It was fun while it lasted, but today Wil Wheaton reported to the internet that his eponymous show has been cancelled by Syfy. Relating the call he received from a channel executive, Wil wrote:
He assured me that it wasn’t the quality of the show. He told me again and again how much he loved it, how funny he thought it was, how much he liked me, how much he wanted to find other things to do together.
Ultimately, he told me, the executives in New York just didn’t think we had enough viewers to justify more episodes. I didn’t say anything about the total lack of promotion off the network, or point out that our ratings were on par with The Soup, or that ratings are always lower in summer than the fall. I didn’t bother saying any of that, because I know he knows that. I was reasonably confident that he made those arguments with New York when he was trying to get the show renewed. I presume he fought hard for us, but ultimately couldn’t sway executives in New York who never seemed — in my opinion — to really understand what kind of show we were doing, who I was and why I was hosting it, and how to engage with and promote to the audience who would like it.
Go ahead and read the rest of his blog post, because he does a great job explaning how he’s dealing with the news, and that he’s okay with it. He knows the show was good, we know the show was good, and we can all be happy we got the chance to enjoy it. Plus, we know that Tabletop Season 3 is coming, so there’s plenty of Wil-infused goodness to come.
Considering it was on the SyFy channel, it probably exceeded their quality standards and they just couldn’t have that.
oh man, i was excited to have something good at last at SyFy……. but tabletop will be more than enough at least for me
“Sifee” abandoned their geek audience long ago, when they elected to move away from their core and leave the “SciFi” behind for the ‘hipper, cooler SyFy’ brand. The malevolent contempt and withering disdain I hold for that network and their executives knows no limits. Wil should take his project to CBS(Big Bang Theory), CW(Arrow), or even HBO(Game of Thrones). At least they recognize the financial muscle of legions of nerds.
I love Wil Wheaton, and am an avid viewer of Tabletop. But the Wil Wheaton Project was bad. The writing was very sub-par(even by SyFy standards) and Wil is just not cut out to be a host of a show in that format…it just doesn’t seem to be in his skillset. Maybe given time he could have eased into his role more, but on TV you don’t generally get that time.