so I woke this morning (as I do most Sundays with the clock radio spewing the propaganda of 51 Percent. (weekdays we listen to WHUD for the local traffic) While in a half awake state I herd a discussion about the role of women in media and one factoid tipped me into alertness.

DAWN TARNOFSKY-OSTROFF, the current president of UPN came there from Lifetime, television for women Not sure If I herd it correctly, I checked with The Oracle and found that she was brought on in the hopes that the network can extend its audience reach for more equal numbers of men and women

And this got me thinking, in the context that UPN has Officially Canceled 'Star Trek: Enterprise'. (official document) Could there be a connection ? I mean I think the show has it's problems. But I really feel that The Forth Season Has really gotten into a grove. While Enterprise has taken longer to get there than DS9 and TNG (I don't believe Voyager Ever found it's voice.) Enterprise was finally getting good. Why would they cancel it now?

I had remembered that star trek was UPN's best rated show. but in putting together these notes, I realized that it was actually voyager that was the ratings anchor for the fledgling network 10 years ago. Sure the Enterprise's Rantings are in decline, but how good could the rest of the programs on UPN be doing. Yahoo shows UPN with nothing in the top20. I found More complete ratings data but that data is not broken down by network. I read the list, and could not identify any UPN programs in the top 106 Above enterprise and that page gives the whole UPN network a rating of "No.6 UPN 1.1 No.6 UPN 2,920,000" so even if there is another UPN program in that list (unless I'm reading it wrong) Enterprise is doing BETTER THAN AVERAGE for all UPN programs. Why would you kill a program that is Doing better than most of the crap you have on ??

Not to mention that they put it into a killer time slot this season "Friday evening" I mean, even geeks have lives. You put something on A Friday or Saturday night if you need an excuse to kill it. that or you put it up against a popular show. I've got a Homemade TIVO so it doesn't matter to me, when they put it on. but clearly only a small percentage of the population have TIVO's or are into "aggressive" VCRing as I used to be before I built the TIVO. ( I used to have 5 or 6 programs scheduled to record each week, and I had to plan ahead as to when to change tapes. Even then I rarely watched programs "live" and skipped commercials )

So what I keep getting back to is "why would they ( she) kill it ?

And my conspiracy theorist alter ego starts putting together theories. The one I like this morning is that Dawn Ostroff, a fanatical womyns activist deliberately put enterprise in a bad time slot, and now is using it's "poor , only when when compared to other networks" ratings as an excuse to kill it.

Now I suppose that it's possible that the show is much more expensive than other UPN programming and the network can't afford to continue to run it. But that's really flawed logic, If this show is in fact the Anchor of the network. Without viewers there, they can't even promote other programs they have ( ones that might be more profitable) In our household, we only watch two programs on UPN. I watch Enterprise and my wife watches Americas top Model Thats it. Either they just don't want me a part of their demographic or they just don't get it.

They are never going to grow their network by killing off one of the best products they have.