We watch... so you don't have to.
Goodbye Boomtown
I've had to say goodbye to many shows since I started writing for TeeVee but none left my heart as heavy as waving wistfully from the dock at Boomtown as it was towed out to sea by NBC and summarily scuttled.
To make things even worse, NBC threw the last four episodes on in just two days in the wasteland between Christmas and New Years Eve -- you know, when no one in their right mind is showing anything at all they expect anyone to watch. Luckily, I never delete Season Passes from my DirecTiVo, so I was pleasantly and painfully surprised to find four hours of Boomtown waiting for me to watch them.
Pleasantly surprised because I figured the show was long gone -- NBC even took the show's Web pages down -- and painfully surprised because there's something awful about watching a show you love knowing it's for the last time. You know it's not worth getting involved with the characters any more, and yet you're drawn in anyway. Altogether difficult.
I'm not sure why NBC ran the shows, either, unless they had a massive gap to fill in their schedule -- what's the matter, repeats of reality shows don't fly? -- or, and this is the most likely possibility, they're just spiteful. NBC wants to rub Boomtown's fans' noses in the show's cancellation and they want to make sure the inevitable DVD can't be marketed with "never-before-seen episodes," that's my guess. There's also the fun in seeing fans get their hopes up: Maybe if enough people watch the last shows, they think, NBC will bring the show back! Uh huh. And maybe if the test patterns NBC's been running in Boomtown's time slot got worse ratings than the show did, it wouldn't have been cancelled in the first place.
So that's that for Boomtown. Although I'll readily admit that three or four years from now I'll be re-reading old articles on this site and wonder why I was getting so worked up since the show did not, in fact, leave a hole in my life. But as a reminder, I'm going to keep an MP3 of the show's brilliant theme song, composed by Philip Giffin, which you can find on his site or over here in higher quality.
