I was a big part of the push to get The Mentalist a seventh season (which it did end up getting, 13 episodes to wrap things up; although its season six finale ended up working as a series finale, we didn’t know that when we were pushing for a renewal). And honestly watching these attempts to #SaveScorpion is almost physically painful because people are doing, well, pretty much everything wrong. And I'm gonna vent about that for a second because it's so frustrating to me.
1. It’s astronomically more difficult to save a show that’s already been cancelled. People are using Brooklyn Nine-Nine as a precedent, but NBC initially had that show and sold the pilot script to FOX, and they regretted it before the pilot even aired. They’ve basically been waiting in the wings to get it back. This organization that people are trying to do needed to happen when Scorpion still had (preferably 6-8) episodes left to air.
2. The “official” account for getting the show a season five drags its feet. They keep tweeting about how they’ll have a plan “soon.” As I’ve already mentioned, not only did this “plan” have to be a thing back in February/March, the show was cancelled two days ago now. If they wanted to trend something on Twitter, it really needed to happen two days ago (note that #SaveB99 trended literally within minutes of the cancellation notice and continued to trend into the next day). CBS is not constantly checking twitter to see our reactions and certainly not anymore. Their Upfronts are in two days, they’re working on that stuff now. If we had a ‘window’ it’s pretty much certainly gone.
3. None of these people have any idea how Twitter works. Trending is supposed to be difficult, and Twitter has safeguards in place to prevent spam accounts. In order to trend on purpose, there has to be a focused effort at one particular time – the @SaveScorpion account keeps telling us to keep tweeting lots with #SaveScorpion, and that’s counterproductive. If there are a lot of tweets over a period of several days but not enough to trend, that hurts the chances of it ever trending. Trends pop up when something suddenly gets a lot of attention it wasn’t already getting. When we got The Mentalist renewed, we had the generic hashtags we used to tweet about the show most of the time, and each week when we trended it, we had our #SaveTheMentalist one (or whatever it was, this was years ago at this point and I don’t remember the hashtags exactly) that we ONLY used when we were trying to trend. We trended almost every week for a while there. Trends also need at least one tweet with 100 retweets, and that needs to be a tweet that happens during the period where we are trying to trend. When I informed some people of this yesterday, they started suggesting we get tweets that already had 50+ retweets up to 100 to help it – that won’t work because those tweets are already hours old. ANOTHER THING is Tweets that are spamming the hashtag (like people using #SaveScorpion #RenewScorpion over and over again copy pasting to fill the tweet up) actively hurt chances of trending because Twitter files those as spam. In addition, tweets with more than two DIFFERENT hashtags in them also are filtered as spam, and it was never announced which of the popular hashtags (#TeamScorpion #ScorpionCBS #RenewScorpion #ScorpionSeason5) were supposed to be used, so some people used all of them (counterproductive as they were filtered as spam in the trend algorithm) or people all used different ones (also counterproductive as the trend algorithm didn’t know we were talking about the same thing). The @SaveScorpion account has also used the same hashtag twice in one tweet, i.e. “we need to #SaveScorpion make sure you use the tag #SaveScorpion!” Not only does that put it into the spam filter for trends, everyone retweeting it is also contributing to the hashtag being considered spam. Honestly I don’t know if it’s even possible for that hashtag to trend anymore, what with all the tweets over the past few days and with how many of those tweets were done incorrectly.
4. People are trying to prove points to CBS that are just kinda proving why they didn’t renew it in the first place. Like some of us HAD CBS-All Access and told them we would cancel if the show didn’t come back – we made good on that promise. Other people are now saying “I don’t have CBS All-Access but I’ll get it if you renew the show” and when CBS reads that they see “this show was on for four years and it never made me get CBS All-Access.” They aren’t losing those people’s money by cancelling the show because they didn’t have it in the first place. Ditto for people saying they never bought the DVDs/merch from the store but will if they bring the show back. A lot of this is just too little, too late. We knew from October the show was in danger, but people didn’t take it seriously until the finale had already aired (when I saw Kat in Chicago she kept on saying “watch Scorpion guys, we want season five!” And when I told that to people they were like “oh we’ll be fine The Cancel Bear says we should get renewed.”
) This show was on the bubble all year, and this big organization to save it happened after the season had already aired in its entirety, and then did so without warning (or even knowing, I suspect) that a good chunk of the effort was counterproductive or just seemed to validate CBS’ decision.
Everyone keeps tagging me in their tweets, and honestly, I'm just tired. I hate that this show ended with the team split up, I cried for hours when we found out we were cancelled, but at this point I've accepted that it's over. The result of that acceptance is two feelings when I see all the #SaveScorpion tweets - annoyance at wondering where all this was back when we were still airing episodes, and frustration at how much is being done wrong. Even though our chances of being saved are literally almost zero, it's still frustrating to me to see how much effort is being put out in ways that don't even count.