Brimstone was the latest in a series of really cool Fox dramas that ultimately failed to find an audience.
The series had a troubled history with Fox. It was originally scheduled to air at 9pm on Tuesdays, then was pulled from the schedule before the season started for a massive retooling. The show eventually debuted late in the fall season in its current timeslot at 8pm on Fridays, replacing two sitcoms.
Even under the best of circumstances, that timelsot has been deadly for a number of Fox shows. And being coupled with the continually troubled Millennium hasn't helped matters.
In fact, this will make the third set of shows that has bit the dust in that timeslot this season. The Wes Craven/Shaun Cassidy drama Hollyweird never even made it to air, and the network's attempts to air sitcoms in that timeslot failed as well.
I recently spoke with producers Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris about the series and why they believe it ultimately didn't succeed.
The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
I know it's impossible to know precisely why a television show didn't connect with audiences. But what is your best sense of what went wrong?
Ethan: We had this anomaly of a show where the bad guys break out and somebody has to fix that, and at the same time it still is a little different than you would expect--a more positive, life-affirming feel. And one thing that never happened was that neither the humor nor that sort of underlying positive foundation really got communicated to the general viewing audience. So that they knew, "Yeah, come and watch this, and you won't just be creeped out, there'll be something else going on."
Well, that's one of the hardest things for even TV veterans to figure out...How to get the audience to look at a new show.
Ethan: The other thing is that we can't complain at all. Just the fact that the show ended up being shot as a pilot from the script stage and then the pilot ended up actually getting on the air. And then we actually got to produce 13 episodes. We can't really complain.
How supportive was Fox as the season progressed? I know that my own experience was that I had a lot of difficulty getting information from them.
Ethan: It's weird, because on the one hand it's obvious that without Fox--and especially with Peter Roth, who at the time was the president of Fox--the show would never have gotten on the air. So how much grief can we give Fox in a way? But it is a little frustrating when you hear things like that, though.
