Tuesday, June 29, 2010

NBC’s 'Day One' could be so bad it’s great

With the television networks now airing summer reruns and reality TV filler, I’m already looking ahead to the fall TV season.
The CW’s “Nikita,” a remake of the French action film “La Femme Nikita” (1990), and the CBS reboot of “Hawaii Five-O” look interesting.
But last year I was interested in seeing an NBC show called “Day One.” It has yet to air and may never air, according to EW and Movieline.
Movieline called “Day One” the “expensive series so bad even NBC wouldn’t air it.” After all, this is the same low-rated network that basically abandoned primetime TV last fall by airing “The Jay Leno Show” five nights a week at 10 p.m. ET.
NBC first announced a midseason premiere for “Day One,” an apocalyptic adventure show, and a 13-episode season. Later they slashed the order to four episodes to air as a mini-series. Then they trimmed it to a two-hour TV movie. Then NBC just scrapped the show entirely.
“Day One” must have been astoundingly bad for NBC to cancel the show after filming the two-hour pilot. The trailer for the show looked like “Melrose Place” meets “War of the Worlds.” It probably had a lot of sappy melodrama, angst-ridden characters and idiotic science fiction. Also, it likely was “crap-tacular.”
“Day One” could have been so bad it’s great. (i.e. unintentionally hilarious.) I’d love to see it. Chances are that NBC will find a way to burn it off as a direct-to-DVD movie for Redbox and Blockbuster or air it on the SyFy channel or something.
I started following the blog and Twitter account of “Day One” creator Jesse Alexander, who also worked on “Heroes,” hoping he would shed some light on the fate of “Day One.” But he’s been completely mum on the topic.
Maybe he’s embarrassed about the whole thing too.

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