The Pentagon Channel today announced the cancellation of its long-running reality TV series, The Abu Zarqawi Hour, saying tonight's special-effects extravaganza, in which Keifer Sutherland and a team of secret agents trail the terrorist mastermind to his hideout and call in a massive airstrike, would be the show's last.
The show originally piloted in 2003, and found a regular place in the Pentagon Channel's prime-time lineup in February 2004, replacing the widely panned sitcom Mission Accomplished, now in syndicated reruns on Fox News.
The Abu Zarqawi Hour debuted to generally favorable reviews, with New York Times critic Dexter Filkins praising the show for its "imaginative" storytelling and "gritty" realism. However, ratings declined sharply in 2005, with many viewers complaining that the show's episodes, which frequently featured the death and/or capture of Zarqawi's closest lieutenants, had become repetitive and unimaginative.
Critics reacted particularly negatively to this year's four-hour special, in which Zarqawi had obvious difficulty staying in character, and was unable to properly reload and fire his Kalishnikov rifle.
Although some critics defended the sequence as a daring experiment in Brechtian alienation technique, most panned the performance, saying it made it extremely hard for the audience to believe that Zarqawi was actually a seasoned terrorist leader, instead of a paid actor pretending to be a terrorist.
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