This is not the future my [friend] warned me about (part 2)

It's about an hour into June 2, which means I'm done with my month-long Birthday celebrating.  If only it wasn't overshadowed with tragic news.

I was at a Pro Wrestling Guerrilla (PWG) show back in April where the venue had a bar and I was "just boozin' it" - a phrase that I picked up from Jesse Flores (Stephanie Jacobsen) in the episode "Today is the Day" of Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:SCC) - while talking to my friend, Marty Hill.

Pause.  Who's Marty Hill?  He's a fellow wrestling fan, a promoter of raves, but most importantly in this situation, he works at FOX.  The WB produces T:SCC, but FOX airs it.  Marty assured me that FOX would renew it for a 3rd season, explaining, "There's too much buzz around it."

And while all T:SCC fans remained in nervous wreck prior to May 18, our "Judgement Day," the date when FOX revealed their Fall line-up of TV shows to determine whether or not our show would be renewed, I chilled.  Everyone thought FOX was the threat.  I thought FOX was the ally and that the show's fate rested in the hands of the WB.  I didn't bother to mount a Resistance.  I believed in Marty's prophecy so much.

I was wrong.  Here's a final message to the fans from T:SCC creator Josh Friedman:

By now most of you have heard the news that T:SCC is cancelled. I received a call earlier today from Peter Roth at Warner Bros. and I appreciate both his personal and professional support throughout this show’s life. I know a lot of you are angry about the cancellation and want to find a place to direct your anger and to that I say do yourself a favor and find a way to move past it. Every network wants a big fat hit, especially one with a brand name behind it, and Fox was/is no different. They supported the show, they supported my vision of the show, and they gave it plenty of time to find an audience.

And what an audience we found: passionate, intelligent, kind of nuts in a good way. My only complaint about the T:SCC fans is that there aren’t ten million of them. But I prefer to be happy for the ones we had instead of lamenting the ones we didn’t.

Good shows are cancelled every year; smart shows, worthy shows, shows which move their viewers to write blogs and have viewing parties and create action figures and bury executives’ email accounts under thousands of messages. I miss Deadwood and The Wire and Arrested Development but thank God that I still have Rescue Me and The Officeand a recently renewed Party Down written by ex-T:SCC writer John Enbom.

Bad shows are cancelled, too. And certainly there are those who did not like what we did and had their own vision for what a Terminator TV show should be. It’s easy to look at low ratings or cancellation as “failure” and for those who believe we’ve gone about this all wrong I’m sure today’s news will only serve to confirm a world view that I would never try to change. We’ve written the show as best we can, executed it to the best of our abilities, and sent it out in the world knowing that we worked out asses off to do something that wouldn’t be a waste of anybody’s forty-three minutes.

Thanks to a brave and talented cast, a feature crew working on a TV schedule, and everyone else who I could list but won’t because they know who they are. Mostly I’d like to thank those of you who’ve supported us and fought for us and given up hours of your life to watch our show. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. The watching.

Hope we do it again soon.

Josh Friedman

I went to the bar - using as an excuse the CSUN graduation celebration of my friend, Richard, who I hadn't seen since we graduated from Providence High School in 2002 - and spent the night "boozin' it."  Even chicks bought me drinks because they felt sorry.  Some chick remarked that they had never seen anyone drink over a TV show before.  

Drinking accomplished.  Reboot brain cells.  Initiate pre-production of Terminator: the Sarah Connor Fanfics.