Sue Thomas: FBI/Eye

It seems like that the folks over at PAX are about to make a big-time mistake by canceling their only original show with mass potential, Sue Thomas, FBI/Eye. Because of some fundamental marketing mistakes, the show has attracted audience more slowly than it might have; but a far worse mistake would be to torpedo a show which, with a little patience, could out-audience Murder, She Wrote.

So here's what went wrong, and what should happen--from the perspective of an observer with no ties whatsoever to PAX nor to this show.

(1) FIRST LAW OF NAMING A SHOW: AVOID GIMMICKY PUNCTUATION IN SHOW TITLES. All these do is make the title irritating to read, difficult to remember, and cumbersome to type. What reviewer wants to spend 20 minutes trying to figure out how to properly reproduce the title's crossed-out word & handwritten addendum, in Microsoft Word? Adding a self-consciously artificial gimmick to the title of a high quality show--and this is--makes as much sense as welding a few extra parts onto the engine of a Porsche: it does nothing to make the show better, and is apt to gum things up.

(2) More importantly, the cutesy subtitle is just doesn't fit this intelligent, sophisticated mystery show. It suggests the mysteries will be childish & simplistic, when they're actually well wrought & complex.

(3) Don't throw away an original show with a small but loyal audience, merely because it's not (yet) a blockbuster hit. A good show will build audience loyalty over time, even with only minimal marketing. Big-network television executives lack patience and are unable to tolerate delayed gratification--hence this strategy; and hence patience and slow but steady growth, the building of a loyal audience over multiple seasons, is precisely the programming strategy to counter the usual thinking.

Consider the huge mistake the Science Fiction Network made, with Mystery Science Theatre 3000. This show was cheap to produce, and came with a fiercely loyal cult audience with good age/income demographics. The obvious thing to do would be to build audience through more savvy marketing of the show itself as well as the development of some MST3K goods. Only a Hollywood executive who exploits short-term relationships in life and in art would think it makes sense to toss out the Sure Thing in favor of something more flashy, more chancy, more expensive, and (no surprise here) ultimately less successful. And that's just what they did.

(4) Market what makes the show DIFFERENT from others in the genre. Sue Thomas should be marketed as "mysteries without gore", or "mysteries the whole family can watch" or "mysteries for people who aren’t coroners ." Americans across the religious and political spectrum are revolted by the gory Fantastic Voyage footage lazy writers substitute for plot or character development. There's an enormous audience for "cozies" like this. Many people are revolted by CSI, for example, which has quickly degenerated from an interesting set of small mysteries with some gore, into 6 parts gore-'n-maggots to every 1-part puzzle element. (CSI’s desperate agglomeration of soap opera elements, so much that they overshadow the mystery, suggests they know they're losing audience but can't figure out why. It's because it's supposed to be a MYSTERY show, people, not the Home Version of How to do an Autopsy, in 25 Easy Steps.)

The message should, then, be: If you'd rather solve a puzzle than watch a bullet in micro-close-up careen through the aorta of a 6-year-old, Sue Thomas is the show you're looking for.

(5) The Sue Thomas folks have marketing opportunities they've not begun to fully exploit (they've not yet had time to do so). Here's an obvious one: consider what could be done with an "education component" targeted at K-12 public schools? Sue Thomas Sign Language Coloring Books, children's books, lunchboxes with sign language around them, scholarships for deaf students interested in police/FBI work-- Partner with a (c) 3 focused on deaf issues; set up deaf theatre, deaf poetry. Have a conference on the show/the depiction of the deaf in television at Gallaudet.

(6) If the folks at PAX are dumb enough to get rid of Sue Thomas, I hope the folks at EWTN are smart enough to buy this gem, to market it in fresh, energetic ways, and to have the patience to watch its audience build incrementally over several seasons.