I've been trying to find a reason for why Amazing Stories was cancelled. I can tell some of the episodes aren't stellar but some of them are very strong. Was the series too uneven and didn't do great in the ratings? Was it too expensive to make?
I guess I'll keep looking around. Maybe the Nielson ratings for the show can be found somewhere online. But maybe you folks on the message boards know the answer?
J. Matt Wigand
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Thanks a lot, this cleared it up a lot. I was looking at the pages from your link and I'm trying to find where you found it was 40th & 46th. Most of the lists of top shows have the top 20 but don't go further. Where did you find that figure?
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One problem was that nothing really united all the episodes together. At least in Twilight Zone, every episode was hosted and narrated by Rod Serling. Amazing Stories might have benefited from a host/narrator -- Spielberg himself, perhaps, since most (all?) of the episodes were presumably born out of his own ideas.
shareThat is a great point. I hadn't really thought about how there wasn't a framing device, narrator, or introduction. But that is really important. Twilight Zone had Rod Serling to introduce the episodes and so did Night Gallery. Tales from the Crypt had the Cryptkeeper. Outer Limits, the newer anyway, had a voice over narrator at the beginning and the end of every episode (I need to watch the old series, did it do that too?). Jim Henson's the Storyteller had the great John Hurt, while the Storyteller: Greek Myths had the great Michael Gambon framing every episode.
The best anthologies usually have a framing device or some introduction. Thanks for reminding me of that! I feel like an idiot for forgetting that!
It got cancelled for the same reason every short lived series gets cancelled. Simply put it didn't generate enough profit compared to its cost. If the ratings were good enough to where they could charge more for ads it would have last longer.
shareI guess it always comes down to whether or not a show is making money at the time - or at least it did in the 80s? - which is determined primarily by its advertisement revenue, determined by its ratings. Getting enough episodes "out there" for future reruns in syndication is another factor, but I don't know how much of one, or how many were needed when this was being aired. I suppose we should be grateful that it lasted as long as it did, as some low-rated programs have been yanked after six or seven episodes, unless championed by a powerful network honcho.
Cancelled due to low ratings, no doubt, but the question is Why the low ratings? That its lack of a Rod Serling/Hitchcock-type "host" was an issue is an interesting theory. With an anthology series featuring unrelated, stand-alone episodes each week - no storyline to keep viewers coming back to see what happens, or characters to whom viewers were attached - it would seem that this shouldn't have made a difference. Maybe people needed some common factor to feel engaged, such as the comfort in continuity provided by the same person's introduction of each story, and closing comments about it? We don't have this with movies, so it must be the medium, I suppose. (If only we could consult with Marshall McLuhan on this subject!)