Hollywood Q&A

Q: Is Tyler Perry’s “The Haves and the Have Nots” coming back?

A: We “have” a few more episodes of the beloved, long-running OWN drama left, after which we all become “have nots.”

The show is midway through its eighth season, and the news of its cancellation came as it went into mid-season hiatus. The back half of this now-final season will premiere in May.

The series has been a flagship for OWN, helping revive its ratings after a few rough early years, and it seems that no one is sadder to see it go than Oprah Winfrey herself (she’s the “O” and “W” in OWN, in case you didn’t know).

“’The Haves and the Have Nots’ was the first scripted drama we aired on OWN, and to say it took off from the first day it hit the air is an understatement,” she said in the official announcement of the show’s cancellation. “I will be watching alongside you all during this final season.”

She didn’t say why the show is ending, but we can make some guesses. Its ratings have been falling pretty steadily over the past few seasons — the first half of Season 8 drew just over a million sets of eyes on average, whereas last season drew an average of 1.32 million, and early in the show’s run, that number was nearly double at close to 3 million.

But a bigger factor is likely that Tyler Perry has a new deal with ViacomCBS. “The Haves and the Have Nots” was the last of the many shows Perry produced for OWN before moving over to produce for ViacomCBS’s BET.

It’s nice that OWN is giving us so much advanced notice. Fans have gotten attached to the twisting, intricate lives depicted on the show, and they will surely want to tune in to see how, and if, those stories are resolved.

Q: Who sings the theme for “Dawson’s Creek”?

A: This seemed like it was going to be easy. I was about to go ahead and say that it’s Paula Cole, singing “I Don’t Want to Wait,” one of the great pop-songs-as-theme-songs in TV history, but that’s because I haven’t checked in on “Dawson’s Creek” in a while.

If you’re watching it on Netflix these days, or on some DVD releases, you’re hearing a different theme: “Run Like Mad” by Canadian pop star Jann Arden.

That may be disappointing for original fans, but it was a rather clever selection. Swapping out the theme song of a beloved show always risks angering the purists in the audience, but picking “Run Like Mad” kind of out-pures the purists because it was the producers’ original choice. It was, in fact, written and recorded specifically for use as the “Dawson’s Creek” theme.

The story goes that, after commissioning Arden to do the theme, the show’s producers put together a series of promotional videos for the show with various then-current pop songs in the background. A WB Network exec saw the one with “I Don’t Want to Wait” on the soundtrack and asked the producers to use that as the theme instead.

They did, but unfortunately they only cleared the song rights for broadcast and the first two seasons of a DVD release. And now the rights holders aren’t willing to shell out for more.

Despite things coming back full circle to Arden’s song, no one’s really happy with the arrangement (pun not intended, but gladly left in).

Cole is downright angry. “Not only do I have to deal … with my name being both married to and usurped by the success of that show, but, even worse, I’m now being erased from the association with ‘Dawson’s Creek’ due to [what feels to me like] corporate greed,” she fumed in an interview with the Huffington Post.

Arden’s a little annoyed, too, but with herself. She told the Huffington Post (for a different story) that people are now asking her where they can hear the rest of “Run Like Mad.” “I have to explain to them, ‘That is the full version.’ I was so naive that I only wrote 32 seconds of song.”

That being said, if you are watching the series on Netflix, the final episode of the series still features Cole’s song despite all other episodes featuring Arden’s.

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