Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski starred in Chuck, the ultimate bubble-discourse show of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Courtesy NBC
So right away, a caveat: As I noted in last week’s post, it was really corporate indifference that led to the end of TV by the Numbers and thus the Cancel Bear — but it’s hard to resist a catchy headline. Tribune Media, which owned the site, shut it down early in 2020, two years and change after killing Zap2it/Screener in an asset dump, preparing for a sale to Sinclair that never happened. (TVBTN survived that, but I’m still bitter on behalf of my co-workers who were laid off.)
But even in a different world where those things didn’t happen, I don’t think something like the Cancel Bear would be a viable gimmick today — and it almost certainly not a driver of TV discourse the way it was at its early 2010s peak. Twelve to 15 years isn’t all that long, but the way people watch TV (and the way media companies measure success) has changed so thoroughly that a pretend bear that predicts which shows will be canceled or renewed just wouldn’t work.
It might be for the best, frankly. Online discourse about TV has been crazy for more than two decades — for current examples, look to The Pitt, The Last of Us, Heated Rivalry or any number of big shows. (By the way, the Pop Heist essay about The Pitt is not, to my eye, an example of insane discourse, but it does contain a good summary of it.) Adding a near-constant hum about whether a show’s prognosis was good or bad would probably make things close to, pardon the wordplay, unbearable.
What I’m going to try to do here is paint a picture of the TV and internet culture in which TV by the Numbers and the Cancel Bear thrived, how and why that went away, and the changes in the business that have rendered the Cancel Bear’s reason for being more or less moot in the current era. (This is a long one, so hang with me.)
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For those who weren’t very online in the first 15-18 years of the 2000s, it was a pretty great time to be a fan of TV. Dozens of sites offered intensive coverage of dozens of shows via episode recaps — a form pioneered by the late, great Television Without Pity and later expanded by the AV Club. I wrote hundreds of recaps for Zap2it, and now-renowned critics like Alan Sepinwall, Linda Holmes and Maureen Ryan got that way in part by being really, really good at weekly breakdowns of series ranging from The Amazing Race to The Sopranos to Lost (they’re also really, really good at the other aspects of being a TV critic).
After hitting publish on a recap, though, it often took on a life of its own via the comments sections and forums. AV Club recaps were notorious for sometimes having thousands of comments, with posters (and often the writer of the recap) dissecting an episode on an atomic level and arguing back and forth about what it all meant.
It could get ugly. I remember a recap of The Wire that I did for Zap2it that devolved into commenters insulting each other’s intelligence and cultural knowledge (“go see an Ozu film” is a line that has stuck in my head). That was exceedingly mild compared to, say, the comments section of basically any AV Club recap of Community.
When people weren’t arguing the finer points of an episode, they were often arguing about whether a show would be renewed or canceled. Daily ratings posts could similarly draw dozens of comments arguing whether a gain or decline of a couple tenths of a point among adults 18-49 meant a show was doomed or safe, week after week.
The 2000s were also the heyday of “save our show” campaigns, where fans would organize letter writing campaigns, buy ads in the industry trade papers and send symbolic items to network executives to show how passionate they were about a given series.
It worked at least once: CBS was persuaded to un-cancel its postapocalyptic drama Jericho in 2007 and order a short second season. But ratings were lower than in the first season, so that was that. Other campaigns might have helped tip the scales for shows that were on the bubble for renewal.
TV by the Numbers helped people scratch that itch — it was fast with ratings every day, and the weekly Renew/Cancel Index posts were catnip for people to argue with or against the Cancel Bear’s predictions. It was kind of like the Moneyball version of TV discourse: Argue all you want about the quality of this or that series, the site and the Cancel Bear’s logic went, but the numbers are going to tell the real story.
Occasionally, a series would activate all pieces of the online TV discourse — long discussions about the direction of the show, endless fretting over ratings and organized fan groups working to keep the show alive. From 2007-12, that show was Chuck.
Chuck was a spy dramedy about an expelled Stanford computer science major (Zachary Levi) who, while working at an electronics store, had an intelligence database downloaded into his brain. Operatives from the CIA and NSA (Yvonne Strahovski and Adam Baldwin) were sent to watch him and use Chuck’s brain to help on missions. In addition to the espionage plots, the show was also packed with pop culture references and goofy side characters and a central romance between Levi and Strahovski’s characters. Critics liked it, the show’s fans loved it … and its ratings were never great.
The 2007-08 writers strike capped Chuck’s first season at 13 episodes, but the show was renewed a couple weeks after the season finale (and well before the May 2008 upfronts). After that, it was perpetually on the bubble, and both critics and fans went to bat for the show to keep it alive.
The hub for fans of the show was ChuckTV.net. The site first organized what it called a “watch/buy/share” campaign during season 2, urging people to watch the show live, then online at NBC’s website or Hulu; to buy the show’s season 1 DVD set; and share those DVDs with other people in hopes of recruiting new fans.
