they purposely painted their characters into tight corners to nudge the network into renewing them. Those tactics usually backfire, though, and cause the producers as much woe as the networks.
The Columbus Dispatch - Ohio
Saturday, June 20
Some fans of the sci-fi/drama series The Sentinel are in an uproar over what they they view as the show's shabby treatment by United Paramount Network.
After The Sentinel ended its season with a cliffhanger, UPN announced that it was not on the network's fall schedule. Fans of the show describe the move as a cancellation and are sending e-mail in protest.
But the show is not canceled, a UPN spokeswoman said. "It's up for consideration for midseason."
San Francisco Examiner
Wednesday, June 17
Tim Goodman
Pointless droning, "Apocalypse Now' and other tales of the tube
Everything we know we learned from television:
* Well of course we'll be watching the X-Games on ESPN. Where else can you see some skate rat get his groin thwacked on a hand rail?
* It's like auto racing. You don't want to admit it, but you're looking for tires coming off and cars flipping. Same thing here, only with street luge psychos.
* Plus it has a cool advertising campaign - like everything else on ESPN.
* KTVU Channel 2 - celebrating 40 years in business, much of that spent beating up on everyone else's news - had a little party in Napa during the weekend. Donnie and Marie Osmond were there - no, not to reproduce - but to hype their upcoming talk show. You know what, they seem very nice. And that Marie, she's got something.
* At 40, Donnie looks lean. Can you imagine an Osmond comeback? A friend says he won't watch. He can't forgive them for horning in on The Jackson Five's cartoon dominance.
* Fight fans certainly know Mills Lane. He's a ref. He was the one who disqualified Mike Tyson for noshing on Evander Holyfield's ear. He was in Napa, too. He's got a new show, too. Trouble is, you can't hear a word the guy says. He's like Boomhauer on King of the Hill.
* The best part of the gala event was Vonda Shepherd, the musical muse on Ally McBeal. She played four rocking songs, had the crowd in a daze and proved she's got some serious pipes. Gil Bellows, who plays Ally's ex, was on hand. He was very animated and nice, too. But he's sporting a beard. That's a bad look. Even worse than his Cadillac commercials.
* But hey, the ladies love him.
* Fox also sent up Sue Costello to join in the Napa bash. She's the star of a new series in the fall. She's got an incredibly grating Boston accent but unlike Mills Lane, you can understand her. Here's the trouble: Who is she? She's supposed to be a famous stand up. Her show is called Costello. Did we have a power outage here where we missed her moment?
* Too bad the Costello show isn't just a bunch of songs from Elvis.
* UPN is launching its fall season in October, instead of September like everyone else (or in August, as has been tried by some in the past). Verdict: Great idea. As Tom Nunan, UPN entertainment president said, the late launch guarantees fresh episodes during sweeps and "allows our new shows to speak with volume and clarity after all the other networks have rolled out in September's clutter."
* Besides, more time to fine-tune those Love Boat storylines.
* Absurd Haiku: Start the season late / Hold back mediocrity / Breathe, take a moment.
* Why we love ESPN - even beyond seeing young people put their lives in peril for no reason: The channel is providing 28 hours of U.S. Open coverage. We all want the lesson. That's why we watch.
* So you've been watching Another World since what, 1964? You're deep into the soap when, on June 22, it gets dumped off the KRON Channel 4 schedule in favor of The Howie Mandel Show.
* To which we say: Ouch, that's embarrassing.
* After the people trying to save Nothing Sacred ran out of spirit, if not passion, the two most heated revival efforts center on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (whose female fans say cutting it is a plot by CBS to go after the young male audience) and The Sentinel (whose entire 12 viewers have vociferously gone after UPN). A sad but true reminder: These protests almost never work.
* Which prompts this regular reminder for all: Television is like the most popular girl in high school, or a good looking, successful, single man in his 30s. No good can come from that relationship.
* Television hurts you. Because it's popular. It doesn't need you specifically. And no amount of angst-filled letter writing is going to make it love you back.
