Emily's Reasons Why Not

Emily's Reasons Why Not
Khary Payton as Josh, Heather Graham as Emily, and Nadia Dajani as Reilly
Format	Sitcom
Created by	Carrie Gerlach
Developed by	Emily Kapnek
Starring	Heather Graham Nadia Dajani James Patrick Stuart Khary Payton Smith Cho
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	7 (6 unaired)
Production
Running time	30 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	ABC
Original airing	January 9, 2006 (2006-01-09)

Emily's Reasons Why Not is a television series starring Heather Graham. The show, which was based on the novel of the same name, was canceled by its broadcaster, ABC, after airing one episode on January 9, 2006.

[edit] Premise

The series centered on Emily (Graham), an author of self-help books who is unable to find success in romance. In the premiere episode she ends a bad relationship and adopts a new rule for her romances: if she can list five reasons to break up with a guy then she does so. Emily gets help from her friends, among them Josh, whose character is strongly based on gay stereotypes. The show was widely considered a less risqué copycat of Sex and the City.^[1][2]

In the first episode, she is convinced that the man she was dating was gay when he was actually a devout Mormon practicing chastity before marriage. His open virginity is presented through gay stereotypes, and his preferred sport, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is described as "the gayest sport there is" by Emily's former boyfriend.^[3]

[edit] Reception

The show drew fire from pro-abstinence groups for its inability to portray an abstinent person and relying on stereotypes of homosexuality to portray an intentional virgin.^{[citation needed]}

It was reported that ABC committed to the show before seeing a script. Despite heavy promotion by both Sony Pictures Television and ABC, the show was pulled after the first episode due to drawing only 6.2 million viewers. Production was stopped after filming six episodes. ABC was said to have spent millions on promotion, including airtime, billboards and radio ads, and considered Emily to be the 'linchpin' of the network's post-football Monday-night schedule. The promotion was so heavy and the cancellation so abrupt that some magazines found themselves carrying cover stories about a canceled show. After viewing it, ABC's entertainment president suggested that they considered the show lackluster and unlikely to improve.^[4]

One television critic^[who?] said there are "over a million 'reasons why not' for this sorry show."^{[citation needed]} The New York Times attributed the cancellation in part to the extremely unappealing nature of the main character and the portrayal by Graham.^[5]

In 2006, all seven episodes of the show aired on Spain's pay-TV channel Cosmopolitan,^[6] on Sony Entertainment Television (Latin America),^[7] on ORF1 in Austria, and on POP TV in Slovenia.

[edit] Cast

• Emily Sanders (Heather Graham)
• Reilly Harvey (Nadia Dajani)
• Midas O'Shay (James Patrick Stuart)
• Josh (Khary Payton)
• Glitter Cho (Smith Cho)

[edit] Episodes

[edit] DVD release

[edit] See also

• List of television series cancelled after one episode

[edit] References

This article uses bare URLs for citations. Please consider adding full citations so that the article remains verifiable. Several templates and the Reflinks tool are available to assist in formatting. (Reflinks documentation) (November 2011)

[edit] External links

• Emily's Reasons Why Not at the Internet Movie Database
• Emily's Reasons Why Not at TV.com
• Emily's Reasons Why Not at Metacritic
• Washington Post article in which the programming chief at ABC discusses why the show was canceled and why it got as far as it did.
• Episode clip on bing.com