'I Want YOU To Save Happy Endings!' - ABC
The good news is that someone at ABC wants Happy Endings to get another season. The bad news is that said someone is trying to put that responsibility on you.
Look, I understand that the landscape of TV marketing has changed of late. Earlier this year, The Following made headlines for a new strategy: promos that requested not that potential viewers watch live, but just that they set their DVRs to catch it. As more and more channels crowd the marketplace, the standard for what makes a TV show a hit keeps dropping (and DVR viewership within the first seven days after air grows more important), so the DVR promo makes sense. And obviously, in the wake of the record-setting Veronica Mars Kickstarter, it must have seemed logical to give this Happy Endings promo a similar angle. Don't wait until Adam Pally starts tweeting at you to pledge your own personal cash for a Happy Endings movie seven years from now: watch the show now and be a hero!
For those of us who do watch the show, though, this strategy is cynical and misplaced. We were already planning to watch Happy Endings when it débuted in its new Friday time slot next week. Of course, if the onus really were on us to "save" Happy Endings, we probably wouldn't have moved it off its Tuesday-night time slot to a funereal Friday-night berth. Nor would we have spent practically all of 2013 stacking episodes of Happy Endings back to back when it did (spottily) air, the better to burn through the whole season as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, anyone who doesn't watch the show but happens to catch the promo gets a clear message: Happy Endings is at death's door, so starting to watch now will probably just lead to heartbreak -- and soon.
That said, there's always a chance that the gambit will actually work, in which case ABC will have proven that it can pass its responsibilities on to the audience -- and you may get more opportunities to do a network executive's job!
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