[This is the first of two pieces on this year’s Upfronts from Antenna – on Friday, Jonathan Gray will consider the newly ordered shows from the five networks, while today I focus on the renewals and cancellations.]

Our friends over at In Media Res are in the midst of a week on “Save our Show” campaigns, and Upfronts week is where many of those campaigns originate. This is the week when the bubble is supposed to burst, and fans are supposed to come out of the woodwork to defend their favorite shows on message boards and social media sites. This is the season when peanuts saved Jericho and Subway saved Chuck, after all, and I’ve been watching my Twitter feed with baited breath to see which show would be this year’s equivalent.

The equivalent never came. FOX decided to give Fringe a shortened final season despite its ratings struggles. NBC, perhaps out of fear over what fans would do if they canceled Community, chose to renew the low-rated sitcom. CBS renewed critical darling The Good Wife over a month ago. ABC showed no interest in threatening sophomore success story Happy Endings, and TBS swooped in to save Cougar Town before the network could cancel it. The CW avoided angering the Chair Factory and allowed Gossip Girl another season despite a precipitous ratings drop. Accordingly, 2012 lacks that one big cancellation that has everyone talking.

This isn’t to say that there were no cancellations, but none of those cancellations made any real impact for a variety of reasons. Breaking In was already canceled last year before being saved by a last minute deal between FOX and Sony Pictures Television. NBC’s Awake long outlasted Kyle Killen’s infamous Lone Star, making it enough of a success to satisfy devotees. In the case of NBC’s Bent and Best Friends Forever, meanwhile, the problem lies in how the network treated the shows: it would be entirely plausible for some people to have never even known that Bent existed with its bizarre three-week burnoff, while Best Friends Forever was quickly pulled off the schedule (albeit after more promotion from the network than Bent received). It’s hard to create a “Save our Show” campaign for shows that never had time to build an audience—Best Friends Forever fans are trying, but it’s nearly impossible to get any traction after such a short run. Given that NBC barely seemed to want the show in the first place, getting them to order new episodes will be an uphill battle.

However, given that we can count the number of successful “Save our Show” campaigns on one hand, it seems strange to think about these campaigns in terms of success rate, even if that is our impulse. Instead, I propose we think of them in terms of visibility. On the one hand, these campaigns are—at their most basic level—about gaining visibility in an effort to save a particular show. However, at the same time, they offer visibility—or the potential for visibility—to audiences who feel their viewership has been marginalized, the cancellation signaling a lack of respect for their agency. Efforts to save The Game upon its cancellation by The CW (as Erin Copple Smith outlined in this post about the show’s resurrection on BET in 2010) told us something about fandom more generally, but it also said something about African American audiences who were being pushed out of the network’s target demographic by way of systematic cancellation.

In other words, we should turn our attention to why we’re not talking about a big cancellation in a year where a number of highly-rated shows got canceled. CBS’ Unforgettable was drawing over ten million viewers a week, while NBC’s Harry’s Law drew more viewers than any other fictional series in NBC’s lineup. However, neither show performed well in the 18-49 demographic (hence their cancellation), and both are in genres (the crime and legal procedurals, respectively) that are consistently delegitimated within the online spaces where such fan campaigns are commonly spread. Does this mean that no one is out there fighting to save these shows? No – in fact, Harry’s Law fans have started a Facebook page that actively deconstructs this delegitimation within NBC’s scheduling practices. However, “Save our Show” campaigns are unable to operate outside of the cultural hierarchies that devalued these particular programs to begin with, meaning that the viewers who might want to save the show are unlikely to be visible in the spaces—Twitter, the mainstream press—where shows are generally saved even if they are actively engaging in such campaigns.

And even in cases where “Save our Show” campaigns do become visible, like with Jericho, they become visible as the actions of cult audiences rather than the actions of audiences covering a wide range of age groups. In my interaction with Jericho fans back in 2007, I discovered a surprising number of baby boomers active in fan communities, and yet when we talk about “Jericho fans” in the context of our histories of active audiences I doubt students are picturing 55-year-old women mailing peanuts to CBS.

While older viewers may be a more explicitly marginalized and delegitimated group within industry and online discourses, we could follow Elana Levine and Michael Newman’s lead and consider how the masculine nature of discourses of quality inhibits the ability for other campaigns—for shows like The CW’s The Secret Circle , NBC’s The Sing-Off or ABC’s GCB—to spread as widely as those for shows aimed towards younger male audiences.

