Joining the club

Wasn't going to blog today, but just saw Dave Itzkoff's piece on Cavemen in yesterday's NYT:

"Every year, it seems, one new series is offered up as a sacrificial lamb to the critical gods....In 2007 that show has undeniably been 'Cavemen.'...[T]he 'Cavemen' creators look back and think they were sunk from the start." —"A Sitcom Battles Its Own Prehistory"

The article looks at how hard it was for the Cavemen creators to shed the "this show was spawned from a car insurance commercial" label, but as fellow fan and Dizzyhead Mike e-mailed me, that just means "it's more 'TV' than TV itself!"

As Itzkoff writes: "Some critics shared the opinion of Amy Robinson of The Charleston Gazette, who acknowldged that the bad publicity surrounding 'Cavemen' had influenced her opinion of it." A reviewer for the Daily News gave it zero stars. Looking back: It seems like the writer of this earlier, negative NYT review fell into the same trap—liking Cavemen more than she expected, and unable to justify this feeling, viz., "Let the record reflect: I laughed." OK—well, isn't that a good thing, isn't that what sitcoms are supposed to make you do? Run with it! Don't fight the feeling!

Alas, this post is not the well-shaped argument for Cavemen that I had contemplated writing a few weeks ago. It seems like a lost cause at this point, and there are other things to think about. But to encourage viewership, ABC could do more—they could offer more than just two episodes at a time on their website, for starters. And they could...broadcast new episodes every day of the week. (The article says there are seven episodes yet to be shown.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging about Gossip Girl.