On Saturday, the powers-that-be at ABC announced that they would be pulling The Nine from their schedule. Much-hyped and critically acclaimed coming into the season, The Nine failed to gain a wide viewership, even with it’s cushy time slot. You’d think that an edgy, high-concept serial drama would thrive in the post-Lost time slot, but, obviously, this was not the case. The Nine regularly retained less than half of Lost’s audience. We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Hank Steinberg, creator of The Nine, in an exclusive interview. Hank was more than genial in his talk with us, and expressed how confident ABC was with The Nine and the concept behind it. As we all know, ratings trump all else in television.
To my knowledge, it looks as if thirteen episodes of The Nine were ordered and, likely, all were produced. ABC claims that the remaining episodes will air next year, but this is less than a certainty. Even if they are aired, it will be in a throwaway time slot and with no chance of more coming after the original thirteen episodes. This all brings up an interesting question: Can any show survive after Lost? It’s been my theory that Lost is so dense and exhausting that viewers can’t handle another hour of thought-provoking television. Last year, ABC tried the serial alien drama Invasion in the post-Lost time slot and it also failed. ABC seems to believe that Lost viewers want more of the same in the 10PM hour. I don’t think Lost viewers want more of anything. ABC should focus on creating something entirely different than Lost for that 10PM slot. Either something totally artificial that will allow the Lost fanatics to turn their brains off or a show that has a whole different demographic. All TV shows need to find their very own audience. It’s fairly well-documented that hour long dramas are tough to piggyback audiences with; this only works (and only occasionally) with comedies. This is a tough pill to swallow for all you Nine fans out there, especially if you’ve grown attached to the story. It looks like we’ll never find out what really happened in that bank. -Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
