Firefly, Wonderfalls and FOX

Cafe Society
1

I noticed there are three threads (well, make it four) on this board right now about these two shows dumped by FOX after they barely had debuted on the air. Both were cancelled after four episodes I believe. Wonderfalls never aired past episode 4.

Both shows have gone on to a good degree of success since then. Wonderfalls DVDs have sold very well, breaking the Amazon top 20 for awhile. Firefly has become phenomenally successful. I heard it was the #5 DVD of 2005.

Networks cancel shows all the time. Sometimes they cancel great shows like Freaks and Geeks. Networks give less time than ever to shows to prove themselves. I think Freaks and Geeks might have caught on if it had more of a chance, but in todays market there simply is no time to find an audience. Cheers and Sinefeld would probably be quick cancellations if they came out today. I should give props to UPN for sticking with Veronica Mars despite its 174th place finish in last year’s ratings.

But the situation on FOX seems somewhat different. At least NBC promoted Freaks and Geeks before they gave up on it. It seems like the FOX shows were doomed from day 1. Wonderfalls was put up against NBC’s “Must-See” line-up and then had its time slot changed seemingly every week it was on (with no real notification as to when it was being shown). The show was actually in danger before it was even aired once. A save Wonderfalls campaign kicked off before the first episode debuted. The show was quickly ditched to make room for an “encore” showing of The Swan. The Swan was heavily promoted by FOX and though it is gone today we will always have the memories. The Swan is not currently available on DVD.

Firefly wasn’t much different. I never even heard of the show until after it had been cancelled. Nice job of promotion! How can you give a show no promotion and insist it draw solid ratings? They promoted House M.D. up the wazoo and lo and behold it’s a hit. Maybe they just looked at another (yawn) hospital show as a proven format and were willing to bet heavily on it.

The thing is why did FOX even bother to develop these shows in the first place? It seems clear that they had little to no interest in seeing them succeed. They seem to have been sent out on airwave versions of kamikaze missions. A friend of mine thinks they just take on these shows to make sure no other network can try and turn them into hits while FOX sticks to the tried and true like Sunday night cartoons, rip-offs of other networks’ shows and American Idol 75 times a week. This seems a little too cynical to me, though. But the question remains, why bother?

2

I don’t know the answer to your question but as far as promoting Firefly I have never quite understood why people say that FOX didn’t promote the show. I could not watch an FX program (especially Buffy repeats) for what seemed like months before Firefly debuted without seeing multiple ads. Usually a shot of River in her box, sometimes Wash yelling “who’s flying this thing?!” I watched next to nothing on Fox at the time so I don’t know how much it was promoted there.

3

Likewise, but that was the only place I ever saw ads for it. I don’t watch other FX shows, so I don’t know if they were advertising it as heavily when they weren’t showing Buffy, but running ads for a Joss Whedon show in heavy rotation during another Joss Whedon show doesn’t strike me as the savviest use of your advertising dollar. It seems to me that audience is the one that needs the least amount of convincing to watch the show.

4

FOX has played an odd game with a number of shows in its history. Obviously, Futurama was one of them: it was a great show that many people who were die hard fans didn’t even watch all that much… because it was never on consistently in a particular time slot, and it was never clear when a new ep was coming. It really seems like there are some execs at Fox who hate a particular vein of programming, loudly declaim that it’s a waste of FOX’s dollars, and then do everything they can to quash and kill it. Seems like a bizarre way to run a business, but those are the rumors…

5

Yes, this is the FOX problem in a nutshell. They may throw some token ads out there, but they pre-empt, move and otherwise frustrate any possible veiwer loyalty in any way they can. If they’ve built a show they don’t like the ongoing price for, they kill it this way: Limited ads, pre-emption, constant rescheduling. (We are Fox and we have 3 weapons. . .)

