Why Tom Swift Was Cancelled

 TOM SWIFT is the first CW adventure show featuring a Black gay man as the lead character. We all had high hopes for it. Now the CW has announced its cancellation.

Why? The ratings were, frankly, shitty. No one was watching. Was it because of the gay Black lead?

No.

The show was awful. It really was. I could see what they were trying to do, but it was all done ... badly. Tom himself simply wasn't very engaging. I didn't really much care about his personal struggles. The networked hyped that he was gay, and they did make it very clear that Tom was gay, but his relationship with his sort-of boyfriend ... failed. There was no chemistry between them. Meanwhile, Tom does show serious chemistry with his bodyguard Isaac, but Isaac also has a thing for one of the women on the show. It looks like the studio wanted both a love triangle AND a "will they/won't they?" couple. What they got was a half-hearted, uninteresting tangle.

I also looks like the studio thought Tom's thing for cars and shoes would make him a cool-guy icon, but that didn't work, either. Yeah, there are the sneaker-heads, but most male viewers don't care what kind of shoe the character wears, even if it has some kind of tech embedded in it, and most female viewers don't care about men's shoes. And the cars such obvious product placement, it was painful. Also, the guy who gets to choose which multi-million dollar car he drives from an entire garage of them automatically becomes less relatable. I didn't envy Tom for his cars, nor did I wish to be him. I only felt he was spoiled.

The overall stakes are too low, or perhaps too abstract. In the first episode, Tom's father boards a Saturn-bound ship that Tom himself built, but the ship explodes after it reaches Saturn. At first, Tom--and everyone else--thinks Dad is dead, but Tom learns his dad is still alive and that a global conspiracy (sigh) sabotaged the ship. Tom now has to rush around the country trying to gather what he needs to rescue his stranded father. The trouble here is that, once the ship explodes, we don't see Dad. We don't feel that he's in danger. And he isn't. The show makes it clear that Dad has plenty of oxygen and whatever else he needs to survive until rescue comes, and in the series, Tom goes off on long, non-Dad tangents, and doesn't seem to be all that concerned that his dad is stranded in space. We have a "we'll get around to it" feeling here. Additionally, Tom doesn't like Dad very much, and for good reason. Dad is cold, homphobic, and plain ol' bitchy to Tom, who would frankly be better off without him. The viewer is left wondering why Tom is so bent on rescuing him at all.

The world-building was also lacking. The show is set in modern-day America, but Tom somehow has access to Star Trek technology--a faster-than-light drive, nanobots, easy retroviruses, and of course, an omniscient AI that malfunctions whenever the plot requires it. Tom's inventions show up lightning-quick, too. In one episode, Tom is able to whip up a miracle drug from some tree sap in just a few minutes. Star Trek can get away with it because of the far-future setting. Tony Stark in the Marvel movies can get away with it because of the super-hero setting. But for this show, the viewer is forced to wonder why all this fantastic tech hasn't made its way into the mainstream.

We also have no decent antagonists. The antagonist is a nebulous conspiracy called The Road Back. The heavy hitters in the organization are, frankly, bland. The group's aims are vague, but they seem to want to roll technology back to prevent ecological disaster. How is this a bad thing? Their members also act with astounding stupidity, which Tom himself fails to take advantage of. In one late-season episode, Tom is talking one-on-one with a tiny, Hollywood-thin woman who is a heavy-hitter in Road Back. She possesses a bit of tech Tom needs to rescue Dad, and she snottily refuses to tell him where it is. I watched this, thinking, "When is he going to grab her and force her to talk? When is he going to conk her over the head and tie her up in the basement until she talks? She's a third his size, has no bodyguards, no weapons, nothing, and she's making threats. Come on, Tom! Get her!" But she simply walks out of the room, leaving Tom shrugging helplessly.

Bad world-building, unsympathetic characters, no romance. It all equals a bad show.

 

The Teacher Shortage--Now

I think most people were thinking that the teacher shortage was something that would show up some time in the distant future, ten years or more down the road or something. It isn't. It's happening right now. You and your kids are going to feel it this school year:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/03/school-teacher-shortage/

The TL;DR version is that thousands and thousands and thousands of teacher positions are going unfilled across the country. Every single school and school district is feeling it. My own district in Wherever is one of the higher-paying districts in the state. Not long ago, a single vacancy garnered dozens of applications, and we had very few vacancies. Wherever was able to poach teachers from other districts, in fact. A few years ago, we had a special education position open up in mid-year, and Wherever persuaded a teacher one town over to leave and teach for us.

Now? I see the HR department putting out several vacancies a week. Just yesterday, they posted three more. And they can't get applicants. Keep in mind that teachers used to fight to teach in Wherever. Now there just aren't enough teachers to go around.

The trouble is, all the solutions are long-term. You've heard it before, and it hasn't changed. We need to increase salaries, improve benefits, reduce class sizes and workloads, and stop vilifying teachers. (Funny that when the pandemic started, we were heroes who restructured schools in less than 24 hours in order to teach and help and reach students during a national emergency, then less than a year later, we were mustache-twirling villains who are trying to wreck every child's life.) But all this will take time. Even if the legislature passed budgets that gave all teachers a 20% raise and restored all benefits and retirement to what they were in 1990, the shortage will continue. It takes four or five years of college to make a teacher, and right now teacher-education programs are empty. Young people aren't going into teaching. Meanwhile, the old guard is bailing out to retire early, and the middle guard is taking jobs elsewhere. If all the problems surrounding teaching were solved tomorrow, it would still be four or five years before the shortage ended.

And rather than address the big issues, some places are trying to lure people into teaching by loosening the licensing. Are you a vet? You can teach! Are you married to a vet? You can teach! Do you have a degree of some kind, any kind? You can teach! Are you in the National Guard? You can teach!

Some people are hearing the call and marching into the classroom, but it's not enough. You can't solve a staffing problem of thousands by hiring a few hundred. And in any case, I doubt retention from the National Guard/vet/business degree set will be very high. The school will be lucky if these people get through three months before they throw up their hands and flee. It's not because the kids are awful, but because they just don't know how to do the job. (I wonder what their state-mandated evaluations will look like?)

No one is allowed to act surprised that this shortage hitting so fast and so hard. Teachers and schools have been shouting about it since the pandemic began. But as I said above, I think the general public (and the legislature) said, "Yeah, yeah. We have time. The shortage is a few years away yet."

It isn't. It's here. It's now.