Why, Fox, why?

So Fox apparently has cancelled what was probably the funniest show on television,"Arrested Development." Fox canned the show because it wasn't getting good ratings--and as much as I love the show, that is certainly true. And considering Fox gave the show more than two full seasons to find an audience, I can't say they didn't give it a chance.

Fox yanked "Arrested" off the air--and the appealing "Kitchen Confidential"--because the poor ratings of those shows were apparently damaging its new buzz-worthy sort-of-hit "Prison Break." But I haven't seen anyone else report this: That the program Fox replaced "Arrested" and "Kitchen" with, a rerun of the previous week's "Prison Break," hardly did any better than an one-hour version of "Arrested" did last week. That's right, "Arrested" got a 2.0 rating among 18-49 year olds (the only rating that really counts for Fox) and "Prison Break" this past Monday garnered a 2.3 in that cohort. That's three-tenths of a ratings point--maybe 100,000 homes in the whole country, if that much. Yes, that "Prison Break" episode was a rerun, while "Arrested" was new, but still...it's not like they haven't paid to film that "Arrested" episode.

Although Fox seems to have indicated that it will show the remaining 8 episodes of Arrested, because it's Fox, I'm not counting on that. They could just put on reruns of "That 70s Show" for no reason. They're Fox. They do stuff like that. As for "Kitchen's" final ten episodes, we have as much chance of seeing all of those as we do of seeing Corey Clark as a guest judge on "American Idol." And yet, their ratings still weren't really all that different from their replacement. But being a TV executive means never having to say you're wrong, I guess.