5 ms·

Fox tried so many crazy things. Brisco County Jr., Dark Angel, Alien Nation. They'd stand by shows that did ok, like x files or fringe, and constantly try rando

by jfoutz 10y ago

Fox tried so many crazy things. Brisco County Jr., Dark Angel, Alien Nation. They'd stand by shows that did ok, like x files or fringe, and constantly try random new stuff. Yeah, i'm bummed with the rest of the internet that Firefly got canceled. Some browncoats still have some hate for Fox. But really without fox churning through random ideas, it never would have been made.

masklinn 10y ago
> Some browncoats still have some hate for Fox. But really without fox churning through random ideas, it never would have been made. Much of the hate for fox is not about trying new things or cancelling a failing show, it's that the way they aired the show gave it no chance: Fox changed the episode sequence (airing it in essentially random order destroying any chance of following the underlying plot), promoted it as an action-comedy series, and often interrupting or dropping it in favour of sports. There's a reason the show's "cult status" started mere months after it was cancelled.
cgriswald 10y ago
The browncoat hate for Fox isn't just that the show was cancelled but that it was aired somewhat out of order in inconsistent timeslots and then cancelled it. Fox has set up numerous shows for failure, including Arrested Development, which was aired against Monday Night Football and wasn't aired during sweeps week. How does a show succeed, no matter how good, when it's never given a chance to develop an audience? You're being overly generous to Fox. It's not enough to "try" crazy shows. They're dead in the water if they're set up for failure this way by extremely short term thinking.
- sho_hn 10y ago
  > Fox has set up numerous shows for failure Seems like a dubious claim to me, since it's not in their interest. My guess is that since the most coveted timeslots are a finite resource, they need to make hard calls about placing stable earners in them vs. new shows, for example, or bank on audiences finding those new shows anyway, via directed marketing effots. "Giving a show a chance to develop an audience" is technically achieved by airing it at all, and it's not the only thing they need to get done in a day. You can criticize individual decisions they make, but only if you take that full picture of everything they need to accomodate into account. There can be good reasons why a network doesn't place your favorite show in your preferred timeslot.
  - TillE 10y ago
    Nobody's claiming that Fox made the decisions out of spite. Just that those decisions happened to greatly contribute to Firefly's failure. > "Giving a show a chance to develop an audience" is technically achieved by airing it at all Nah. You might get away with that now with DVRs and streaming and Twitter word-of-mouth, but not in 2002.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Without commenting on Firefly specifically, one hears a lot of comments in the vein of: "They needed to just give this show another season so that it could find its voice/find an audience/develop its storyline/etc." Personally as a viewer, especially these days, you have very little time to grab me given how many options there are--and how relatively little time I spend watching TV. I'm not going to give your show 3 seasons, even if the network is willing, to hope it turns into something interesting.
    - wruza 10y ago
      Consumer's life is fast and boring, so he cannot wait to entertain himself. I think it is called positive feedback.
  - twoodfin 10y ago
    This is exactly right. The X-Files had a shitty Friday night time slot when it first aired, and grew out of it to a prime slot on Sundays.
- forgettableuser 10y ago
  Somebody should compile a list of all the stupid decisions networks have made, because they all seem to make a lot. Mork & Mindy (RIP Robin Williams) became the #3 show in America in its first season. Come season 2, the network (ABC) fired the entire supporting cast and changed its timeslot to go up against Archie Bunker. Even back then, most people had enough sense to know to not mess with something that worked, but you wouldn't know it from the network executives. The show was never able to recover.
  - dottrap 10y ago
    ALF was moved from Monday to Saturday and the ratings crashed. The show ended on the cliffhanger where ALF is caught by the military. Everybody assumed the show would be renewed, but it was cancelled. NBC exec Brandon Tartikoff later regretted cancellation feeling the show should have gone another season or two.
- shalmanese 10y ago
  > Fox has set up numerous shows for failure, including Arrested Development, which was aired against Monday Night Football and wasn't aired during sweeps week. How does a show succeed, no matter how good, when it's never given a chance to develop an audience? This is revisionist history. Fox pushed AD hard during season 1 and discovered that it was the ultimate cult show, with a small but devoted audience and no reach chance to expand it's base. Fox pushed it into the dead zones of the schedule because they knew the audience would follow it anywhere. Internally, AD had huge champions which is why it got far more episodes than it would have rationally deserved if you just looked at ratings. There's no real way Fox could have turned it into a viable hit if only it had treated it better. Like later critically adored darlings like Community of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, there was a natural ceiling to its viewership that was never going to fit into the business model of an early 21st century network channel.
vamur 10y ago
Well, Fringe should have been cancelled after the first season as it became a boring mess of plotholes. And Fox is generally terrible with scifi shows - see Terranova, Being Human. So it's a good thing they cancelled Firefly, otherwise there is a high chance it would not have been remembered fondly now.
stevekemp 10y ago
Dark Angel? That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I really enjoyed watching that when it came out, and was surprised it was cancelled just as it started to move on from the initial premise. My memory is that it shifted from being about her-past towards the snake-people. Along with the more visible rise of mutants? I'm hazy on the finer details, with my overriding memory being that it contained both Jessica Alba, and Michael Weatherly (who went on to become Dinozzo in NCIS.)

