"But if ALL those shows get canned, we might have a chance."

I've been thinking a lot about the scene at the beginning of the Family Guy episode North by North Quahog, which was the first episode shown after FOX renewed the show in 2005. Typically parodically, the show opens with Peter receiving news of their cancellation. "We just have to accept," he says, "that FOX needs to make room for shows such as Dark Angel; Titus; Undeclared Action; That 80's Show; Wonderfalls; Fastlane; Andy Richter Controls the Universe; Skin; Girls' Club; Cracking Up; The Pitts; Firefly; Get Real; FreakyLinks; Wanda at Large; Costello, The Lone Gunmen; A Minute With Stan Hooper; Normal, Ohio; Pasadena; Harsh Realm; Keen Eddie; The $treet; The American Embassy; Cedric the Entertainer Presents; The Tick; Luis; and Greg the Bunny."

What these shows have in common is that they were all commissioned, produced, aired and cancelled in the time that Family Guy was off the air. A few made it past Season 1 (Dark Angel, for example) but most were cancelled before the end of their debut season, and some (notably Girls' Club) were cancelled after as few as two episodes had been shown.

FOX is notorious for this cavalier, scattergun, moronic approach to TV success. I was personally affected by several of these untimely calculations (Dark Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls) and read many similar tales concerning other shows. The fabled, unicornesque regular reader of this blog will know that I am the last person to criticise the practices of capitalism, and I accept if a TV show isn't successful, you stop spending money on it: but the problem is, FOX seems to have forgotten how to make a show successful. Apart from 24, now limping towards its sixth season finale and trading heavily on former glories (as I understand it: I don't start watching a season of 24 until it's finished, then I watch the whole season in a weekend), FOX seems to have very little success with scripted drama, and I wonder if their inability to give a show the time and support it needs to build a following has anything to do with this. Again, 24 is the exception, but what better advertising for a show about Americans defeating terrorists than for its excellent first season to start weeks after 9/11?

This week, after airing a mere four episodes, FOX cancelled Drive, the new show from Ben Queen and, more importantly for me, Tim Minear, who along with Jeff Bell gave us those two incredible seasons of Angel, 3 and 4, which were ultimately retconned into one long arc. Minear must be starting to feel personally insulted by FOX, since it did much the same to his Wonderfalls. But here's the point. I do not know this personally, since I don't live in the US, but consensus seems to be that FOX didn't exactly push the boat out advertising Drive. It wasn't on the air long enough for FOX to start bouncing it around the schedules (another favourite ploy to drive viewers away; see also Firefly) and at least they weren't airing the episodes out of order (see, again, Firefly). But they didn't exactly get behind this product they'd spent so much money on. And then they're surprised that nobody's watching?

But even more fundamental than that is this consideration. FOX now has an entirely deserved reputation as a network with no respect for fledgling TV shows or audience expectation, and no concept of audience development. As a number of people on various message boards have said explicitly this week, they keep away from new FOX shows for precisely this reason. No-one wants to get invested in an interesting new TV show that shows considerable potential for future development only to have the Evil Prince of Numbers yank it because they can't sell enough ad space. People who were, all other things being equal, interested in watching a show like Drive were steering clear of it because it was so likely that FOX would cancel it that they felt it wasn't worth bothering with. This is not the way to develop and maintain a loyal audience, FOX, you fucking idiots. Get a grip.

In Soviet Russia, art draws you!

I am, as may perhaps be obvious, more than occasionally embarrassed by the behaviour of people, groups or organisations who are in many ways my ideological stablemates - economically, say, or geopolitically - when the discussion turns to the role in society played by graphic (that is to say "explicit" or "violent") art.

Hayek wrote that the search for meaning is innate: it is an instinct to which we are little more than slaves, much of the time. It is a fundamental component of constructivism (I have covered this before in the context of religion): the search for meaning, the relentless analysis of effects in search of causes inculcates the belief, or more accurately the unconscious assumption, so ingrained as to take on a degree of certainty quite alien to a belief, that design is inherent and that it can thus, quite naturally, be refined if a greater intelligence is brought to bear than has been hitherto.

