At the end of each airing season, a bunch of shows just coming off of their freshman years get canceled. Usually, I don't feel too badly about this. It's not that there aren't brilliant shows that had really terrible first seasons (yes, "Parks and Recreation." I am looking at you), but most brand spanking new shows aren't going to be all that great. It would be nice if such shows were nurtured like the lovely snowflakes they have the potential to turn into, but people don't typically have that kind of patience for this sort of thing. This is true of cable television (fare thee well, "Luck." Some day, David Milch will get to finish a story he comes up with), but network TV has it infinitely worse, and the casualties this year were brutal, even by the typical year-one slaughter standards.
Dozens of shows were taken off the air, but the one that's going to torture me is "Awake," a show about a detective who - after a terrible car crash kills a member of his family - embraces an elaborate delusion of living in two separate worlds rather than be faced with the reality of the death of either his wife or son.
First, we have to understand the man
behind the curtain, Kyle Killen. This guy has written three things in
his entire career. 1) A show called "Lone Star" about a scheming
would-be oil tycoon living two lives, by two names, and with two women.
This show aired was hailed as one of the best pilots of the year in
2010, but alas, after two episodes it was promptly canceled. 2) A movie
entitled "The Beaver," the story of a troubled husband and executive who
adopts a beaver hand-puppet as his sole means of communicating. 3)
"Awake."
