Trouble in Sarahland

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on March 2nd, 2009

Just eleven days after the premiere of Sarah Silverman‘s quirky sitcom on Comedy Central, the network announced that the show would be picked up for a second season.

Well, here we are and, nearly three months after season two’s final episode has aired, Comedy Central is asking (telling?) the show’s producers to cut the budget for each show by twenty per cent.

Comedy Central’s “most successful primetime launch in three years,” may just disappear because Silverman, “on behalf of the three executive producers, informed the network late last week that they can’t proceed with a third season.” Whoops! (Read the whole thing on THR.com.)

CC cites the usual: The shrinking ad market! (Website Business Insider helps the cause by titling their rehash of the Hollywood Reporter item, “Will The Economic Downturn Kill The Sarah Silverman Program?”)

Both sides are alleged to be in negotiations. Wonder why we’re privy to all of this? Must be a leak from Silverman’s camp. Otherwise, why would we know the names of her co-exec producers? (Dan Sterling and Rob Schrab)

As always, we’ll never know the real truth of what’s going on. But we gotta figure, if Comedy Central can/would ask a successful show to cut the budget by twenty per cent, they probably figure there are plenty of Sarah Silvermans out there and that she is… expendable. (They got over Dave Chappelle’s departure pretty quickly. And they’ve got Demetri Martin‘s new show in the lineup– and that had eye-popping numbers… for it’s premiere episode.

Then:

After last week’s terrific record-setting debut, the second episode of Demetri Martin’s Important Things (1.7 million, 0.8) fell 38 per cent on Wednesday night. Things went from fourth place among cable shows last week to 11th. Now, that’s still a big number for the network, and he drew a bigger number than companion The Daily Show. But let’s hope Martin got the expected post-premiere drop out of his system.

Perhaps they decided to kick Sarah Silverman to the curb after Martin’s sparkling debut… then– oops!– it dipped in the ratings.

If we were Silverman and Sterling and Schrab, we’d ask for more money per episode!

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