While this saddens Wheaton fans I kind of get it. I’m not blaming Wil. The show was unique, truly a geek-fest of news and entertainment and like I said in my earlier review of the show ‘He has allowed nerds and geeks to laugh at themselves, their quirks, genre and their fixations without being ashamed of who they are and what they love. It works because Wil is genuinely one of us….he is a card carrying nerd.’ That being said I think many of us knew, and perhaps Wil knew it too, that this show was a little too unique for the likes of the suits at Syfy who see one thing only – the numbers.
The failure for the show’s demise should not reflect on Wil or his style of showmanship. He gave us exactly what we were looking for week after week. The failure of The Wil Wheaton Project falls squarely in the lap of those self-same suits in their corporate offices in the celestial clouds over New York City. The show never got off-channel promotion via other NBC Universal outlets, wide print ad or radio play. It was put in a summer timeslot, an almost sure death sentence for any kind of show that doesn’t follow the typical Hollywood blueprint of bland and routine and,…..Alright! I admit I am a bit upset and tend to ramble when I get this kind of bad news. Instead, I will take a cue from Wil.
“I’m really okay with it,” Wil said in his Wil Wheaton.net blog. “I’m super sad that I won’t get to work with my writers and producers, and I’m sad that we don’t get to keep writing jokes, but I did everything I could to help the show succeed. I promoted it the best way I could, I worked hard to write stuff that was funny, and I tried so, so, so hard to get the network executives in New York to understand how they could help the show succeed. I can only do so much, and we didn’t get a lot of promotional support. I did everything I could, and I’m proud of the work we put on the screen. On the one hand, it’s a shame that they stopped us right when the show was hitting its stride, but on the other hand, we went out with some great episodes.”
I’m sorry Wil, but you set the bar too high. I think I will go on disliking those execs, even if for just a little while longer.
And Wil’s “talent” is exactly what ?
I’ve been reading Wil Wheaton on Twitter for as long as I can remember, appreciate many of his sensibilities/causes, and I enjoy seeing him pop up in some of my favourite geeky shows here and there. But I just couldn’t watch this show. I am a card-carrying geek myself and while I found myself grinning and maybe even chuckling here and there in what little I saw (even after it supposedly got better), it never made me really laugh and never tickled my geek bone in the kind of way something like the Big Bang Theory does. And you have to ask yourself if a few chuckles is worth the undivided attention time on a couch in front of the television. For me, it wasn’t, and I suspect that was true of many of the geeks that Wil needed to watch the show to pull the kind of numbers needed to keep it. In the end, it felt like too personal of a project and never really spoke or entertained me more than a random encounter with a YouTube video…where his more viral content ultimately ended up anyway. I really wish that Wil would look into something like Twitch.tv or a YouTube project to show case those little moments of humor (much as he provides in his random show appearances) and capitalize on his 30 second viral capacity to make us laugh, and he’d probably gain quite the following that, done right, could make a living and make us laugh at the same time. That’s where he shines.