David Mitchell mentions another aspect of TV making in his autobiography - if an executive leaves, it’s highly unlikely for their successor to follow up on any plans of theirs, as they won’t get the credit but are in line for any blame.
So not only are so many shows cancelled before their time, a lot don’t even make it onto our screens.
This seems to be a bit of a problem with manned space programs, too. 
Jayne is a girl’s name.
Maybe tens of examples of it not working, not thousands. We used to not hear* about the examples where it did work - where a show that some roughness around the edges was picked up and the retooling (based on notes from networks and the creative team) got it to the point where it was better overall. In the not that long past day of shows without strong multi-episode arcs, airing the strongest episode first (which was likely not the first episode filmed - where everyone’s still getting used to each other) happened frequently and made sense.
Scripted tv (like “Firefly”) is very expensive to produce. Reality shows are very cheap. And they can get the same number of people watching. (e.g., last week, a repeat of “Hollywood Game Night” (not the original airing, a repeat) had 3 million people watching it.) the targeted advertising is not going to make up for the difference in production costs.
*These days we do hear about changes between the original pilot and the post notes pilot. Terra Nova, for example, got better - not good, but better.
Yeah, well, you tell him that. 
[ul]
[li]**The Wire *was HBO, so that’s a different animal.[/li][li]I’m note sure how AMC does shows, e.g., Breaking Bad, but I had read something about FX offering shows very little money early on, but great artistic freedom, and if the show pans out, they get more money later which is why It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia made it while Starved did not.[/li][li]Bob’s Burger’s has a killer set of voice-actors behind it, so I can’t imagine it was too risky for regular network TV.[/li][/ul]
What people forget is, by the standards they’re held accountable to, network executives succeed far more often than they fail.
Take for example, what’s considered the stupidest move in network TV in this millennium: *The Jay Leno Show. *NBC’s goals were a) stop losing money on high-priced drama series and b) keep their promise to give Conan O’Brien The Tonight Show, and c) keep Leno from taking his audience somewhere else.
To this day, NBC executives will swear up and down that Leno actually made money for the network at 10:00 p.m. The fact that 98% of people watching at that time did not watch Leno is not relevant, and only when the local affiliates started complaining that those 98% of viewers were also not watching the affiliates’ local newscasts did NBC feel compelled to do something. The fact that Conan lost more older viewers than he brought in younger viewers made it easy for the network to push the big, red reboot button.
Meanwhile, the WB network had a legitimate hit series with *Reba. *When the WB turned into the CW Network, execs had to decide whether to keep a successful show that wasn’t hitting the demographic target the network was trying to reach. In the end they canceled Reba and kept the lower-rated but demographically appealing America’s Next Top Model.
I love the show. But, yeah, it’s not a big risk. An animated sitcom on Sunday evening? By now, that’s a tradition.
I’d pay good money for that.
Exactly.
At the end of the day, Network Execs don’t get paid to produce art, or to please vocal sci-fi fans, or to make memorable television. They get paid to make money, and this they are very good at. They are doing so now, despite technology marching on, which is a lot more than many media companies can claim. Sometimes, this means giving geeks what they want, perhaps building a block of programming to appeal to them. At other times, it’s creating dark dramatic pieces or decent, watchable mystery shows. Whatever the era, whatever people want, they care about one thing - are they making money?
For them, it’s actually pretty easy to measure. While feeder or teaser shows are used to bring in viewers for later shows, at the end of the day they know what the advertising dollars are per episode, and they know what the costs per episode for a series are. The math isn’t hard. This doesn’t mean they always do things in lock-step, of course. One network targets young audiences, another older ones. One network aims at middle-brow entertainment, another producing low-class comedies. And then in another timeslot they might just switch.
From the PoV of the execs, shows like Firefly aren’t good money-makers. They attract a certain crowd, but that market itself is less likely to buy the kind of products often advertised on television. Production costs are high, and the show itself has to be fit into some kind of schedule that works with the station’s other shows. At the end of the day, some series just don’t have a good fit.
Yes, taken as a committee–which is how they often work–they are pretty stupid.
Back in the days when I knew a bunch of them, the common theme was that they were sales guys, not creative (and very few women).
It’s probably the same now, only with more women. (I would hope.)
And they’re a dying breed…y’all are talking about demographics and timeslots, I can remember the last time, other than the news, where I had to be in front of a tee vee screen at a certain time in the week, to catch a show DVRs, HBOgo, and the pirate bay are making THAT set of decisions irrelevant.
I thought I had it straight, but then you did that “slash” thing, like when someone tells you they’re a “movie writer-slash-director” and the next time you see them you say “You direct slasher movies, right?”
But I’m pretty sure you meant Sam and the Firefly.
I detect a strong presence of ex-horse dust in this thread.
probably remnants from the turbines which was mistaken for a blender.
That’s what comes from eating crow too often.