Put the Book of Daniel on iTunes!

Today, NBC announced the immediate and sudden cancellation of The Book of Daniel — a quirky little show about a drug-addicted Episcopal priest who talks directly and candidly to a Jesus only he can see. Oh — and he has a gay son. Oh — and his wife’s an alcoholic. Oh — and his mother’s got Alzheimer’s Disease. Oh — and his father, a church official, is having a long-term affair with the local bishop.

In short: Book of Daniel was a complex dark comedy that was just too honest for t.v. Fundamentalists, lured in by the title, were turned off by a drug addict having a buddy-buddy relationship with Jesus. Gay people who might have tuned in were put off by the Biblical title and the Friday night time slot. Only those of with Tivos ever saw the show, apparently … and now, we won’t see any more of it, ever.

Unless, that is, we can convince NBC to put the remaining episodes on iTunes.

The show was cancelled (or NBC claims the show was cancelled) because the show drew inadequate ratings. But even on the show’s least-watched week, four million people tuned in. Let’s say just two percent of those are involved enough in the show to download the next episode from iTunes. That’s eighty thousand people — or $160,00 dollars in revenue for the network. Multiply that by the total number of episodes remaining in the series … and The Book of Daniel could still generate significant revenue for NBC.

I mean, now that the program’s been yanked, and now that NBC has made the decision never to air the remaining episodes, all the tapes are gonna do is rot on the shelf. Why not make ’em available to those of us who would spend twenty bucks or so to see the rest of the series?