Yeah, yeah. I’m not demanding that people stop or spoiler-box it. It’s just a personal frustration.
No fair, man. I haven’t seen Sound of Music!
The Third Reich loses the war
There are MOTHERFUCKING snakes on that MOTHERFUCKING plane!
George Washington kills Hitler
The statement was that Firefly wasn’t a good show for broadcast TV. There’s a variety of reasons, I’ll list some:
1 - Audience, Executives and Adverting Money: This is a multi-level problem. For executives, it’s everything. Broadcast audiences are a huge melting pot. The “Demos”, as we call them, are what we’re after: the 18-40 demographics, male female combined. That’s what advertisers want – that “global” demo. For cable, advertisers throw less money down but target their ads to specific groups: SciFi, Spike, ESPN, Hallmark… they have very different demos.
A show like Firefly didn’t have a broad appeal – not as much as the fan base would like to think it could have had. Want it or not, it was “cowboys in space”, with whores and religion mixed in, written by “the guy who did Buffy.” Fox, by nature, is a highly conservative place to be – executives wise AND viewership-wise, believe it or not. It was a bad fit.
Even if the show had had proper advertising and even if it’d had a better time slot, I’m not entirely sure it wold have survived because of its structure and style… and because of Fox executives and their dislike of arcs. Also, Sci-Fi is just NOT their thing at all, nor can they hold onto those audiences. Plus, they really REALLY seem to let go of any and all shows that don’t produce the ratings they like in the demos they want.
**2. Storytelling, Arcs and the Broadcast Curse: ** I mentioned this upthread. Network execs are NOT fans of shows with this kind of structure and will do their best to blow them up and ask for restructuring really early on. They have their reasons, and one of them is audience retention (see #3), which directly affects #1 above in that it’s all about ratings and demos.
**3. Retention: **Audience retention is everything. You win some, you lose some. Arc-style writing means you run the risk of losing people along the way if they miss an episode. Broadcast is notorious for pre-empting, shuffling schedules, and airing shows out of order. Broadcast audiences are also notorious for their fickle nature. Cable audiences tend to be smaller (ratings wise) but way more loyal. Seasons on cable may be shorter, but audience retention is way healthier…
… there are lots more reasons, but this is a start…
Well…
Futurama and Family Guy are cartoons, which are obviously much easier types of shows to resurrect.
Firefly was made into a friggin movie! How often does that happen to a cancelled series? It didn’t end up being successful enough to continue after that, but if it had been, there would have been more movies instead of another series. And it’s lack of success might have had more to do with marketing and release date than it’s inherent worth. It was certainly a great end cap to the series, and was a very good movie in it’s own right. It consistently is listed high up in best sci-fi movies lists.
And of course it shouldn’t need to be mentioned, but neither popularity nor network choices are indicative of quality.
Although critically acclaimed and with many fans, it wasn’t popular in the ratings when it aired due to Fox doing what it does best. But the DVD sales let it get made into a movie.
Can you explain how Fox is “conservative”. They are constantly cited as giving chances to shows that are too wacky for the other networks. That is almost the exact opposite of “conservative.”
I also have to question just how much Fox hates arc-based shows. It’s a meme that comes up from time to time, but it doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality. 24 became they’re biggest hit in years and a few months before Firefly premiered, they sold a boatload of 24 DVD sets. Non arc shows didn’t do that back then.
I hate to say it, but I think any chance of a resurrection was blown by the movie simply not being very good. I know that’s a sacreligious comment to Firefly fans, but “Serenity” was an absolutely by-the-numbers space opera rife with the usual cliches. It had its good points to be sure, but had far too many weaknesses to be a good overall movie.
Depends on what shows you are talking about. On the Drama front, Fox is a conservative network. Its executives are a pain in the ass to work with. On the Trash/Reality TV front, they are all about “shock television”, which the conservative viewer eats up like nobody’s business.
Fox is a study in contradiction, I know. Then again, so is the American Conservative Viewer. This same “viewer” freaks out at a nipple during a football game but would scream if you took away the scantily clad, almost nekkid (!) cheerleaders. On the drama front, Fox executives and its demos are very pro-soap-opera style shows – OC style, adultery drama is a go… just don’t show us shows that glorify whores and speak poorly of religion all that much! It’s a really strange slice of the world. Developing an action drama pilot for Fox is, I’m told, an art form.
