Miami Marlins Are No Longer a Television Show Worth Watching

According to USA Today, The Franchise on Showtime is having its plug pulled. The show, whose promos kept asking "How do you build a championship team?", evidently realized that they were not going to answer that question this season.

There was such wonderful promise for a season filled with superstars, an insane manager, a new colorful stadium, fish swimming behind home plate and cutaways of bikinis on the beach. Then came the disappointments and now playing out the string.

Showtime has deemed the Marlins unworthy of reality TV. Take a moment to think about that. What subjects are worthy of reality television?

There is a show devoted entirely to opening up storage containers. There is another show called Extreme Couponing. That's right. It is about coupons.

The Kardashians and Real Housewives have whole episodes where nothing happens. And those shows are high intensity drama compared to Ice Loves Coco.

And all of those shows were deemed more worthy for reality television than the 2012 Miami Marlins.

This author is a reality show producer. I just finished shooting a program called Ax Men for History Channel. The show follows loggers cutting trees down, moving timber and avoiding dangerous situations.

That does not sound as interesting as a big league ball club, but actually it is fascinating. The main thing that makes these shows work is viewers get an inside glimpse into a world they do not usually see.

But once they have that look, the viewers need something else. More specifically they need to see the people in that world working towards a common goal.

Whether it is catching the most fish, selling a house or finding out if Teresa and Joe are going to get divorced, the viewers need to have that build up to either success or crippling failure.

The Marlins no longer were offering that. A team playing out the string and ownership looking to trim some bucks is not good television. Most people are bored at work and have bosses they hate. They do not want to sit down on their couch and watch someone else going through the motions grumbling about management.

Or if they do, they want to be watching The Office, not millionaire baseball players.

In an earlier Bleacher Report article, I wrote about why the Marlins should send the Showtime crew to follow an actually interesting baseball team.

That should be the goal for the Marlins in 2013: Be interesting enough to be a reality show. In other words, be as interesting as extreme coupon cutting.