This is why I hate television. Fox has canceled "Drive" after only four episodes aired.

Which means not only has another promising show bitten the dust, but yet another serialized show will leave us forever hanging.

Not that it's a particularly surprising move on the network's part. "Drive" averaged only 5.6 million viewers per episode, which — in the world of network television — is bad.

But the short life and early death of "Drive" involves a whole bunch of the things that I hate about television, including:

• Bad scheduling: What in the world were they thinking at Fox when they decided to premiere "Drive" on a Sunday night? And not just any Sunday night, but the one on which HBO aired the final-season premiere of "The Sopranos"?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I'm no scheduling genius, but wouldn't it perhaps have made more sense to premiere "Drive" on Monday? Maybe even push "24" up an hour to 7 p.m. for one week and air the "Drive" pilot at 8 p.m. on a week when there was not a new episode of "Heroes"?

• Lack of patience: Given that the first two hours of "Drive" aired in a two-hour block, the show really only got three outings before it was axed.

Whatever happened to trying to build an audience?

• Quality loses out: At least for its first four hours, "Drive" produced exciting, watchable episodes that not much of anybody watched.

On the other hand, the show it replaced on Fox's schedule, "Prison Break," degenerated in its second season into an embarrassingly bad, unwatchable piece of junk. And yet enough viewers tuned in for it to be renewed for a third season.

• Sticking it to viewers: OK, so "only" 5.6 million viewers were watching "Drive." But those of us who were among those 5.6 million will never find out what was going on.

Like most serialized shows, "Drive" was loaded with mysteries. The characters in the race had secrets; the identities of those behind the race were secret; their motives were secret.

And we're never going to find out what those secrets were. Even if the two episodes that are sitting on the shelf are ever seen anywhere (like the Internet), we won't come close to the end of the 13-episode story arc.

And that stinks.

I DON'T REALLY hate television, of course. I love television. If I didn't love it, I couldn't work up the emotion to hate it when things like this happen.

It would be just awful to be a TV critic if you really hate television. What a miserable life that would be, and it could turn you into a miserable person.

I have, however, known a few TV critics who hate television. ...

ONE OF THE REASONS Fox pulled the plug on "Drive" is because "24" has been getting some of its worst ratings ever the past couple of weeks with "Drive" as its lead-in.

(Instead, "House" reruns will air Mondays at 7 p.m. until further notice.)

Just an FYI for my friends at Fox: The rating problems of "24" have a whole lot to do with how bad that show has gotten in recent weeks.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com