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Jun 06, 2004

Early Game Over for UPN's Aptly Titled CG Animated Show

Walking in Times Square last night, I noticed a billboard for a new computer animated prime-time show called "Game Over." I'd never heard of it before, and I was kind of excited by the idea of CG animation breaking into prime-time.

The premise seemed a bit like a reboot ripoff but the characters looked like they might be interesting enough, and if it had as much madcap humor as it was touting it might have done well.

Amazingly, the Times Square billboard seems to have outlasted the series by a couple of months. Imagine the advertising cost of getting that thing up there, and then the face they're losing for every person who goes looking for the show only to find it gone. Case in point, I was going to blog here about the "New show" and instead I'm highlighting UPN's idiocy.

It seems that if you're going to put something like a TV show on your network, you have two choices. Either decide that it is brilliant and then stand by it, waiting through the inevitable low ratings until people warm up to the show, or decide that it is crap and can it. Somehow the network exec's are missing this entirely, canceling good shows and endlessly plying new crap on us each season to see if we miraculously like some of the drek.