Fox's "Reunion" will end unsolved.

Ok, so I don't usually write about TV shows, but this time I'll have to make an exception.

At the beginning of this season, I tried plugging into a lot of the new TV shows on various networks. I was already following 7th Heaven and Alias, though it was more and more just to see how they would finally mercifully kill off those series. And the combo of my other returning favorites (Cold Case, ER, Gilmore Girls, House, King of Queens, the various Law & Order series, Medium, and Smallville) just weren't exciting me as much anymore.

So I picked up on several different freshman series. Close to Home has been ok, but it has the same old formulaic Law & Order style. E-Ring has been nice, but again, it's nothing terribly new. Everybody Hates Chris has been hilarious. Ghost Whisperer has grown on me. Invasion is growing on me too, though (like the plot) a bit more slowly. Prison Break, Supernatural, and Surface have really rocked, unlike Threshold.

But the stand-out one for me this year has been Reunion.

I'm not sure what the total attraction is. There's the concept which hasn't been done in quite the same manner lately, though it does remind me slightly of 24. I like the idea of watching the characters progress from year to year. Then for the nostalgia buff in me, there's the various artifacts from the 80's and 90's (clothing, music, etc) that litter the landscape. And there's Chyler Leigh, whom I could watch in rapt attention if she was reading the phone book. Plus it has all the trappings of a whodunit. Granted the writing is not always the best, and the acting is what you'd expect from a bunch of good-looking young adults trying to play teens. And also granted that you'll almost always want to throw the detective off a cliff. But the show is addictive.

And Fox cancelled it.

Fox, being the same brainiac company that cancelled Family Guy, has decided that the show will not run out its tenure of 20 episodes (each episode representing one year in time.) Initially, there was a promise that the network would allow the show to finish this spring with a "truncated" ending, but according to this article on TV Guide's website, Reunion will not be able to reveal the final ending. "Despite a week of brainstorming," the article continues, "show execs have concluded it simply is not possible to wrap up the central murder mystery nine 'years' sooner than planned." Producer Jon Feldman states further: "Because the events of Samantha's murder are partially reliant on characters we haven't yet met — and events we haven't yet seen — there is no way to solve the mystery of her murder without being able to complete the full arc of our story through the present day. I greatly regret that this question along with many others that the series has posed will remain unsolved, and I am deeply grateful for the support of viewers who share this regret."

Sigh.

So, in a nutshell, the series, which just ran its seventh episode, will conclude on February 2 with its thirteenth and final episode, never to reveal the ending of the story.

Way to go Fox. You jerks.

So what caused the downfall of the show? Try CSI. Fox, in their infinite wisdom, put a freshman series up against the number one show on TV. Secondly, the debut of Reunion was such that it was often weeks until the next episode, largely due to Fox's broadcasts of the Major League Baseball postseason (which were the lowest rated EVER in the history of baseball.) Combine all that with the fact that a show like Reunion is very difficult to pick up once you've missed the first episode, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

So yet another good show goes down the drain, a victim of network incompetence.

Or does it? Fans are keeping hope alive by signing an online petition in hopes that an online campaign can cause yet another Family Guy-esque turnaround.

Will it work? Who knows? Until then, only fan-fiction writers will be able to tell us who killed Samantha.