I will disagree on one point though, and that is I feel you shouldn't lump Ugly Betty in with the rest of the garbage on ABC. Okay, it's not as edgy possibly as it could be, but it has some great acting and it's not always completely predictable. If on the other hand, you are bored to tears by fashion and by the struggles of young Latina women trying to make it out there in the cruel world, I can see why you might not like it much. But please allow that it is a good show of its ilk. It's certainly way better than either Grey's Anatomy or that primetime soap Dirty Sexy Money.

Also on a related topic, I am encouraging everyone to watch the new series Leverage on TNT. It is funny and well-acted and the casts are full of great character actors, etc. Plus it has Timothy Hutton doing angsty insurance adjuster-turned-Robin Hood figure. The banter is good, and oh, yeah, it has the wondrous Gina Bellman, late of Coupling UK, doing the Cinnamon Carter thing from the old Mission Impossible TV series. Definitely, a must see!!

So, as they finish the season, I will remain hooked.

But for now:

Goodbye, Ned. I will miss your adorable face and quirky smile.

Goodbye, Chuck. I will miss your "stick to it" attitude and the love you shared with Ned.

Goodbye, Olive. I will miss your silly remarks and google-eyes generally directed at Ned.

Goodbye, Emerson. I will miss you. I don't know what it is about you, but you're amazing.

Goodbye, Vivian and Lilly. I will miss the sisterly bond between that is oh so similar to one I have with a certain sister of mine.

Goodbye, Digby. I will miss you because you are the most amazing dog ever.

GOODBYE, PUSHING DAISIES!! You will be greatly missed.

are you kidding me…we're going to have to put up with those loud and annoying desperate bitches till 2011…but they're canceling Pushing Daisies…NICE JOB ABC…really nice. LOST I can deal with and even that's getting old. It almost feels as though I'm watching the same episode every week. Ugly Betty I never got into…especially because its a cross over of a spanish soap opera that ran for months on telemundo or univision, which was cute but too be came old after several months.

Hear hear… BL is not garbage but neither is Pushing Daisies.

BL may not be the same as it was in the beginning… but in it's Genesis it was a spin off of the Practice.. it has grown to much more than that. Silly.. but then that's the fun otherwise it would be Law and Order.

PD wasn't given a chance.

To the Powers that Be at ABC – You should be ashamed of yourselves… I say to you, start dumping some of that mind numbing "reality tv" drivel otherwise… I'll watch the remaining episodes of BL and then you've lost another viewer.

And while ABC to its credit has been promoting the hell out of the show, it puzzled me as to why none of the ads never highlighted the guest stars. For me that is one of the great joys of the show–seeing people like Paul Reubens, Molly Shannon, and David Arquette completely playing against type. If these appearances were heavily promoted in the ads, I think the show would draw a lot more viewers. NBC has become very adept at this strategy in promoting appearances of Oprah and Steve Martin and others on "30 Rock." Actually come to think of it, ABC does this well with "Ugly Betty." So maybe ABC really had it in for "Pushing Daisies" after all.

For me the real question isn't why ABC canceled PD, but how can millions of viewers keep going back to the CSIs without getting bored?

That said, I'd love to see a Pushing Daisies movie.

Shows can come back from cancellation.

It's no mystery the show got spiked. Kristin Chenoweth as Olive Snook, the waitress panging for Lee Pace as Ned, the buddha pie maker with goo goo eyes. Remember her singing "Hopelessly Devoted to You" to the Ned's dog in the first season? I was
swept away. I confess infatuation with Chenoweth, who intially played the Wicked Witch of the West, in Wicked. She is a compact hottie with a voice to match. Great things come in petite packets, and she is super comic actress. Swoosie Kurtz did a fine job as the aunt/mother of Chuck, or Charlotte. Anna Friel played Chuck an American sweet heart and the actual femme fatale, and nailed it. The same praise could be cast upon for the rest of the cast. Emerson Dodd, PI, estranged father, played pitch perfect by Chi McBride. He was the Worchestershire sauce on Ned's gullible sugar. Whack. Snap. Crackle. Pop.

