This just in. Fox is suspending their new hit show New Girl, starring doe-eyed, girl twee, Zooey Deschanel, to make room for more bloated-with-suck episodes of that American Idol and America’s Got Talent nonsense spawn The X-Factor, oh, and something about baseball too.
There will be no new episodes of the New Girl until November. Yes, yes, sure, all you fans out there all set to twirl in your rompers and your pre-adolescent tights, will be sorely disappointed. Zooey Deschanel has been sent back to that loft in Soho where she will commence singing sad songs about “Waiting Patiently For Dreams to Begin” and the touch and feel of cotton, or some such thing about unicorn kisses.
The suspension is happening immediately, so no New Girl tomorrow night. Don’t set your DVRs! Anarchy! Twee Rebellion! No, not really. In addition, the network wants to clear some space for the MLB play-offs and World Series. This actually makes more sense. It does suck to tune into a show just to find that it’s been pre-empted without warning by a baseball game. This never happens with Basketball, guys. Baseball has the potential to drag on and on like no other sport happening today, right? Well, I’m not sure about that. What happens at the end of Jai alai? Anyway, yes, we Americans who adore the baseball type thing can get behind shows moving to accommodate the most boring best sport ever played!
But two hours of The X-Factor, really, Fox?
This seems like two hours of staring at Simon’s breast implants straining in his gray man-girdle while Paula Abdul tries to focus her barbiturate hazed eyeballs on some calamity-person screeching their spleen out on stage in an arena filled with ex-monster truck rally participants in acid wash lady-jeans; i.e. television torture at its most concentrated. No? Yes.
It’s a gamble for the network to say the least. New Girl has done consistently well for the network since it’s first airing. The X-Factor, not so much. The show has struggled to find its audience and is under performing in everyone’s expectations, Simon’s included. Despite what many are calling “singing show fatigue” given no fewer than four singing competition shows in rotation right now, Simon is still hopeful, even though he says he’s been “humbled” by the latest numbers.
“We’re in a different world now with Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, where people are gonna decide the fate of this show,” Cowell says. “All we have to do is make the show as real as possible, make the contestants as great as we possibly can. And importantly, on the live shows, put on a show you’ve never, ever seen before.”
And there is a lot riding on the live shows scheduled to air next month, but that won’t stop the ratings hemorrhage if the show doesn’t attract more viewers soon, and beefing up the episodes may not be the way.
AOL TV notes that the U.K. X-Factor “has been shedding viewers in large numbers since it adopted a new extended format. Many fans have complained that at a whopping two and a half hours running time the show simply drags on for too long.”
It seems unlikely that Cowell will be able to procure lightening in a bottle once again, but it does seem that FOX isn’t willing to go down without a fight. They better hope that if it fails, viewers will still be interested in seeing Deschanel goofball herself come Turkey Time.