While all the visibility in the world might not convince NBC to renew Harry’s Law, what visibility these “Save our Show” campaigns achieve could shed further light on marginalized groups and the industrial hierarchies that placed them in this position; the networks might not be listening, but this is the time of year when their voices can at least be heard.

Hart of Dixie (Premiered 9/27/11)

Sharon Ross, Columbia College

Hart of Dixie is not really anything special or original, but I have to say it has its charms and offers a compelling antidote to the more typical images of young adult women that we see on mainstream TV (I’m looking at you, Snooki). If you’ve seen the promos, you know that Zoe Hart is a whiz surgeon but needs help with the basics of practicing medicine—and “lucky” for her, her biological dad (surprise!) from Blue Bell Alabama dies and leaves her half his medical practice. So, mixing in Northern Exposure, Gilmore Girls, Sweet Home Alabama and Something to Talk About we have a fish-out-water in the South, with all its quirks and misunderstood traditions. And Zoe needs to decide: will she stay or will she go?

Well, of course she stays—with the help of the mystery dad, 2 hunky guys, and an emergency baby birth that proves her value to the town. As I said—not much original here. But the cast is killer and the characters show great potential (especially for a pilot, they are nicely drawn out). Rachel Bilson holds her own (after you get over the initial shock of Summer Roberts being a surgeon); in fact, the characters made me wistful for the early days of The OC, when silly stock characters came together and created some magical fun, helped by excellent older characters and actors. Here we have Tim Matheson, Nancy Travis (soon to be Elsa Davis of The Wire), and JoBeth Williams; the young adults offer Jamie King, Cress Williams, and Scott Porter (nice to see Friday Night Lights alum continuing on past guest-ing roles in other series). I also enjoyed the trademark Josh Schwartz/Stephanie Savage snarky humor popping up—even if it entailed at times clichés like alligators in the road, rocker neighbors you kiss when drunk, or Southern belles oozing sugar and venom. Is it worth watching? If you have some time and want something sweet and well acted, make an appointment!

Alyx Vesey, University of Wisconsin – Madison

I’m excited for Rachel Bilson’s small screen return. I enjoyed her brief appearances on Chuck and How I Met Your Mother. I follow her InStyle column, even though I know stylist Nicole Chavez deserves most of the credit. And she’ll always be Summer Roberts to me. So I was particularly interested in Hart of Dixie reuniting Bilson with executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who made television magic together (for one season) on The O.C. The show also gives Gossip Girl producer Leila Gerstein the opportunity to run a series.

But I’m not sold on this fish-out-of water medical dramedy. Bilson’s Zoe Hart is destined to take after her distant father and become a cardio-thoracic surgeon before she gets dumped by her boyfriend and her supervisor does not recommend her for a post, believing she has the hands but not the (wait for it . . .) heart for medicine. A strange old man named Harley Wilkes has hounded Hart to join his practice in Bluebell, Alabama since she graduated medical school. Hart visits Wilkes’ practice, only to discover that he died but instructed his assistant to keep sending postcards in anticipation of her arrival. Because, you see, he’s her real father.

Just as this show has dad issues, it does not like mothers. Hart is distant with her mom, who does not want her to be a doctor. Thus, she empathizes with a female patient whose mother is similarly dismissive. Hart also establishes a romantic adversary in high-born Lemon Vreeland (Jaime King), who is engaged to George Tucker (Scott Porter). There might be a potential intergenerational friendship between Hart and precocious Annabeth (Kaitlynn Black), who bond over Sex and the City. The cast is promising, particularly Porter and Cress Williams. But the show lacks originality, and will have to do more than cast Meredith Grey as Doc Hollywood to get me to watch.

