TVSquad

When the San Diego Comic-Con opened its doors to allow every corner of television onto their floors, they weren't kidding. After seeing the roster of panels, I'm surprised the original panel from PBS's Washington Week didn't field questions from guys dressed in Transformer cosplay.

Apparently, Warner Brothers set up a panel for just about every television show that have in development including Patricia Heaton's new ABC sitcom The Middle, making it the most "fish out of water" selection for a panel at the geek confab.

And so did the geeks in attendance. The panel only drew around 75 attendees and studio heads ordered Heaton not to introduce the panel because the crowd was too small.

Oooo, that's gotta sting. They couldn't even reach a meaningless 100, 25 of which were attendees who thought they were waiting to talk to the cast of The Middlemen.

But what were they doing there in the first place? Even though Comic-Con has been around forever (aka 39 years), it's still a fairly new marketing and advertising tool for television. So maybe the idea was to throw a bunch of shows the Con's way and see which ones stuck to the wall the longest. Apparently, The Middle lasted as long as a Wacky WallWalker coated in baby spit.

Maybe they have learned their lesson and will reduce their panels to shows that are worth the time of the cosplayers, the geeks and the cyberpunks. So tune in next year when Rue McClanahan, Christine Baranski and Ernest Borgnine attend the Con to promote their new live action Voltron sitcom!