NBC has canceled Reel Talk, the Saturday morning movie chat show starring Jeffrey Lyons and Alison Bailes (formerly of IFC’s “At the Angelica”). Never exactly a stoker of the flames of the zeitgeist, Reel Talk is probably most familiar to New Yorkers, who have for the past year or so been exposed to a repurposed form of the show screening as part of the loop of noise blaring out of flat screens in the back of taxis. Because this show was useful as a repository for fluffy pull quotes for indistinguishable studio films with the consistency of oatmeal, but was otherwise considered by most people who actually care about movies to be generally unwatchable, the sort of indignation (righteous or otherwise) that accompanies the firing of most name film critics will probably not surround this story. Though Bailes and Lyons have at least temporarily lost their livelihoods as well as a platform from which to influence moviegoers, it seems unlikely that anyone will bemoan the cancellation of Reel Talk as yet another blow to the already crippled culture of film criticism, because Reel Talk’s contribution to film criticism mostly sucked.

But still … what are the chances that the network would replace the bad move critics show with a good movie critics show, or any critics show at all? To say that they’re slim would seem to be overly optimistic. This leaves Lyons’ son Ben as the default prince of TV film criticism, by virtue of the fact that he and his partner Smart Ben are the only TV film critics who still have a show. How long do we give At the Movies before it too falls in the face of total consumer disinterest, thus rendering the post-Ebert era of advert slush branded as criticism mercifully dead? Or will the zombie corpse of At the Movies continue on indefinitely, feasting on brains already softened like ripe bananas, each needlessly hyperbolic, context-oblivious pullquote hammering another nail into the coffin of public film debate?

Happy weekend!