A bear. via Wikimedia Commons
Before I dive back into the life and times of the Cancel Bear, I want to highlight something I wrote for The Hollywood Reporter this week. For a good while, I had been turning over an idea that I could try to pinpoint when we last had a real monoculture — a truly shared popular culture where more or less everyone was at least aware of what was happening in movies, music, TV and other media.
I looked at a bunch of data and discovered … that there wasn’t one specific dividing line. But I argue that the 2014 Oscars, which had an audience of more than 43 million people and featured the instantly viral group selfie taken by Bradley Cooper, was the last peak for monoculture. You can read the story here.
Now, back to the Bear.
As I wrote in last week’s part one, TV by the Numbers — the all ratings, all the time site that birthed the Cancel Bear — became a partner site of Zap2it in 2010 and bought it outright in 2014. The site’s founders, Bill Gorman and Robert Seidman, were not really involved in the daily workings of the site by then.
At the same time, I was thinking about moving on from Zap2it, where I had worked since 2001. Or rather, I was thinking about moving away from Los Angeles, which in turn meant I would need to leave my job. Higher-ups weren’t into the idea of remote work, but my wife and I had recently had twins, who were sleeping in the dining room of our two-bedroom L.A. apartment (our older daughter had the small second bedroom).
We moved to Austin in May 2015, and I cobbled together some freelance work for a few months — until my former Zap2it bosses called and asked if I’d be interested in taking over TV by the Numbers.
(Side note about Zap2it: It had a goofy name, and its owner, Tribune Media, never saw the editorial side I worked on as anything more than ancillary to the TV listings product that brought in the lion’s share of revenue. But a lot of really talented writers worked there over the years — the editor who hired me, Brill Bundy, had a knack for bringing in good people. Zap2it alums include my current THR colleagues Dan Fienberg and Mikey O’Connell, Salon executive editor for culture & food Hanh Nguyen, TV writer and showrunner Carina Adly MacKenzie, Chris Hayner, Jean Bentley, Andrea Reiher, Terri Schwartz, Tierney Bricker, Korbi Ghosh and a bunch more. If you’ve been a regular consumer of pop culture in the 2000s, odds are you’ve read, watched or listened to their work.)
I had been the primary ratings person for Zap2it for most of my time there, and I would be more or less left to my own devices at TVBTN. It was an easy yes, and I settled in reasonably quickly.
Emphasis on “reasonably” there. I remember that the very first daily ratings post I did for TVBTN was written through, as in “Show X led primetime among adults 18-49 with a z.z rating, up whatever from its performance last week.” The very active TVBTN commentariat was not on board with that, demanding I stick with the ratings tables that were a hallmark of the site. So, no big deal, I kept that — and it did make things easier day to day.
I also decided to change up things some in how the site operated. For all the talk about how TVBTN and the Cancel Bear were immune to network spin about ratings, much of what actually appeared on the site were copy-and-pasted press releases from those same networks. I didn’t want to continue that, so I started being more choosy about what else to report that would fit the site and did a good number of original data-driven stories like this one surveying every Nielsen-rated show on cable and network TV in a week.
Along with that, I also took over the Renew/Cancel Index and the Cancel Bear Twitter account. The index was easily the most read feature on the site in any given week during the TV season, and there was no way I was going to do away with it. As for the Bear, I was little more ambivalent.
What it came down to was this: The Bear persona was a troll. It loved to needle TV fans who were arguing for their marginally rated shows to be saved and present itself as the ultimate arbiter of what was going to survive or die on network TV.
The thing was, the Bear was usually right about its predictions. The Renew/Cancel Index was in fact a good barometer — in the three years I ran it, I correctly predicted about 85 percent of renewals and cancellations. Most shows weren’t that hard to call, but in some edge cases the index helped make the case one way or the other.
But while I liked to make jokes about stuff on Twitter (and still do on Bluesky), my heart was never really in the meaner side of the Cancel Bear. I tried to match the tone of the Bear persona for a while after I took over TV by the Numbers, but I didn’t like doing it.
So over time, the Cancel Bear mellowed out some. I would still post as the Bear every Tuesday when the newest round of predictions came out (more on that process in a minute), and would reply when someone asked a question. But the persona became much more matter of fact — it wasn’t that the Bear took relish in gobbling up badly rated shows, necessarily, it was just what it did.
It was probably to the small detriment of TV by the Numbers that I didn’t lean harder into the Bear’s trollish aspects. During my time running the site, the Bear persona didn’t really play into any larger conversations around shows in danger of cancellation. That’s in part because in the late 2010s, there weren’t as many bubble shows with especially vocal fanbases — not a ton of people were out arguing for, say, ABC’s Time After Time in 2017 the way there were for the likes of Chuck or Happy Endings a few years earlier.
But it’s also maybe because I didn’t make as much of an effort on that front as I could have. I’ll take that tradeoff, though.
As far as actually running the actual Renew/Cancel Index, though, that was kind of fun. How it worked was I would track each scripted network show’s 18-49 ratings (same-day only) on a Google document, along with the network average. It looked like this — the screenshot below is for ABC in the 2017-18 season (and by the way, with a few modifications over the years, I still track ratings like this).
I would stay up late on Mondays putting together the renew/cancel posts and then get online early each Tuesday when weekend ratings came in to publish them. I stuck with the original index formula the first season I ran TVBTN, then made some small changes that made it a little more data-oriented — I quantified what a replacement-level rating might be and indexed shows to that rather than just their network average, which could get skewed by a couple of unusually big or small shows. I doubt anyone really noticed, but it was a fun exercise for me.
But after three years of running TV by the Numbers essentially on my own (I had a part-time freelancer for the last year), I was burning out. Zap2it, renamed Screener in 2016, had been shut down the previous year as Tribune shed some costs in anticipation of a merger with Sinclair that never actually happened. I was shuffled over to a product group that left me to do my thing, but there was precious little support. When a chance to work for THR came in 2018, I jumped at it. TV by the Numbers continued for about a year and a half after I left before it too was shut down in early 2020.
That’s the end of the Cancel Bear’s story, but I think there’s a little bit more to say. Next weekend, I’ll get more into the online TV discourse of the 2010s that made the Cancel Bear possible, and why that kind of ratings-based chatter has gone away.
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