Cougar Town Will Keep Its Name After All – Good Idea

When I first heard about the idea of changing the name of Courtney Cox’s show, Cougar Town, I thought: what genius is behind this nonsense?  You don’t change a show’s name after it’s already made its way on the air, and you certainly don’t change it if it’s successful.  The main motive for the change is that Cougar Town transitioned from being a star-centered show, to more of an ensemble cast.  Plus, the word “cougar” has surpassed its fifteen minutes of fame and it’s now an excessively off-putting term.  Cougar Town producer, Bill Lawrence, discussed his desire for the name change in a pretty enlightening interview about how pitch meetings work.  The chief problem in the Hollywood of today, is that the people you pitch your show to are usually a bunch of half-wit neanderthals that couldn’t predict the success of a show with even a crystal ball in-hand (we’ve all heard the stories about how everyone and their mother passed on Marc Cherry’s ‘Desperate Housewives).  Lawrence gave a great example of this in his interview.  Picture this: you walk into your pitch meeting and say that you would like to make a show about a bunch of guys that work in a bar.  You would be kicked out of that meeting within 5 seconds – and Cheers never would have made it on the air.  So when the word “cougar” was becoming part of our everyday comedic vernacular, it seemed like the best way to pitch the show.  ABC jumped on it – and now they’re stuck.  While I agree that the title creates issues, I still maintain my original point: what’s done is done.  So I’m happy that it looks like Courtney will remain a cougar for the life of the series.

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