It’s not quite that bad on Fox any more; the network already realizes that Sundays between 7 and 8 is where it sends shows to die. (Both 'Til Death and The Cleveland Show were moved there because they were in their final seasons.)
The problem with Futurama was, when the show was moved to Sundays at 7:00 (one version of the story: Fox executives wanted “The Simpsons in space,” and was told that this is what it was - like The Simpsons, “it’s by Matt Groening, and it’s different”), “late” Sunday afternoon football games started at 4:00 Eastern and weren’t expected to run too far past 7:00. When Fox noticed that more and more games were running until 7:15, they asked (well, begged is probably more accurate) the NFL to start the late games at 7:15, so they would run until 7:30; this not only gave Fox an excuse not to air Futurama on nine Sundays a year (then again, in its last two seasons, Fox had a habit of replacing new Futurama episodes with Family Guy repeats during sweeps periods), but could count the football coverage as a prime-time show towards its overall ratings.)
It has been ever thus. Over 30 years ago * Taxi* had a great episode where Reverend Jim told an incompetent network executive(played by Martin Short) how to set the schedule .
I’ve met a few people who work on the business side of TV, including the exec of a major network and, in general, I’ve found them to be smart, passionate people with a real love for the craft, doing a very tough job which only attracts criticism, not praise.
It’s easy to point to a few examples where, with the benefit of hindsight, were clearly wrong decisions but it’s also important to point out the number of incredibly daring bets over the last decade that were amazingly prescient. The Wire, Breaking Bad, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Bob’s Burgers, etc. all required some network exec to put their reputation on the line for something that sounded crazy and unlikely to work.
Also, something that execs are unwilling to say in public but is widely whispered behind the scenes is that piracy puts studios in a lose-lose situation. The audiences that are the most vocal are also the ones most likely to pirate a show. Cult shows like Community are watched by college kids who torrent shows en masse and skip all the ads while broad comedies like The Big Bang Theory is watched by 50 year olds who only use their computers for Facebook.
This puts studios in the unpopular position of constantly having to cancel critically acclaimed, well loved shows to the massive protest of fans and TV press, further increasing the hate they get from their audiences.
While I’m sure there’s plenty of politics and greed and infighting involved, none of those are necessary to get this kind of outcome. Even if you had network execs of noblest heart and purest spirit, you’d still get this kind of thing. I mean, something has to be on the schedule after the football game; the viewers are eventually going to tire of listening to reporters interview football players (I hope), and we can’t really have dead air. Every show that’s not actually cancelled has someone who believes in it and wants to keep it out of that slot (and many of the ones that have been cancelled have someone on the inside fighting for them). They can’t all win.
Take, for example, the aforementioned sci-fi western series (nitpic: it was called Firefly). They aired the Train Job episode first. Ultimately, whoever had to make the call of when to air which episodes probably can’t watch all the episodes of whatever many shows they have to make the call on. So they’re listening to their trusted advisors, and one guy says, hey, this Josh* guy has a real artistic vision of space cowboys here, and he was real good with that vampire show (before vampires were totally a thing), so let’s do it like he wants, and the other guy says whoa whoa whoa, that first episode is kinda slow getting started and it has all this backstory that no one cares about. Let’s hit ‘em with a barn buster first and then follow up with backstory later. Plus trains play well in the demo’…
That’s what it comes down to (in my opinion) - advertising money. We think ads are in addition to the tv shows, but the reality is that it’s all about the ads - they’re the main event.
I’ve said this before. Too many people are willing to suspend their critical faculties and just assume a decision must be smart if it’s made by a guy wearing a suit and collecting a bug salary. But sometimes a decision that appears stupid really is stupid.
The entertainment business is especially subject to this. Somebody’s going to make the number one TV show or movie, even if it’s just by random luck. But if you’re the executive who happens to be associated with that success, you could end up in charge of a network or studio. Meanwhile the random luck that made you a success moves on to somebody else and you just make a bunch of dumb decisions until your incompetence becomes obvious. Then you get fired and the next monkey gets your job.
Well, you know, the suits may have an overabundance of idiotic ideas, but every now and then, they manage to blunder into a real winner. According to TVTropes, they insisted that Joss Whedon put a “space hooker” character into Firefly. We all kinda like how that bit of meddling turned out, don’t we?
The thing I don’t get is that it seems like they’re more interested in transient viewers- i.e. that person who’s flipping channels and happens to leave it on “Mike and Molly” because it’s sort of funny and there’s not much else on. That, and ones that get a lot of initial hype and viewership, and then transient viewers.
The shows we’re discussing probably don’t have a very big transient viewership, and nor do they start out very strong, but once they get rolling, they have a VERY faithful following.
I (holder of an MBA) have to wonder if having a small, but fanatical following may not be a better deal if you can entice the advertisers. I mean, if you have 5 million geeks a week watching “Firefly”, then you can deliver very tailored ads to those 5 million geeks and potentially get better results.
I also wonder about the strategy; a lot of these shows aren’t even replaced by something better, or are noticeably worse than other shows that remain on the network in other time slots. I mean, if you put something in the “Friday Slot of Death”, what do you expect? Why not put a show with a fanatical following there? At least you can count on your dogged few to be there every single Friday watching that show.
The other thing is that I don’t get how they can be so tone-deaf, or at the very least, how the early 2000s Fox execs could be that way. They cancelled Futurama and Family Guy, both of which rose from the dead to become very successful on other networks.
I guess the crap forces out the good; junk like “Nanny 911” ran for several seasons on Fox, and the shows above were cancelled early.
Regarding the Firefly/Serenity thing: I can always trust members of the SDMB to run a joke into the ground, back up and run over it again.
As for network executives, I think part of the problem is moving shows around the schedule. And it doesn’t help when they show two episodes in September, take a break of several weeks for the baseball playoffs and World Series, air a couple more and then take a break for Thanksgiving.
Network television now has to compete with companies like Netflix or Amazon, which are producing their own shows and don’t have to make advertisers happy. Plus of course, there’s the very fragmented nature of television today, when most of us get dozens of channels.
Have you ever seen the original pilot for Dollhouse? It’s a complete and total mess. The reworked version that was created with the network notes isn’t great, but it’s light years better than what Joss and crew created on their own.
