UCB Difference

connorratliff:

Best Friends Forever could get a Second Season!

Thanks to fans’ and critics’ outcry, NBC has decided to air the final two episodes of Season One on June 1st. This is a great opportunity, as it gives us all a few weeks to build word-of-mouth.

The first four episodes are all available online, at NBC’s website and on hulu. This means you can get friends and family to check out the show between now and then, and hopefully grow the audience so that the June 1st episodes demonstrate some improvement in the ratings.

Meanwhile, former NBC president Warren Littlefield has a new book out, Top Of The Rock: The Rise & Fall of Must-See TV, which is filled with helpful reminders that NBC has done very well in the past when it gave good shows a chance to find their audience.

Some key quotes:

WARREN LITTLEFIELD: “I called Dick Wolf and asked him to come see me. It was just the two of us in my office. I told him I was sorry but I was canceling his show at the end of the season.”

[He’s talking about a little show called Law & Order. Turns out they changed their minds and decided to give it a 2nd Season.]

LITTLEFIELD: “At the end of its first season, Cheers was the least watched show on prime-time network television. The chances looked good the show wouldn’t have a second season, much less an eleventh.”

Also, veteran sitcom director JIM BURROWS (Friends, Cheers, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, etc.) weighs in regarding the precarious state of Cheers at the beginning:

BURROWS: “Nobody was watching the show when it first went on. There was no reason for the public to watch the show. No star in it. And nobody was watching NBC generally.”

In an interview promoting the book, Littlefield talks about the show Friends, and why it was such a big success on NBC:

LITTLEFIELD: “Their experiences were actually very universal. Friends played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.”

Do you see shows on TV now that compare to that?

LITTLEFIELD: “I think the single-camera equivalent today of the Must See lineup is Modern Family. If you were looking for your tentpole show—NBC doesn’t have a tentpole show right now—if you could magically pick one and say, “If I could take anything from any network and it could be the cornerstone of Must See TV on Thursday…,” today it would be Modern Family. They have 20 million people watching a week, and what you feel with those characters is a lot closer to what we were presenting back then. That’s not taking anything away from NBC’s comedies. They’re just not as mainstream.”

While Littlefield doesn’t mention BFF by name, it’s not difficult to infer that it’s exactly the kind of show he’s talking about here. Hopefully, the people currently making decisions at NBC will bear some of these things in mind before making a final decision…

In the meantime, keep tweeting about the show— @NBCBFF, @NBC, #saveBFF, #saveNBCBFF, etc…

Sign the petition. Get your friends to sign it!

“Like” the show on Facebook.

Buy the season pass on iTunes, if you haven’t already.

Watch the show on hulu or nbc.com and send that link around!

#saveBFF