Some of us writers would rather die than try to pitch a drama there. Joss said he’d never work for and with them again… and yet, here he is with Dollhouse… which, by the way, he’s had to revamp significantly. The show he sold them, originally, is not the show Fox thought/felt they bought.
… which leads us to point 2. They had him trash the arcs a lot (they’re still in there, but less so), rewrite a lot of the show to add in more action, more “bing, bang, crash, poof”, if you will.
Shows like 24 and Prison Break are more arc based and seem to do okay on Fox right now – but note that 24 is pushed like mad and is, right now, the only truly arc based action show they have and it was also pulled for a year when they felt that retention (there were other factors, too, but bottom line was retention) wasn’t going to allow the show to survive) was going to slip. Prison Break is perpetually on the bubble and threatened with cancellation.
Soap-like dramas do manage arcs AND retention. How? Repetition, baby. You miss a week? You’ll be fine.
Can you cite any articles that describe this process? Because everything I’ve been able to find says that Joss himself is the one behind the revamp. I also wasn’t able to find anything about significant changes to the show’s tone or plot.
24 was pulled for a year because the writer’s strike would have prevented the creation of 24 episodes. You don’t fuck with the core concept of your biggest show and expect audiences not to notice.
As a 24 fan, I thought it was the right decision. Especially after seeing the first act of the first episode of the new season. I am more amped for 24 than I’ve been since season 4.
I don’t really see *Serenity *as an attempt to revive the franchise. Yes, lots of fans had hopes. But Whedon killed off two great characters! He was saying a goodbye to the 'verse. As a standalone, the movie wasn’t excellent. As a substitute for The Series That Was, it was sad. But it was what it was–on to the next project(s).
Don’t know whether I’m in a coveted demographic–but 99% of broadcast TV bores me. I’ll tune in to Dollhouse. But the only other show I’m looking forward to is the next season of AMC’s Mad Man. Even there, I’m concerned that the suits at Lionsgate are still “negotiating” with Matt Weiner, the show’s creator, to convince him to stay. (Last I heard, at least.)
In this day and age? Constantly.
Of course usually the movie is made years later, with few or none of the original cast, and is played ironically for the nostalgia appeal…
One that is publicly available that has some hints about the process is available here:
http://whedonesque.com/comments/17945
Yes, a little later, Joss seems to make it sound like he was behind the changes – at least some of them, but given the history, there’s more at play than what’s being said right there. You have to read between the lines. He also has to be careful. Bridges. Matches. All that.
Essentially, the tone and the storylines, broadly, may not have changed, but a lot of adjustments had to be made. Nature of the creature when working for this network, apparently…
Had Fox wanted to, it could have ordered its 24 episodes with a moved season even after the strike. The writing and shooting schedule was entirely doable. The fact that Sutherland was in jail kind of threw a monkey wrench into things, mind you 
Glad you’re passionate about 24 – it’s a fun show with a great staff and crew.
Is FOX the only network that will give him a chance? i don’t see why he wouldn’t go somewhere else.
Similarly, as it’s been repeatedly indicated that Joss’s ideas might do substantially better on cable with their more niche demographics, is it his idea to stick with broadcast networks, or is he just not getting any offers from the cable stations? I don’t understand why he wouldn’t just go pitch hard to, say, USA or SciFi, unless he has absolutely no “in” with them at all.
I don’t see why he couldn’t go elsewhere.
I have the feeling, however, that there’s pricetags, budgets and paychecks involved. Cable and Broadcast are two completely different animals when it comes to that stuff. Taking a show to cable means smaller budgets, shorter seasons. Some “big names” aren’t willing to deal.
He’s got plenty of pull if he wanted to peddle his wares, I’m sure. His shows are expensive, however. He’d be significantly limited in what he’d be able to do, who he could hire and how much he’d be paid. This may well have a lot to do with why he has not gone to USA or SciFi with his shows.
I don’t know the details of how Dollhouse came to be, and I doubt this is what happened, but sometimes some writers/producers are approached by a network they have worked with before and asked to develop a new pilot/show – this used to happen a lot more in the past than it does now, by far. In fact, times are so bloody tight and our industry is so much in the shitter that the only people really doing that at all, and only sparingly, are the cable folk. The only instance I can think of in recent memory is the upcoming NCIS spinoff – but that, in itself, is due to some pretty freaky numbers and freaky trends that have us all amused and scratching our heads. 
I recall reading somewhere that Joss is under a contract with Fox which means he has to come to them to develop a show before he can look at other networks. The only cite I could find mentions a similar contract that he signed in 2001, which has an interesting quote.