Chapter 1

Well, Virgin Wilderness finally premiered last night ... and in a modern network record for a new primetime TV network show it was officially cancelled less than two hours later. And good riddance!

Even for a 9pm Friday night show the expectations for the pilot episode hadn't been high and Friday evenings have never been a good place for any show that a network has had high future aspirations for. Still, it was remarkable to even pretty outright astounding that the network executives had read their tea leaves this quickly ... and accurately. Without even waiting upon the overnight ratings, let alone any Live+3, L+7D or even C3 statistics, they yanked the cord ... and fast.

Did I mention good riddance?

As a very highly respected professional TV rating analyst and critic, I usually receive advance DVD 'screeners' well in advance for all of the new pilot network shows, but I didn't receive one for Virgin Wilderness. Neither did any other television critic that I know of. This alone was a pretty fair warning that the show was likely to be a steaming turd, but fortunately I had made a few quiet phone calls and tracked down a copy to preview a few days before the official premiere on Friday night. I watched it twice, with growing disbelief that the network programming directors didn't have some moldy old rerun of a stupid sitcom that wouldn't have rated higher than this colossal waste of advertising airspace. Trust me; I know everything there is to know about TV ratings.

I've been working in the television ratings business for about fifteen years now and for the last ten years or so I've been the co-owner/operator of tvratings.com. We're the largest and most influential independent television ratings and network programming news web site on the web and I'm the statistics guru. I take the raw Nielsen numbers, adjust for DVR recording and viewing three days or a week later (D+3/7), resolve any C3 variance (did the viewer watch or fast forward the recorded commercials), and assess the social media 'hotness' of a show to determine what a show's true index value or final adjusted rating is. I'm pretty good at this and my predictions for whether or not a show will be either cancelled or renewed are over 95% accurate. It would be closer to 99% except Fox network tends handle it's cancel/renew decisions almost randomly, often with very little if any logic or rational justification. Still, that's a pretty decent track record.

So, on the basis of my professional judgment, Virgin Wilderness had to rank among the top 25 worst TV shows of all time. Perhaps even the top ten ... and I said as much in my weekly personal blog column, posted up online Friday night at 10:03pm, mere minutes after the pilot episode was over. No, I didn't hold back much on my personal and professional option that this new show ranked as a Zero, a stinky owl pellet. Pure crap. It was a shame really, because I'd originally been rather optimistic about this production after viewing the first tentative pilot episode about a year ago. But in life things tend to change ... and usually for the worst

Wilderness Rangers was something of a delightful surprise when I received the first demo screener of the original pilot episode early last fall. As conceived, the show was about a pair of inexperienced but clever state park rangers facing dangers and solving crises with inadequate experience and few if any resources. It was being developed as a tentative replacement series for the spring and even then it showed signs of hasty production and an inadequate budget ... but it had something going for it. It was a show that clearly was trying to do too many things at once; having enough action and suspense to hold a male audience but just enough hints of romance to attract the female audience as well.

Oddly it worked. The real attraction of the show (pun very much intended) was the obvious genuine smoldering sexual chemistry between the male and female leads. You could just tell that they were undressing each other with their eyes in every scene that they were together. You can't force sexual chemistry ... the lead's either have it or they don't. These kids did ... and I wanted to see more of it! Ok, the rest of the show needed some tweaking, but in my opinion it was well worth fixing. And in several blog posts last winter and spring I championed the show, even expressing my own professi0nal opinion that the show would be an excellent fit for that network's weak existing Sunday night rotation of largely female-centric shows.

Spring became summer repeat season and Wilderness Rangers remained lost in network limbo. Doing some followup I'd heard via some very off the record rumors that a second and even a third pilot for the series had been filmed, each with an entirely new cast, director and production crew. Not to mention massive radical script rewrites. Because it was being produced by an independent production company it suffered from a 'not created here' mentality right from the start and by the time some major budget hassles had been straightened out many months later, the original leads were unavailable, signed to other productions. This latest pilot screener, now called Virgin Wilderness, bore absolutely no resemblance to the original one, and now I hinted as rather loudly as I dared that this new freshman drama ought to be instead strangled in its cradle and left unbroadcasted.

