Last September, Fox's brightest new show was Back To You. After all, it had great comedy and TV bones. Kelsey Grammar reprised his preening, persnickety Frazier with a touch of gigolo as TV anchor Chuck Darling. Patricia Heaton still seemed as highly strung as she was on Raymond, playing TV anchor Kelly Carr. Finally, Fred Willard mixed his brew of eccentricity and exquisite comic timing to the newsroom and ensemble actors Ryan Church and Ty Burrell topped the cast in laughs per on-screen time.
Even the show's creators and producers had strong bloodlines, with Steven Levitan (Just Shoot Me, Frasier, Wings) and Christopher Lloyd (Frasier, The Golden Girls) helming the show.
However, even with its blue-blood background, Back To You was canceled on May 15, 2008. So what happened?
In a sentence, Back To You was canceled because of high costs, higher expectations, creative miscues, disappointing ratings and network shortsightedness.
First, higher costs. Signing the top draft picks in sitcom world - Grammar and Heaton - was costly. Also, the show even had a bidding war for its writers, who had impressive street cred with Frasier and all those Emmys (or is it Grammars?)
Second, Fox had high expectations for the show.
"This was not an easy decision to cancel the show," said Fox Entertainment Chief Kevin Reilly to TV Guide in May after the announcement. "But with that kind of top-profile talent and American Idol lead-in during the second half of the season, the expectations were higher.”
“The show did not seem to be striking a chord, and in terms of creative direction, it was a pretty mixed bag," he added in a TV Guide interview.
Third, creative decisions seemed to torpedo whatever small-scale momentum the show was building. First, the writers bogged down the new show with a
Grammar / Heaton one-night fling that had produced a daughter. Those revelations and entanglements about Chuck's discovery that he had a daughter with Kelly threw cold water on the comedy and did not allow viewers to warm to the characters before throwing them this “soap opera” K turn.
Moreover, the show switched actors for the daughter “Gracie” in post-strike episodes and then apparently decided that boob humor was too low-brow for its audience by axing wonder bra weather girl Montana Diaz-Herrera (Ayda Field).
Fourth, ratings never met the network's expectations, but strangely several new shows on other networks were renewed with much lower ratings and share numbers.
Strangely, Fox's sophomore sitcom Til Death finished the year with 5.79 million viewers - slipping nine percent from its first year - while Back To You wrapped the year with an average of 6.87 million viewers. So why didn't Til Death get canceled? First, it's a much cheaper show to produce and second, Back To You seemed to squander the granddaddy of all lead-ins - American Idol.
To its credit, Back To You started in September like a ratings success with more than nine million viewers. In April, the show twice managed to attract more than 12 million viewers, although it often lost more than 20 percent of its American Idol eyeballs.
Finally, network “short-term-it is” doomed Back To You, as it has sent many a promising show to the graveyard for shows with potential - that's for you, Jericho and Dresden Files fans.
In TV Guide, Back To You creator Steven Levitan freely admitted that Fox was not the best home for the show, speculating that CBS may have done more to nurture the show.
So who's the big loser here?
Admittedly, Fox opened the Rupert Murdoch treasure chest for Back To You and the gazillionaire may have lost a few million, while Grammar and Heaton are unemployed, but not in Ed McMahon-type of financial distress.
But the biggest losers are again the viewers, who lost the joy gained from watching a show gain its sea legs. After all, TV Land gems such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show and even I Love Lucy posted low ratings in their inaugural year. In fact, the Van Dyke show was almost dead last its first year in 1961.
What kind of world do we live in when ABC sitcom According To Jim can remain on the air for eight years? Just shoot me.
Back to you, Chuck.
