Nieslen Torpedos Another Program

So it appears that the powers at be over at CBS have decided to cancel the show "Joan of Arcadia." Personally I am shocked by this announcement as I thought it was a really well written and executed show. The actors and plots were believable and it gave just the right amount of God factor that it didn't tick off too many people on either side of the fence. It was a good show and in my opinion much better than "Touched by an Angel" which should have been a short run TV mini-series and not a long standing staple of weekly television. Ugh, the mere memories of that show make me ill.

Anyway, evidently "Joan of Arcadia" was not getting adequate ratings. ARGH! I swear that I am going to beat this horse until it is decayed and not just dead. The Nielsen Rating system is flawed, inaccurate and at best it is an incompetently lazy way to gather horrible ratings information. Now with that said, Nielsen may have been a decent sampling of data in days gone by but there are definitely better and more accurate ways of gathering ratings information today. In the opinion of this writer the major cable, satellite and DVR (Tivo and such) companies need to get off their collective butts and start assisting their customers by tracking watched programs through their boxes and DVR’s. After the data is collected it should then be released for the purpose of research analysis. The data could also be sold in order to create a new cost center for the cable companies. A little extra cash in the corporate pockets never hurts the earnings numbers now do they? :)

In my opinion we are loosing too much quality television these days in favor of mindless reality clone programming. Certain programming seems to almost hypnotizes the Nielsen participants which skews the results of the nations prefered television programming.