CBS Cancels "Partners"

[JamesG]

CBS Cancels "Partners"
Nov 16, 2012
by Liz Raftery


CBS has canceled freshman comedy "Partners" and will take it off the air effective immediately, Deadline reports.


The ratings-challenged show, which starred Michael Urie, David Krumholtz, Sophia Bush and Brandon Routh, hit a series low this week, was modest from the start, bowing to 6.5 million viewers and a 2.4 in the 18-to-49 demographic.

It hit a series low this week, drawing just 5.8 million viewers and a 1.8 in the demo.



Comedy reruns will fill the show's 8:30/7:30c Monday time slot, according to Deadline. CBS reps did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/CBS-Canc...s-1056468.aspx

[AB]

I'm not surprised about this one being cancelled. I only watched the first episode of it & didn't think it was very good.

[70s show watcher]

Originally Posted by AB

I'm not surprised about this one being cancelled. I only watched the first episode of it & didn't think it was very good.

i watched the whole run of eps hoping that it would get better but it just was not very funny

[AB]

Originally Posted by 70s show watcher

i watched the whole run of eps hoping that it would get better but it just was not very funny

I know what you mean. In that first episode they were trying too hard to be funny and they were rushing through their lines of dialogue. It just wasn't very good. But sometimes after a few episodes a show will get better, I guess that didn't happen this time.

[Mr. Television]

CBS should have kept Rob.

[Yong Fang]

Rob was funny, epecially Cheech Marin and the brother in law.

[Chocolate Moose]

I thought it was cute and that it had potential. Oh, well.

[robyrob]

i thought i liked the show, but it may have just been Sophia Bush.

[Blackout]

good!

the amount of gay TV shows on tv is sickening

we need more masculinity on TV

[TMC]

http://splitsider.com/2012/12/partners-the-post-mortem/

If there ever was a sure thing in this world, it's that Partners was going to be a part of our lives for a very long time.

The lone new sitcom on CBS' 2012 fall lineup, Partners was on a highly rated Monday night, comfortably sandwiched between the age defying How I Met Your Mother and the hipster hating 2 Broke Girls in the 8:30 time slot, a position that the popular 2 Broke Girls occupied in their inaugural season just last year. The show was created and executive produced by Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, the same gentlemen responsible for the long running sitcom Will and Grace that anchored the last ratings dominant era of "Must See TV." Every episode was directed by James Burrows, the most popular sitcom director in the world. Every member of the cast was pre-approved by audiences, including David Krumholtz, a man who possesses an almost Tom Hanksian level of likability, and Brandon Routh, a human individual deemed worthy enough to play Superman.

But not only is Partners not going to run eight times a day on basic cable and your friendly neighborhood local network affiliate for the next fifty years, it got cancelled before it could air its seventh episode. A few days after the cancellation, CBS basically pretended that it never existed.

So what went wrong? How did the show on day one shed over two million viewers from its lead-in and never improve? Bad publicity didn't help. Jeff Greenstein, who at one time worked with Mutchnick and Kohan on Will and Grace, noticed immediately after the network upfronts this past May that Mutchnick and Kohan's Partners bore a more than passing resemblance to a show he co-executive produced in 1995 called…Partners. The 2012 Partners centered around the friendship of Joe and Louis, two lifelong buddies in an architecture firm. The 1995 Partners focused on Bob and Owen, two architect pals that worked in the same office. The female lead, who is engaged to one of the dudes in the 2012 version, went by Ali. In 1995, the female lead who is engaged to one of the men: Ali…cia. To pile onto the empirical evidence, Greenstein tweeted that Mutchnick and Kohan were "big fans" of his show. (James Burrows didn't say a word about any of this even though he directed a few episodes of the original Partners. To be fair, he's directed every network comedy you could think of and ten more.) In Mutchnick and Kohan's defense, it's doubtful that they attempted to rip off Greenstein's Partners in not making it past its first season.