This search for meaning seems to catch everyone out at one point or another. Most destructively (pun intended) it is in the constructivist economic ethos; for some, as mentioned, it is religion. And some people like to blame art when people go on kill-crazy rampages. Distressingly, as I say, it is often those who avoid the other pitfalls of constructivism who fall for this one.

The Virginia Tech shootings have prompted an entirely predictable rash of debate and recrimination. I do not intend to rehearse the vastly entertaining argument I am having with a friend via email about gun control, my views on which are briefly outlined in this post. It was only a matter of time before some sharp-eyed, dull-witted hack noticed that the pose in which the perpetrator Cho held a gun to his own head in his ridiculous "multimedia manifesto" was remarkably similar to that in which the protagonist of the Korean film Oldboy held a gun to his own head. The notion that perhas there is pretty much only one way in which one can hold a gun to one's own head appears to have escaped him, and many others subsequently.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is not, for once, to indulge my penchant for rambling, self-righteous discouse; rather it is to draw attention (insofar as this blog is at all capable of that) to this excellent article by Sam Leith (which oddly enough had quite a different headline when it appeared in Saturday's paper, something like "You might as well blame the Bible for these shootings". I wonder why that was changed. The constructivists strike again, perhaps?). Mr Leith, despite being, I suspect, a candidate for that select (though very large) group of journalists who owe their career success to something more than innate talent, is nonetheless an exceptionally talented writer, and although he occasionally writes drivel, I am unable to think of where I have seen better repudiated the constructivist view that we are all slaves to the hynpotic ugre to violence that is inherent in violent art.

More cultural doublethink

I'm greatly enjoying the second season of Life on Mars, which I've just started watching. I marvel at the writing of Philip Glenister's character DCI Gene Hunt, for sometimes it seems as though these days the BBC is the kind of place where you'd get excommunicated for even thinking up lines like Hunt's. Despite the fact that they are delivered as it were ironically, through the prism of early 21st Century mores, with a knowing wink to the audience for whom the humour derives (or is supposed to derive) from the exquisite agony of remembering there was ever a time when people were so "unreconstructed", and certainly not from any empathy with the character; despite, in other words, the seal of modern, progressive disapproval being stamped all over Hunt, Glenister has managed to make him a genuinely likeable character whose bluntness merely defines and characterises rather than condemns him. It is not clear to what extent the writers wanted to ignite the audience in a fervour of "progressive" zeal, but to whatever extent it was their intention, they have failed. Audiences like Gene Hunt because he reminds them of a time when the everyday processes of life weren't so stultifyingly micro-managed by the paranoid rigours of political correctness, a time when the police "service" was a police force and a joke was a joke. They have embraced the programme without buying into the myriad PC pieties which pervade it. (Most of them, at any rate: this chap has a different take on thinly-veiled progressivist TV/film.)

But you just can't keep a good progressive agenda down. There have been at least three references to Margaret Thatcher so far, which for a show set in 1973 can only be to provide dramatic irony-derived humour for the 2007 audience. The first two (that I can recall) one might be tempted to let pass: both were essentially the same, that is to say a 1973 character voicing disbelief or disapproval. Hunt scoffs at the general notion ("there will never be a woman Prime Minister as long as I have a hole in my arse") and later his boss, Supt. Woolf, is more specific, reacting with horror when Tyler says "by the time Maggie Thatcher becomes Prime Minister". So far, so what: Hunt is casually sexist and Woolf, for all we know, may be a socialist red in tooth and claw. Neither of them knows the future so their reactions are entirely understandable, even if the writing is somewhat uninspired.

