LAST EDITED ON 07-23-07 AT 11:51 PM (EST)

vince3,

You are almost certainly right. And there can be, I think, no legitimate objection to a commercial network's decision to decline to buy or air programming that is unprofitable.

But ...

When the purveyors of serial offerings - programming that asks the viewer, not for an hour's investment of time and interest in order to know the answer to the question posed at its beginning, but for an investment of hours of time and interest spread over weeks - then I think that there is an implicit moral obligation - a promise made - by the network that it will deliver that answer: where, when and as advertised.

So, I don't think that the question that warrants debate in this instance is whether or not Pirate Master was, or was not, good - or profitable - television. The time for the handsomely-paid executives at CBS (whose business it is to know such things) to make that decision was before they asked me, and millions of other viewers, to follow them to Pirate Master’s conclusion. Via sequential installments. On my television screen.

What I hope will be debated here and in other forums and in the boardrooms and hallways of several networks is whether or not American audiences will continue to 'buy into' a genre that, at the networks’ discretion, is a larceny.