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okay, I need to say something, and it's not actually that important, and some people might get mad at me, but I really need to say it, as someone who genuinely enjoyed many things about Countdown, was rooting for it as a show, and also found many things in it to be disappointed by.

Y'all, Countdown did not "get cancelled". It simply wasn't given an additional season. And you're sitting there going, "but Blue, that's what cancelling a show is!" and you're RIGHT, EXCEPT that Countdown wasn't originally supposed to have more than one season (at least, that's what we were told). And I truly believe that Derek Haas trying to parlay it into a multi-season series is what, ironically, led to it ending after only one.

Here's the thing: The show was billed as a limited series. That has some pretty significant implications for writing, production, and marketing. As a viewer, when a show is marketed to me as a limited series, I expect certain, specific things from that show, among them a single, high-stakes overarching plot that is introduced at the beginning of the season and neatly wrapped up by the end; subplots that help me get to know the characters and more deeply engage with certain themes of the show but which ultimately tie back into the main plot in some way and which are also generally wrapped up by the end, to the extent that it is possible to do so; and writing which doesn't waste a single second of the, by definition, limited time the cast and crew have to tell me this story.

Countdown had none of those things, and the show paid a price for it. Which is sad for a lot of reasons.

Full analysis under the cut. (There are spoilers; read at your own risk.)

I was genuinely excited by Countdown when it was first announced. I thought the premise was intriguing, and obviously the cast was, too. The "task force" mechanic seemed pretty well suited to a limited series: a group of previously unconnected people (who turned out to be even more interesting than just that), brought together to solve a high-stakes problem over a specific period of time. This, layered with the Mark Meachum brain tumor subplot, seemed actually pretty promising. The stakes were high in both the individual and global sense, which are critical for any kind of action story. I felt that this interweaving of "countdown" themes was clever, if a little heavy-handed, and I was looking forward to watching Jensen do his thing on a platform with broader reach alongside a cast that, by all accounts, was pretty damn wonderful together. I was a little leery of the terrorism plot, and knew the show was likely to amount to naked copaganda, but was hopeful that there would be some nuance to the storytelling and was more than willing to give it a try.

In short, I was rooting for the show and everybody involved.

And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it the entire time, actually. The cast were all incredible, and I fell hard for them and, crucially, for their characters, despite the fact that we didn't get to know most of them on any kind of human level.

There were also a lot of things that drove me insane.

From the very beginning, the pacing of the show felt off to me. They would spend entire episodes doing what amounted to basically nothing that actually furthered their overarching plot or the primary subplot. Not uncommon on a 22-episode-per-season series, but unforgivable in a limited series. Every moment counts. Even my husband remarked on it. There were plenty of times when the show actually felt, well, boring.

Despite that, I was willing to wait for the payoff, if only because I got to watch some awesome people being awesome together every week. So every Wednesday we'd watch the new episode together, and every Wednesday we'd be disappointed. But I kept the faith. Every week I'd mutter, "Derek Haas, I'm trusting you." (My husband did not trust Derek Haas, but he watched with me anyway.)

Then we got to episode 10. This is the episode where the team finally takes out their Big Bad, the one they've been chasing all season (the only one that ever showed up in any promos), managing to both miraculously defuse the dirty bomb that will destroy LA and kill Volchek, saving their city and the day.

This all happens within the first ten minutes of the episode.

Meachum starts treatment for his previously-believed-to-be-lethal brain tumor shortly after, with the rest of the team showing up to support him at the hospital. It's a nice moment. Meachum and his love interest, Oliveras, intentionally part ways without hooking up.

Everybody goes their separate ways, and there's a ten-month time jump, followed by the introduction of a new character we know nothing about, who discovers a fresh new terrorist plot (a white nationalist this time, guys--see, we don't think only foreigners are terrorists!), which brings the team back together, sans Oliveras (so Mark can have a bitch fit about it, to show he still cares) and plus the new guy, Fitz.

There are only three full episodes left in the season at this point.

"Oh my God," I said out loud. "Haas is shooting for a second season."

I was furious. Not that Haas would want the show to go on--it seems like everyone did, and I wasn't opposed to having more of the show. I wanted more time with these characters, actually, especially since I still didn't feel like I knew most of them ten episodes in. I was furious about the way that he did it: blatantly, unapologetically setting up for a second season, rather than doing a really good limited series and letting that speak for itself and lead to more.

Here's the thing: there was absolutely no payoff from either of the major plots that the show was marketed on. None. All we got from Volchek was a very brief shot of him with a hole in his head. All we got from Meachum's brush with death was a paltry love triangle (between Meachum, Meachum's doctor, and Oliveras, who introduced them), and a throwaway exchange designed purely to make Supernatural fans scream, which, yeah, I did: when asked how he's feeling, Mark responds, "Like Lazarus." That's all we get. During the ten-month time jump, this man beats fucking brain cancer, the primary subplot of the show, and we never hear a goddamn word about it.

The stakes were so incredibly high, and there was so much they could've done with them. But where they ended up didn't live up to what Haas had promised.

The last three episodes of the show introduce a new villain and main plot, waffle around a few old subplots, and end on a deeply unsatisfying cliffhanger, which, thanks to Haas's hubris and blatant scrapping for a second season, will never be resolved. There are few, if any, meaningful callbacks to anything that happens in the first 9.5 episodes; it's as if the only thing that happened in them was the team got together and Meachum and Oliveras had some brief will-they/won't-they action. My husband and I kept waiting for something to bring us back to the original plot. "It was too easy," we kept saying. "We missed something. They missed something. Maybe Volchek's not dead. Maybe Drew's not dead. Maybe Meachum's cancer isn't gone and he's faking it." We were, of course, wrong on every. single. count.

But we felt that way because we were promised a limited series, and viewers expect certain things from that type of production. Countdown simply didn't deliver, and now we know why: Haas never actually intended to create a limited series. He intended to create a new blockbuster cop show, and he failed. And what's awful about it is that, if he'd simply written a good limited series, that could've become something more! Instead he wrote something that was neither a good limited series nor a good first season of a television show, and that's pretty fucking sad, actually.

So yeah, I was bummed when Jensen made his announcement. I loved this entire cast, and it seemed like they really loved each other and put a lot into their characters, and I wanted them to have a chance to do that again, hopefully with a better script this time. I was planning to watch, even though my husband informed me in no uncertain terms I would be doing so on my own this time.

I was bummed, yes. But was I surprised? Not even a little bit.

I hope all of these wonderful folks get to work on new projects they're excited about. I will be an Evan Shepherd adorer until I die. And I hope Derek Haas learned his goddamn lesson, because I think what he did with a show that had so much going for it is actually pretty unforgivable.

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