“Despite the best pilot on a major/big/growing network in the recent memory of whomever was keeping track, it promises more than it can deliver, and its ratings just aren’t high enough.”

People is stupid, in other words.

If Game of Thrones were cancelled tomorrow, people would probably start killing themselves. But the free world might be doomed afterall if the cancellation of fuzzy-hearted and hip but silly little TV shows cause a mini-uproar among the type of normals who would only watch if they were on vacation or sabbatical. Oh, not? You watch these kinds of shows regularly? Like, a lot? Oh.

Benched is 10x better than Suits, but who can even bare that kind of show for more than 15 seconds at a time? Lamers coming home from a 9-to-5-ver to chill in front of something familiar. People are stupid? How much TV did you have to watch to come across Benched (as opposed to a bench)? Esoteric arts.

That said, much of it is inspiration that intelligent comedy can still make it to TV. That you, dear reader, can take a great idea all the way to the box and make it. But the way this season was panning out, who knows? Had this been given a chance, it might have become Ally McBeal. Horrors.

Benched is/was apparently the new hope for Happy Endings freakoids, the show that had Elisha Cuthbert as its Kickstarter to her restarter (Her claim to fame was 24 and a teen comedy that wasn’t a spoof? Got it.). If the six grown children from that show were to ever pursue serious careers, they would be Nina, the protagonist for Benched who seems a constant screw up, but is actually too smart for everyone she meets. The intelligent man who takes his career semi-seriously would have Nina as an ideal mate, because what Nina really wants is to make babies, stay home, and take care of them. She just doesn’t know it yet (feed your feminist friends this male-empowering line — they’ll fucking love it).

And that is much of the problem for Benched. It’s too smart for TV. Which is not to say it’s genius, because TV is 97.3% highly toxic idiocy. Its creators had the extended roadmap so tightly wound as to have a show that would last at least 6 seasons, they forgot about making season 1 appealing to the casual viewer who has a life. Or maybe it’s the reverse: the dumb love triangle had already run its course. We don’t care, because finally we were convinced once and for all by the “create your own meme” crap on the internet, which was seriously retarded.