How to overcome a bad debut — the lessons TV can learn from Cougar Town

The TV show opens with the 45-year-old woman appraising her body in the mirror and hating what she sees. Over the course of the pilot, she bails on her best friend, goes trolling for young guys with her young coworker, and gets caught by her son and ex-husband fellating a guy by her pool.

That’s the first episode. In the second episode, we get the hilarity of a 40-something woman trying to keep up with the 20-somethings drinking. In the third, she has to get up extra early to do her hair and makeup so her younger boyfriend doesn’t realize 40-somethings look like 40-somethings. In the fourth, we get the double standard, as she criticizes her womanizing neighbor for his young conquests. The fifth involves her teaching her boyfriend to kiss. And in the sixth, she has to break up with said young boyfriend because he wants to tell her he loves her.

Add in the worst title in the history of television, and no one anywhere would have been surprised if that was the end of the show, if the cancellation axe fell.

Now, that title was Cougar Town, and the 45-year-old woman appraising herself in the mirror and acting like she saw something ugly was the very obviously beautiful Courteney Cox, and the show lasted for six seasons and 102 episodes on two networks.

For those unfamiliar with how television series typically work, there’s a pilot filmed. Sometimes it gets picked up and sometimes it doesn’t. If it does, it gets a contract for a certain number of episodes, usually a low-ish number that can get extended if it does well. They film the episodes a little while ahead of time, so if something doesn’t click with the audience in Episode X, they can’t do much about it until Episode X+5 (or whatever). If the show is bad, they don’t extend the order to a full season and/or cancel the show. If it’s very bad, they don’t even air all the episodes filmed, or they consign the last few episodes to airing on some Saturday in April.

With all that information, the fact that Cougar Town went longer than those six episodes is a bleedin’ miracle.

Oh, the show had pedigree. It starred the aforementioned Cox and it was from Bill Lawrence (the Scrubs guy). The powers that be definitely wanted it to succeed. But from the cold open, with Cox in the mirror, to the first scene, where they offer a cursory non-gross excuse for the show’s title by showing that the local high school is called the Cougars, to … well, just about everything that happened over the first six episodes of the show, it seemed doomed for failure.

But then something happened. Lawrence & Co. appeared to realize they had something in Cougar Town, and it was wholly something other than what they expected to have. Friendship. The relationships the show established early — Cox and Busy Philipps, Cox and Christa Miller, Ian Gomez and Brian Van Holt, Josh Hopkins, Dan Byrd — were, in true Lawrencian fashion (think Turk and J.D.) the foundation for a good show, even a very good one. It just couldn’t be the “older lady trolls for young tail” show that it was purported to be.

So they switched. In the sixth episode, Cox’s Jules Cobb dumped her boyfriend, played by Nick Zano.

(Quick aside: I mentioned the actor who played the boyfriend there because there was about six-year period where Zano played the brief love interest in every single television show. He was on Cougar Town, Melrose Place, 90210, 2 Broke Girls, Happy Endings, Mom, and One Big Happy. He was on all of them but Mom at least five times; he was in none of them more than nine. Nick Zano is a ridiculously attractive man, but goodness there had to be at least one other actor out there between 2009 and 2015.)

Anyway, they switched. Jules dumped her boyfriend in the sixth episode. In the seventh, she went on a quasi-date with a much older man. In the eighth, she started dating Scott Foley, sort of a generation-older Nick Zano. From that point on, through three seasons on ABC and then three more on TBS, it became a show about friends drinking wine, and it was genuinely good, with recurring gags (Jules had a different ridiculously large wine glass each season, the characters invented a game called Penny Can) and recurring characters (Jules’ dad Chick, the creepy neighbor Tom) and what became one of the best characters in television history (Brian Van Holt’s Bobby Cobb, and I’m not exaggerating when I say he was one of the handful of best characters of all time; he was amazing).

But think back to that beginning. Most sitcoms — ones not helmed by Bill Lawrence and Courteney Cox, ones not arriving with a built-in leash — never would have gotten to work out their kinks beyond those six episodes. Because while there were moments in the early going that showed what the show might become, by and large what we got from early Cougar Town was a big exercise in “Wait, what the heck are y’all doing?”

I’m not saying networks have historically been too quick to pull the trigger on a show. But the same season as Cougar Town debuted, ABC had a sitcom called Romantically Challenged, about a … recently divorced single mom who was learning how to be on her own for the first time in a generation. I didn’t watch it, so I can’t speak to how good it was, but instead of Bill Lawrence, Courteney Cox, and some interesting names down the cast list, the show came from Ricky Blitt (who?), Alyssa Milano (famous, but not Friends-famous, and a supporting cast headlined by Kyle Bornheimer and not much else. Instead of getting six episodes and then more to figure itself out and find its footing, Romantically Challenged got seven episodes of production, with only four getting aired (apparently it was so bad the other three episodes didn’t get burned off on some random Saturday; they didn’t even get released online — ABC consigned them to television’s ghost graveyard).

Could Challenged have become Cougar Town with more rope? Not a clue. Probably not, just because making a good TV show is hard even if you haven’t started out with a bad TV show to begin with. But the TV landscape is littered with shows that networks, cable channels, streaming services thought were good enough to bring to air only to bail on them after barely enough episodes to fill a movie running time. And I can just about guarantee there were shows out there that could have, like Cougar Town, figured themselves out and become excellent shows.

If only they had gotten the chance.