Why Don't Trust The B In Apartment 23 Was Canceled By ABC

ABC

It wasn't great to be a Millennial at the top of the 2010s. Not that other folks were having a ball, but by then people of that generation had spent a solid decade growing rapidly disillusioned with the state of the world upon coming of adult age. (As opposed to Gen-Zers and younger, for whom the planet has always been on fire.) They and millions of others had also barely gone through the worst economic recession in the lifetimes of practically anyone still alive today. Plus, on top of somehow being both broke and utterly reckless spenders (or so the "Millennials are killing [Insert Name of Industry]" think-piece cottage industry at the time would have you believe), most of them were still in their early to mid-20s, which is a trying age for anyone who's ever lived.

So, naturally, we did what we always do when we're suffering: looked for opportunities to mock our deeply privileged lives of woe.

Television writers seemed particularly eager to play the world's tiniest violins for the Millennials of the world. Problem was, Michael Patrick King and Whitney Cummings' CBS sitcom "2 Broke Girls," with its laugh track and multi-camera format, was designed squarely for normies (Kat Dennings innocent though), while Lena Dunham's sorta-biographical HBO dramedy "Girls" was too esoteric to represent the experiences of those who didn't occupy the same space as her. Nahnatchka Khan and ABC's "Don't Trust the B—- in Apartment 23," however, was the rare New York City-based comedy series at the time that really spoke to the lives of single, 20-something working-class types. Well, that and the sickos. (As always, that's a compliment.)

Unsurprisingly, "Don't Trust the B" was also short-lived and barely got 26 episodes spread unequally over two seasons before ABC sent it to the chopping block. But why, exactly, did it suffer a premature death? Chalk it up to a mix of bad timing and the series itself being an acquired taste (much like the eponymous bad roommate).

ABC

The premise of "Don't Trust the B" — wide-eyed, small-town gal June Colburn (Dreama Walker) is forced to shack up with hard-partying, responsibility-shirking Chloe (Kristen Ritter) upon moving to NYC — seems innocuous enough; it reads like "2 Broke Girls" with a little more edge. The actual show, though, was much more daring than that. Chloe wasn't merely badly behaved in a cutesy, benign way; she could be legitimately awful. "Don't Trust the B" was also frank about the sexual needs and emotional insecurities that motivate its oddball characters, including the man responsible for your favorite crying gif: James Van Der Beek, gamely sending up his ex-teen heartthrob persona by playing a fictional version of himself who's pals with Chloe. Even Eli (Michael Blaiklock), June and Chloe's peeping neighbor, was a lot like the series around him: pervy, yet also strangely wholesome.

Weirdest of all, real-life chaos demon Eric André operated as the show's straight man (!) by playing June's good-natured co-worker Mark Reynolds.

Despite its bold and idiosyncratic personality, "Don't Trust the B" averaged over six million viewers an episode in its first season, which debuted in April 2012. All the same, ABC elected to shorten season 1 to seven episodes and folded the remaining six episodes into season 2, where they were aired out of order. This apparent attempt at self-sabotage be damned, season 2 still managed to draw a not-at-all-terrible average of 3.8 million viewers per episode. But even that couldn't stop the network from canceling "Don't Trust the B" partway into its second season and declining to air its final eight episodes (which were later released online).

ABC's actions make a little more sense when you realize the network, like the broader media industry, was struggling to figure out what even constituted a hit anymore thanks to delayed viewings and especially the then-newfangled phenomenon that was streaming. "It was right before the metrics sort of changed. Like, we got canceled for numbers that now are considered, like, massive hits, right? It was kind of scheduled badly," Ritter told Michael Rosenbaum on "Inside of You" in 2023, noting (in a very Chloe-esque way) that the show was "dragged around by a s***-smeared dog." But maybe that wasn't all bad in hindsight.

"But it was also very edgy. And we really pushed the envelope. The writing was way ahead of its time. And it was just one of those, like, great little quirky shows that probably served everybody better by just being two seasons," Ritter added, pointing to the show's cult status. A little Chloe does, in fact, go a long way, as the enduring legacy of "Don't Trust the B" illustrates. It's certainly not as though the show's sense of quarter-life malaise is no longer salient.