Carnivale - The Loose Ends

...an early morning rant... no 3rd season
(and yes, I'm aware I'm a day late and a dollar short in agonising over this, but some rants are timeless)
Evidently there's only two seasons of HBO's Carnivale. (We've rented both seasons over the past few weeks) Lovely. Isn't that always the way? You get engrossed, entangled with plots and sub-plots and characters that make you think. It's brain-food. Few and far between are any tv series that could stand up to an engaging novel. You know what kind of novels I mean...the ones that have more twists and turns than a Blue Ridge Mountain road. The ones you go to bed thinking about. They Stick. The ones that, after reading 400 pages, you look up from the print and wonder what the hell room you're in. The Carnivale series was in a class of it's own.
I read a sentence one of the execs had written in 2005 on the savecarnivale.org. He said, "I mean how does one mass-market esoterica?" (Clancy Brown) {See edit at bottom}
You're kidding me, right? Esoterica = things understood by or meant for a select few
Why? because the show had uncommon characters in an uncommon setting?
So, I guess the main stream, mass-marketable stuff are those idiotic half hour sitcoms, or any one of two dozen damn near cookie cutter cop shows.
Question:
Does the majority of couch potatoes want cop shows...and so the networks give us what we want - or... do the networks keep cranking out cop shows, so we just gorge on the plate set before us? (Wouldn't most of us rather have shows with depth and breadth and meat on their bones?)
On a side note: I do realise I'm throwing HBO in the same heap as the other networks. Two points about that... 1. If HBO wants to stand out and be different, they should continue with shows like Carnivale. 2. I haven't subscribed to HBO in more than ten years. I've caught it here and there when we've gotten free weekends or set up new cable service, and to be honest, every time I wanted to watch a decent movie (give HBO another chance), I kept catching the original Rocky. uggh. When I'm ready for an evening of movies, it's worth it to me to toddle down to Family Video.
EDITED(PS - I apologize! Being caught up in the rant flowing from my feverish head to my fingers, I misspoke about Clancy Brown being a exec. Anonymous has set me straight in the comments. Thanks.)
Alright-I'm done.
The Happy Medium