The BoormanBlog

Not to give any free press to Yahoo, but I was looking over the shows that were canceled this season on their TV page. It came as no surprise that most of these shows only aired a few episodes in the fall and then quickly vanished during sweeps. Some came in as quick “mid-season replacements” in January, and left just as quickly. I guess this year’s writers’ strike had something do to with it.

The longest running series of the cancelled bunch was the CW’s ‘Girlfriends’. OK, I’ll admit, I watched a few of the reruns on the CW while waiting for the remastered Star Trek episodes to come on. Hey, I don’t want to miss the beginning! Like a lot of sitcoms, I found this one to be more silly than funny. I will give the show kudos for sticking it out for 8 seasons; they must be doing something right. From what little I’ve seen, the overall tone of the show appeared to be positive, focusing on a group of 20 to 30 something women who live, laugh, love and cry together. Certainly not as crude as other sitcoms in the CW/WB/UPN slums of television, probably because of the female-centric nature of the show. Heck, the even had a character who was conservative! Of course, he was to Girlfriends what Ned Flanders is to the Simpsons, a straw man held up for ridicule as comedy. But I digress.

What has me posting about Girlfriends at this point was that the final episode aired this past Monday, May 19 (I didn’t watch it). Aparently, this show ended its run with a run of the mill episode about one of the women (an author) confronting writer’s block. That’s it. Not a full 1 hour episode filled with clips from years past or the tying up of major loose ends. Just a run of the mill show. This would have been a sad way to end things even if the writers had planned to end it this way.

They didn’t.

Aparently, the CW cancelled the show at the very last minute, and didn’t give any of the writers time to write a proper send off. This is a real smack in the face to the cast and crew, not to mention the fans that have supported the show for 8 years (to put it in perspective, no Star Trek series went past 7 seasons). Rumor has it that the CW thought a proper series finale would be “too expensive” to make.

I’m hoping that some kind of TV movie can be made to give the girlfriends the send off they deserve. Maybe something to include as a bonus on the DVD box set? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of Girlfriends, but the show deserves respect for not being complete crap. An 8 year run should not have ended so abruptly.

Stay tuned….

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Rants and rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.