NBC Kills "Paul Reiser"

NBC Kills "Paul Reiser"

Television News

By our guest blogger, Nick Hanover

Proving good things come to those who wait, Deadline has confirmed that NBC has canceled "The Paul Reiser Show" after just two episodes. Of those two, the premier was actually the worst in-season premier NBC has ever had. Let me just make that clear again: "The Paul Reiser Show" was NBC's worst rated premier of all-time. And the numbers on the second episode actually managed to drop a full 18%, which is fairly normal except normally a show drops from a relatively high place to somewhere a little more average rather than, you know, dropping from the bottom to the center of the Earth.

So, what factors into the absolutely abysmal performance of "Paul Reiser?" Well, as Deadline's Nikki Finke points out so subtly "even the ads for "The Paul Reiser Show" were annoying," and Finke is one of the few humans who would admit to liking Reiser. In case you missed them (not sure how you accomplished that since they may as well have been legally forced on all of us), the ads mostly just featured Reiser whining to the camera and self-deprecatingly calling all of us out for probably not giving a shit about his show. One even had Reiser pouting about how everyone probably won't even watch his show even though it's coming after the episode of "The Office" where Will Ferrell first appears. Reiser then proceeded to claim all anyone would remember about the ad was that Will Ferrell would be on "The Office."

It's tempting to blame those spots squarely on NBC, which has worked extremely hard to make itself the worst rated network on TV. But Paul Reiser's recent appearance on Jay Leno pretty much proved he's a whiny, entitled jackass all on his own. Score one for humanity.