Why did it have a such a short life??

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Originally Posted by Nighthawk76

I've read several different stories concerning the drug use behind the scenes. Some sources say that it was the cast on the set that were heavely into drugs where as somewhere else I read that it was the producers who had the drug problems. I think it comes down to the simple fact of ratings. The show wasn't getting the ratings that CBS thought that it should and so they decided to end the series after only one year. I think if the ratings had been higher then even if there had been drug abuse behind the scenes that the network would have looked the other way. I guess that we'll never know what the true story is.

Sarah Jessica Parker claims that she wasn't privy to what was allegedly going on behind the scenes of Square Pegs until well after the fact. So it's really hard to tell if it was a cast thing or a production staff thing if not a mixture of both.

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Originally Posted by Nighthawk76

Michael Grade is evil. I figured that in the end it came down to ratings. If Square Pegs had been the number one show, I don't think that cocaine use on location would have really mattered.

Anne Beatts herself wrote to New York Magazine to explain the show's cancellation, and says it was all about ratings:

The highest audience share Square Pegs ever received was a 24, which now would make you the queen of Hollywood, but was considered inadequate for CBS, then the leading “Tiffany network.” In ratings competition Pegs was facing Little House on the Prairie and Monday Night Football, both certified ratings-grabbers. When Harvey Shepherd, a top CBS executive who had always had a fondness for Square Pegs, decided to “save the show” by moving it to 8:30 p.m. on Wednesdays, with a “wonderful new show” as lead-in called Zorro and Son, NBC promptly counter-programmed by moving its hit The A-Team to 8 p.m. opposite both shows. Such were the days before DVR and streaming.

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Originally Posted by TMC

Sarah Jessica Parker claims that she wasn't privy to what was allegedly going on behind the scenes of Square Pegs until well after the fact. So it's really hard to tell if it was a cast thing or a production staff thing if not a mixture of both.

It would've been highly doubtful that Sarah Jessica Parker or Amy Linker were going to party anywhere or nearly as hard given that they were still in high school and had parental supervision. Thus, their parents if they had any common sense, wouldn't let them.

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Originally Posted by king of comedy

It was ahead of its' time.

Others who have seen it have said that Square Pegs was never a "laugh out loud" show but more of a "quiet humor" show. And with SNL writers, the dialogue was not your typical teenage banter, and probably went over the target audience’s head.

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Originally Posted by PracTz

I'm going to bring up a room elephant that no one among its fans seemed to acknowledge. While the premise of nerdy outsiders wanting to join the popular crowd in of itself was appealing, alas the fact that said outsiders almost immediately LOATHED every single member of the 'popular crowd' but STILL felt entitled to join it was rather annoying. I mean, it would have been one thing had the girls started out liking the clique but, over the course of the series, had gradually gotten disillusioned with them and ultimately decided that they had a good friendship AND had befriended two outsider guys so they couldn't have cared less about said clique's existence, viewers could have stayed sympathetic to them. However, by them believing they were ENTITLED to be part of this clique and took umbrage at virtually every remark the members of the clique made and constantly put them down to each other, this made them seem like hypocrites and backbiters rather than sympathetic outsider nerds. And even the dimmest bulbs within the clique would have gotten nonverbal vibes that these two loathed them so WHY would anyone want folks who despised them to be part of one's clique?

Yes, it had some catchy 80's music but, this viewer wound up actually sympathizing with the clique members who were constantly dissed by the nerds instead of the hypocritical, entitled nerds so THAT may be why the ratings dropped and it got cancelled- instead of some conspiracy the late Miss Beatts seems to have concocted that blamed the network instead of the show's writers and producers for making their supposed heroic protagonists rather unlikable.

I was just thinking, could a show like Square Pegs make it on the air today and be accepted as the cult classic that it is? What I mean by this is that, maybe I'm wrong, but it just seems like teenage narratives have changed and evolved a great deal in the 40 some odd years now since Square Pegs arrived.

Basically, do movies or TV shows centered on teenagers and high school still unironically focus on the importance of "cliques" and wanting to be popular above all else? The movie Mean Girls arguably deconstructed the typical tropes and clichés of teen narratives to such an effective degree, that it just seems really hard to accept such storytelling at face value anymore.

As others have said, it just seems like a weird Hollywood invention to have such specific, subculture driven friend groups or cliques. While they do exist in real life, it was never as structured and well-defined as Hollywood liked to portray it. And going back to Mean Girls, it did have really rigid cliques in the movie, but it was practically played as a joke. And by the end, the idea all the cliques was called into question and ultimately abolished.

I really don't know if that was the end goal for Square Pegs had it been able to continue beyond that single season.