Entertainment Weekly today released an updated list of confirmed show renewals and their expert predictions. My thoughts on a few of their reports… (the block quoted text is direct from EW. The text that follows are my thoughts)

Alcatraz: 3.4 rating. Status: Not hopeful: Monday’s finale was the lowest-rated episode for the season.
Fringe: 1.7 rating. Status: We’ve been hearing Fringe was doomed — until this week. There’s renewed hope for a 13-episode “final season” pickup thanks to the modest performance of Alcatraz.

This one is interesting and I pair them together for a couple of reasons. First, they are similar shows from JJ Abrams that blend serial, sci-fi mythology with episodic, procedural elements. Second, because they are similar, but not the massive hits Fox would like its shows to be, I find it unlikely that Fox will renew both of them. My guess is that because Alcatraz is still largely untested having had a very short first season, because it is a new show and therefore automatically cheaper to produce than older shows and because it has a higher rating overall than does Fringe, I think Alcatraz would get the renewal. However, I am not in the know and EW is. Alcatraz has had a luke warm critical reception but Fringe has mostly been critically respected and is a cult show. Simply for reputation sake, Fox would be more motivated to give Fringe a proper final season and to seek out new pilots that might fare better with both viewers and critics than Alcatraz did. Personally, I want to see Alcatraz renewed as I think it has a great premise and is just getting warmed up. But all the prognosticators are saying we have sadly seen the last of it. 

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We’re mid-way through a busy and buzzy television season so I thought I’d check in with what I am watching and what I am not watching. I do plan to write about some of the mid-season shows but now prefer to watch the first four or so episodes before doing so. You get a better picture of what the series is capable of after a few episodes and thus a more accurate assessment. 

What I am and am not watching in alphabetical order…

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Jack Layton died today. We love someone the most after they die because before their death, we sadly take them for granted. But when they die, when they will no longer be in our lives, we discover just how much we loved them because we are suddenly so viscerally sad that they are gone and that the possibility of all that they could have done in the future, with us, for the world, for themselves, is dead with them. This is certainly true of Jack Layton. He was publicly under-appreciated until today when we publicly poured out our love for him. I wish he was alive to see how much love the country he loved has for him.

But he left us with a message. The man who worked so hard for the country he loved, left us with a final gift, a declarative letter to all Canadians with universal truths.

“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

The All You Need Is Love philosophy—an airy-fairy, touchy-feely, old-school liberal bleeding heart, hippie-dippe philosophy of ultimate compassion for all living things and things that are not living, oceans and art and science and truth—is one that I have believed in my whole life and strived to live up to. It’s a cliche by now and yet one that needs to be repeated. Love is indeed more powerful than any force out there but a lot of people don’t know that and don’t use love in their daily lives to overcome their despair and the despair of others. Focus on what and who you love and what and who loves you back, truly and deeply. If you approach the world around you with compassion the world around you will love you back. Cut hate and anger and nastiness out of your life and you will discover that they do no one any good. Approach, always, with love.

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I want 30 Rock to start getting ready to take its bow. 30 Rock is fantastic but lets face it, its golden days are fading away. It’s a very very slow decent of quality and because it’s inevitable for a show to begin to decline in quality, it’s admirable that the decline is negligible. What I want from 30 Rock is for it to end soon and for it to end well while it is still a great show that’s a lock for a Best Comedy Emmy nomination. I want for it to not lose respect by continuing when it is a mere shell of its former greatness. Wouldn’t it be great if it went into TV history having earned a spot in the Comedy Emmy category for every season? So many shows (*cough* X-Files *cough* anything from David E. Kelly) lost all the respect they had earned in their acclaimed early years by not ending before they turned into utter crap. I don’t want this to happen to 30 Rock. I want 30 Rock to end strong having never become weak. Lost set a very promising precedent of ending a show not when the ratings decline but when the creators determine it is best for the integrity of the show. I’d like more shows to end this way.

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