The Secret Circle (Premiered 9/15/11)

Sharon Ross, Columbia College

You know you’re watching a WB show when…Ooops!—I mean CW…

But Secret Circle did feel oh so very 1990s and ergo WB-ish: The Craft meets Dawsons meets The OC meets Twilight (thus the modern twist). If they can lose the Twilight angst and embrace the camp or comedy values of these other texts, they might pull off a fun adventure for us as viewers. There are some good ingredients: dead adult witches—with the remaining live ones apparently up to no good as their children discover their own latent witch powers; secrets galore, involving forbidden sex/romance and magic; a teen hangout by a carnival pier; a blend of adults and teens; hottie casting; decent soundtrack. But then there are the bad ingredients: a sorry slow pilot, with the “big reveals” visible a mile away (you don’t have to be clever to watch so far); central casting that led to my husband and I imbd-ing everyone to see where we knew them from (thus, you don’t have to be paying full attention so far); and stock characters that led to me remembering everyone as Nice Witch, Slutty Witch, Punk Boy Witch, Sexy Chippendale Witch, Reluctant Heart of Gold Orphan Witch…and perhaps most grievously: Vaguely Multiracial Witch—who gets next to no dialogue and no character background comparatively.

Still, given my love of The Craft, the appeal of Australian Mermaid Show Girl (H2O) aka Slutty Witch, and a decent cast overall, I’ll tune in for a few more episodes. Vampire Diaries started out similarly weak and found its footing, so it’s worth at least the old college try if you’re into the supernatural and the wonders it can offer for metaphorizing the teen experience.

Kyra Hunting, University of Wisconsin, Madison

It would not be a The Secret Circle review unless it described The Secret Circle as Dawson’s Creek meets Eastwick meets Pretty Little Liars, etc. with a healthy dose of The Vampire Diaries and just in case you were liable to forget it the CW is happy to remind you with a Bing commercial featuring Kevin Williamson researching The Secret Circle.  As a result the series feels more than a little familiar, with many of the “twists” revealed in the first fifteen minutes of the show and many of the other mysteries certainly not requiring a connection to the other world to figure out. However the familiarity of the program is not always a bad thing and the show has something of a comfortable nostalgia to it. The trope of adolescent power had proven interesting in the past, much of the cast is charming (if largely stolen from failed CW shows and obscure Scream sequels), and the show has a strong combination of teen angst and drama and supernatural mystery that can be built on in future episodes. While the pacing of the show felt a bit off at times, too much was given away too quickly, and the writing varied from slightly clever to pretty trite; the show’s cozy small town feel, potentially intriguing familial mysteries, and extensive cast (not to mention my residual love of Gale Harold from years of Queer as Folk) were more than interesting enough to make we want to return next week and it received the highest praise a CW show can receive from my vaguely television adverse husband “okay, sure, I’d watch it again.” While not exactly a grand slam, I’m sure many will agree with him.

H8R (Premiered 9/14/11)

C. Lee Harrington, Miami University

H8R cracks me up.  Based on the premise of celebrities meeting and trying to win over people who hate them, the premiere featured Snooki – who successfully transformed her hater into an accepter – and Jake Pavelka, who failed profoundly. Hosted by Mario Lopez, who himself could be a reasonable show participant, H8R explicitly claims an anti-bullying tone, with Lopez stating the goal of the show is to “hold haters accountable.”  Cameras catch the hater in the midst of a rant, unaware that the celebrity is witnessing the behavior and is about to surprise them in-person and sans wary publicist guiding their response. In some ways the show reminds me of the compelling values clash that signaled early seasons of “Wife Swap,” but here instead of social class being the barrier, celebrity culture stands in the way. The potential to really explore core issue – what people think they know about celebrities from reading the tabloids and the open vitriol with which people express their distastes – is unfortunately subverted by cheesy tabloid graphics and a Jerry Springer-ish confrontational set-up that’s unnecessary, in my opinion. I’m curious to see what celebrities have signed up for this – presumably not A-listers and hopefully not all reality stars – so I will probably stick with it, at least for a while. I have reservations about whether the show can develop at all – the problem with “The Marriage Ref” after a couple of amusing episodes – but the premise is fab.