The third time is different. WPC Annie Cartwright, who might as well be a representative figure called Emancipation, recently groundbreakingly (of course) promoted (of course) to WDC by Tyler (of course), reflects, after someone mentions that pretty soon she'll be Commissioner, that she might even become Prime Minister - after all, a woman couldn't do a worse job than the blokes have been doing. Cue laughs all round, then Tyler, the only person in the entire 1973 world who actually knows better, tells Annie that she might live to regret saying that. In other words, Tyler affirms to the expectant audience that yes, in fact, the woman did do a worse job than the blokes had been doing.

This kind of cognitive dissonance is astounding. The entire premise of the show is to highlight the differences between 1973 and 2006/7, to show the degree to which British life has changed in the intervening three decades. The person most directly responsible for those changes is Margaret Thatcher, in the teeth of opposition from almost everyone, including many in her own party. That Life on Mars can present those changes as overwhelmingly positive (as it does when it invites us to disapprove of all the aspects of life which are now gone forever) yet have its protagonist, the only person who knows what changes are coming and why, state that the woman Prime Minister will be the worst of the lot, is simply unfathomable. Nothing may be permitted to infringe on the cultural assumptions of the progressive agenda, prime among which is the caricature of Maggie as the Great Satan, not even when writing a show that highlights all the positive changes she wrought.

Implacable insanity

Nepotistic sinecure though it may well be, Celia Walden's Spy column in the Telegraph has an astonishing little snippet. The BBC postpones Bob Dylan's Old Time Whiskey-Soaked Rambling Hour in the light of the Virginia Tech massacre because he was going to talk about guns.

Right. Now is not the time to talk about guns. Obviously.

Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow

A year ago I had a great deal more time for David Cameron than I do now. While I am not instinctively a Conservative, I am realistic enough to understand that the party most likely to promote and apply policies I am prepared to support, while remaining at all electable, is the Conservative Party (the Liberal Democrats having, with a few uninfluential exceptions, almost entirely abandoned all political philosophy remotely related to their name), more specifically the Thatcherite wing of same. (Although Mrs. Thatcher was a Hayekian liberal economically, she remained morally authoritarian; but as Hayek himself makes clear, it is economic freedom that is the prerequisite to all other types of freedom, on the basis of which I consider it more important to support a party of economic freedom and questionable moral authoritarianism than to support a socially liberal but economically ignorant party.) There are, of course, many schools of thought within the Conservative Party, of which only few are instinctively liberal in outlook: the Tory tradition of paternalism is esentially statist in character, for example.

Unfortunately David Cameron has demonstrated not only a worrying degree of naïve faith in the benign power of the state in the economic arena, but also he has from the very beginning shown himself to have a healthy self-righteous moral authoritarian streak, not least in his dreary and transparently psephologically-motivated homilies about the environment. Not one to shy away from a cause du jour, he has parlayed vague and generally ill-informed watermelon rhetoric into a moderately successful favour-currying machine. The practical result of this, combined with his bewildering belief in something called "sharing the proceeds of growth" between tax cuts and "public services" (which serve only to ensure there will, in fact, be little or no growth of which to share the proceeds), is that now there is no aspect of the modern Conservative Party which the average voter of less than 35 would recognise as remotely Conservative in any respect.

That is, of course, the point, but it makes it pretty strange that Cameron should arrange to have Arnold Schwarzenegger address the party conference this year. This is the man who introduced Milton Friedman's TV series Free to Choose in 1980, the man who voluntarily recorded nearly five (perforce hysterical) minutes of to-camera speech praising the socio-economic views of one of the most powerfully anti-state thinkers of the last century. If indirectly, Friedman was almost as potent an influence on Mrs. Thatcher as Hayek was - and now Cameron invites his disciple to address the Tories. They're united over their environmental "concerns", of course - although Arnie doubtless favours more freedom-friendly non-statist measures. I wonder to what extent he'll discuss that, and to what extent his speech will consist merely in evasive platitudes that are the hallmark of Cameron's tenure as leader.