Actually, "Davinci’s Inquest’s" ratings in its first few years were the best they ever were. At one time it got over a million viewers. It steadily declined throughout its run.  So it’s not really a "Seinfeld-like" example of letting a show grow.

Also — and this is the key thing — there is a BIG difference between a show that starts low in ratings and steadily grows, and a show that starts out with a high rating and declines.

Momentum and direction are important. When the trend is in the bad direction, it’s much, much harder to resist that slide. It means you have been ACTIVELY REJECTED by a lot of the viewing public. Both Intelligence (which I loved) and J-Pod, (which I thought was flawed, but promising) never reached the highs they drew with their premiere, andworse, they kept falling.

Little Mosque, for contrast, premiered huge for all the hype, lost 50 percent of their crazy huge, curious premiere audience — but then settled.  2 million watched the premiere, but the ratings settled around 1 million.

then the show came back in the fall against tough competition and was off for the first few months, but built back up to that natural million audience.

There are times when the numbers really aren’t that hard to interpret. It may be hard for JPOD fans and MVP fans and Intelligence fans to accept — but the numbers weren’t that hard to interpret.

So it goes.

That may be true, but it’s also true that now we’re in a very different corporate culture dictating what stays and what goes than we were just a few years ago. It wasn’t so long ago that shows that were struggling in the ratings were given a fighting chance to actually *build* an audience, rather than simply dropping them. Remember how "Seinfeld" struggled its first season and was barely renewed by NBC, only to eventually find and build a massive audience?

I’m not saying that would happen with these shows, but at least these shows *do* have an established audience, and it’s something on which CBC could build. Instead, they’re reinventing the wheel yet again and could just as easily fail to miss the ratings mark *again* with new shows.

If only shows that knocked it out of the ballpark crack off the bat, ratings-wise, were renewed, then we’d never have seen a whole lotta shows that ended up being success stories. I’m thinking that "Law & Order" (ironically, another NBC series) didn’t do so well in its first few years, but the network kept giving it a chance, and also tweaked the casting a bit to give it more of a universal appeal, and now that show is in its 18th season.

I’m wondering what the ratings were for "Da Vinci’s Inquest" its first year. Of course, no matter the ratings, Haddock has said that it was a struggle every year to get that show renewed. So ratings can’t be all there is to it.

Last time I checked, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal, which is like half of the country’s population, isn’t all white and Soccer is actually the #1 sport in Canada — not hockey. But when the CBC is headed by unilingual, unicultural, ungendered rich old boys club, this is the kind of stuff you get.

To read this thread, you’d think CBC had canceled shows that were drawing huge audiences.  But to a one, the shows that were renewed were getting two to three times the audience of the three canceled shows.

In order to "give a show a chance to grow" you need to actually see evidence that that’s, you know, gonna happen.

The complaints here are out of step with not just TV viewing, but CBC tv viewing.  I had to laugh at the critique of Coronation Street. Believe me, friend, your critique of that show is way off base. There isn’t a TV writer or producer in the country who wouldn’t give their eyeteeth for the loyal, consistent numbers Corrie Street gets "after the news."

For all the demands for greater eclecticism, there is a pure and incontrovertible fact: CBC is a publicy funded trust.

Would that MVP and JPOD and Intelligence had found their audiences, all would be well. But they didn’t.  CBC is not a charity. Sometimes serving your audience means crafting shows they want to watch — and accepting when you’ve missed the mark.

In a sense, if you’re complaining here, you’re not even really mad at the CBC. You’re really mad at the audience who watches the CBC.

Because they didn’t want to watch what you wanted to watch.

Oh, and JPOD fans, maybe more of you should have laid off the torrents, and watched the show off air.

Just sayin.

jpod was a brilliant book and while the TV show needed some getting used to, it was still a damn good show. 

CBC also offered full episodes on their website, did they ever try and guage how many were watching it online?  After all, if you missed it Friday Night because you were out, that’s where you’d catch it.

jPod was all Canadian, brilliantly written, well acted, and had an equally impressive production value.  Having Douglas Coupland involved was genious.  Translating a book to television can be a very rough ride, and he pulled it off famously.

"Podsters" are furious with the CBC, as evident from the http://www.savejpod.ca website,  petitions, and facebook groups all trying to appeal to the powers that be at CBC.  Some stories have surfaced  about the lack of ad revenue sure to be lost from Canadian NHL teams not making the play-offs being the culprit fot the cruel cut.  But in my opinion, the blame lays squarely on the shoulders of the CBC.  They changed the timeslot, they did not promote it like Sophie, (which by the way, I’d rather gouge my own eyes out than watch, and I am probably what they would call their perfect target, a 30 something Stay at Home Mom) and they could have had Alan Thicke, who is stellar in this role, all over the Canadian Television Promotional Circuit.  They also missed out on countless sponsorship opportunities, Dell being the most obvious one as their computers are featured prominantly in the show.

Vancouver may have been plastered with jPod posters, but here in TO I saw nary a one.  In fact, the only reason any of my friends knew about jPod was because I told them about it, as a fan of Mr. Coupland.

It’s not like the CBC has younger Canadians lining up in droves to watch their programming, you would think they would give jPod a little more than a month and a half to find it’s feet.  Especially at a time when many people had somewhat abandoned their TV’s during the Writer’s Strike.

Contrary to popular belief, not all Canadians are    American television watching sheep grazing on "Reality" driven tripe sure to knock ones IQ down a few notches.  I was so impressed with the CBC for finally giving those of us not from the Tommy Hunter era a wonderful reason to tune back in again.  Other than Coach’s Corner and RMR, I haven’t watched one show on the CBC since the original Kids of Degrassi Street aired.   Not even Little Mosque on the Prairie was enough to entice me, as I find all that show does is make Canadians look like fumbling clueless dolts.

I know in the grand scheme of things waxing on about a cancelled television show may seem trivial, but my time is valuable and I must choose  how I spend it wisely.   Jpod is worthy, and every week I look forward to that 1 hour of wildly entertaining television.

Which begs the question, if jPod is not good enough for the CBC, and they can’t bring in younger viewers, then where do they think they will find themselves in a few years to come when most of their older demographic has passed on to greener pastures?   Sophie is no Don Cherry, and the "Google Generation" may very well hurt from the sting of cancellations so much that the CBC will not draw ratings, but contempt.  It’s a brave new Tech-driven world, and cancelling jPod may go down as one of the worst decisions in the history of Canadian Television.

If I missed it I always caught it on-line….for me the timeslot was too late on Tuesdays…..Besides HNIC, MVP was the only CBC show I watched. I will be sad to see it go without a series finale.

Truthfully I never watched jPOD…no interest for me there.

You can keep The Border – it is truly dumb shlock.  For my money jPod was unfunny and unbelievable and MVP was unwatchable because I just didn’t care about the premise or the characters.

Intelligence was gritty and realistic without the plastic cutout characters TV is famous for and the storylines were germane to what is really happening in our world.

I hope CBC reconsiders this.