Fox Cancels Ben Stiller Produced Comedy Pilot 'The Station'

For all of his big screen success, Ben Stiller can’t seem to crack the television world. Oh sure, for every successful skit like “The Hustler Of Money” (his parody of “The Color Of Money” which got him on “Saturday Night Live”) or “Zoolander” there is a failed experiment like his titular sketch show “The Ben Stiller Show” which barely survived one season before getting the axe from Fox.

Well, the television studio has done it to him again, canning the gestating comedy “The Station.” As Stiller noted in a tweet late last night, “I like to produce a failed pilot for Fox about once every ten years. Latest was the Station. Written directed and acted by a great group.” While we feel for the guy, the high concept comedy seemed like a hard sell from the start. The single camera show revolved “around a covert CIA operative and his workmates who are embedded in a South American banana republic with a mission to install a new dictator.” A weekly political comedy on Fox? Unless they can work Stewie and Brian in there it probably never stood a chance.

Anyhow, Stiller still has a lot of other projects on his plate including the gestating “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” (which recently lost Noah Baumbach in the director’s chair) as well as the not-quite-dead “Zoolander 2.” As for another TV pilot it might be awhile, but perhaps Stiller can reboot “Heat Vision & Jack” about a former astronaut (Jack Black) and his talking motorcycle (voiced by Owen Wilson). No, we’re not fucking kidding about that. See below: