Show Me the Door

The People of Television can take heart that, in a year of strife and turmoil, there is some good news to report: ABC has cancelled its Shatfest "Show Me the Money."

Or, as the Washington Post's Lisa de Moreas so winsomely put it, "Just days after ABC suits announced they had ordered six more episodes of the groundbreakingly bad game show 'Show Me the Money,' they realized they had just ordered six more episodes of the groundbreakingly bad game show 'Show Me the Money' and, wasting no time, announced they were pulling it off the air, effective immediately."

But the heartening developments don't end there: NBC's "Identity," the Penn Jillette-affiliated project that genuinely deserves to be called "Bullsh!t," hemorrhaged a third of its audience from Monday to Tuesday, from 12.2m viewers to 8.2m. At that rate, by Friday, its viewership will be a negative 3.8 million. Not sure if that's possible, but if any show can pull that off, it's the stultifying "Identity."

Hence, inroads are being made against the insurgent creators of chaos and reality and game shows. This could bode well for a brighter 2007, as the ratio of successful game shows introduced this season (one out of four) is actually worse than that for serialized dramas.