It’s become a widely accepted fact in the traditional TV market that niche, cultish comedies will flounder in the ratings, only to subsist on the strength of its cult audience. We’ve seen it with Community, with Chuck, and most notably we’ve seen the power of a cult audience help to ressurrect a show with the new season of Arrested Development soon to come.
Well, there’s a new show to add to the list that’s going to need some help. I wrote about Happy Endings‘s pilot episode way back when it premiered. At the start, Happy Endings seemed like another low-key Friends-clone about a bunch of young, good looking people working through relationships. While it took the show some time to find its legs (as almost every comedy does, except maybe the aforementioned Arrested Development), Happy Endings has grown into the funniest comedy on network TV.
Relying on a stable of pop-culture humor and daringly high-concept gags, Happy Endings turns in a higher laughs-per-minute rate than any other show on the broadcast networks. With a rapid-fire pace and performances that skew to the fun side of the over-the-top scale, it’s almost impossible to get five minutes through an episode without a big laugh. Parks and Rec may get all the critical love, but when it comes to laughs, no one can touch the Happy Endings gang. The show has even managed to develop characters like Dave and Alex, who seemed like liabilities at the show’s start, into funny and interesting characters.
This makes ABC’s treatment of the show that much more troubling. This past week, ABC decided to move the show to a Friday night timeslot, a sign of death for most shows (though Fringe made it work for a couple of seasons). This comes after a bunch of strange scheduling moves, one of which had the show airing two episodes per week, another sign of the network wanting to burn off episodes before a cancellation.
Like any of the other cult comedies with rabid fanbases mentioned above, Happy Endings‘ survival will ultimately rely on how loud fans of the show are. As long as traditional TV distribution models remain, niche comedies will continue to get this treatment from networks. Arrested Development‘s return will go a long way towards seeing what the future of cult comedy looks like–whether it will be easier for shows like Happy Endings to survive, or whether they will continue to circle the drain.
