Alcatraz is no more

I really liked the show and the last few episodes were really great but sadly it has been cancelled by Fox.

I haven't seen it posted anywhere but last night Beth (Jorge Garcia's girlfriend) announced it on facebook.

Thanks to all of you who watched, but Alcatraz has been canceled

then this was just posted as well:

Thanks to all of you guys for such sweet comments and for being such great fans! Hopefully ALCATRAZ isn't completely dead and will come back on either another network or in another medium. I'd totally run out to buy the comic book series!

Hopefully another network picks it up but Im not counting on it.

Heres a pic from the last episode viewing party

They had all the right ingredients but failed to make anything you'd want to eat more of.

I really wanted to like this show. I tried. Just nothing jumped out at me.

I think I need to go back to episodic television. I don't think I can invest in another season of any show that takes an entire season (if you can call these 13 episode things they now have a "season") to develop into something interesting.

I thought they'd at least give it another season to prove itself. When did this 13 episode season thing start anyhow? To me a season was 26 or more episodes like they had for a lot of shows in the 80s. Fox will be replacing this with a CSI clone or reality show.

The problem with the show was that it was too episodic when it should have been serial like Fringe & LOST. I think what turned off a lot of fans was that it proved too much like just another procedural cop show featuring the villain of the week. If they had more episodes like the finale scattered throughout its short run I bet it would have gotten much better ratings and would have been picked up for a season 2.

Producers/writers need to start putting into their contracts that they get a two hour episode to wrap up the series. I hate it when a show ends on a cliffhanger or with a lot of unanswered questions.

Sent from my Apple Newton

I'm with Mic on this, I really wanted to like it, and tried, but...





Doug

I watched episode 1. Nothing got me going enough to continue after that.

Good concept no meat. Sometimes I felt like I was watching early seasons of Smallville. Very standard superhero formula. Intro bad guy, bad guy gets upper hand, good guys find weakness, good guys win

Seeing as all the execs look at are numbers, i'm sure they saw the numbers drop the first 5-6 weeks and only pickup a tad a the end and killed it.

It's the shows problem though. The teased you with a big conpiracy in the pilot and then never got back to it really until the last couple episodes. People would tune in to see what was up with the main story and they ignored it too long and people dropped off. I can remember thinking that it seemed like the writers assumed they had a guaranteed year 2.

That's what happens when assume....

cboath said:

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Seeing as all the execs look at are numbers, i'm sure they saw the numbers drop the first 5-6 weeks and only pickup a tad a the end and killed it.

It's the shows problem though. The teased you with a big conspiracy in the pilot and then never got back to it really until the last couple episodes. People would tune in to see what was up with the main story and they ignored it too long and people dropped off. I can remember thinking that it seemed like the writers assumed they had a guaranteed year 2.

That's what happens when assume....

That's how I felt too except that I feel that it was the suits at Fox, not the producers, who made the show so episodic. Regardless, I hope they learn their lesson and if they plan on making shows like Alcatraz ,and Terra Nova for that matter, they really need to deliver on the conspiracy or mythology and not go all episodic until the end.

Well, another pebble in the bucket for "Not everything JJ Abrams touches turns to gold".

Not surprising at all that the show was cancelled. They just didn't do enough with the plot. I would buy a comic with the show but it should never come to that. The producers and writers dragged out the secrets in the hopes that this would be like Lost. They were wrong.

Wakeem said:

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Not surprising at all that the show was cancelled. They just didn't do enough with the plot. I would buy a comic with the show but it should never come to that. The producers and writers dragged out the secrets in the hopes that this would be like Lost. They were wrong.

LOST isn't a fair comparison seeing as they added to the mystery in pretty much every episode. It may not have gone where people liked, but they didn't just ignore the mystery and give you 8 straight weeks of Jack busting fellow losties for stealing food or something.

Alcatraz, they lured you in with the mystery of what happened in 1963 in episodes 1 and 2 (aired as a 2 hour episode) and then ignored it the next 6 weeks or so and the re-addressed it in their last 4 episodes or so. People felt they were sold a mystery serial and cop a run of the mill cop show and turned it off.

Though it wasn't a "great" show, I'll miss this mix of actors/characters. Like others have mentioned, the central ingredients were all there, it just didn't come together coherently. I think I mainly liked seeing Hurley once again. He's just such a pure spirit on screen. I love pretty much all the other principal actors too, and thought they were well on the way to developing these characters, it was the story behind the characters that seemed to let me down. I could get into each episode individually, but there was never any element that drove me to anticipate the next episode if you know what I mean?

Dave

Yeah, I gave up after episode 6 - I just couldn't get attached to the characters. What it really needed was more Sam Niel as a bad-ass agent (field, not office).

NormanF said:

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Sent from my Apple Newton

This, by the way, is awesome - I'd love to know "how"...

That sucks. My wife and I got into it. Yet another canceled show where I have no answers.

Sean