No offense, cljohnston, but your friend is an utter bonehead.
Low ratings my a$$.
I may have my days a bit off, but here's what happened:
The premiere was on a Sunday night, opposite the season premiere of a wildly popular show that had ended its season on a cliffhanger. I went in to work the next day all excited, asking my colleagues if they had seen EZ Streets, but they had all watched the season premiere of the other thing because they'd been waiting for it all summer long.
Episode Two, for some ungodly reason, aired, not the following Sunday, but on Wednesday. Anyone who wasn't paying close attention, who might have been interested in Episode Two, would have tuned in on Sunday and been dumbfounded. I'm fairly sure Episode Three was the next day, but it may have been the following Wednesday. Then the show was yanked. Low ratings? Well, yes. When the fans can't even find the show, low ratings might be expected.
I ranted to my colleagues at work. I was heartbroken. I spent the next several months bemoaning the loss of this intelligent, dark, and funny show. (Loved the bleached out look of the sets!) Then, lo and behold, we heard EZ Streets was coming back in the spring.
And come back it did. But rather than starting it over from the beginning so that the people who had missed it might be brought up to speed, it started right away with Episode Four. Nobody had half a clue what was going on. My friends at work, who watched it on my say-so, were befuddled.
CBS showed a couple more episodes (I videotaped them all, and still have the tapes), then one night I tuned in and there was Walker Freakin Texas Ranger where EZ Streets should have been.
And that was the last time I watched CBS for about fifteen years. And it was the end of my loyalty to serial TV. No more heartbreaks for me. No more CBS.
And I'm sure CBS doesn't give a rat's a$$ to lose one viewer, but then I'll bet I'm not the only one who blames the network for lamenting the loss of viewer loyalty when it has no loyalty to its viewers. It's a two-way street, CBS.
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ARH
8 years ago
I was a huge fan of The X-Files (I remember having my brother tape it so I could watch EZ Streets, and even though EZ Streets wasn't fantasy/sci-fi, I think that really hurt them because they both appealed to people that like quality dramas.
I also asked people the next day if they had seen it, but I was in middle school, so you can imagine the confusion that I caused!
EZ Streets "regular" time slot on Wednesday sucked for that reason too, because them it was on at the same time as Law & Order!
EZ Streets also premiered later than every show that year, except Public Morals, whose first and only airing was right before the second episode of EZ Streets. CBS premiered all of their other shows in September. I have no idea why. I think a lot of people were unaware that there were any more premieres. I think that the recently cancelled show Wicked City suffered from the same problem. In fact, when I called my mother to tell her to watch it because it had Jeremy Sisto and Ed Westwick, both of whom she adores, she was unaware of it and said; "I thought all the shows had started!"
The lack of promotion EZ Streets got from CBS didn't help either. The show I remember CBS really pushing that year was Cosby!
I refused to watch any new shows for several years afterwards because so many shows I loved got cancelled like My So-Called Life, Profit, and Relativity. I didn't watch any new shows until 1999 when Norm MacDonald got his own sitcom and, because I'm a big fan of his.
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