It had the makings of reality-television gold.

The third season of "Wall Street Warriors" started filming last spring, as the financial sector's meltdown accelerated. The show's camera crews captured the pain and anger of the biggest stock market crash in decades.

But right now, the show doesn't have an audience.

"Wall Street Warriors" was shot for Mojo HD, a high-definition cable channel that's shutting down today, leaving the series without a home. Its producers are shopping the show to other networks, with no takers so far.

Its problem: American television viewers are too depressed about their own finances to entertain themselves by watching shows about money, according to industry executives and academics.

"People don't want to come home at the end of the day and have more bad news about their money," said Jeanine Basinger, chairman of the film studies department at Wesleyan University. "They don't want to see the Enron scandal; they don't want to see CEOs getting away with it."

Television ratings reflect that trend. ABC announced last week that it wasn't ordering new episodes for "Dirty Sexy Money," a show about a wealthy and unscrupulous New York family.

In mid-November, only about 3.6 million viewers tuned in live or on the same day to NBC's "Lipstick Jungle," about three high-powered New Yorkers, which is almost half the number who tuned in when the show began.

And Bravo's "First Class All the Way," about extremely rich people going on very posh vacations, was watched by 319,000 people in its premiere episode.

Reviewing "First Class All the Way," Variety chided Bravo for being "tone-deaf — pushing $1,000 a night hotels and caviar dreams to a nation in the throes of a 401(k) nightmare."

"People don't want to watch rich people whine," said Rick Kushman, television columnist for the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee.

In "Lipstick Jungle," for example, a character played by Brooke Shields wars with a former nanny who threatens to write a tell-all book. "A normal person would be like, 'Are you kidding me?' " Kushman said.

Viewers may have been similarly annoyed by some of the characters in early episodes of "Wall Street Warriors," which premiered in October 2006. One featured bankers talking about how "life is good" and boasting in expletive-filled language of waking up each morning with the expectation of making piles of money.

Subsequent episodes featured men in finance flying on private jets, pitching wealthy clients on yachts in the Caribbean and making and losing tens of thousands of dollars in the span of a few minutes.

As the financial crisis deepened after filming of the third season began in April, the drama intensified.

"People are intrigued watching a train wreck," said Sean Skelton, the show's director and co-producer. "I know I've been way more interested in filming my characters this year because it feels like history in the making."

Wall Street's devastation took a starring role. Unaired episodes feature their subjects running into friends who left banking to work as gym teachers when their companies folded and hearing stories about hedge fund managers committing suicide after losing millions.

"When people are killing themselves, it's real drama," Skelton said.

Good drama, yes, but it may not appeal to viewers already reeling from losses to their pension plans and stock market accounts.

Most Wall Street characters aren't as sympathetic as, say, a cancer patient who lost his house in a hurricane and gets an extreme home makeover from Ty Pennington.

Brothers Phil and Ken Brisard, owners of a global equity wealth management company, have appeared on the show. They recently moved into a bigger office because they figured out how to earn money for their clients as the stock market went south.

"There will be some people watching this who are upset — maybe they were wiped out," Ken Brisard said. "But that's the way the cookie crumbles."

Networks are being more cautious about economy-themed programming that could seem insensitive.

Bravo delayed airing the second season of "Million Dollar Listing," a show about real estate agents selling multimillion-dollar homes in Southern California, because the real estate market was so bad, said Frances Berwick, executive vice president and general manager of Bravo Media. It also delayed the start of "First Class All the Way."