I’m getting a little tired of this.

Is it just me, or is the failure rate of new series going up?  I’m not sure, but I’m getting a little tired of investing hours into a new series, only to find out that it’s cut off before it really gets somewhere.  Maybe I should bag the whole thing and move to purely watching good series on DVD or iTunes (once NBC realizes they are completely off-base taking their content off iTunes).

Well, I had been meaning to post this all season, and now, I catch this article on BuddyTV, which indicates that NBC has passed on filling the last 9 episodes of Journeyman this year, basically putting the nail in the coffin for the series.

So this Wednesday, December 19th, the show is basically over:

The series suffered from low ratings and the network allowed its option for a full season order to lapse by the December 11 deadline for renewal.  While there has been no official announcement from NBC, such an action effectively implies that the series has been cancelled.

So, before the sun sets on this series, let me explain, with two days of potential relevance, how I would have liked to have seen the series evolve.

The rationale for Dan’s time travel that I would have liked is as follows:

• Dan, Livia, and other time travelers are all linked in some sort of master plan to alter the time line, or rectify it, for some reason.
• Each “mission” that they take are a set of carefully orchestrated minor changes that each feed on each other to create bigger and bigger effects.
• We’d start to see people or changes that Dan and/or Livia have made snowballing – the boy saved doesn’t just create a technology to help the blind see, but a blind man helped by the technology becomes Governor, etc.
• In the end, there is a major, world-ending catastrophe, like in Heroes, that all these micro-changes compound to avoid.

I care less about the exact “orchestrator” of these micro-changes, and how it ties in with Dan, Livia, and other potential travelers.  It could be the scientist found a way to project the future, saw the disaster, and orchestrated this exact path to prevent it.  Why micro-changes?  To limit collateral damage from butterfly effect issues.  I’m thinking of something like Asimov’s time managers from End of Eternity.

Here is what would have made me shut off the show immediately:

• Anything that indicated they were taking a Quantum Leap direction, with good & evil orchestrators of time travel
• Anything that indicated this was a mystical or magical phenomena vs. science-based (got close tonight on this, by the way, with the psychic)
• Anything that sounded like Dan was there to “just do good” and “fix things that went wrong”.  I’ll take my karma from “My Name is Earl”, thank you very much.

HBO better get moving on some new series.  I just don’t trust the major networks to do any of this well, ever.

If you are one of the few people also watching the show, let me know what you think.