I do think Lifetime needs to get back into the real drama business. The shows aside from Drop Dead Diva and Army Wives has not been very stellar or interesting of late. (Army Wives even at times veers into the way too mushy territory)
They’ve ordered three pilots all with a police theme (a fourth possible show is an Army Wives spin-off also with a police focus)
The shows include: (Descriptions from Variety)
Against the Wall created by Annie Brunner (“Huff”). Show “is about a policewoman who joins the Chicago Police Dept.’s internal affairs division — causing a rift with her cop brothers.”
Exit 19 created by Jeffrey Bell (“V”) and exec producers Nina Wass and Gene Stein. Show “centers on a single mother who juggles parenthood with her job as an NYPD cop.”
Untitled Berman Project, “which centers on a San Diego police detective who’s the mother of two and on the verge of divorce.”
Lifetime needs to have more shows with female creators and female showrunners.
Lifetime Cops an Attitude (Variety)
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What a disappointment! i’m soooo sick of wall-to-wall cop shows, dumb game shows, and competitions. There must be tens of thousands of people with good ideas for shows that would have held my interest. i love, love, LOVE Drop Dead Dive. Why couldn’t they spin off a second show called Teri (Margaret Cho’s character) and build a comedic series based on her after-the-job home life? I’d even go for a new version of “Charmed”. Why are we drowning in these shows that seem to be little boy G.I. Joe style macho male super-hero, police-are-always-right, military-might-is-right themes? Why not have shows about what women dream of too? It’s just fine that they would cast women in big roles (in the contest of male fantasy), but it still seems to me that the larger Hollywood focus is too male-oriented. That’s just my own opinion.
I haven’t watched DDD beyond the pilot, only because I didn’t have time for a new show unless it grabbed me and refused to let go. It didn’t quite do that, but it certainly seemed to have a lot going for it, and I’m happy to see it succeed.
I wonder sometimes why I’m still watching AW, but then they knock out a killer scene that reminds me just how much better all the characters are than much of the melodrama that happens to them.
I would totally watch a cop-show spinoff with Pamela, which I assume that allusion to refer to. Other cop shows… I’d have to see. It depends on the angle. But then, I’m not a cop-show person, and a lot of women are. And traditionally, they don’t feel like Lifetime serves them.
Which puts those audience members where I was a couple years ago, when Lifetime dropped the ball pretty egregiously with Blood Ties. Every indication was that they wanted to expand their audience to a substantial chunk of women who don’t touch their typical fare with a ten-foot pole, and they picked up a kickass supernatural drama to do it with. Then they (a) barely advertised it beyond their own sphere, (b) scheduled it opposite SciFi’s flagship timeslot (which at one point put it up against The Dresden Files, the ONE other show occupying the exact same genre niche), (c) slapped it together with a tacky psychic “reality” competition and tried to sell it as a coherent evening, and finally (d) canned it, not because of its own (pretty respectable) numbers, but because those viewers didn’t translate to lead-in.
End result: The audience they did manage to pull in (largely via word-of-mouth/internet) that previously wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole… now won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.
So here’s hoping whichever cop show they decide to serve up (if indeed they end up taking any of these pilots to series), they do better by the audience it draws. My expectation, though, is that they’ll continue to be “Television For Women Who Like What Women Are Expected To Like.”
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