Subway was an advertiser and had some product placement spots in the show, so fans also organized a campaign to buy a bunch of sandwiches on the day of the season 2 finale. It was an innovative way to show NBC and advertisers that people were motivated to buy the products advertised in the show.
That all worked to the good, but there was also a lot of weird and bad discourse around Chuck — none moreso when a small segment of fans suggested tanking the ratings of the show to register their displeasure with a storyline.
The specifics of this particular campaign are lost to me. I know it came during Chuck’s middle seasons, and it bubbled up when a portion of the audience was annoyed by the direction the show seemed to be going. It may have had something to do with the introduction of Brandon Routh’s character, Daniel Shaw, and hints that he and Strahovski’s Sarah might become romantically involved.
Whatever the reason, a Chuck fan laid out a plan to force the show’s writers to change course: They proposed that people not watch the show’s next episode, sending its ratings tumbling in order to send a message they didn’t like the creative decisions being made.
The idea caused a furor among Chuck fan forums, enough that I and several other reporters and critics heard and wrote about it. Others pointed out that the only message purposely tanking the ratings of a show already on the bubble would be “NBC, you should cancel Chuck.” There was also the fact that just about every show works several episodes ahead of what’s airing, so such an effor wouldn’t result in immediate changes anyway.
The extremely dumb idea never came to pass, but it was an early example of fans assuming they were entitled to creative input on their favorite show. That idea has only proliferated in the decade-plus since, with social/algorithmic media fueling a more amplified discourse and a growing cohort of viewers approaching series as either puzzles to be solved or templates on which to project their own ideas. The second piece of that can be part of what makes discussing a TV show fun, but the algos tend to feed us only what we already agree with, such that a difference of opinion can feel like a personal attack.
The Cancel Bear was relatively kind to Chuck for most of its run, only predicting cancellation late in the show’s fourth season. It survived for a final, 13-episode season and ended with a pretty well-received finale. The Bear moved onto other shows, and people continued to freak out online about whether their favorites would survive.
Chuck was arguably the height of bubble-show discourse. That discourse kept going for most of the rest of the 2010s — the renew/cancel posts I did while running TV by the Numbers from 2015-18 were always among the most trafficked in a given week — but, like a lot of things tied to the traditional TV business, it faded with the rise of streaming.
A couple things played into the ebbing of obsession over ratings. For one, streamers treated viewing data as a life-or-death secret for most of the late 2010s and early ‘20s (and still do, to some degree). Nielsen, which has been the standard for regular TV ratings for decades, was slow to roll out a streaming measurement product — and even slower to start sharing any of that data publicly. What little data streamers did put out then was pretty meaningless. Netflix’s first offering measured the number of user accounts that watched 70 percent of a movie or an episode of a series, which was dumb. The second one was even dumber, counting views after only two minutes of someone watching a show or movie.
Companies obviously had reams of streaming data, but with little to no transparency for it, renewals and cancellations seemed entirely vibes-based, which made no one really happy. Eventually, Nielsen started releasing its weekly streaming top 10s that measured total viewing time, and the industry adopted a standard for what a streaming “view” is — total minutes watched divided by run time. Those things at least enabled comparison across different streaming services, but it’s not perfect. Netflix has more subscribers than anyone, so it might have a higher bar for renewal than, say, Apple TV or Hulu.
As streaming started to really cut into the audiences for traditional TV shows, a lot of cable outlets stopped making scripted series (HBO, Showtime, FX and AMC are notable exceptions), and networks kind of stopped canceling shows. As I broke down in that post, cancellation rates on broadcast networks have fallen significantly in the past few years.
Network shows also now get a big portion of their audiences from streaming. Broadcasters used to rely heavily on same-day ratings. That would be foolish now, particularly for chasing viewers under 50. Outside of sports, only a couple of shows this season averaged even 1 million adults 18-49 for their initial airing. A viewer that streams a network comedy or drama in the days after it airs is typically about 20 years younger than someone who sits down to watch it at 9 on a Tuesday or whenever.
All that would make running something like the renew/cancel index a crapshoot today. Higher ratings = better chance of survival, as they always have, but there are so many data points now — not all of them regularly made public — that it would be really, really hard to parse small differences between middling shows.
That’s not a bad thing, by the way. I yap about the need for more transparency with streaming data fairly regularly, but it’s because I think there’s something like a public interest in being able to compare the programming that giant media companies deliver to us. I’m a data nerd — see the title of this newsletter — but I recognize that continually focus on a binary like renew/cancel doesn’t add much to the discussion about TV as part of popular culture. The goal of presenting data, and what I’m trying to do with The Data Stream, is to add context to the decision-making behind the TV business. I don’t need to play a bear on social media for that.
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