Networks - Can't you give a show a chance before you cancel it?

Cafe Society
1

The WB has cancelled Birds of Prey, which I was giving a chance, I thought it was a good premise, I have seen and bought this series of comic books.

The WB doesn’t have that many good shows as it is, would it really kill them to give BOP a chance.

Fox let Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place go for a season or two before they hit, and they sucked in the their infancy. But, they cancelled a show called Models, Inc which I watched and liked and didn’t give it a chance.

UPN let Buffy have a chance and it was not that good of a show when it first started. Then it took off and you have a Hit Show.

ABC had a new premise for Fantasy Island, with Malcolm McDowell as Mr. Roarke, no Tattoo, it was a little darker than Ricardo Montalbon’s but I liked it, and it was cancelled.

My point is, the networks are cancelling shows that probably deserve a chance, to get the viewship to sustain. BOP probably could have had better writing and talent, but there are show out that are lacking and are hanging around.

Will and Grace, Everybody Loves Ray, and probably others that I can not think of, that in my opinion suck, but the network keeps around.

What shows have been cancelled that you think should have gotten a better chance.

and what show’s should have gotten the axe faster than they have. My pick Ally McBeal - never got the appeal.

2

What really sucked was when NBC cancelled Freaks and Geeks because they put it in a dismal Saturday timeslot. That was an excellent show.

3

And why does Scrubs keep getting only half seasons?? All of a sudden it’s just not on anymore. And what about Undeclared, I was really liking that show.
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!!!” (Sorry, first thing that popped into my head when you said Network.

The second thing is “This floor is dirty as hell and I don’t have to take it anymore” from UHF!!

4

Simple economics. If a show isn’t making them enough money, then they need to replace it with something that will.

Remember, the point of TV is to sell ads. And ad income is tied to ratings.

5

Actually, WB gave Buffy a chance – and kept it on for 5 seasons. My understanding is that it was critically acclaimed even in its first season.

Daniel

6

That was actually the WB, and I don’t think the ratings have been as good on UPN as they were on WB, but I’m not certain of that.

I hear you, in that I’m afraid Firefly is ticking. I think it probably will never be a smash hit show, but I think it could be a steady producer for Fox if they’d put it in a decent timeslot and actually advertised it a little. Unlike many of the shows you list (including Birds of Prey), it’s actually well-liked by the few people that have managed to find it. I’ve heard nothing good about BoP, even from the comic books geeks I know who’ve seen it and who enjoy Smallville.

But it’s all about the numbers, as Chuck said. TV is not in the business of making art, they’re in the business of selling toothpaste. If the show doesn’t sell the toothpaste, it’s not going to stick around, no matter how well-done you think it is. It’ll be that way until we come up with a different way for networks to operate.

7

It’s true that the point of TV is to sell ads, and the way to sell ads is to get viewers. But I think that the networks are shooting themselves in the foot with this new short-run programming model.

Back in Ye Olden Days, TV shows were made like this: 13 episodes of a show were produced and aired, then rerun for 13 weeks. During this 26-week period, another 13 episodes were produced. When the reruns ended, the new shows were shown, and then also rerun. Again, during this 26-week period, new shows were produced, and by the time the reruns ended, a full 52 weeks had passed. Time for fall premieres.

Now, however, it appears that networks make shows in blocks of about 6 episodes at a time. And if a show doesn’t succeed right away, it gets promptly yanked. I’m sure on some level, this makes sense to the network; losers get identified and taken off the air early, and there are plenty of slots to premiere new shows throughout the year, instead of having to wait for the usual mid-season mark.

The problem is, it takes time for a show to build an audience. Cheers would have been cancelled in half a season, had the current programming model been in effect; for a while, it ranked dead last among all prime-time programs. I’m not saying that Birds of Prey would eventually win a fistful of Emmys or anything, but it’d be nice to give 'em a full year, at least, to sink or swim.

8

Yes, but the network doesn’t want to lose money for that full year.

Now, of course, there are problems with their logic. The replacement show may do no better, or even worse. And there are still cases where a network will stick with a show with weak ratings, and even renew it (some examples: Scrubs, Sports Night, Quantum Leap), but they have to pick and choose and the pressure to make big profits is a big one. When a show with low ratings is renewed it’s usually because the head of programming happens to like it a lot.

(As an aside, this all due to the current philosophy of business, namely that you have to drop things that, while profitable, are not as profitable as something else. The idea of making a solid profit gets the back seat to the idea of making as big a profit as possible, and this shows up in all sorts of insidious ways.)

Actually, things are better now than in the 70s, when a show had to be a hit by the second episode or it was in trouble.

And back in the real olden days, a show ran 39 weeks straight of new episodes, then 13 weeks of reruns. The number of new episodes kept decreasing, but reruns were rarely shown from September to May. Then the networks decided to only show new episodes during sweeps, and began rerunning things just before Thanksgiving.

9

Firefly was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. This is, IMO, the best sci-fi series ever shown on network TV, but it’s thematically complex and is likely to require at least a season to find its audience. And for chrissake, Fox, if you’re going to run it at 8 on Fridays, of course you’re going to miss its target audience.

