I Think Your Engine Block Is Cracked

I'm a little late on this one (still getting used to the whole blog thing) but I have come to bury, if not quite mourn, Tim Minear's Drive. Minear's show about an illegal cross-country road race was pulled from the Fox line-up after only four episodes which is a depressingly familiar for fans of Minear.  This is the fourth Minear run show that Fox has cancelled in the last five years. Minear made his reputation on Joss Whedon's red-headed stepchild vampire show, Angel and then solidified it with helping Whedon guide his brilliant if short-lived space western Firefly to the little screen.

Minear has now had three shows (Wonderfalls, The Inside & Drive) outside of the JossWhedon orbit and unfortunately, each show has not only died a quick death but all have had diminishing creative returns as well. Wonderfalls was like Pinkberry, sweet yet tart. This little show about a misanthropic shop girl, talking nicknacks & a benign universe in need of a little tweaking had a pleasantly comforting worldview, at once sarcastic yet surprisingly warm. Minear followed it with The Inside,which was a solid detective procedural but nothing more. Trapped in the morbund serial-killer genre, this show was well-executed but suffered from a fatal lack on any reason to exist except to fill a timeslot, no matter how briefly that was.

Drive was going to be Minear's big-time show. He had Firefly star Nathan Fillion (great as expected) in the lead and Fox was finally behind one of his shows with TV ads & billboards everywhere. Yet, the premiere was a distant fourth in audience and the show never picked up viewers from there. Why? Well, the main issue was that the premise itself reeked of desperation, an attempt to do for The Amazing Race what Lost did for Survivor. The weakness of the premise doomed the show but it's execution is what was most alarming. Cheap characters (AWOL & his wife), awful dialogue ("Hey Homes") and a noticeable lack of dramatic momentum, Drive was, in short, a mediocre television show.

Minear is clearly a talent but he may need Whedon more than I suspected. The one thing he definitely needs (which Whedon had in shapes) is some passion. The next time out, Minear may want to worry less about coming up with a marketable premise than coming up with a good one.