I loved watching Central Park West and I miss it terebly. I was wondering just other day, what could have happen if it wasn't canceled? I tried to think about it, but in my mind it was never as good as real show. What is your option???
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Honestly, having re-watched the whole show recently the writing wasn't bad at all, I mean, considering what else was on during that era. The problem was when they came back from their hiatus and drastically changed characters, i.e. Mark Merrill. But there were some fun storylines and characters in the later episodes. It just felt rather disjointed, and seemed like they were trying to fix what wasn't broken. It was just a matter of a small audience, despite marketing the hell out of the show.
shareThe first 13 episodes were actually quite well-written, perhaps bar the dire Alex/Peter romance. However, when the show didn't take off in the ratings like CBS expected to, they panicked and didn't seem to take into account that Melrose Place's first season (as an example) had 32 episodes to build an audience. Central Park West got to air 9 episodes, before being pulled off the air and then when it returned in the summer they decided to skip four episodes, which pretty much explained what happened to some characters and just decided to air the completely "revamped" "CPW" episodes, despite it not making sense to the viewers at all.
Add to that CBS pretty much demanded that most of the cast was to be written out, hence the hasty character transplants of people like Alex, Peter and Mark, while poor Nicki was all but written into a few pathetic appearances. Camille Marchetta (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest) was also brought onto the show as "story consultant".
Darren Star also pretty much admitted that he had the rug pulled from under him with the revamp.
"The first 13 episodes were actually quite well-written"
Forget it, only the first 9 episodes were decent. The weirdness already started in the last couple of episodes.