JimK:  Well, My Own Worst Enemy has been canceled.  The word is that the currently-shooting ninth episode will be the last.  So why did this show fail, aside from what seemed to be a total lack of promotion outside of the network after its debut?  I have a couple theories.  SPOILER WARNING: Like it matters, this show is canceled, but I may spoil plot elements below.

Theory 1: The basic premise made no sense at all.  Why do the real people, who are the super spies, need to be switched to cover personalities that don’t know they are fabrications?  What is the purpose of the cover?  To protect the knowledge of the spy?  That could be easily accomplished without the whole switchover by implanting the chip with a small amount of explosives.  Spy is in danger of giving up vital intel?  Spy goes pop.  Given the fact that the spies go into missions fully aware, and they get captured, the information contained in their heads is not safe at all.  The cover life of Henry Spivy was completely and totally tacked on to accomplish the Jekyll/Hyde conflict between Edward and Henry.  Fundamentally it made no sense to do this.  Yes it was somewhat interesting to watch them leave little phone videos for each other, but it never really worked as a literary device.  The British show Jekyll did that about a million times better and more organically.  It made sense in that show.  This show never passed the basic smell test once you started thinking about the premise too much.

Theory 2: While I maintain that Slater did an excellent job distinguishing between the two characters, Henry was written in a cliched, simpering wimp TV husband manner, and it was actually unpleasant and annoying to watch.  The show came alive when it was an action/spy show and Slater was playing Edward.  When he was Henry it dragged.  I woudl much rather have watched how Christian Slater would play an oversexed, over-adrenalized spy like Edward inside the confines of having to be normal.  Lots of room for a whole caged animal thing there.  Also?  Spivy’s son looked half Italian and half Hawaiian.  Come on, casting directors.  I know you can’t make actors look that much like they are related, but the idea that those two people produced a dark-haired, dark skinned kid is ri-god-damned-diculous.  Maybe not eveyone would name that as a fatal flaw, but subconsciously everyone sees scenes with the family and can feel something is well and truly off.  It breaks the reality, and a show like this cannot afford to let the viewer think too much about the reality of the world it has created.

Theory 3: The show was too “television.”  Everything was written like TV is.  people talked funny, situations were too pat, most things that happened were kind of expected, and the show very much followed a formula. 

Theory 4; a lack of attention to detail.  Example: There was one little thing they established early on from the pilot; When agents go in the box in the cover company, a woman speaks a phrase into her wrist com: “_so and so_ is in the box.”  Henry and Tom always said the same things to her: “You say that every time, why?”  And she;d smile and say “You ask that every time…”  Well, in the fourth episode another agent went in the box, and when the woman spoke her phrase into her wrist com, “Ellen” the agent didn’t say anything…they just cut to the downstairs scenes and out of the elevator walked spy “Paula.”  Little details like that help sell a world as real, and lazy television writers (and terrible TV directors and editors) love to leave those little details out.  Either because they are hacks, they don’t understand their craft or they just don’t care.

So how could they have fixed this show before it ever aired?  Fairly easily, in my ever-so-humble opinion.  Drop the entire idea of switching personalities.  Make it a straight-up spy thriller show.  Edward is always Edward.  His cover life exists so that he has somewhere to land when not on mission and a reason to be flying around the world, with a full, real, verifiable identity to back him up.  The problem would be, he’s a super spy with an over-active libido and a need for danger…so the conflict is there naturally between his home life and his day job.  You could bring the tech stuff in by establishing that when the spies come off mission, they get mundane memories of day trips and business meetings implanted so that when they talk about these events in their cover lives they believe them.  In fact in *my* pilot, I would establish that Edward’s wife can always tell when he is lying.  The bad guys don’t…but for some reason that could be explored later, Wifey always knows. So when Edward comes off mission, they give him memories he believes are real.  When he comes back to work he gets flashed with a set of real memories.  More natural areas that can generate conflict: some memories leak in Edward, no one knows why, also someone is deliberately introducing odd memories and flashes of things that Edward has never done…or has he?  The Saffron Burrows character plays very much the same role: monitoring the psyche of the agents to make sure that no cracks form between all of this memory switching.  and speaking of her…

Another element that might have saved this show in week 2 would have been to spring the surprise of Saffron Burrows being an active field agent (and Edward’s squeeze) for both sides of the company.  People love beautiful female ass-kicking characters with accents.  Well…by people I mean specifically me, but I know I am not alone, which is why Milla Jovavich and Angelina Jolie have movie careers outside of standard dramas.  They should have handed Burrows a gun at the end of week 2 and never wasted my time with a storyline about a dress and a refrigerator.

So now they’ve ruined TV for Christian Slater.  I’ll bet that guy doesn’t get within ten feet of a TV script again.  Which is a shame, because he was holding the show together on sheer willpower alone.  Given a great story and a good producer and direction he’d make some really excellent TV.  Hopefully I’m wrong and he’s being pitched some kick-ass new FX series or something on Showtime.

And lastly, like everyone else writing about the demise of this show, I am compelled to say that in the end, My Own Worst Enemy was in fact, its own worst enemy.  Four episodes in and as a fan of the show I was picking it apart.  No wonder it lost 42 percent of the pilot audience in a month.  None of this bodes well for Dollhouse, BTW, and neither does Fox putting Dollhouse on Friday night, the death knell for all scifi television.  We may as well say goodbye to the ever-improving Sarah Connor Chronicles as well, as it is also being moved to Fridays.

I swear I will never understand why networks and show runners make these terrible decisions and never, ever listen to the people that love and watch their programs….