* Thuy Vu, one of the best TV reporters in the Bay Area, left KPIX Channel 5 for KTVU Channel 2. That's a fine addition to an already solid staff.
* Comedy Central has decided to abandon plans to market South Park dolls and toys because it doesn't want kids - who are not the target audience - to fall for an adult show that some have called obscene.
* Why, then, can children still buy "Garfield" dolls?
* CBS is bringing back The Magnificent Seven as a midseason replacement, proving that even when you've been shot in the back, you're not dead.
* American Movie Classics is kind of known for being staid and boring, but it got a rise last week when it aired uncut versions of Apocalypse Now. Cable operators were worried that Congress would come down hard on them. Relax. It's a great movie, there were parental warnings and Congress has never shied away from a war.
* Maybe it's the power of Magic, maybe it's just flat out bad, but Vibe is done after this season. Another talk show dead, as four more rise from its ashes. This is a losing battle, people.
* People who do syndication deals are chewing their fingernails over the down market. Seems Suddenly Susan wasn't the hot seller they thought. Must we again utter this: Duh! Maybe no one wanted it because, uh, it's not funny.
* Having recovered from the shock, here's this: CNBC cancelled Charles Grodin's talk show. Perhaps pointless droning is not the ratings champ everyone thought.
* Yes, this is pointless droning.
* Bring me the heads of Sinbad and Charles Grodin.
* The High Fives: 1. The U.S. Open. 2. Miami Vice. 3. Pay cable original shows. 4. Martha Stewart Living. 5. Apocolypse Now, uncensored on AMC.
Cop TV Site
Wednesday, June 17
The Sentinel Fans Take to USA Today
If you picked up the Monday edition of USA Today, you might have noticed something that Sentinel fans hope make a point. They want the show back.
An ad in the national paper showed that The Sentinel has a very organzied fan-base, but will it mean long-term survival for the show? UPN has sent out mixed signals about the show, saying, at one time or another, that it is coming back in the mid-season, or that it is cancelled out-right.
Fans, however, are confident that they can bring the show back, especially after similar tactics paid off for Magnificent Seven fans, who also placed ads to get the attention of executives.
Still, it's important for fans to communicate their feelings to the network. The "Support Our Sentinel" site has tons of information for how to help save the series and show your support.
Where to write UPN:
Mr Dean Valentine
President
UPN
11800 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90025-9425
Tom Nunan
President of Programming
UPN
11800 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90025-9425
Deseret News ,Salt Lake City
Wednesday, June 17
Not every show is worth saving
By Scott D. Pierce
The networks announced their fall schedules last month. Which, of course, means we're in the midst of the latest go-round of the Save-Our-Favorite-Show Derby.
The trouble is that, these days, there's a campaign to save just about every show that gets canceled - whether it deserves saving or not. And all this noise makes it harder to draw attention to those programs that are truly worthy of a second chance.
Take, for example, the current effort under way to revive the UPN series The Sentinel. Chances are that most Americans are unaware of these efforts because the vast majority of Americans are unaware of the show.
In a news release e-mailed to newspapers across the country, the organizers of this campaign write that "Loyal fans of The Sentinel hope that bringing the plight of their show to wider media and public attention will help force the network's hand."
Well, probably not. Particularly because this particular TV critic never thought much of the show in the first place.
The fact is that even the lowest-rated TV shows are still viewed by a few million people every week. And, obviously, even if they're a tiny minority of the general population, there are at least a few passionate fans of just about every series on television.
Since the advent of the Internet, these passionate fans have a way of joining up and at least attempting to create some sort of united front.
Fans of The Sentinel are particularly incensed because the final episode was a cliffhanger - one of the major characters appeared to have drowned and the hour ended with the tag line, "To Be Continued." Which is undeniably frustrating and annoying.
(Not that it hasn't happened before, even on UPN. Remember Nowhere Man?) But is this a show that's really worth saving? Not really. Not that it was any worse or any better than most of what's out there. But whether it comes back or not (and, apparently, there's still some slim hope) is really of little consequence.
