n Monday, Nov. 14, ABC announced that it was removing Night Stalker—one the five members of this television season's Lost generation—from the schedule and, more ominously, stopping production.
A week earlier, CBS announced that it was moving Threshold from its slot on Friday evening between Ghost Whisperer and Numbers and shifting it to Tuesdays.
While Threshold's future is still uncertain (rumors are that CBS is more concerned about saving Far From Home by giving it a more compatible home in the spot after Ghost Whisperer), it's clear that Night Stalker is dead.
It is time to talk about failure. Bombing. Tanking.
It happens to all of us, believe me. That dream project that never finds a buyer. The pilot that doesn't get a pickup. The interesting series whose ratings don't measure up.
The movie that fails to open. The novels that don't excite the buyers for the chains, and never shipped to stores, much less sold.
The books and movies and television episodes that get reviewed harshly, if they get reviewed at all.
The easiest to tolerate are the critical failures, the projects that win good reviews but just seem to be cursed or ruined by factors beyond your control. (I'm thinking of Eerie, Indiana, for example, a wonderful series created by Karl Schaefer and Jose Rivera that surely deserved more than the gas chamber of a timeslot that NBC gave it back in 1991-92. It should have run for seven years, not one.) At least with a critical success, you can look back with some pride and a shake of the head at the unfairness of it all ...
Then there are failures that are your fault. The projects you took because you needed or wanted the money—the ones not suited to your talents—the ones beset by confusion at network, studio, production office or stage that you simply did not solve.
A certain percentage of any writer's work is going to fail. Why, I may look back over ... dear God, is it 75 columns here? ... and find one or even two that are not as outstanding as the others.
But it still surprises you. It often baffles you. And, boy, does failure make your life difficult.
The worst is yet to come
It's not just that failure threatens your career. Yes, a string of failures will render you permanently unemployable. But the right kind of failure sometimes doesn't hurt at all—quite the contrary.
It's that we don't have rules guiding our behavior in the face of failure—our own, and around us.
One friend of a decade or more wrote and produced a television pilot that was the worst piece of ostensibly professional filmmaking I've ever seen. Even Timeline, a sci-fi feature that is, to me, the largest waste of time, talent and money in the past couple of years, was better than this thing. I watched it in a screening and seriously considered crawling out of the theater on my hands and knees. In the darkness, I glanced at my neighbors—and every one of them was looking back, wide-eyed in horror, each one wondering the same thing: What the heck do we say?
When the lights came up, we all said, "Interesting!" and ran for the parking lot. The project aired to universal derision; my friend survived it and went on to better things.
And we have never spoken about it. Not even an abortive question: "Say, remember when you did that pilot—?" Urk. Zip. Nada.
Failure forces you to look away.
It is the nature of art—the business of art, anyway. As one friend used to tell me, "The Constitution does not guarantee you the right to be rich and successful as a writer."
With few exceptions—in the sci-fi field, Todd McCaffrey and Brian Herbert come to mind—you are not groomed for the writing business—much less the sci-fi writing business. Not in the way you are groomed to take over the family farm or your uncle's insurance practice, or to become a doctor like Mom.
In other words, you knew the job was tough when you took it.
Having had failures in both mainstream work and in sci-fi, I find that we are a special case: I think failure hits us harder.
Because entire worlds are being rejected.
When you write a sci-fi project, you tap into something deeper—your unconscious fears and hopes. That's where you come up with an apocalypse or a utopia or a story about your housecat being an intelligent alien.
And when it's not just your storytelling or dialogue or casting or direction tanking—when audiences turn away from your vision of the world—
It hurts a bit more.
A stranger fails successfully
Thirty years ago, I saw a documentary on the singer Elton John (composer of "Rocket Man" and "I've Seen the Saucers," among other noted works of musical sci-fi) in which his publisher, Dick James, opined that "The artist ... lives with failure magnificently. I've never yet met one who could deal with success."
To which I said then, and say now—give me a break! (We'll pass over the accounting practices of the music publishing business of those days, which, shall we say, made it almost impossible for an artist to dream of financial success.)
But James had a point. Failure is often a step toward success.
In 1948, Robert A. Heinlein was reeling from a series of failed projects and personal miseries. Searching for an idea for a pulp magazine serial, he came up with Stranger in a Strange Land. He knew that this story could not be published for a decade, if then. Yet he wrote it. When published in 1961, Stranger was seen as a commercial failure—until it found an audience of millions.
Director-screenwriter Peter Jackson was obsessed with the idea of remaking King Kong. Jackson was set to do the remake in 1996 when his movie The Frighteners opened—and tanked. He was able to move on to Lord of the Rings (another risky proposition) and to use that success to revive Kong.
Consider this: He now judges that 1996 script to have been "very shallow and silly." Suppose Jackson had made Kong a decade ago. Where would he be now? It's certain that he wouldn't have made the Rings trilogy.
OK, failure has its rewards.
But I still don't like it. And I'm betting that the team over at Night Stalker doesn't like it, either.
Michael Cassutt's list of failures is too long for the space alloted here. He prefers to dwell on his association with critical successes like Max Headroom and Eerie, Indiana, while writing new projects, including two for the SCI FI Channel.
