And I talk about it over at Tor.com. It’s the equivalent of me walking up to 30 Rockefeller and slapping an outside pillar with a cotton glove, but at least this way no one can put it on YouTube and get me arrested for assault with a deadly custom.

I am disappointed about the cancellation, since a world populated with slightly-speculative dramas filled with awesome character actors is pretty much my dreamscape. I am also, always, a little surprised when a show with promise gets canceled, because the first time in my youth that happened, with the X-Files, they actually got the big salvage and kept going until they sucked, and then had four more seasons after that. Curse you, formative years, and your beautiful lies about the longevity of offbeat TV series!

However, when I went to saveoneshow.com to put my vote in for Kings, I saw that about a dozen shows were on the block, including ones I thought were pretty popular, like Chuck. Are networks just ousting everybody and putting reality shows in their places?

(For those who want to catch up on Kings but don’t like Hulu, the SciFi Channel is airing them all in a row starting at 11pm tonight – the only time slot worse than its current Saturday slot! *sigh*)

It has begun.

Everywhere you turn in Manhattan, a charter bus is spitting out four dozen slackjawed senior-year Civics students. Uniformed in skinny jeans and multiple scarves, armed with iPhones, they stand in clumps on the sidewalk, lost in a haze of their own youthful hormones, trying desperately to look unimpressed.

These teens, somehow, are infinitely worse series of businesslike pro tourists with their precision unloads and the speedy point-and-walk tour guides. Something about three hundred adolescents before coffee in the morning just beats you down, you know?

(This morning, one of them whispered under her breath to a boy, “Everything’s so TALL!” When he laughed, she shrugged and laughed, too, and said, “Whatever, it’s lame,” and it was more fraught than a Merchant Ivory movie. I could hardly walk through the unspoken feelings.)