The circumstances of American Gothic's early demise probably seem on the surface to be quite unremarkable: bad ratings for the show led to quick cancellation. But the real story is much more complicated than that.

New television series that fail to catch an audience right away are sometimes given time to build an audience. In the 1980's NBC's Hill Street Blues weathered initial audience indifference, and more recently the Fox Network's shows The X-Files, Party Of Five and Sliders - not to mention ABC's Murder One - have escaped early termination, despite poor first season ratings. Some shows make friends in the hierarchies of network executives. Unfortunately, the very moment American Gothic faltered in the ratings, it was doomed. And given CBS's institutional identity and relatively recent troubles, American Gothic may have been doomed even before the airing of its pilot.

The Big Four networks each have distinguishable corporate characters that are represented, and reinforced, by the kinds of programs their respective executives choose to schedule. ABC has made an effort to sell itself as America's family network, boasting as signature shows a long string of child-friendly, unsubtly didactic, sitcoms. NBC has made itself number one by positioning itself as the sophisticated, urbane network. And Fox's sole target is the under-fifty demographic advertisers crave. But CBS's special identity has endured longer than any other network's. For decades, CBS has targeted the older television viewer, providing an abundance of programming with a distinctly rural, or Southern, flavouring. In the 1960's countrified sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres were a CBS staple, and in the 1970's the networks showcase drama was The Waltons. The Dukes Of Hazzard, as popular as it was stupid, carried CBS's Southern commitment from the 1970's into the 1980's. Dallas updated an old theme by setting the action in a large Southern city.

In the September 1995 issue of Cinescape, American Gothic executive producer Sam Raimi mentioned that CBS had approached him to do an "X-Files-type" show. Such an approach would have been consistent with CBS's goal for the new season. The theory at the network was that placing something dark and weird in the Friday third-hour timeslot, right after The X-Files, would draw that younger audience to CBS - which theory had, in its favour, the convenient fact that Fox itself did not program anything at that hour. Unfortunately, the hoped-for channel-hopping didn't happen.

In the October 1995 issue of Sci-Fi TV Fall Preview, Robert Tapert (another American Gothic executive producer) expressed a fear that would turn out to be well founded. There was a huge changeover in management at CBS, prompting Tapert to note that "the people at CBS who championed American Gothic are no longer at CBS."

Critics complained about American Gothic's storyline being confusing, convoluted, and self contradictory. Confusing is what one would expect a TV series to be if despite its having been designed to unfold in a very particular way, its broadcaster aired many episodes out of order (which CBS did) and skipped four of them altogether: "Potato Boy", "Ring of Fire", "Echo of Your Last Goodbye", and "Strangler". The haphazard order in which the episodes were broadcast created one bit of major confusion: in the final January episode, Dr. Matt Crower is put in an insane asylum, but in the first episode aired in the summer - an episode that should have aired much earlier in the season - Crower is still practicing medicine.