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Fox Broadcasting Network started airing My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss on November 7th, promising a new episode each Sunday. Admitting to being an Apprentice rip-off, the show had its merit, since it was basically a parody on all the high-life big-business go-getter shows, which launched after the success of the original apprentice.

N. Paul Todd, an intricate individual and a billionare unknown to the Forbes list, runs the IOCOR Corporation, which will hire the fabulous winner of the show. There was a little catch, which consisted of Mr. N. Paul Todd being a hired actor and IOCOR being a non-existant multi-billion dollar corporation. The show itself sometimes jumped the shark too fast, with N. Paul Todd sharing his wildly sexist and unethical views on venture capital business with the contestants. There were some clues from some of the contestants who questioned Mr. Todd’s business skills, but nevertheless, the happy bunch of A-professionals seemed to happily participate in activities like selling a chemical to the kids with the help of a cartoon character (they didn’t actually sell the chemical, they just had to come up with a character idea) or pushing reusable toilet paper to some street market visitors in Chicago.

The 5th episode aired on Dec 12, 2004, and since then the show just would not appear on TV screen. From the forums and all the un-official sources it seems that several things happened in sequence:

• The show ranked beneath Nielsen 100
• Fox figured out they could do better with the Sunday night timeslot
• They unexpectedly pulled the show
• They provided no official explanations whatsover, and the official page still creates the impression of show being aired
• They offered no excuse to those who actually watched it

It’s understandable when a network cancels the show, but it’s totally confusing why Fox decided to handle it the worst way possible – providing no explanation and no pointers to where the remaining episodes can be found, and why the show was pulled off. You don’t expect a network like this to put up torrents on the site with free video downloads to those who liked the show, but there should still be some mentioning of it on the show Web site.

So be careful not to get hooked on any show coming from Fox Broadcasting – it might get pulled off totally unexpectedly with no subsequent episodes provided whatsoever, even though the entire show was apparently already filmed.

So what exactly happened to the show? The rumor has it the shooting was completed, so someone in Fox Broadcasting does have a complete set of all the episodes. The secret boss was a monkey in a business suit with the hairdo resebmling Donald Trump, in an obvious take-off on the Apprentice.

MSNBC has an update on the show as of January 18:

We’ll soon know who it was, as FOX plans to put the remaining five episodes online. The network just did the same thing with all eight episodes of the similarly-killed series “Playing it Straight,” although each one of those episodes costs $1.99 to watch. “Big Fat” will apparently be free when it debuts on FOX’s Web site for the show, but there isn’t a premiere date set yet.