Two days ago, I wrote about MoveOn.org's silly petition to stop staff reductions at the Los Angeles Times. In that post I posited that capitalism is awesome and customers will decide what they want in the market place. If something is "good," they'll buy. If it's "bad," they won't. It can be harsh to what a few people want, but I accept that because it works. That didn't stop me from signing this petition to save Fox's Reunion, a cheesy murder mystery with awful dialogue and wooden acting. What can I say, I'm a sucker. But I'm happily a sucker, and ESPN's BillSimmons summed it up with these reasons:

All right, this is stupid, and I don't care if you think less of me …

But the Sports Gal made me start watching "Reunion" on Fox this season, and I ended up getting hooked for five reasons:
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2. I'm a sucker for any show where the acting is so staggeringly bad, you can't even believe it's happening, and then you reach a point where you're actually rooting for the actors to pull off scenes. ...

3. I like shows where I can predict everything that's about to happen before it happens. Literally, everything. It makes me feel smart.
...

5. The murder mystery was actually pretty cool -- these six high schoolers started out as best friends in 1986, one of them was killed in the present day, and then they go back year-by-year starting in 1987 to figure out what happened (with new clues every year). Interesting concept. And just when I was totally hooked …

FOX CANCELED IT!

Umm … what????

How can you cancel a sequential murder mystery? Apparently, they were scheduled for 22 episodes, but Fox pulled the plug after 13, which means they'll be speeding up the rest of the years (we're up to 1993 right now, the Grunge Era) so we can figure out what happened. I find this unconscionable. Look, people at Fox, I didn't ask to watch your show. You kept plugging it, and you stuck it on after "The OC," and you put Amanda Righetti in the cast, and you eventually sucked us in … now you're screwing us? Sure, only 4.3 million people were watching, but still, that's 4.3 million people! At the very least, move it to FX for the remaining episodes. This is an outrage.

It is an outrage, and the damned underlying capitalist nonsense can sod off.

Okay, so I'm not willing to abandon capitalism for one television show, no matter how gloriously bad it may be. (And Reunion comes pretty close to the zenith of "gloriously bad.") But I want to see how the show ends. I want to know the whodunit. That's a reasonable expectation since Fox marketed it and I bought into that. I realize that the financial implications don't permit it to continue under the current business model for television shows.

That's the fun part of capitalism, though. This is a chance for Fox to figure out a new content delivery scheme. Take a chance. Move it to FX. Move it to On Demand. Sell advance order DVDs of the show to finance completion of the series. (With the premise, I only expected one season anyway.) Come up with something. Marketing people don't exist just to create exciting logos. Fox may not have forty million buyers for Reunion, but four million is a good test scenario. Remember that "creative" is part of "creative destruction". But don't do anything to save Reunion. God knows it doesn't really deserve saving. Do something to reward Reunion's viewers customers. Because I'll stop watching Cops if they don't.

P.S. Not really on that last threat. Please, never cancel Cops.