Josh Friedman, the creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, pens a wonderful last entry on FOX’s TSCC explaining the cancellation without pointing any fingers or stirring any negative sentiments.

What a class act.

While I am truly saddened that TSCC was canceled—I’m halfway through the second season and haven’t even gotten to what are widely considered the best episodes—I take solace in the fact that exceptional shows are canceled all the time, including The Wire and Arrested Development. It truly is a wonderful show and a must-see for anyone who considers themselves a Terminator fan.

The first two Terminators were iconic and landmarks in film history when they were released but it wasn’t until a recent rewatching inspired me to give TSCC a try, along with Terminator Salvation. Salvation was decent, but definitely pushed the envelope on CGI and action choreography more than good old-fashioned story-telling and plot. TSCC, while it lacked the CGI budget of the films, fully made up for it with great writing and terrific casting.

Josh Friedman, thanks for the wonderful series and I look forward to seeing your new work.

Update (May 29, 2011)

Since Fox removed Josh’s blog along with the rest of the show website, his blog post is reproduced below:

By now most of you have heard the news that T:SCC is cancelled. I received a call earlier today from Peter Roth at Warner Bros. and I appreciate both his personal and professional support throughout this show’s life. I know a lot of you are angry about the cancellation and want to find a place to direct your anger and to that I say do yourself a favor and find a way to move past it. Every network wants a big fat hit, especially one with a brand name behind it, and Fox was/is no different. They supported the show, they supported my vision of the show, and they gave it plenty of time to find an audience.

And what an audience we found: passionate, intelligent, kind of nuts in a good way. My only complaint about the T:SCC fans is that there aren’t ten million of them. But I prefer to be happy for the ones we had instead of lamenting the ones we didn’t.

Good shows are cancelled every year; smart shows, worthy shows, shows which move their viewers to write blogs and have viewing parties and create action figures and bury executives’ email accounts under thousands of messages. I miss Deadwood and The Wire and Arrested Development but thank God that I still have Rescue Me and The Office and a recently renewed Party Down written by ex-T:SCC writer John Enbom.

Bad shows are cancelled, too. And certainly there are those who did not like what we did and had their own vision for what a Terminator TV show should be. It’s easy to look at low ratings or cancellation as “failure” and for those who believe we’ve gone about this all wrong I’m sure today’s news will only serve to confirm a world view that I would never try to change. We’ve written the show as best we can, executed it to the best of our abilities, and sent it out in the world knowing that we worked out asses off to do something that wouldn’t be a waste of anybody’s forty-three minutes.

Thanks to a brave and talented cast, a feature crew working on a TV schedule, and everyone else who I could list but won’t because they know who they are. Mostly I’d like to thank those of you who’ve supported us and fought for us and given up hours of your life to watch our show. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. The watching.

Hope we do it again soon.

Josh Friedman