Fox: Where former Whedon stars go to die.

It's fairly obvious that throughout the years 20th Century Fox has put a pox on anything connected to the name "Joss Whedon". Whether it's giving up rather quickly on television shows (Firefly), or putting out embarrassingly horrible extras on DVD sets (pretty much all of the Angel DVDs and Buffy Season 7 – weren't you expecting more? Yeah, me too).

But the most horrifying death march at Fox has been the march of former stars of Whedon's shows. Let's look at this trend and where it might lead for the newest almost certainly dead show, Tim Minear's Drive.

"Standoff"
– It's not dead yet, but as Miracle Max once said, "mostly dead". Gina Torres is in this one,starring Office Space's Ron Livingston. I haven't actually seen it, and I hear it's not that good. I don't have much more to say than that.

"Bones"
– Sure, the show is doing decent in the ratings, but didn't David Boreanaz say he was tired of doing TV no longer than 18 months ago? I guess plans change when all you can get is direct-to-dvd romantic comedies.

"The Inside"
– The bad part about Fox's cancellation of The Inside is the fact that Tim Minear produced this one too. It had Adam Baldwin in it and it lasted 13 episodes. Again, no one watched it, mainly due to Fox putting about zero promotion into it…and also because there are 500 shows just like it.

"Wonderfalls"
– Oh boy. Tim….maybe you should try another network? Seriously, man.

Wonderfalls was great, it was clever, I actually enjoyed it. It was gone in half a season.
This time it was Fox airing it in the death nail Friday night line-up that did it in.

"Firefly"
– This doesn't even need to be said. We all know why, we all know how. Except apparently a lot of us forget that we didn't even like it and never watched it when it was on the air.

Drive has a lot going for it. It has Nathan Fillion (that's a sure fire way to get the depressed, dateless girl viewership up). It now has Amy Acker (in what looks to be a smaller role as Nathan's missing wife – but hey, the more Acker I get, the better my day feels). It also looks like it's not about lawyers, or cops, or anything having to do with forensics, so that it's not exactly like every other drama.

Unfortunently for Tim Minear, it has Tim Minear – whom I like very much, but let's face it from the list above, he hasn't had that much luck at Fox. I think that's putting it REALLY nice-like.

Will Drive be the success – like Bones – or will it be the failure – like pretty much everything else? It's a very hard-to-tell question, but me thinks we shall see soon enough.

I hope it will be a success if it's any good, or one of us might have to be on Minear suicide watch.

I have this theory that all of these cancellations at Fox are due to the fact that Joss campaigned for John Kerry in 2004, but that's for another article at another time.

I'm sure I missed one or two shows that probably qualify for this list, but there's a good chance I missed them because they were gone so quickly I never even caught their titles.