Audiences hunger for something with a little originality and executives have convinced themselves (like you seem to have) that remakes are just good enough for them that it makes no difference to the final product to have such an obvious dislike for anything not a direct lift of something else.

And they’re probably right.

When you see how GE has so profoundly mis-managed NBC from First to Last Place, you understand how the conglomerates that, regretfully for the public, own Hollywood don’t have a clue as to what it takes to run a successful studio or network.

CBS does a lot better than the rest because it’s its own company and Les Moonves is the only high executive in TV with a little bit of knowledge, but you can see even he is often tempted to give in to the trend and make shows nobody watches but the press loves.

It’s amazing that I keep reading how popular 30Rock is and how difficult it will be for NBC to do without it when it is getting 3 million viewers.

You do make a good point about CW, but I think the way to look at it is that CW has been so grossly mismanaged (on the altar of “younger viewers”) that it now barely exists for most people.

You also bring up a great point about cancelations. The problem the networks have right now is that they do not have enough money to properly program their airtime.

That’s why they stopped programming Saturdays, and if CBS hadn’t made a determined effort to bring back Fridays from the Dead, most networks would not program Fridays either. All networks programmed re-runs on Premiere Week, which is insane if you remember how network TV used to be.

The networks used to have a huge cache of replacement shows to try out and would cancel shows that weren’t hits so they could find the hits.

When NBC keeps renewing 30Rock it deprives itself of the opportunity of finding a real hit.

Multiply that with the insane number of flops being renewed [cough] Whitney [cough] Fringe… and you have an industry in secular retreat (even as it claims to be doing great).

I could go into the problem with production budgets which have inflated to ridiculous sums even as ratings shrunk (10 million for Fringe’s pilot – why?!!!!) but that may be going too far off topic.