Amber Watts, Texas Christian University

It’s surprising that we haven’t encountered this premise before: Mario Lopez forces a celebrity to hang out with someone who hates him or her.  In theory, the hope is that the hater can learn and grow, and viewers can learn how to “combat bullying” or something that sounds just as earnest but rings completely false. In reality, the show trades on our desire to watch someone call Snooki worthless, or Bachelor Jake Pavelka “a douche,” while Mario Lopez laughs at him. As a schadenfreude-aficionado, I loved the first episode, although I fully understand why most people would not.  The Jake-hater in particular, a punchy 20-year-old named Daniele, was hilarious.  Unlike the Snooki-hater, who seemed to reluctantly cave in by the end of the episode, Daniele remained unimpressed with Pavelka, even after he gave her a mini-Bachelor experience that ended at the actual Bachelor mansion.  Her response was, “It’s a house. I’ve seen it before.  I don’t need to be in front of it to know it’s real.  Like, where’s the rest of his life?”  Why I found it fascinating: Neither Snooki or Jake seemed surprised that they had haters, but both countered the hate with the same argument: “You don’t know me.”  Snooki, in particular, seemed convinced that the only possible reason someone could dislike her is if they don’t know her well.  Neither seemed to understand that their haters mostly hated what they represented. The Snooki-hater’s large Italian family was leery of how Jersey Shore depicted Italian-Americans, and having dinner with Ms. Pollizi wasn’t going to change that.  So as a purely academic exercise in gauging how celebrities read (or misread) their own status and understand how their fame works, H8r is worth watching.  Also, I’m really looking forward to the woman yelling at Joe Francis in a few weeks, because he deserves it.

Ringer (Premiered 9/13/11)

Amanda Ann Klein, East Carolina University

The first few minutes of the pilot episode of Ringer finds Sarah Michelle Gellar being strangled on the floor of a darkened New York City loft. As I watched her struggle, I became frustrated. “Just kick his ass, Buffy!” I yelled at my TV. Then my husband reminded me, “That’s not Buffy.” Right. This is Bridget, a recovering addict/prostitute who escapes the witness protection program by pretending to be her own estranged twin sister, Siobhan. Bridget is able to take over her twin’s identity because Siobhan killed herself in front of green screen (errr, I mean, in a big ocean) and because becoming Siobhan is as easy as pulling her hair into a chic bun. Much of this episode was disappointing: the dialogue was often clunky in its attempts to provide exposition; the background music made me feel like I watching the Lillith Fair, not an urban thriller (a saccharine cover of “25 or 6 to 4”? Really?); and I do wish the show had waited a few more episodes before revealing the identity of the mysterious Sean. But the pilot was not all terrible green screens and rich people clichés. The scenes in which Bridget tentatively navigates her relationship with Andrew, Siobhan’s husband of five years, were both nerve-wracking and enlightening; every wrong turn Bridget makes with Andrew tells us a little bit more about Siobhan and her quirks. For example when Bridget kisses Andrew upon his return from a two-week trip, he responds with surprise, “Aren’t you friendly?” (Aha! Siobhan was having an affair!) Likewise, every time Bridget encounters someone new she doesn’t know if he¹s there to kill her, have sex with her, or arrest her. Watching Sarah Michelle Gellar wear couture and tremble is not as fun as watching her stake vampires, but Ringer is definitely worth a second look.

Eleanor Seitz, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Darkness pervades the CW’s neo-noir thriller Ringer. In typical noir fashion,  mystery, intrigue and a femme fatale drive the narrative of this show. The unique premise of the show is appealing, and abounds with opportunities for engaging complex story lines. Recovering addict Bridget seeks redemption and respite from her past and reaches out to her twin Siobhan, who she hasn’t seen in six years, and then ends up assuming Siobhan’s identity after she kills herself (or does she?) But this enticing plot is perhaps overshadowed by Sarah Michelle Gellar’s first return to television since her departure in 2003.  Gellar plays the role of producer, as well as twins Bridget and Siobhan, and there are a lot of over the shoulder shots when the twins interact with each other, which kind of gave me whiplash. Luckily one of them dies (or does she?) and then we can commence with arty mirror shots that don’t overwhelm the viewer. The best I can describe this is to  compare it as some sort of hybrid between The Parent Trap, Laura, and Gossip Girl.  Ringer’s execution of this script is compelling and almost beautiful, with its dark narrative and luscious cinematic production, minus the sailing scene, which is evidently filmed on a fake lake backdrop like the one at Universal Studios.  Bridget’s own naïveté and ignorance of Siobhan’s glamorous (yet devious) life almost functions as an audience surrogate, and as she encounters each new reveal and threat, so do we. I like it, and I hope that it doesn’t get axed. The real question seems to be whether Sarah Michelle Gellar’s star still shines on the small screen enough to draw in a large enough audience in the CW’s demographic.