Many shows now considered classics, such as Cheers and Seinfeld, were unsuccessful early in their runs. OTOH, networks seem willing to give sitcoms more leeway than location-based series, because of their generally lower production costs (at least before their stars start demanding a bigger salary for each new season).

Nevertheless, I’d love to see hard evidence that scrapping a show and replacing it with another before a full season has elapsed actually generates more revenue for the net than just leaving the first show on.

10

Television is the only place where you can put on a half hour of entertainment, have 5 million people watch it at the same time, and be considered a failure. Think if that were music, or broadway.
R.I.P. Futurama

11

Now that the networks have access to overnight ratings in major markets, they can literally have enough information on their desk by 9:00 the next morning to decide whether to let a show run another week.

Warning signs for the network include: how much of the audience of the preceeding show that show managed to hold on to; whether the show is gaining or losing viewers in its targeted demographic; whether the audience is climbing or decreasing in each 15-minute section of a show (particularly how many people tune into or away from an hour-long show at the 30-minute mark); whether people tune away from the network after the show ends; etc.

A lot of shows (Square Pegs is the first example that comes to mind) premiered to good ratings and good demographics and then sank like a balloon with a slow leak. That won’t be tolerated anymore. WKRP was also getting clobbered so badly in the ratings that the producers moved the “Turkeys” episode up by a month because it was the strongest episode they had. That stabilized the show’s audience and it ran for four seasons.

Shows like Cheers and Hill Street Blues started off with disastrous ratings, but the critics loved them and kept talking about them. Their initial bad ratings didn’t sink any lower, so NBC decided to give them a little more time. That patience was rewarded, but oftentimes it isn’t.

But I still can’t figure out what the hell happened with Police Squad!

12

If only FOX put Firefly in a more decent timeslot like on Mondays at 9pm. I’d also ask for Thursday nights but it seems like Thursday nights are owned by NBC.

13

There’s also an intangible factor of network style, or the particular audience for which they are aiming. If a network is going after young girls, for example, they may give a lower-rated show more of a chance if it gets good ratings in the 13-20 crowd, while immediately cancelling another show with similar ratings that mainly attracts people over 35.

Money factors into the style decisions as well. I remember reading an article that said that each Dawson’s Creek viewer was worth four times as much money from advertisers as each Nash Bridges viewer, because of the age difference in their audiences.

There’s prestige involved as well. It looks worse to cancel a show that critics are praising as well-written, intelligent T.V. than it does to cancel something that is being dismissed as drivel.

My votes for shows that should have been given more of a chance: TNT’s Bull and Breaking News (the 13 episodes filmed were eventually shown on Bravo). Both excellent shows that might have had a real shot on one of the major broadcast networks.

14

IIRC “Breaking News” was an original series from Bravo.

15

No, here’s a complete timeline on the show.

One of the interesting things about the show was that it seemed to be topical, with ripped from the headlines stories, but the headlines were from 2000, when the show was filmed. For instance, there was a plane crash, and no one even mentioned terrorism as a possibility – the issue was illegally carrying oxygen cannisters, like the flight that crashed in the Everglades. Ah, the joys of a simpler time.

I just loved Breaking News. AFAIC, it rivaled The West Wing and NYPD Blue in quality.

16

Say what you will, but network flightiness is what spared us from the horror of further episodes of “girls club.”

This isn’t new - Police Squad! was cancelled after six episodes, despite being one of the most beloved shows in TV history. “WKRP in Cincinnati,” which is now considered one of the best sitcoms ever run on TV, was put in a DOZEN timeslots and killed off after three seasons despite good ratings.

17

The ratings of S6 was pretty much the same for the 1st half of the season, but then there was a very slow and steady decline for the rest of the season. This season the audience is slowly returning…

18

May be splitting hairs here but, from what SpoilerVirgin said, IMO while Bravo didn’t CREATE the series it did RUN it originally.

19

That’s one of the strangest things about TV thinking: there are certain unstated axioms that don’t bear up to the slightest scrutiny, but which major TV decisions are based.

Why is Firefly on Friday? Because that’s where you put science fiction shows. The number of televised SF that ran on Fridays is skewed out of proportion. My guess it that it’s because one of the most successful shows in the genre – Twilight Zone – ran on Fridays. So when executives try to place a science fiction show, Friday is the first day they think of. This dispite the fact that very few SF shows since then have succeeded on Friday, and even some successful shows (e.g., Star Trek) were cancelled once they were moved to Friday.

In addition, network executives are still influenced by the most successful US network SF show of all time: Captain Video. I doubt any of them have ever seen Captain Video, but the idea that SF fits into that model – adventures for kiddies – is still very strong.

Another phony axiom is that younger viewers are somehow more desirable. The “logic” is that younger people develop brand loyalty, but there’s no evidence older viewers are any less likely to switch brands than younger ones. Plus, America is aging; even if over 45s buy less, there are more of them. However, networks (and ad agencies) are so used to the “younger is better” philosophy that they aren’t interested in the facts.

20

Another one who immediately thought of Firefly. But it’s funny that Firefly springs to mind in a thread about shows that have ALREADY been cancelled. It’s not quite dead yet…

Quite…