So…the strategy worked, didn’t it? 
Stranger
I’d forgive Fox anything for The Simpsons. I don’t think any other network would have given it house room.
It was on ABC for one season (or part of a season) and then was picked up by Fox.
Fox just takes more chances and airs things that are more ‘out there’ than the other networks. So they have a reputation for being slimy, which probably goes all the way back to Married with Children. I doubt they’ve blown it with more good shows than any other network has in the same time span, but I can’t back that up. Good shows get cancelled all the time, would that that weren’t so. Some of Fox’s shows never get popular, but find niche audiences that blame the network for cancelling it. If Fox sucked that much, it wouldn’t put them on in the first place. Other shows do get mishandled - of course nobody watched Futurama, they kept delaying episodes and running half of them after football games that went long. I had no idea it was still on by the end.
The Simpsons probably did its bit to make Fox-bashing fashionable, too.
Herman’s Head! Roc! Tribeca!
They tried to kill the Simpsons, too. Remember, they put it on against Bill Cosby, after moving it all around the schedule?
This is untrue. The Simpsons has only had two timeslots: Sunday at 8 and Thursday at 8.
When Fox moved it against (the ageing) Cosby on Thursdays, The Simpsons was already a huge hit and Fox wanted to show it’s little cartoon show could stand with the big boys. It’s ratings dipped a little, but it was still a resounding success in those years.
Actually, Fox’s slimy reputation probably has a lot to do with the fact it was started by Rupert Murdoch who was long notorious for such journalistic innovations like the “Page 3 Girl” and the dumbed-down, no-brow, and sleazy content of his tabloid newspapers.
I’m too young to know for sure. But I expect the billionaire tyrant didn’t really become a name in the US until after his TV network got going. I can see him being notorious for that sleaziness in the UK and Australia, though.
Murdoch came to the attention of Americans when he bought the New York Post in 1976 and turned it into a right-wing sensationalist tabloid that ran headlines like HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. When Murdoch started the Fox network in 1987, many people expected tacky lowest-common-denominator programming that would match the tone of most of his newspapers. Although that has not been entirely accurate over the past 20 years, there have been enough questionable decisions made by the Fox network (e.g., “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?”) for that belief to never completely go away.
This BBC article seems to suggest that Murdoch was not personally responsible for Page Three Girls, and indeed, that he was extremely unhappy when he discovered what the Sun’s editor had done in his absence:
Of course, the “legend has it” bit somewhat detracts from the reliability of this statement. Make of it what you will.
While a proper send-off would have been nice, one thing Fox didn’t do was kill Married… The show was on for 9 seasons. We got to see Kelly grow up, and Bud get older (because, let’s face it, he never grew) 