It is with some great sadness that i echo the announcement from Nellie that FOX has ordered the Geoff Stults series that is a fabricated spin-off of BONES to series. What a waste of a gorgeous actor and a time slot. Even worse was the waste of “Finder” as the milestone 125th broadcast episode of the series. It might be worth one viewing just to see how it stands up on its own and after the probable significant changes that will be coming.

On the outs are Human Target and Breaking In. With Human Target having been bounced all over the schedule to end its second season and most of the show being broadcast in Canada a day or two before FOX showed it in the US the writing had almost always been on the wall about this one. I must have missed something because last i looked Breaking In was doing not too bad ratings-wise.

BONES‘ star’s sister’s show did get picked up so come this autumn we should be seeing Emily in BONES and Zooey Deschanel in The New Girl.

Other announcements include Jaime Pressly’s I Hate My Teenage Daughter being a GO while Weekends at Bellevue and Iceland are both a NO.

O yeah, and JJ Abrams’ ALCATRAZ is a GO for those who had any doubt.

Joining in on the cancellation pyre is Shawn Ryan’s 2nd show of the season, RIP Terriers, the on-location cop drama The Chicago Code starring Jennifer Beals (will she return to Lie to me* ?) and Jason Clarke. The Chicago Code had shown some promise after a couple of episodes but by then it was loosing viewers rather than gaining.

Ok so an hour later and the bloodbath continues as word comes out that Lie to me* is also dead. I guess that answers the query in the above paragraph about Jennifer Beals returning to Lie to me*. This is one that i will actually miss.

Other shows in the #foxbloodbath include Traffic Light,  the pilots Locke & Key and Outnumbered while for now the fate of Ethan Hawke’s  pilot Exit Strategy remains undecided.

(retitled because there is more on the out than coming in)

While i have found myself enjoying many of the new shows put out by Shaw, most of which were conceived by Canwest, i am not the only person to notice a few things with how they are treating their new CanCon shows.  And it is not always with the open arms friendly hug one would think an in-house production would receive.

The most recent of these is XIII, a continuation of the 2008 mini-series that is based on the Belgian comic series that was started in the mid-1980s. There are some rather big names in the show, particularly Stuart Townsend who portrays the titular character XIII and Aisha Tyler, whom many know and loved on the first season of Ghost Whisperer. The series was filmed in and around Toronto and Paris in the autumn and winter of 2010-11. That is the good. The bad comes in the broadcast or more specifically the promotion of the broadcast. As far back as the announcement of the commissioning of the series it was part of the collection of shows slated for Global & Showcase. All of the dramas ended up going to Showcase while the comedies varied somewhat. On 15 March Shaw announced the premiere date of XIII in Canada as 20 April on Showcase.

TORONTO, March 15, 2011 – This spring Showcase entices viewers into the ultimate conspiracy theory with the new drama series XIII, starring Stuart Townsend (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Queen of the Damned). The all-new suspense thriller centres on XIII (Townsend), a skilled and lethal former secret agent who can’t remember his past and sets out on a quest to uncover his true identity. XIII premieres Wednesday, April 20 at 10 p.m. ET/PT exclusively on Showcase.

Somewhere between 9 July 2010 and 19 April 2011 it was decided that XIII would not actually premiere on Showcase but that they would still promote it as such. XIII actually premiered on Tuesday, 19 April 2011 at 10am ET on MysteryTV. It was then repeated at 11pm that same night before making its ‘exclusive premiere’ on Showcase the next night. The pattern of unmentioned broadcast on MysteryTV the day before each episode ‘premieres’ on Showcase has continued through the fourth episode being broadcast this morning and scheduled for repeat tonight on MysteryTV before being shown tomorrow on Showcase.

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