Less than two weeks ago, the staff of Bestweekever.tv put together a spirited and inventive internet campaign whose mission was to convince NBC not to cancel Friday Night Lights. By all accounts, it seemed to be working well; not only did it receive a healthy amount of press coverage, BWE.tv was able to convince over 10,000 people to sign an online petition to save the show. However, over the weekend, all mention of the campaign mysteriously disappeared from the site's homepage. So we decided to do some digging.

According to Viacom insiders familiar with the situation, the campaign immediately began to draw the ire of upper management the second it was launched. You see, Friday Night Lights airs on Friday nights, the same night that Best Week Ever premieres a new episode each week. Although the shows are not direct competitors, Vh1 production execs were less than thrilled that the flagship site of their new Digital Programming unit was using Viacom funds and bandwidth to promote a show that airs on NBC. The irony here is rich, especially when you consider that the entire concept of Best Week Ever revolves around content generated by sources outside of the walls of Viacom AND includes significant amounts of programming aired on other networks.

So, what will become of the campaign? At press time, the answer is not clear. All of the archived posts still remain on the site, but not only have there been no new posts on this topic in over a week, the petition is no longer operational. If you know anything else about this situation, please drop us a line at tips [AT] defamer.com. Until then, developing...