In regards to the show itself, the pilot episode had a lot of red flags. If you watched CBS this past summer for more than 20 minutes, or the first episode itself, you were completely bombarded with Michael Urie's ridiculously over the top character Louis. Louis was an incredibly self-centered individual that made his best friend Joe's (Krumholtz) big decision on whether to dump or propose to his girlfriend Ali (Sophia Bush) about himself, and unrepentantly referred to his long-term boyfriend Wyatt (Brandon Routh) as a doctor because he was embarrassed that he was a nurse. Louis was so unlikable that in the entire final act the show tried to unsuccessfully convince the audience that Louis is worth knowing. Wyatt had to remind Joe that Louis isn't always a tremendous jerk before making a terrible "heart on" pun, which would be repeated again in the concluding moments of the episode, to the horrifically huge delight of the laugh track. Also, the show asked us to ignore that Joe got engaged one evening and did not tell his supposed best friend until the next morning, even though he would be aware that Louis and Ali attend the same morning yoga class. Brandon Routh's Wyatt was a character that only felt the need to speak in one tone, and Ali was equally as underdeveloped.

To Partners' credit, there were some improvements, namely the recalibration of Louis. Urie dialed the energy down from an 11 to a 6 in subsequent episodes, and Ali was made to go from simply tolerating Louis to treating him as a close friend (So how bad can he be?!). Mutchnick, Kohan and producer Jeff Astrof quickly realized that Brandon Routh pretty much always plays monotonic, frigid characters and gave Wyatt a riotous past that led him to his conservative emotional state. Sophia Bush realized that her nine year stint on the drama One Tree Hill was over. But for every promising moment, like David Krumholtz and his secretary acting out a back and forth with an Abbott and Costello rhythm, or legitimately amusing running gags that didn't overstay their welcome (more specifically for the few completists out there I refer to the "I don't want to start a fight" and the unable to look Joe in the eye bits), there would be a "morning sausage" utterance and the archaic (is it 1995?) laugh track again. A cousin of Ali's, played by Jillian from Workaholics, was abruptly introduced, and just as quickly disappeared. The Sklar brothers are always welcome, but their guest appearances in the final two episodes changed the energy of the show enough that it flashed a giant spotlight on how directionless and malleable Partners truly was.

It's really easy to imagine a world where this show is successful. All of the aforementioned sins that they committed in the beginning were either corrected and/or tolerated on network television in this day and age. It is certainly possible that the seven unaired episodes of this show are each a little better than the last. It takes time for writers and producers to get to know the characters they created, and where exactly the funniest jokes can be extracted from them, just like it takes awhile to see what the actors and actresses can and cannot do. But time was something Partners didn't have, for the reasons written above, but for all we know maybe simply because the title of the show is cursed.

[robyrob]

for the record, the 1995 show Partners was AWESOME - with Jon Cryer, Tate Donovan and Maria Pitillo

[TMC]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywo...nes-get-the-ax

LOS ANGELES, May 12 (UPI)--Four U.S. TV shows with prominent gay story lines during a record-breaking season for openly gay characters will be cut for the next season, officials said.

NBC's "The New Normal" and "Smash" and "Go On" and CBS's "Partners," will get the ax, the Hollywood Reporter said Saturday.

Heather Morris, who plays a bisexual on Fox's "Glee," will not be returning next season, the Reporter said.

A Hollywood Reporter survey in November discovered that gay characters on TV, including couples on "Grey's Anatomy" and "Modern Family," helped voters to support gay marriage at the polls.

"This data would suggest that seeing this stuff makes it more socially acceptable. Views on gay marriage have exponentially gone in its favor since 2002," THR pollster Jon Penns said at the time.

The THR poll came a month after watchdog group Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation released its annual "Where We are on TV" report that found a record number regular LGBT characters on the small screen.

"The sheer number of characters who will no longer be on the air means diversity on television is once again at risk. Following a season with the highest recorded number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters, these cancellations mean networks have to make a concerted effort to ensure the 2013-2014 season truly reflects the diversity of their audience," Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation national spokesman Wilson Cruz said.

[TMC]

http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2...shows/partners

18. Partners (CBS)
Stars: David Krumholtz, Michael Urie, Sophia Bush, Brandon Routh

Some sitcoms are so bland that it's difficult to complain about them—if the producers can't bother to show creativity, why should haters waste mental power finding clever ways to destroy their series? Because it's fun to be mean, of course.

In the case of Partners, the butt of all insulting jokes should be the overall stock feeling. Its premise—two buddies working together and helping each other cope with annoying relationships—was only slightly less perfunctory than its nondescript stars (David Krumholtz and Michael Urie), who did little to enliven the ho-hum jokes and desperate plots.

In one episode, Krumholtz's character gets insanely jealous over his wife's attractions to Derek Jeter and Justin Timberlake. Pre-cancellation, it was only a matter of time until his love for Kate Upton powered an entire one-joke episode.