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The TV dead list As the broadcast networks get ready to unveil their prime-time lineups for the 2012-13 TV season, the landscape grows ever more littered with shows that bit the dust this season, opening up those precious time slots.
Are You There Chelsea?
Star of Comcast’s E! network late-night show Chelsea Handler wrote the autobiographical book on which this now Comcast-owned NBC series was based; she also starred in the show, though not playing herself. Viewers don’t watch synergy -- they watch shows.
Jordin Althaus
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NBC
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Pan Am
Just days before ABC officially announced “Pan Am” was not returning for a second season, the '60s-set drama won this year’s Rose d’Or Award for best TV series -- Europe’s most prestigious TV honor.
Patrick Harbron
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ABC
Alcatraz
Fox canceled J.J. Abrams’ drama about time-traveling residents of the infamous prison after one season to make room on Monday nights for a drama in which Jordana Spiro plays a mob doctor and another in which Kevin Bacon hunts for a cult of serial killers.
James Dittiger
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Fox
Unforgettable
One year ago, CBS moved “The Good Wife” out of the Wednesday 10 p.m. time slot because while it was strong with viewers overall, it was soft with key age brackets and did not capitalize on its twin “NCIS” lead-ins. This season, its replacement, “Unforgettable,” was strong among viewers overall but soft with key demographic groups and did not capitalize on its twin “NCIS” lead-ins. Plus, it faded in the second half of the season.
Giovanni Rufino
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AP
Harry’s Law
In recent weeks, Kathy Bates’s NBC drama has been the network’s second-most-watched franchise -- behind only its two nights of “The Voice.” On the other hand, it has been attracting fewer 18-to-49-year-olds -- the currency of NBC ad sales -- than “Betty White’s Off Their Rockers.” NBC execs said they tried for two years to get younger viewers to the show, and failed.
Lewis Jacobs
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NBC
CSI: Miami
“ 'CSI: Miami' leaves an amazing television legacy -- a signature look and style, global popularity and as a key player in CBS’s rise to the top over the past decade,” CBS said as it pulled the plug on the camptastic David Caruso vehicle for sunglass donning. Though the show enjoyed strong overseas sales and AMC recently closed a deal to air reruns -- including an 11th season had it been ordered -- CBS chief Leslie Moonves had hinted the move to investors weeks earlier when he told them, “To use a sports term, we’re going to take a player off the field a year early rather than a year late.”
Monty Brinton
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CBS
Fear Factor
NBC dropped a whopping eight reality series from its schedule, including a second cancellation for “Fear Factor.” The list of non-survivors also includes “Escape Routes,” “The Sing-Off,” “Minute to Win It,” “The Marriage Ref,” “Who’s Still Standing?”, “It’s Worth What?” and “Who Do You Think You Are?” Surviving the purge: “The Voice,” “The Celebrity Apprentice,” “Fashion Star,” “The Biggest Loser,” and “Betty White’s Off Their Rockers.”
Michael Weaver
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NBC
Ringer
Sarah Michelle Gellar’s TV series comeback averaged just 1.8 million viewers for CW this season (compared with “Vampire Diaries’ ” 2.8 million). And, rumor has it that Gellar, who played twins on this series, is pregnant, which would have meant working two pregnancies into the already mind-numbingly complicated storyline -- or at least one twin spending about half the season behind a potted palm.
Eric Liebowitz
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CBS
Charlie’s Angels
ABC reboot of TV classic was one of the season’s early cancellations after America deemed it too cheesy -- even for Charlie’s Angels.
Nathan Bell
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ABC
Desperate Housewives
Over its eight-season run, “Desperate” is credited with jump-starting the prime-time soap genre, saving ABC and changing our perception of 40-something women.
Peter Hopper Stone
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ABC via AP
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
ABC canceled its home makeover show as a series in January when it hit 200 episodes, because ratings faltered when the network moved it from Sunday nights to Fridays -- duh.
Ken White
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ABC
Man Up!
Man-coms -- you know, men emasculated in a woman’s world -- did not fare well this season, including this one from ABC.
Matt Kennedy
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ABC
Work It
Four days after ABC programming chief Paul Lee said there was room in prime time for “a very, very, very, very silly show” about guys dressing in drag to land jobs during the man-cession, and likened it to the Dustin Hoffman flick “Tootsie” -- which the Library of Congress had deemed “culturally significant” and inducted into the National Film Registry -- Lee canceled it.
Michael Ansell
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ABC
How to Be a Gentleman
TV suits thought man-coms would be all the rage this season. They were wrong. This one -- an etiquette columnist told to sex up his column asks slobster pal for help -- performed poorly on Thursdays on CBS following “Big Bang Theory” and got shipped off to the Night of Low Expectations, a.k.a. Saturday, where it did even worse.
Greg Gayne
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CBS
Allen Gregory
After just seven episodes, Fox programming chief Kevin Reilly said net’s animated series about a 7-year-old rich brat forced to assimilate in public school had run its course.
Fox
House
Show producers announced in February they would pull the plug on the Fox show at the end of this season, explaining, “How much better to disappear before the music stops, while there is still some promise and mystique in the air” and adding, “If the show lives on somewhere, with somebody, as a fond memory, then that is a precious feat, of which we will always be proud.” Let’s pause here to contemplate how Dr. House would have mocked such treacle.
Ray Mickshaw
Terra Nova
After weeks of deliberation, Fox suits were unable to figure out how to evolve the befuddled, money-gobbling, time-traveling dino-drama into anything that could survive on its prime-time lineup. So they canceled it, whereupon TV critics began yowling to other TV critics, like mastodons bellowing across the primeval ooze, that it was the end of ambitious TV.
Brook Rushton
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Fox
Chuck
Another of those cult dramas that managed to linger thanks to manic thing-buying by rabid fans (in this case, Subway foot-long sandwiches), NBC’s “Chuck” finally ended its five-year saga in January.
Chris Haston
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NBC
Free Agents
Despite star Hank Azaria’s best tweeting efforts, the NBC comedy finished in a dead heat with CW’s reality series “H8R” as to which would be the second new broadcast series to be canceled last fall.
Dean Hendler
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NBC
The Playboy Club
Anyone wondering what NBC was thinking of when it unveiled its '60s-set drama got an answer just a few short weeks later: the season’s first cancellation. Despite much chest-thumping by both conservatives and Gloria Steinem before its launch — all mother’s milk for network marketing suits — the first episode attracted just 5 million viewers and tanked with the younger ones NBC targets.
Matt Dinerstein
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NBC
Prime Suspect
Were he still running programming at pay cable net Showtime, NBC chairman Bob Greenblatt noted in January, “Prime Suspect” would have been picked up after the third episode, declared a hit and put into production for three or four seasons. But he’s not, and it’s gone.
Patrick Harbron
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NBC
H8R
CW reality series, in which Mario Lopez took a D-list celebrity to confront some average Joe who hates them and demand they turn their hate to love, made NBC’s freshman comedy series “Free Agents” look like “Dr. Zhivago.” And yet, they finished in a dead heat to be crowned the season’s second cancellation.
Scott Alan Humbert
One Tree Hill
Former WB soap migrated to CW over its nine-season run, by which time its loyal middle-school fan base had graduated college and decided to move on.
Fred Norris
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The CW
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Section:/lifestyle/style
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