What. A. Treat!
The advertising for Last Resort was unrelenting and intense so I gave it a shot. I fell in love with the show in the first episode so naturally it was canceled.
Before learning of the cancellation, I made sure to watch this show every week. Despite not having an alien or spaceship in sight this show felt like what I’d want a modern day Star Trek TV show to look like. Last Resort started with 9 million viewers but started hemorrhaging viewers week by week. I suppose it was the controversial subject matter of a soldier taking matters into his own hand in some moral stance against the United States. In reality, I’d be angry with this guy because how dare he? The situation should have been handled differently at every turn. In fiction, it makes for great TV. Everyone on the show is compelling to watch but Andre Braugher as Captain Marcus Chaplin is like magic happen on the screen.
The show started out really strong but the newer episodes aren’t as tight and the situation seems as if is being unrealistically drawn out. The writers promised closure with the cancellation announcement. I am curious to see how it all turns out.
Last Resort airs Thursdays 8/7c on ABC. It streams for free on abc.go.com and Hulu.
I agree with you once again. This show is awesome — one of the best, smartest, most exciting, most unpredictable new shows to come along in a while. So, it was doomed.
I’ll confess that the show has gotten a little more bizarre as it’s gone along. I can’t help but wonder if so many members of a real life U.S. naval crew would be so unhinged so quickly. I mean, half the crew are committing crimes and ending up in a makeshift jail; the other half are either going crazy or have split loyalties. To their credit, they actually addressed the crew discipline issue in the last episode in an unavoidably extreme yet effective way. Until then, this crew was acting a little too much like the corrupt cops on Shawn Ryan’s other show, The Shield.
But, that pilot episode… There was more excitement and character development in the first 15 minutes than two or three episodes of Revolution combined. I mean, we already get to know half the crew before battlestations is exclaimed about eight minutes in, and by 17 minutes in, a nation was nuked, and the submarine was scraping the ocean floor! You knew right away that this show was not going to screw around. Even the hallucination episode was done unexpectedly well.
Ryan addressed everything from the show’s time slot (“brutal”) to problems with certain demographics (“There was a military aspect to the show that research showed kept some women at a distance”)
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/last-resorts-shawn-ryan-cancellation-392156
Save Last Resort Petition
http://www.change.org/petitions/abc-sony-television-renew-last-resort-2