On the advice of a friend, I just finished watching all three season of Happy Endings. I am shocked this show got cancelled. Was it the ratings? Were they THAT bad? I am also surprised no one tried to pick it up - it would have gone great with Cougar Town on TBS.
What a shame. It seemed like it could have had three or four more good seasons left.
Sony was incredibly high on it, and tried shopping it around when it was clear ABC wasn't picking it up after this season ended. They went so far as to promote it during Jeopardy, which is something I've never seen happen.
It was an ah-MAH-zing show that couldn't get ratings to justify its cost. I hope, like you, others catch up with the show via VH1 showings if only to spread the love.
Happy Endings is why I can't watch The New Girl, it just seems like a terrible knock off.
"Tattoos are the mullets of the aughts." - Mike Naimark
"Don't stop after beating the swords into ploughshares, don't stop! Go on beating and make musical instruments out of them. Whoever wants to make war again will have to turn them into ploughshares first" - Yehuda Amichai
I read a good article recently about how ABC is quietly struggling as a network. Scandal and Modern Family are their only two legitimate hits but both shows have proven to be difficult to build a night around. This is the rare case where putting a promising show like Happy Endings next to a big hit (Modern Family) isn't a good move since the two shows are so tonally different.
I'm taking solace in the fact that at least Damon Wayans is (back) on New Girl so the spirit of Happy Endings is being kept alive. In the interim, I will always enjoy that show for teaching me that Casey Wilson and Elisha Cuthbert are both very funny actresses.
"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." --- Bart Giamatti, on baseball
Happy Endings was a typical adult friends in the city set up with atypical and at times bizarre timing and humor that got weirder and more niche as the series went on. Putting it up with Modern Family which at it's roots is a much easier to follow new wave nuclear family sitcom was a bad move. Had that show been put on the same channel and time block as say another niche, reference-heavy, non-nuclear family sitcom like Community it may have still been around today.
In the words of Hunter S.
"It was too weird to live and too rare to die."
Tell somebody about it, and I'm glad Damon Wayans Jr. made it back on New Girl. I love that show.
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