Dennis Miller’s show was canceled from a cable channel that nobody watches. Whatever. He’s such a phony that his show won’t be missed a bit. Rather than pretend that he’s still the snarky, intelligent badass that people thought he was in the 80′s, the producers of his show should have recognized that he’s a robotic, pretentious bore and gone with it. The great tragedy of the Dennis Miller show isn’t that it totally sucked, but that it had the potential to be brilliant.

To make Miller’s show watchable, they should have taken a cue from Paddy Chayefsky and styled the show after Howard Beale-centered Network News Hour from the second half of Network. Imagine each episode of Miller’s show starting like this :

ANNOUNCER : Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it — how do you feel?

AUDIENCE : WE DON’T WANT TO GET OFF ON A RANT HERE!!

(cue “Bad to the Bone” or some other shitty song that “rocks”)

ANNOUNCER : It’s the Fox Evening News with…Sybil the Soothsayer, Pat Roberson in the “What God Wants You To Do” department, Miss Mata Hari, another installment of “Fuck the Jews with Pat Buchanan”, and starring…

(spotlight opens up on a darkened stage to show Miller standing alone with his arms outstretched in a Christ-like pose)

ANNOUNCER : …the mad genius himself, Dennis Miller!!!

Then again, that might not stoke his ego enough.