ABC In For a Landing

Okay, it's official: "Pan Am" has been grounded.  Its last flight was earlier in the year, and subsequent flights have been canceled, despite the fact that it was expected to soar when it took off at the start of the 2011-12 television season.

Having exhausted the obvious aviation puns about an airline-related show that was actually an eagerly awaited TV show eight short months ago, I have to ask the obvious question: What went wrong? "Why did this "Mad Men" clone, set in the early 1960s, end up doing little better than NBC's early-sixties series "The Playboy Club?" Well, I partially answered the question right off the bat: It was a "Mad Men" clone.  And sometimes obvious copies are offensive to viewers who think they're being pandered to with unoriginal ideas - in this case, a period drama showing how people dealt with a world run by and for white men.  As Red Skelton once said, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery - it's plagiarism.

But another reason could simply be that "Pan Am" wasn't very substantial or interesting beneath its historical veneer.  It came across to me as the television equivalent of Billy Joel's 1983 LP An Innocent Man, which featured Joel performing original songs arranged in the style of early-sixties pop, the sort of music that  predated the British Invasion.  The complaint about An Innocent Man was that, while Joel got the sound and arrangements right, his music lacked the emotional honesty and feeling of the Four Seasons-styled songs that inspired the record.  And that's pretty much what happened with "Pan Am."  There was no heart in it.  It got the period right with its costumes and sets.  Alas, there was nothing in the storylines to keep you interested and nothing about the characters that made you care about or for them.

Also, you've seen this all before on "Mad Men," only done better.  The penultimate episode of "Pan Am" revolved around President Kennedy's assassination.  Uh, yeah, we kind of went through that on "Mad Men" already.  That was a painful enough moment in history even for those of us who didn't live through it; we lived through it once on "Mad Men," now do we have to live through it again? I imagine "Pan Am"'s second season would have worked the Beatles in, as it was a Pan Am flight that first brought them to America in 1964 (and references to their success in England in the series were obviously meant to set us up for that).  Alas, we'll instead have to relive early American Beatlemania the way we've already been doing it - watching footage of their "Ed Sullivan Show" appearances on DVD or cable television.

So what of the 2012-13 season? What's ABC going to offer up then? Well, The likable Sarah Chalke, whose CBS series "Mad Love" failed last year, appears in an ABC mid-season replacement, "How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life)," about a single mom forced to move back home with her own folks - an acknowledgement of how supply-side economics brought back multigenerational homes. Wednesday nights get turned upside down again, as "Revenge" gets moved to Sundays at 9 PM Eastern in favor of "Nashville," a country-and-western drama, in its 10 PM Eastern slot on Wednesdays.  And taking the place of "Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23" (a cop-out title) at  9:30 PM Eastern on Wednesdays is "The Neighbors," a sitcom about a couple who move in to an exclusive suburban community and discover that their neighbors are aliens from another planet: "V" meets "The Munsters." 

"Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23" moves to same time on Tuesdays, following "Happy Endings." "The Neighbors" will likely be the latest in a series of sitcoms that follow "Modern Family" for awhile, then either get rescheduled or canceled.  I'm predicting that it gets canceled.  The Boston Globe predicts that "The Neighbors" will be canceled first, before any other new show on any network.

And what will be in place of "Pan Am?" Well, the show that earlier replaced "Pan Am" in the 10 PM Eastern time slot on Sundays,  "GCB," about upper-class evangelical Texas women (the initials stood for "Good Christian Bitches" - another cop-out title), is also gone.  It is to be replaced by "666 Park Avenue," a drama featuring Vanessa Williams about the struggle between good and evil in a literally hellish New York apartment building. 

Now that I think of it, maybe "Pan Am" should have been given another chance . . .. 

The full ABC fall 2012 schedule is here.