The Midseason Comedy Dud: A Strange, Annual Tradition

I just don’t get it. I just really don’t get it. What don’t I get? You see, it seems that there is some sort of agreement between the major four networks of TV that every new TV season, one of them will air a comedy show that just looks downright terrible according to the promos. I don’t know if this is always the case. And while I may hate these shows without even seeing them a lot of the time, some of these shows keep lasting for at least one other season, if not many more. What’s going on here?

The most notorious example I can think of regarding this is a show called Work It. It suffered from nearly universal hatred from critics. The plot of it relates to men cross dressing as women due to a belief that people aren’t interested in hiring men. It sounds so bad that one can be surprised that it went from a person’s mind who thought it was a good idea to get green light by the network who thought that it was a good idea, and actually made it to air on television. Like many duds, it aired only two episodes before it wound up cancelled. I’m still surprised it aired the second one.

Sometimes these shows last and are not just outright cancelled like Work It was. The Real O’Neals, for instance, got renewed for a second season despite getting worse overall ratings than The Muppets which aired in the same timeslot. I could tell from the first promos for The Real O’Neals that the show would suck. When the World Series preempted Bull, I tuned into The Real O’Neals and then knew for sure that I was right about the show being as terrible as it was.

Why does this keep happening? Why is there always a terrible show on one of the networks that starts at midseason? Is there some sort of conspiracy or rule that states that such a thing might happen? I mean, we have had terrible shows like Bad Teacher, The Mick, Significant Mother, and now AP Bio all start sometime in midseason. Was there a time this hasn’t happen in recent memory? There’s always at least one new comedy that never starts in the fall that is or at least looks downright terrible. What’s up with that? Why do this to people? And why do people watch these shows?

I don’t really have any answers in this post. I think that I don’t really have much else to say or do in this post. I’m just wondering why this always happens and I doubt that I will ever get an answer. In fact, there are probably people who disagree with me. Maybe they thought a show like Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 was somehow a good show. Maybe they don’t see this trend that I do. But if you want to create a blog about TV to say things like I do, by all means, go ahead and do something like that. I’d love to see someone besides me blog about TV in general. If one exists, I don’t know about it.