The folks at ABC are pure evil....

Why do all the good shows have to get cancelled? Pushing Daisies certainly isn't the best show on TV, but it is/was a delightful and unique high concept comedy that always kept itself fresh and fun. Just when Lee Pace had a great career break....what a shame. How is it that this is going off the air and crud like America's Next Top Model and Survivor keep on living? ARGH!

Source: TV by the numbers

Update: Watch with Kristin has Pushing Daisies executive producer Bryan Fuller’s take on the news.

James Hibberd reports that producers of all three shows have been informed that their series will not get full season pickups. This jibes with all of our numeric sensibilities, and we’ve been seeing it in the making for weeks. But rumors were rampant that Eli Stone or Dirty Sexy Money could be kept. It’s possible that’s true, but that continued ratings erosion this week killed off any chance of that. We’d presumed Pushing Daisies dead all along.

The networks held off on using the word “cancellation” but that’s typically the case. Hibberd seems to think since the shows are still on the schedules the networks want to leave a little wiggle room about it in the event that they order more shows. I believe it far more likely, especially given this week’s low numbers for all three shows that the network is avoiding the “c” word only because it doesn’t want to hear flack from advertisers who don’t want to advertise on shows that have been CANCELLED.

We may need a new category of as close to cancelled as you can possibly get — so close, that it’s the same thing as being cancelled.

Personally, while I’m sad for both fans of these shows and the producers and everyone involved with working on them, I’m happy it shook out like this. If they’d have kept Eli Stone, for example, we’d have seen 10,000 “how could they cancel Dirty Sexy Money and keep Eli Stone! WTF!?” I’m glad we won’t have to deal with that…

Again, there is no comment on the quality of any of the shows here, but from a numbers perspective, they weren’t on the bubble, they were well below the cancellation line. All three shows performed well under ABC’s average, and even before this week’s lousy numbers are factored in, they were ABC’s three worst performing scripted shows among 18-49 year olds.

Update: Hibberd also reports that Life on Mars will air after LOST at 10pm on Wednesdays as was earlier thought, starting January 28, but I’m not sure yet whether that means a full season pickup for the show.