6

I’ve wondered this myself, and I just can’t quite figure it out. They invest millions of dollars in shows and then just toss them in the garbage. TV networks and movie studios are pretty bizarre places compared to most other big businesses. The people in charge of what gets made and aired change very often. There seems to be all kinds of weird dynamics going on where what projects you supports has very little to do with the success of the company or any long-term business plan.

Since UPN is a smaller network, it can keep smaller shows like Veronica Mars on. They’re a little more desperate so they can give more offbeat shows more of a chance. Fox used to be the same way, and gave many shows a lot more of a chance than they would’ve gotten on the bigger networks. Lots of those shows sucked and eventually disappeared, but some became hits. Of course, these hits brought enough success to Fox that they eventually became a mainstream network that didn’t want to run off-beat cult favorites any more…

When Tim Minear was brought in to work on Wonderfalls, he found out what time slot it was going to be in and suggested the creators use the thirteen episodes they’d been contracted for to tell a self-contained story because he knew Fox wasn’t going to keep it on the air. He knew it had no chance even before a single episode had been broadcast.

Freaks and Geeks didn’t get very good treatment from NBC. They did run commercials for it, and ran more episodes than Wonderfalls got, but they changed it’s time slot and put it on hiatus two or three times. As you said, a number of the most successful, longest running shows took forever before they found their audience. Shows like Cheers, All in the Family, Seinfeld. Iirc, MASH took something like two years to start doing well. None of these shows would’ve made it past thirteen episodes if they were to premiere today.

I agree with Apos about Futurama. As far as I can tell, Fox actively tried to kill it. As I understand it, they basically agreed to the show to keep Matt Groening happy. However, they co-own the Simpsons, while Futurama is wholely owned by Groening. So they stuck it in a crappy time slot, pre-empted it constantly and ran as few episodes a year as they could get away with. By the end of the fourth “season”, they had enough un-aired episode left over to run it another year. So technically, they weren’t cancelling it, but they also didn’t contract for more episodes. So Groening was stuck. He couldn’t move the show elsewhere, it was still under contract to Fox. But he couldn’t keep paying the writers, animators or actors because, well, Fox wasn’t buying any episodes.

7

This is not unique to FOX; it’s true of all the networks. Many classic sitcoms were killed by the other networks in part due to weird scheduling, like “WKRP in Cincinnati.”

The reason people pick on FOX is that FOX is willing to at least try a lot of shows the other networks wouldn’t touch. Without FOX, there’s no Simpsons.

A new twist, though, is the hiatus, or non-consecutive episodes. “Lost” is being subjected to the damndest scheduling by ABC; there will be a new episode, a repeart, a new episode, two repeats, two new episodes, repeat, three more repeats, etc. There’s no rhyme or reaosn to it, and people are starting to turn away in frustration.

8

It sure feels like they’re doing the same thing with House. Between rescheduling and preempting it for America’s Wannabee, I don’t think I’ve seen more than two episodes since the new year.

9

And let’s not forget FOX’s treatment of its (only?) breakout hit of this season, Prison Break. Obviously they weren’t expecting it to do well so they scheduled a break in the schedule from the end of November to freaking May. I guess, since they repeated the last-run episode last night, that they’ve changed that decision, but why the hell would you even come up with that scheduling idea in the first place? Run an episode every week for three months, then hold the last nine episodes of the season for six months? The hell?

10

That’s what I’ll never understand. Why bother developing a show and investing all the time and money, and then just cancel it after a quickie run?
I mentioned this over in the Wonderfalls thread - they only aired four episodes, and episode six, “Barrel Bear” featured guest stars Rue McClanahan and Louise Fletcher. It’s just beyond me how they could cancel it so soon, and without getting to that one.
You’d think they’re be somebody along the line who would have the balls to say, “Hey, wait. We have these two well-known stars in episode six. Can we at least get to that one?”
:rolleyes:

11

The success of shows like Firefly, Wonderfalls, Futurama and Family Guy on DVD indicates that they do have audiences, no matter what Fox thinks. Creators may be able to eventually create their shows and get them to the audience without being stuck in a particular time slot, controlled by a network. The producers of Futurama are working on new shows available directly on DVD. A number of network shows are selling very well downloaded from the 'net. So far they’re “re-runs” of shows that’ve already aired, but before too long there’ll be original material too.

