It's been slightly over a month since NBC announced that it was pulling "Next Caller," the midseason comedy starring Dane Cook that had yet to air and this weekend, the show's creator, showrunner and sole executive producer Stephen Falk took to Tumblr to express how he felt about NBC's decision --in nearly 1,700 words "from outside a Starbucks in Flagstaff, AZ."
In the post, titled "Advice To Young TV Writers (but really: What Happened To My NBC Show)," Falk compared finding out about the cancellation of "Next Caller" to natural disasters. "This is the moment after the 10.0 earthquake. Suddenly, nothing is the same. You don’t have a show anymore," Falk wrote. "The frozen people of Vesuvius had more warning than you did."
Falk has been making the cross-country drive from New York, where he was filming, to his home in LA with his dog and set a depressing scene in his open letter-style Tumblr post: "You too might find yourself in a shithole Arizona motel eating Taco Bell and watching Zooey Deschanel on Letterman and drinking a bottle of Jameson’s you smartly got back at an Albertson’s in Gallup, New Mexico ... "
The "Next Caller" creator continued on, talking about why he enjoyed working on the show and, as he explained, being "bummed out for myself and my bank account and my career and the resulting 'waste' of a full year of my life" and for the audience who will never get to see the show.
But based on early responses of critics, audiences aren't really missing out on "Next Caller."
HuffPost TV's Maggie Furlong said, "I groaned when I heard Dane Cook was getting a sitcom; I almost cried when I realized he's nowhere near the worst part of this show," while Daniel Feinberg of Hitfix wrote: "Imagine being warned that a medical procedure would leave you feeling like you'd been hit in the crotch with a giant steel-driving hammer 75 times and then waking up and only feeling like you'd been hit in the crotch 25 times by a padded Whack-a-Mole mallet. Your first reaction would be, 'OH MY GOD, MY GROIN!' Your second reaction would be, 'But I guess it wasn't quite as bad as I feared.' Ladies and gentlemen, that's my rave review for 'Next Caller.'"
