By Lisa Fary
Kyle XY is following Pushing Daisies to ABC’s genre graveyard.
Hopefully, Kyle will get a more dignified send off than the Pie Maker. There are still three episodes of Pushing Daisies that ABC seems to have no intention of airing. Maybe this summer, but possibly, not ever.
There have been opportunities to get them out of the way. Super Bowl Sunday would have been a good place to dump those three episodes on television. Or, just post them online. Or make them available on iTunes.
Or, ABC can just keep stringing us along, dangling the lost Pushing Daisies eps in front of us while they develop more traditional sit-coms to replace According to Jim and recapture the white trash glory of Roseanne.
Yeah. I’m bitter.
Kyle XY never had the numbers of a network show, but it was ABC Family’s highest rated show until The Secret Life of an American Teenager came along last summer. It wasn’t as successful with its 2009 return, however, and fans say that it’s ABC Family’s own fault. Kyle XY isn’t a bad show, but ABC Family set up its demise by doing two things.
There was no promotion. I had no idea it was coming back until it was already on my DVR. John happened to see it while scrolling through the listings one night and set it to record. Perhaps if I had been watching ABC Family, I may have seen some ads. But, I should see ads around online, and I didn’t.
They pulled a BSG. Before this premiere, the last time new eps aired was a year ago. Kyle XY can’t withstand that kind of break. Although it is charming, it just doesn’t have the same ferocious fanbase that BSG has.
I get that programs are canceled if they don’t perform to expectations. What’s really bugging me about Kyle XY‘s death, is what it’s being replaced with.
ABC Family is targeting a female audience and the three replacements are “female oriented”. They are:
- 10 Things I Hate About You: A TV adaptation of a ten year old movie
- Perfect 10: A drama about gymnastics
- Ruby and the Rockits: A comedy with David Cassidy
You know, because anything that’s remotely science fiction-y is so totally not for girls. Gymnastics, romance, having David Cassidy for a dad – that’s what females want.
I suppose I shouldn’t hold out any hopes for The Middleman, then.
Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS
Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
Related articles by Zemanta
- The Middleman is probably dead, but fans can look forward to DVD (tvsquad.com)
- 10 Things I Hate About This TV Show (jossip.com)
- Secret Life of the American Teenager Season One (popsyndicate.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7340c4f2-d4a9-49a3-8929-ce7f59d964a2)
Related Stuff:
Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
I can tell you that Kyle has a huge teenage girl audience. My 13 year old son says he's one of the few guys who watches it in his class. ABC is just stupid but of course the networks are these days. I don't love this show but I enjoy it and it's a damn shame that it's being canceled before it's time.
I remember at Comicon 2007, the crowd waiting to get in to the Kyle XY panel was mostly girls.
The ads for Kyle XY never grabbed me enough to watch the show, but I'm sorry to see it go for the fans' sake. It seems like a family sci-fi drama that I might've watched ten or fifteen years ago (during my days of seaQuest and Lois and Clark).
I understand that a lot of girls enjoy traditionally "girly" subject matter. Heck, as a former (and I mean once-upon-a-time former) gymnast, I might even be enticed into watching an episode or two of Perfect 10. (Except that they're not using a 10-point scoring system anymore, but that's a different argument entirely.) It's unfortunate that, in a post-Buffy world, we're still having to defend women's and girls' right to like genre shows.
This might seem like a strange question, but did Buffy really have an impact on getting girls to like more "Geek" oriented things? As a guy, I simply remember thinking, "She's fighting vampires. This is awesome." I know Buffy is a girl, which might make the show more accessible to woman, but I just never really considered her gender, at least not consciously. She's a girl she's got stakes-she's the same as any other male super hero minus a bulge in her pants(besides the stakes). It really wasn't until I ran across this site that realized the show had this impact on people. Was it the fact that the central character is a girl? Was it that the female characters had more depth than unusual for genre stuff. I just always thought it was cool(ya know that theme song was very catchy). Did it mean something more to female fans? If so would anyone mind talking about it?
I was already a major geek before I watched Buffy, yet when I watched the show I did have a "ZOMG THIS SHOW + ME=BFF." To be really basic about it, it's just nice watching something with a girl lead that's written well. And as a bonus, it's nice to see that show do well. Not a lot of girl lead genre shows do well, or at least, they haven't in a long time, which is probably why everyone had a FREAKOUT when Twilight made a bazillion dollars.
It's kind of hard for me to say, having grown up geek myself. But there was a stigma attached to liking "boy things" like sci-fi, fantasy, and horror when I was young. Even though I also played with dolls and tea sets and other traditional "girl things", it was my love of Doctor Who and Star Trek and Star Wars that got poked at by other kids.
I've definitely observed a cultural shift — toward geek acceptance in general, and girl geek power in particular — over the past decade or so, and I think Buffy was an important part of that. I tend to think of Buffy Summers as a sort of gateway drug for a lot of young women who wouldn't normally watch a supernatural action drama, because the main character looks like she just stepped out of 90210. She's not as physically intimidating at someone like Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley. Buffy (and Willow and all the other characters) showed that people don't have to be one thing or the other. We can be both and more. So, yeah, maybe Buffy is that important, at least to some of us.
Also think about the television landscape when Buffy premiered in 1997. There was ST: Voyager, The X-Files, Xena, and Buffy. That was about it for genre programming. Every one of those shows had prominent women, but Buffy was the only one that was accessible to younger girls. As Robin points out, Buffy was a teenager, going through teenage stuff, and that made her more relateable than a starship captain, warrior princess, or FBI skeptic.
Thanks for the responses. I appreciate them all. I was thinking about it, and I think my real question is, "Why would sci-fi/fantasy put females off to begin with?" The fact that they supposedly need a primer is the weird part to me. I mean, as a guy, I'm not sure I related to Janeway or Xena on any level, but they still ruled(btw Xena owns Hercules any day of the week). I guess the fact that people are supposed to like stuff based on gender confuses me a little. For instance, I love Gilmore Girls. I never thought much about it until my friends in college were convinced it's only for girls(not that I really care, my love for Lane is eternal). The show is funny, that's it. I suppose that's the ultimate point of this site and that's why it cool.
I think that's a question that baffles a lot of genre fans. And I'm pretty sure that's because so much of the original-Trek / Star Wars era material is built on the ideas of acceptance and inclusion and hope. Those of us who have grown up with the mentality of "anyone can do anything" often find it difficult to relate to the more old-fashioned gender split.
I, too, watched and enjoyed Gilmore Girls (and Dawson's Creek, but that was mostly for Joshua Jackson) at the same time that I was making a point of watching Buffy and X-Files and Stargate: SG-1 (in syndication due to university's lack of cable) and Jack of All Trades. I have no interest in Sex and the City, but my roommates and I watched the entire run of The O.C.. The dividing line for me seems to be whether the plot and dialogue and characters are intriguing, rather than what pigeonhole the network programming executives try to stuff it into.
Closing thesis: Gilmore Girls owns all, execs are stinkheads(at least some), Buffy Summers is a rock star, and rayguns are a unisex WMD.
I'd like to know that answer to that myself.
Sometimes it seems like we've moved past all that nonsense of "explosions & spaceships are for boys – chicks talking is for girls', then some exec makes a comment about female oriented programming or some woman gives me a look of dazed confusion during that inevitable ice breaker where we guess each others' favorite shows.
BTW, Gilmore Girls is one of the best family dramedies ever. I love love love that show.