Being pretty sure a heartbreak is headed your way doesn't make it any easier to bear when it happens.

'Terriers' has been canceled by FX, the network announced this morning. It's not surprising but it's immensely sad nonetheless.

If I was being true to myself, this post would be filled with nothing but profane interjections and elaborate curse words. In the name of decorum, not to mention keeping my job, I'm going to try to restrain myself. But this is one of those times that TV really kicks you in the stomach.

Before it ended, I wrote a few pieces (here, here and here, among others) about how sensational this show became as it figured out what it did well and then proceeded to up it several notches from there.

But right now, I want to do what Britt did to the guy he thought Katie cheated with. I want to punch something. I want to drink excessively. I want to sigh and swear for a very long time.

I'm sorry this show didn't go the distance. It eminently deserved another season, but, as hard as this is to say, I can see the financial reasons why the network made the decision that it did.

I just thought that, given that FX's brand stands for quality and risk-taking, that the network would give 'Terriers' one more season to show the world how many wonderful qualities it had.

There's a press phone conference in a few minutes with John Landgraf, president and general manage of FX. When that's over, I'll append a few quotes from him here on why the decision was made to cancel this show.

But rational explanations won't make me feel any less heartsick about this. Damn.

Damn, damn, damn.

UPDATE: Here is a condensed, bullet-point list of some of what Landgraf discussed in a 35-minute conference call with the media on Monday. (By the way, I also recommend this post-mortem interview that Alan Sepinwall conducted with 'Terriers' creator Ted Griffin.)

• Landgraf took issue with the idea that the show's name or marketing had anything to do with its poor ratings. He said that the billboards featuring the dog (and not the show's stars) were only seen by residents of New York and the west side of Los Angeles. Clips that aired on TV were the promotional efforts that were seen by far more of the show's potential audience, Landgraf said. And to make sure that those were not the issue (because if the promotion had been confusing, that could have been a reason to bring the show back), he commissioned market research a few weeks after the show began airing.

• In the course of that research, which was done among 600 adults (200 of whom could be considered regular FX viewers), viewers were shown the 'Terriers' promos, then the show's pilot, then the promos again. They were asked if the promos spots advertising the show provided an accurate representation of 'Terriers,' and the research indicates that viewers thought that the promos indicated the show's content and tone well.

• So, according to Landgraf, most people saw promotional materials that explained what 'Terriers' was. "For reasons that are harder to explain, they just didn't watch the show."

• If he could have changed one thing, he said he might have wished the name was 'Terriers: P.I.' But he said he also didn't think the show's name was the barrier to its success.

• The research also revealed that people thought the show wasn't quite similar to other FX shows; the perception was that it wasn't quite as "edgy, sexy, suspenseful." As Landgraf noted, the "things that really worked about the show tended to be really subtle.... And I don't think subtlety is something the American public is buying in droves today."

• He noted later that "FX has had a lot of shows on the air that are very good shows, like 'The Shield' and 'Rescue Me' and 'Nip/Tuck' and 'Sons of Anarchy' -- they have layers of subtlety but they're not, on the surface of them, particularly subtle shows. On the other hand, we've also done relatively well with 'Justified,' which I think is a relatively subtle show. I guess I would say, one of the challenges of 'Terriers' is that a buddy detective show is something people have seen a lot of, so you have to convince people that this one's worth watching, because, like 'The Rockford Files,' it's better than the other ones," he noted. "That's a hard thing to convince people of," and, as he pointed out, viewers have many other options when it comes to detective shows.

• When it came to the ratings for 'Terriers,' Landgraf said they were just so bad that a relaunch wasn't a realistic option (especially given that, in the network's view, the original marketing of the show wasn't the problem). In the show's primary airing on Wednesdays, it was getting 509,000 viewers in the 18-49 demographic. By comparison, in their first seasons, 'Dirt' got 1.6 million in the same demographic, 'The Riches' got 1.4 million and 'Damages' got 1.1 million.

• Over multiple airings, 'Terriers' was picking up a total of 1.6 million viewers, while 'Dirt' got 3.7 million and 'Damages' got 2.4 million. Essentially, 'Terriers' could have doubled or tripled its ratings and still been too low-rated by FX's standards (or any network's standards, really).

• As far as any potential plan to do something different in the second season, Landgraf said that, creatively, 'Terriers' was just fine. "I don't think you could make 'Terriers' much better," he said. "It only improved throughout the run of [season 1] episodes. They made it great. Now, could you make it more explicitly sexy or more explicitly violent? I suppose you could but [I believe] that would feel cheap. Part of what was great about 'Terriers' was its integrity and its subtlety."

• "We wish there was a perfect intersection between all that is good and all that is successful," he said. "But the reality is that there's a relatively poor correlation between excellence and commercial success. And what we said at FX all along was, we intend to find the points where those two things intersect." In its "at bats" over the past decade or so, Langraf noted, FX has a batting average of about .500, in terms of shows that were successful and those that weren't. "And we're going to keep swinging. We're going to keep plugging. We're going to renew the shows that hit both those targets and keep them on the air for a long long time and the ones that miss either one of those targets, we're going to move on."

• The thing about TV is that nobody ever really knows what viewers are going to respond to. As Landgraf noted, 'Sons of Anarchy' wasn't exactly thought to be a slam-dunk before it premiered, and it's now the network's biggest hit. "I think all successes are obvious in 20-20 hindsight. None of them are obvious with foresight."

• He said the network would consider the kind of high-concept genre shows that have worked for HBO and AMC of late ('True Blood,' 'The Walking Dead'). "I would be happy to put a show on the air that was based on a graphic novel property," he said. "My question would be, how can FX and how can television bring something to the table that film cannot?"

• Finally, Landgraf sounded genuinely pained that 'Terriers' didn't make it. "I just couldn't find any way, from a business standpoint, or quantitatively, to figure out how to do a second season of this show. And that's really unfortunate, because I love it," he said. Even he found it hard to stop using the present tense.


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