Well, it's official: Fox has canceled 'Lone Star.'

The network announced that 'Lie to Me' will occupy the show's former time slot as of Monday.

It's depressing that a promising, complex show got canned after just two episodes. But what's truly troubling is that the death of 'Lone Star' is a symptom of everything that has gone wrong at the broadcast networks.

Any critic who sat through all the fall pilots this year will tell you the same thing: They were mostly bad.

And they weren't bad in "let's try this crazy idea!" ways. They were just boring. The broadcast network dramas that made my Fall's Best New Shows list definitely weren't groundbreaking in any way. They were simply the best of a pallid bunch and decently executed examples of a few different TV genres.

On the derivative shows that the broadcast networks came up with, the edges were worn down and most of the characters were blandified to the point of irrelevance. 'Lone Star,' which hewed to no particular formula, was the exception.

Given that the one show that got through the broadcast network filtering process died a quick death, will next year's crop of shows be even worse? I fear that may be the case. I hope I'm wrong, but well before the death of 'Lone Star,' I had deep misgivings about the network show-creation process in general.

In yesterday's 'Talking TV with Ryan & Ryan' podcast, veteran writer/producer Shawn Ryan ('Lie to Me,' 'Terriers,' 'The Shield,' 'The Unit,' 'Ride-Along') unveiled a list of 'Five Things That Bother Showrunners.' One of those things is the "layers of network notes" that mess with the DNA of almost every new and veteran show on TV.

"Notes" is the Hollywood term for feedback on scripts and episodes in progress, and most showrunners get notes from studio executives, network executives and various other people. Conversations with most writers and showrunners are rife with examples of notes that don't makes sense, notes that contradict each other and cancel each other out and notes that reek of micromanagement. Writers of all shows get notes, but the process is apparently much worse and intrusive at the broadcast networks.

Now, notes are not always wrong and they're not always bad, but they tend to wear on producers who have an actual vision, and, especially at the broadcast networks, there are just too many of them. Between the pervasiveness of not-helpful notes and the overall timidness displayed by the networks when it comes to buying pilots, what hope is there for another 'Lone Star' making it through the gauntlet next year?

Not a lot. It looks like cable's creative dominance isn't waning any time soon.

There are a few signs of hope. ABC's pilots have been generally unimpressive if not terrible for a few seasons now, but there's a new top executive, Paul Lee, at that network. NBC will be installing a new network honcho now that Jeff Zucker, a famously clueless micromanager of TV shows, is finally gone.

CBS manages to come up with winners once in a while, despite its devotion to procedural formats. 'The Good Wife' manages to be more than the sum of what could be formulaic parts, and 'The Defenders' was actually kind of fun, rather than rigid and dour like most 2010 drama pilots.

And to be fair and/or rational, there's every chance that 'Lone Star' was the right show on the wrong network in the wrong time slot. And I can logically understand why America didn't embrace a show about a con man swindling people out of their savings and cheating on two different women.

Maybe the quick death of 'Lone Star' is just one of those things, and next year's broadcast network crop will contain some spectacular finds.

But it's hard to be optimistic. And like the con man's victims on 'Lone Star,' it's hard not to feel a little cheated.



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