MovieChat Forums > Awake (2012) Discussion > Can't believe it's been cancelled

Can't believe it's been cancelled

posted 9 years ago by srbinusrcu
5 replies | jump to latest

This show had the potential of being a successful long running series. I mean,it had a great idea,great character developing,great leading actor,big potential at least. I think that even the makers of the show saw this as a long running series(gemini serial killer who found out about Michael's condition first comes to mind,he never returned so the writers must have had future plans on how he would make Michael's life more difficult), but low ratings seem to mess up everything. I just don't see why people didn't want to watch this when it had almost everything that good show should have...

[–] nunnehickc 9 years ago

The cases were s*** and childishly written. The interesting part of the show wasn't interesting enough. The idea that a cover up of something he can't remember is essentially remembered because they wouldn't drop it is so lol. It reminds me of something in the Netflix show Happy Valley. In the show a character has been re-living a catastrophic event and can't get it out of her head. Then, something bigger happens that allows it to be removed from her head. When she gets home her sister says, "Well at least you haven't been thinking about...". Gee thanks.

U.S. audiences have had it up to here with shows that open up mysteries and don't pay them off (the LOST effect). It had a great lead actor, but after all was finished, it felt like a gigantic waste of time (when watching it week to week). It came out at a bad time, and the execution wasn't the best. You have to do well at the things that get the audience in the door (the procedural aspect) and this show just didn't.

The big conspiracy in Awake was dumb, the cases of the week were terrible, and it had tons of unpaid off mysteries. That's a recipe for disaster in today's TV landscape.

http://chriscolleytvblog.blogspot.com

[–] skat1140 9 years ago

I couldn't agree more. The potential of this show was monumental. Jason Isaacs was an incredible catch for the series. (I still don't understand how these British actors come over to the US and speak flawlessly "without an accent"; an American attempting a British accent inevitably ends badly.) It just didn't catch on. The timing was bad or an untalented public relations effort is to blame? When I was watching it, no one I talked to about it had watched it. It was completely under the radar.

All that effort and talent ends in failure, but Two and a Half Men continues for 13+ seasons.

"Elementary" has Jonny Lee Miller (talented though he is) doing the same thing over and over again, and it persists for 3, going on 4, seasons.

It seems like the only way "Awake" could have succeeded is if it had been done on cable. (eg, Leftovers, Breaking Bad, True Detective)

[–] nunnehickc 9 years ago

This is pretty revisionist history. The show started out at ratings that would have gotten it renewed had they stayed there. Instead, the audience lost interest, and the ratings crashed and burned by the end (probably right around the time we realized the big mystery was a frigging drug conspiracy...lol). The show was too simple to appeal to police procedural fans, and the mysteries weren't interesting enough to keep people around. They basically went right past their target audiences, and the people that stuck with it were people who tend to get behind a lot of canceled shows.

The only thing that was interesting to me was finding out which "reality" was real. The creator said one was, then he copped out, and said he never thought of which one was. wat? I always said that this show was the equivalent of a 300 page book that had no clue how to end, because it didn't know what it was going in. That makes it end up as a big waste of time for a huge chunk of the audience. The people who didn't think it was a waste of time were the ones who didn't care about which one was real.

No one will dispute you that Isaacs was the best thing about the show. He was really the only thing that made it worth watching.

http://chriscolleytvblog.blogspot.com

[–] tkech 9 years ago

Never saw (never even *heard of*!) this show. However, the descriptions of the ongoing duality of the lead character's life remind me of "Do No Harm" and "Forever." Both of which intrigued me. Both cancelled. (Same female co-star, incidentally - maybe it's her, lol!)

I guess there has to be an "event" that the dual existences deal with, but it's a shame that people don't realize that's not the Real Story. It's just to show the duality.

I'm blabbering here, but I think I have a point, lol.

[–] nunnehickc 9 years ago

It's nothing like Forever, a show that I think was a really good one. The duality isn't what the show was about, it was determining which one he was actually alive in. If you don't know which one is real, you can't figure out what the character's all about, what motivated him to do what he did. It was a bad construct with no payoff.

Plus it was a police procedural with an actual case and a conspiracy. The weekly cases were amateur hour for the procedural genre, and the big conspiracy was so dumb I don't even know what to say. Then it has nothing to say about which side is real, despite the creator of the show clearly saying one was real (in actuality neither made sense to be real, and the guy was likely in a coma). Jason Isaacs made the show worth watching, but in the end it felt like a big waste of time for anyone locked in on which side was real. In the week to week, that was what brought most viewers who stayed back.

http://chriscolleytvblog.blogspot.com