Elementary

[The Man]

Are you being obtuse? Game of Thrones did not start off with great ratings.

I... didn't say that it did? I wasn't arguing about the ratings for the pilot. I was arguing about the ratings for the second season. And I don't appreciate the implied insult.

Or great reviews for that matter.

With the exception of a couple of high-profile carpers (Gina Bellafonte being the main one that stands out in my memory), I remember most of the press coverage being quite positive.

But of course it has the potential to be something like Lost on regular TV. I never said it was impossible. All I said was that shows that are smart and intense and character driven are going to have a harder time than shows that are easy to watch. The shows you can pop into for gentle mental stimulation before going to bed. Shows like Elementary that are perfunctory in it's entertainment will appeal to people much more easily than shows with lots of depth or violence or too little violence or a host of other reasons.

Look at Friday Night Lights. Arguable one of the best television shows on network TV in recent years. To NBC's credit they really did try and push the hell out of the show. Aggressive promotion, huge favorite amongst critics AND TV execs which is kinda rare.

And every freakin' year, threat of cancelation. The numbers were terrible.

It also had a hugely loyal fanbase, even if it was a small one. But America just didn't want to tune in. It is an amaaaazing show.

And they also ran Friday Night Lights on Friday night every year except the first one. Appropriate given the subject matter, not so appropriate if you want to turn a show into a gigantic hit. It's called the Friday Night Death Slot for a reason.

I haven't said every great show will turn out huge. But the point you're missing is that not every mediocre show will either. For every show like Law and Order, there are dozens that don't make it, and statistical analysis alone indicates that large numbers of them will be mediocre. Meanwhile, we can focus on Arrested Development, but there are also shows like Modern Family, a complex and intelligent show that with aggressive promotion that does become a cultural phenomenon. We can focus on Firefly, but that would be ignoring shows like Battlestar Galactica (terrible though the ending was) or Doctor Who. It has yet to be demonstrated that the ratio of great shows that struggle with ratings to great shows that become huge hits is any worse than the number of mediocre shows that constantly struggle with ratings to mediocre shows that become huge hits. You're acting like mediocrity alone will be enough to make a show a gigantic hit, and that's plainly not true. The reason such a smaller number of great shows become huge hits than mediocre ones is because there are such a smaller number of great shows.

There's no other shows like Game of Thrones because no one expects a show like that to succeed. And it didn't at first. Which kind of proves the point. Now that it has succeeded, maybe we will see more shows like it. I'd be fine with that.

Most people didn't expect a show like Lost to succeed either, but it did - in this case from the start (and arguably too well, as the first season led people to expect them to maintain a level of quality that was obviously, in retrospect, impossible for them to maintain). And then dozens of people copied it, and a lot of the imitators were pale imitators, and most of them floundered. The one show I'm aware of that really managed to capture the same balance of mystique and character focus, Once Upon a Time, has also become a pretty big hit (although it lacks the moral complexity of Lost, but whatever, can't have everything).

Furthermore, no one ever really expected Game of Thrones to get ten million viewers an episode in the first season, so I'd say that it wasn't exactly a commercial failure. As far as I'm aware, it performed almost exactly as everyone except certain fanboys expected it to.

Like I said above - for every mediocre show that becomes a gigantic hit, there are probably dozens that fail. For every great show that becomes a gigantic hit, there are probably quite a few that don't. But acting like it's harder for a show to become hugely successful if it's a great show? I don't see that. We notice the mediocre shows that are successful more because, well, they're successful. But there are plenty of such shows that don't make it.

I would say Sherlock is more of a modern adaptation of the Doyle books than a variation of the modern cop show. Of course you could then say all modern cop shows are just copies of the Doyle stories. Maybe they are.

Read my mind. Cal Lightman is certainly a copy of Sherlock Holmes. So, from what I can tell, is Monk (I'm not that familiar with the show yet). It even extends beyond cop shows - The Doctor is also a copy of Sherlock (and The Master is a copy of Moriarty). Hell, in the latter case the writers have flat-out admitted it.