by jfoutz 10y ago

masklinn 10y ago

> Some browncoats still have some hate for Fox. But really without fox churning through random ideas, it never would have been made. Much of the hate for fox is not about trying new things or cancelling a failing show, it's that the way they aired the show gave it no chance: Fox changed the episode sequence (airing it in essentially random order destroying any chance of following the underlying plot), promoted it as an action-comedy series, and often interrupting or dropping it in favour of sports. There's a reason the show's "cult status" started mere months after it was cancelled.

cgriswald 10y ago

The browncoat hate for Fox isn't just that the show was cancelled but that it was aired somewhat out of order in inconsistent timeslots and then cancelled it. Fox has set up numerous shows for failure, including Arrested Development, which was aired against Monday Night Football and wasn't aired during sweeps week. How does a show succeed, no matter how good, when it's never given a chance to develop an audience? You're being overly generous to Fox. It's not enough to "try" crazy shows. They're dead in the water if they're set up for failure this way by extremely short term thinking.

sho_hn 10y ago
> Fox has set up numerous shows for failure Seems like a dubious claim to me, since it's not in their interest. My guess is that since the most coveted timeslots are a finite resource, they need to make hard calls about placing stable earners in them vs. new shows, for example, or bank on audiences finding those new shows anyway, via directed marketing effots. "Giving a show a chance to develop an audience" is technically achieved by airing it at all, and it's not the only thing they need to get done in a day. You can criticize individual decisions they make, but only if you take that full picture of everything they need to accomodate into account. There can be good reasons why a network doesn't place your favorite show in your preferred timeslot.
- TillE 10y ago
  Nobody's claiming that Fox made the decisions out of spite. Just that those decisions happened to greatly contribute to Firefly's failure. > "Giving a show a chance to develop an audience" is technically achieved by airing it at all Nah. You might get away with that now with DVRs and streaming and Twitter word-of-mouth, but not in 2002.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Without commenting on Firefly specifically, one hears a lot of comments in the vein of: "They needed to just give this show another season so that it could find its voice/find an audience/develop its storyline/etc." Personally as a viewer, especially these days, you have very little time to grab me given how many options there are--and how relatively little time I spend watching TV. I'm not going to give your show 3 seasons, even if the network is willing, to hope it turns into something interesting.
  - wruza 10y ago
    Consumer's life is fast and boring, so he cannot wait to entertain himself. I think it is called positive feedback.
- twoodfin 10y ago
  This is exactly right. The X-Files had a shitty Friday night time slot when it first aired, and grew out of it to a prime slot on Sundays.
forgettableuser 10y ago
Somebody should compile a list of all the stupid decisions networks have made, because they all seem to make a lot. Mork & Mindy (RIP Robin Williams) became the #3 show in America in its first season. Come season 2, the network (ABC) fired the entire supporting cast and changed its timeslot to go up against Archie Bunker. Even back then, most people had enough sense to know to not mess with something that worked, but you wouldn't know it from the network executives. The show was never able to recover.
- dottrap 10y ago
  ALF was moved from Monday to Saturday and the ratings crashed. The show ended on the cliffhanger where ALF is caught by the military. Everybody assumed the show would be renewed, but it was cancelled. NBC exec Brandon Tartikoff later regretted cancellation feeling the show should have gone another season or two.
shalmanese 10y ago
> Fox has set up numerous shows for failure, including Arrested Development, which was aired against Monday Night Football and wasn't aired during sweeps week. How does a show succeed, no matter how good, when it's never given a chance to develop an audience? This is revisionist history. Fox pushed AD hard during season 1 and discovered that it was the ultimate cult show, with a small but devoted audience and no reach chance to expand it's base. Fox pushed it into the dead zones of the schedule because they knew the audience would follow it anywhere. Internally, AD had huge champions which is why it got far more episodes than it would have rationally deserved if you just looked at ratings. There's no real way Fox could have turned it into a viable hit if only it had treated it better. Like later critically adored darlings like Community of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, there was a natural ceiling to its viewership that was never going to fit into the business model of an early 21st century network channel.

vamur 10y ago

Well, Fringe should have been cancelled after the first season as it became a boring mess of plotholes. And Fox is generally terrible with scifi shows - see Terranova, Being Human. So it's a good thing they cancelled Firefly, otherwise there is a high chance it would not have been remembered fondly now.

stevekemp 10y ago

Dark Angel? That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I really enjoyed watching that when it came out, and was surprised it was cancelled just as it started to move on from the initial premise. My memory is that it shifted from being about her-past towards the snake-people. Along with the more visible rise of mutants? I'm hazy on the finer details, with my overriding memory being that it contained both Jessica Alba, and Michael Weatherly (who went on to become Dinozzo in NCIS.)