A show too clever by half, not quite, was Pushing Daisies. It won me over with art direction, coloring, acting and, totally, with the writing. Even a few of the guest roles
were luminous crystals. Paul Reubens as the nosy olfactory genius? Pee Wee Herman who sniffed out the aroma of death on Charlotte on a snowy rooftop with hives of
hibernating bees? Brilliant bit of casting and writing. David Arquette's stuff: sharp.

Cut my IQ by one third and spare me the pain of witnessing the death of a fine
series. By the way, did not ABC also hatchet out another too good for broadcast
show with Dennis Leary? "The Job" a few thousand years ago? It seems lightning
strikes ABC every few years and someone in programming actually green lights a paradigm shifting show which finds it way on the air. The new form gets raves from the critics then gets buried in the dismal swamp of fatuous viewers. The dipsticks and doo doo heads who spend too much time in front of the screen. It happened back in the early nineties with NYPD Blue, but that show morphed into a sermonizing on humans disposition to addiction and went off the rails, and despite what David Milch, the forever addict claims, never found it's footing again. The question remains can Jimmy Smits act, or is his face too weird and interesting to decipher? My wife thinks he is hot. I have a crushes on Kristin Chenoweth and Katey Segal. Real women.

Oh, and Mr. Frank as far as your malice towards Dancing with the Stars, and Who Wants to be a Millionaire they make Private Practice, arguably one the lamest shows on television look challenging. Any spin off of Gray's Anatomy is like Barbie giving birth to Barbie jurior, or Jackie Collins penning another Playtex Bra ripper. Gray's Anatomy is really Chicago Hope, redux, and Private Practice is, two footsteps into drek.

For some mental relief I recommend trying Sons of Anarchy on FX. Imagine Deadwood set on Harleys in woodsy wild east of the mountains of California. Watch it to actually see Ron Perlman act as conflicted human, sans masks or makeup, and see Katey Segal kill as the menopausal motorcycle queen bee. In fact just watch the show for Ms. Segal in the role of a lifetime. She is a brilliant reprise of Carmella Soprano, but this time she is pulling the strings on her Tony, Ron Perlman's gang chief. SOA is a very underappreciated show. The Harleys are really horses that propel one primal, masculine
tribe into another, in and around the aptly named frontier town of Charming.
Sons of Anarchy, has real potential as a long form, novelized treat.

Ugly Betty? Now there's a case of a seriously flawed gem. I have to give ABC a C+ on that one. Infinitely better than Gray's Anatomy, but a far cry from Pushing Daisies. It has it's moments and it's appeals and the show has all the components of becoming a B+ series. Except for the central character as written and therein lays the rub, the thorn, the twist.

Betty is a classic example of how not to write a series lead. Things always, always happen to her. As written she
is always the victim, never the protagonist, much less the antagonist. The first thing an emerging writer – television writers included – should learn is not make the central character a chronic victim. The circle of characters in the show surrounding Ugly Betty, paradoxically, are far more interesting. Justin, the gifted gay younger brother is always fun and could be the most intrigueing and pained character. Her cosmetically fixated older sister has a feckless working class charm. Vanessa Williams is Cruella DeVille with a luscious body. Judith Light as Mother Meade? A marvel. Judith Light's role is probably the best in the show. The few lines and scenes Ms. Light gets she nails. She perfectly understands it's not the length of screen time you have, it's what you do with it.

