RIP Trio

One of my favorite cable channels, Trio, was killed last week by owner NBC Universal. The move was as surprising as the Houston Texans firing Dom Capers.

No cable channel was ever more doomed to fail than Trio. How doomed was it? Trio had a series called “Brilliant but Canceled” featuring TV shows that were taken off the air because nobody watched them. A network must be run by hippies or madmen to schedule shows with a proven track record of nobody watching them.

Well, maybe not nobody. There was me and 18 other people across the country. And we loved it. Trio had wonderful pop culture documentaries about esoteric subjects like comedian Bill Hicks and the notorious 1980 western “Heaven’s Gate.” The channel also showed weird stuff like British journalist Jon Ronson’s creepy series “The Secret Rulers of the World,” which keep me up late for a week last fall.

NBC Universal has moved Trio to the Internet, I suspect, because there is no room left in Siberia. Until our next click, Trio, so long.