I usually have a firm rule of never commenting upon a new TV series for at least two full weeks after its premiere. That's just politeness to the networks mostly – not shitting too much where you eat. Besides, it sometimes takes a new show awhile to find itself. The cast might need several episodes just to begin to 'find their characters'. Many shows just start off a little rough and need a bit of polishing, and some of them get it. Others, right from the start are obviously nothing but dead mouse pellets straight from the Renewal Owl's ass.

So, I restrained myself and didn't hit the Send button to upload my caustic review until I was sure that the pilot broadcast was over and the local nightly news had begun. That was all the 'wait and see' time that this turd deserved. In my review, I had even fabricated the rules for a drinking game to play in the unlikely event that the show ever enjoyed any future episode airings.

· The lead female ranger says, "Oh!" = Take a drink. By my official count this was at least fourteen times in the pilot episode alone. The fact that the new lead actress for the series appeared to be a complete and total tree-hugging airhead was probably the single worst thing that made the show unwatchable. Her IQ might have been about room temperature and her acting ability was strictly community college level ... but she was blonde and had impressively big tits that strained the top buttons of her tightly cut ranger's shirt. She'd have made for a passable co-star just for the eye candy ... assuming the writers gave her as few speaking lines as was possible.

· The lead male ranger says, "Damn, there's no cell reception/road/helicopter access in that part of the park!" = Take two drinks. We got the idea the first time but they repeated this mantra ad nausium the entire program. They're in the back-ass part of Nowhere and surrounded by rabid mountain lions and carnivorous bears waiting to chow down on lost hikers like picnic baskets. The worst part was his deliberately slow punctuated line delivery, ala a graduate of the Ricardo Montalban School of Fine Acting. Casting wise, the kid was obviously a SoCal beach boy hired for the role on the basis of his massive pectorals and biceps alone and it was utterly laughable that his character could McGyver his way out a paper bag, let alone fix a broken jeep or rescue helicopter with a wad of chewing gum week after week.

· Any time either the male or female co-stars blatantly ogle the asses or tits of the lead actor or actress = Take another drink, but get ready to have another soon. Sorry, I was already hammered by this point and pretty much lost count. In truth, there was a good deal of obvious sexual attraction between the cast... all of it unfortunately rather homosexual. The male costar, a wilderness rescue expert (or so purported to be) only had about four speaking lines, so he spent the remainder of his onscreen time obviously checking out the ass of the lead actor with a distinctly visible hard-on bulging out the front of his trousers. As for the female costar, during her onscreen moments her eyes appear to be locked upon the ample tits of the lead actress. She might have been bisexual and willing to give one of the cocks a go, but probably only as a threesome with her girlfriend.

· Any locker room/shower scene with male open shirt or bare ass = Finish the rest of the bottle. For some reason it was very important in the storyline for the male actors to change their shirts and display their overly muscular bare shaved chests several times during the 42 minute long episode. One locker room sequence briefly depicted the male lead while obviously nude except wearing for his ranger hat. It was all very overtly Tom of Finland and it couldn't possibly be any more homoerotic without them blatantly exchanging loads of their bro-tein man-chowder.

· Female shower scene bare ass/female full bare back or 49% of their breasts visible – Get a new bottle and some more ice and then change the channel over to Cinemax or the Spice Channel. The female cast had to make do with one longer (and equally plot pointless) shower scene together that involved lots of slowly and tenderly applied soap upon fully bare backs with just the most tantalizing hint of tit and ass in the midst of the steam. Admittedly, this sounds entertaining, but trust me you've seen better and juicer scenes elsewhere. Go rewatch the women's prison movie of your choice instead. There was more than a hint of suggestion that this pair of gals liked to snuggle together closely in bed to keep warm on long cold wintery nights here up north in the back-ass of nowhere, but really it was all pretty tame, especially by 'L Word' historical standards.

· When the ending credits roll ... turn off the TV and make emergency run to liquor store. No, actually please don't ... by this point you'd be far too drunk to drive.