The earnest and earthy Scot seamstress is another plus. The seamstress is actually Betty's boxing coach. Her fight manager. The greatest weakness of the series is that Betty shows up in too many scenes like
the boring girl scout, the chubby, whiny playmate who sucks the air out of a child's birthday party. The class president who recruits you into making vasts murals out of construction paper on a Saturday while your friends are out getting dry humped, or so you imagine, while you're stuck cutting and pasting giant letters and rainbows with the Honor Society chicks.
The less seen of Betty's suffering, the better. Her terrible taste in clothes is a one trickpony that went lame about four episodes in the first season. Past time for her character
to develop personally, i.e., rub the wounds of Life's disappointment and heartaches sutured closed with cynicism. Give her a new wardrode or, perhaps, let her run butch. The series is a winner weighed down by the lead character being too much of the moral, nice nice anchor. If I were running the show I'd let Betty have a few good bangs, get sexy and show a dark side. She needs to lose the glasses and get plucked. Depilate Betty. The dark eyebrows and heavy glasses are not necessary parts of America's character but vaudeville props in a bad sitcom. A character's clothes should not represent an integral part of her inner self. An actor's words and deeds represent.
She needs internal conflict, and not just the struggle over whether to eat dirt and not complain, or eat dirt under protest. Enough of a Latina goody two shoes getting burned and microwaved over and over by the selfish. Let the homely Latina hit back, lose ten pounds of garish clothing and show some tension. Is Betty a pathetic clown girl or Dulce or a Dykette? Make her be. Make her ugly on the inside.

Now I will committ heresy and call Lost, lost. Heroes? Defied gravity of any narrative
success by introducing too many blonde chicks with super powers, including one with two or three personalities or doppel gangers. Too confusing, and with commercial
breaks, and the fossilized acting of Old Man Petrelli, and his game, it's lost.
The series writers and producers got too charmed with their own gimmicks and
cheats, and MacGuffins – gadgets or suitcases and formulas – to propel the story
forward. They forgot the primary element of compelling interest in the viewer; keep it simple and the characters sympathetic.

Now on Mondays, I think the Sarah Connor Chronicles, interestingly, in it's second
season actually got better, which is against the norm in television. The Chronicles
have a fast pace, a clear story line, good arc, and just enough surprises and twists to enhance the interest. Heroes, in counter point, is a case of throwing too many things at the wall too see which one sticks, much like, the metaphor of
the Indian cab driver intellectual, getting all stuck up, and cocooning apparently
innocent bystanders for no good reason. Too many gimmicks muddy the plot line and stifle the characters. In a phrase or addage, saying, Heroes,
did not abide to that old line, "Oh, the webs we weave." The spider like
aspects of the scientist who drank the Kool Aid is the metaphor for the series.
The only way to repair Heroes is kill off half the characters starting with Old Man
Petrelli and send Hiro back to 1600s Japan. Go back to the beginning and straighten the narrative out, untangle the rubber cement crap. Another possibility is to
have Hiro, the time jumper, carry away some of the bad guys and deposit them
in old Japan or colonial America.

One more ABC show I want to see succeed – if only to watch Gretchen Moll in a police uniform, and Michael "Christofah" Imperioli, as a bushy and bad cop and Harvey Keitel stealing every scene with his plasticene faceand heart – is Life on Mars. I am hardly confident about the series. Given the show's premise, a cop from the present drop kicked by a car into a coma, and time sucked into 1973 New York, I knew it was going to be problematic to sustain. Life on Mars, is not going to be renewed, or it will be on the ropes at best. It's a shame, too, although thematically the concept is a big hobbling, the ensemble is wonderful. The chemistry hot. Too bad. Oh, well, another form busting show, bites the dust.

In the end, I guess, television is like Evolution, a fact, and survival is determined by
Natural Selection. In the case of entertainment, however, the pressure of the environment and ecology is the great force of simple headed, who identifu with one dimensional to two dimensional characters. Third dimensions are confusing. A peek behind the curtains or a morally ambivalent lead is way too scary. In the words of P. T. Barnum, "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

Absolutely. You want to make a successful series. Play it dumb and write it hack, stick to the formulas and usuall gags and bags of tricks – confused identities, woman
giving birth in elevator, car or plane, idiot husband, ya da ya da. Bing Bam Boom.
Smart Jews. Jive talking blacks. Wiley Oriental Gentlemen. Hard drinking Irish. The usual suspects. or shop it to HBO or Showtime, or even, FX. Or if you really want to be iconoclastic an creative, put it in a cartoon. Some of the most envelope busting stories
and characters and funniest stuff are to be found in animation. Simpsons and South Park were total myth busters. They opened the box.