Cable TV systems are offering more and more movies and shows ‘on-demand’. High speed fiber optic internet is starting to become available, and it’ll also offer hundreds of cable channels and on-demand programs. A report today in PRNewswire says that there are now nearly 100 million home broadband users in the US. More and more of those people are going to be downloading shows rather than just watching them via airwave, cable or satellite.

We’re getting to the point where people can access shows without relying on the networks to deliver them. I think it’d still be difficult for a creator to introduce an all new TV show this way (without the neworks to front the tens of millions a season of an average TV show costs), but some will be able to do it. Sure, they’ll start with low budget stuff, but as it demonstrates that they can do it successfully, there’ll be more expensive productions. Hopefully shows that networks cancel because they’re not mainstream enough can continue with new downloadable and on-demand episodes.

It’s probably not coming soon enought for Wonderfalls or Firefly to be re-born, but maybe future promising shows will have somewhere to go when they get cancelled. Heck, Tim Minear’s working on a new show for Fox. How many episodes do you think they’ll actually broadcast? Three? four? Heck, he’d probably consider it a success at this point if they ran the whole thirteen episode contract…

12

OK, one more time:

Fox had the choice of premiering a two-hour episode of Firefly or running a one-hour Firefly followed by 24. Fox evidently believed that it was not a good idea to delay 24 an extra (judging by it’s success, a fairly wise decision). Firefly ended up running “The Train Job,” which, while good, tuned off a lot of people (“Gee,” they said. “It’s just a western in space.” And the didn’t bother with episode 2).

Firefly never recovered. And while there was some hostility toward the show on the part of the network, the fact remained that 24 was a ratings smash and clearly justified the decision.

13

The premiere epsiode of Firefly was followed by the premiere episode of John Doe. AFAIK, 24 was not part of the equation. AFAIK 24 never ran on a Friday, but since I don’t watch it I could be wrong. There certainly was no scheduling reason why FOX could not have run the two hour premiere of Firefly and followed it the next week with the one hour second episode and the one hour premiere of John Doe*. FOX did not run the two hour Firefly episode, according to the DVD commentary, because it wanted the first episode to be more action-oriented.

14

This is new to you? It’s the way I’ve seen broadcast network television shows for years. The standard order nowadays is 22 episodes for a single season. Since there are 52 weeks in a year, they can’t run new episodes all year round. The networks generally don’t run new episodes during the summer, so they want to run new shows from September until April or May, reducing the number of available weeks to about 39 or so.

They won’t run a new episode against something big and popular like the Superbowl or the Academy Awards or on a night like Thanksgiving when people don’t generally watch TV. And they have these things called sweeps periods. During February, May, July and November, local ratings are measured, so the networks generally want to run new episodes during those periods.

As a result, you get the typical schedule of a series of new episodes followed by a series of reruns. Does that make sense?

15

Umm…didn’t Firefly debut straight onto Friday nights(?)…a timeslot that (IIRC) no Fox show has survived long since X-Files…

-Joe

16

Yes, Firefly aired on Friday. It never aired on any other day on FOX, even the premiere.

17

Oh yeah, and ditto the John Doe thing. It was Firefly followed by John Doe on Friday.

18

WKRP was on for four years and aired 90 episodes. It even hit #1 once. So it’s not really on the same level.

19

So, can anyone think of a Fox show that was dumped into the Friday Night Death Spot that has survived?

-Joe

20

Doesn’t almost EVERY show gather a cult following of a sort after being cancelled? Are the ones mentioned here so exceptional in that regard?