You get the idea. When the only sexual attraction in a show is strictly same sex stuff, at least have the sense to market it as such accordingly. Gay/Lesbian themed shows can be marginally successful ... if properly presented and advance marketed accordingly. If you advertise a show as a conventional romantic drama ... deliver one. Don't spring a low budget backwoods Brokeback Mountain by surprise on them instead. Besides ... this sort of trickiness really, really pisses off the advertisers.

Anyway, this turkey was one and done ... and consigned to history in near record time! Now I could get back to work and worry about other programs instead.

Unfortunately, the goals of network, sponsor, and audience are not the same. The network wants to make money from ads, the sponsors want to reach the audience--and the audience wants to be entertained and wants to avoid the ads altogether. My site tvratings.com attempts to find and hold the middle of this very uneasy triangle. It's impossible to please everyone ... so I just crunch the numbers and tell the truth the way I see it, and it makes us extremely popular with industry and public readers ... and extremely profitable.

Monday through Thursday, my web postings are strictly limited to network ratings analysis. My emphasis is upon the six major broadcast networks but I also cover the bigger cable TV networks and top 100 or so cable programs as well, as time or interest permits. Every day I'll post the raw overnights for the previous evening's shows and update the previous week's data with D+3/7's revisions as I get or can create them. Several major networks (and a dozen different cable networks as well) also contract with us for a somewhat deeper private analysis of the raw and adjusted show ratings as an independent check upon their own in-house analysis'. Often we'll consult with major advertisers as well about what the true C3 numbers are for a show, determining if the program that they're paying prime advertising rates for tends instead to be DVR fodder and watched later ... with the commercials entirely avoided. C3 ratings directly measure commercial (not the program) viewership and are the primary metric advertisers/the networks use to set their rates.

Friday's are lot more fun; that's when I don the hood and feathery cape of my online alter ego, the Renewal Owl. Here on a featured page of our site I host the famous (or infamous) Renewal Watch, where I distill weeks or months of network rating data into a single simple index. Here, after making a few educated assumptions (or wild-ass guesses) I'll wisely prognosticate which shows will either be renewed for another season or else cancelled. I update this index weekly for the fall and spring primetime broadcast schedules and over the last ten years I've had an extremely successful prediction record. Usually I can predict if a new show is going to become an owl pellet within its first month, even if it has already received a second order of episodes for a complete full season. Every network sometimes needs filler (called Spackle) to fill in unexpected cracks and holes in the broadcast schedule. Fox network usually needs entire truckloads of it.

Saturdays are much more eclectic. I'm still working in the office more times than not, but unless there is some serious important number-crunching to be done for a network or advertising client, I'll use this time to get caught up on my email and check all of the online comments posted concerning my columns from earlier in the week. Often, if I have the time or ambition, I'll post up a short blog entry on a semi-random discussion topic about old TV shows or oddities of historical TV ratings, usually something to encourage our readers to post up their own thoughts.

With all of the fuss about the historically fast cancellation of Virgin Wilderness, my topic for today's blog community discussion was an easy one: 'What were the Fastest Ever Network Show Cancellations?' Not to be confused with 'Worst Shows of All Time', although this show might easily have made both lists. Actually quite a few shows had been killed in the past after just the first episode (at least twenty by my count), and I listed a few just to get the conversation stated, but to be killed off by the network in a bit less than two hours after initial broadcast was admittedly pretty hasty.

Anyway, I'd picked a good hot-button topic, and already by late Saturday morning my internet readers were in something of an uproar. Hunched over my laptop while trying to chew on a muffin I found that there were already over eight hundred posted comments, about twice as many as usual. Earlier a regular reader had private messaged me that my posting had already been cross-linked by most of the big webnews aggregate sites, like the front page of Yahoo, MSN, Fark, Reddit and even a minor link from Drudge. This wasn't commonplace for us, but it does occasionally happen and this was sure to bring us a large surge of new traffic today, and probably create a few new regular readers. Just like television ratings - more hits for our front page also means more advertising revenue for us.