Public pressure campaigns sometimes work. CBS has said that viewer feedback is one of the reasons it ordered 13 episodes of The Magnificent Seven as a midseason replacement after initially canceling the series.
Not to mention that some excellent shows have been saved by letter- writing campaigns. Everything from the original Star Trek to Cagney & Lacey to Designing Women found new life after cancellation because of public pressure. At the time, however, those were the exceptions rather than the rule. Those campaigns stood out - and succeeded.
But nowadays, we have groups out there trying to save a show like Family Matters, an annoying sitcom that is going off after nine seasons on the air. It's difficult to imagine a show that is less deserving of another year on the air than that one.
The problem with all these Save-Our-Favorite-Show campaigns is that any noise they create becomes just so much buzz in the ears of network programmers. It's like having a house full of screaming kids - it's all but impossible to pay attention to any one of them.
And that can be a bad thing when a truly deserving show - shows like Homefront or Brooklyn Bridge - can't get noticed above the din.
Much of the blame for this sort of annual anguish has to be laid at the feet of the networks themselves. They go out of their way to try to make you love their show, they encourage you to build up a personal relationship with it, and then when they cancel it, they tell you it's just business.
Which is true. But it was just business from the beginning. In the case of The Sentinel, Paramount not only co-owns the network on which it was broadcast but it also owns the show. Thus, it had a vested interest in keeping it on the air. Obviously, the decision was made with a bottom-line mentality, taking into account budgets and license fees and ratings and demo-graphics.
The same could (and has) been said of CBS's Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman - another show that was both owned and broadcast by the network. The series' ratings and demographics didn't attract the advertising dollars needed to keep it on the air.
Does this in any way negate the feelings of fans? Absolutely not. But fans should remember - from the beginning - that all television programming is designed to wrap around the commercials.
With that in the back of their minds, potential heartbreak might be minimized.
The article was accompanied by a picture of Richard Burgi and Garett Maggart with the caption: Fans of The Sentinel, which stars Richard Burgi and Garett Maggart, are trying to revive the show in the wake of its cancellation.
Kansas City Star
Wednesday, June 17
So what happened to The Sentinel (7 tonight on Channel 29)? In the season-ending cliffhanger, the sensory-enhanced detective Ellison (Richard Burgi) apparently lost his partner Blair Sandburg (Garett Maggart). Or did he? It appeared fans would never find out because UPN left The Sentinel off the fall schedule. A UPN spokesman said that no decision has been made whether to bring the show back at mid-season. As for a one-time TV movie that would wrap up the loose ends, the spokesman said, "That would be so premature to contemplate." In tonight's repeat the sole witness to a policeman's death claims she was in a trance.
By Aaron Barnhart - Television Writer
Sci-fi Channel
Tuesday, June 16
Sci-fi channel has the press release up at their Wire page and the lead in their News section.
Sentinel Fans Take Protest To USA Today
Fans of UPN's TV show The Sentinel took out an ad in the June 15 edition of USA Today protesting UPN's decision to remove the series from its fall lineup in favor of the freshman SF drama Seven Days. The fans, who have organized a campaign called Support Our Sentinel or SOS, were particularly aggrieved by The Sentinel's season finale, a cliffhanger episode that promised viewers the story was "To be continued."
The USA Today ad ran with the slogan "When UPN said no...the fans said no way" and directed readers interested in keeping The Sentinel on air to the SOS Web site. In response to the SOS campaign, UPN set up a Sentinel Hotline that, as of June 16, simply said there was no further information available on the status of the show.
Last month UPN released a fall programming schedule that did not include The Sentinel, but UPN has said the series has not been officially cancelled and could return as a mid-season replacement. Calls to UPN from Sci-Fi Wire were directed to the Sentinel Hotline.
You can respond to their inclusion of the story direct to: Email: scifirewire@scifi.com
(Thanks Gloria)