Screwed By The Network - Television Tropes & Idioms

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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScrewedByTheNetwork

The prototypical network executive is a schlub, grown bloated and
neurotic on expensive meals and drugs, who does not have a creative
bone in his body and whose understanding of the creative process is
only marginally smaller than his grasp of what the viewing public
actually wants.

Aware that his job is so dependent on luck that he might as well empty
the network's coffers at the nearest roulette table, his time revolves
not around nurturing talent for the benefit of all, but around making
himself look competent.

That means appearing responsible for every success and innocent of
every failing that the network might have, irrespective of whether
this was actually the case. Note that the people that the executive is
really trying to convince are his fellow execs, both inside and
outside the station. Execs that are, to a man, also having the exact
same neurotic crisis day in and day out.

Nevertheless, the need to keep their channels populated with new shows
means that their commissioning bods will keep putting forward all
kinds of shows that may or may not appeal to the network executives'
sensibilities.

For this reason, the execs will sometimes find themselves in the
unfortunate position of being in charge of a show that they do not
understand and therefore do not know what to do with. This presents
them with a tricky situation: if the show is a failure they risk
losing face, but if the show is a success then they'll look
redundant.

Alternatively, the show may be a legacy commission under your
predecessor, which is worse - because if it's a success they'll have
one up on you, but if you cancel it straight off, you'll lose all
plausible deniability when people call you petty and small.

The answer to both of these problems, of course, is to screw the show
over completely. Put it in a different time slot each episode, show it
in the wrong order, bury it at midnight, put it up against CSI... do
everything you can to stop it from building up a regular viewing
audience that's not quite big enough to warrant the budget, but just
big enough to cause some trouble when you cancel it for not
"attracting the right audience".

Then wipe your beaded brow, pop a few pills, put on your best happy
face and chant your power mantra. So long as you look good in the eyes
of others then everything will be fine. And that's what this job is
about, right? Right?

Okay, okay - not all network executives are like this. Some
intentionally seek out creative people to make shows that don't just
Follow The Leader, and as they get promoted, they may become the very
predecessors these shows are inherited from. However, this happens
more often than you may wish to believe.

Fox is pretty much considered to be the king of this sort of
programming decision, so much so that ratings for new shows on Fox are
usually comparatively low, since most people know they'll just be
canceled within 10 shuffled-around episodes anyways.

Please try to avoid listing shows as being "screwed" just because of a
disagreement over the reasons for their cancellation. Plenty of shows
are canceled simply because they just weren't making any money even
with the network backing it. This is about intentional sabotage, not
"the mean network executives canceled my favorite show".

Compare Executive Meddling, Executive Veto, Too Good To Last,
Invisible Advertising. Also compare No Export For You, though that
doesn't affect the actual production, but the export of a given
product.

Rarely, the situation will invert itself with Network To The Rescue.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Examples

Anime
Digimon on ITV[UK] was OK,for the first two series. They showed four
episodes Tamers then ditched it. As for Digital TV,they didn't pick up
Frontier but showed endless trailers for it, and the only Digimon
you're likely to see is their little mashup of the Digimon World Tour
[that thing from Adventure 02 with the worldwide Digi Destined or The
Movie.
In a rare subversion, Code Geass seems to be a case where Screwed By
The Network didn't end up killing the show. Reportedly, Sunrise was
wary of giving too much leeway and many resources to a director like
Goro Taniguchi, still relatively untested and with a reputation for
absolute perfectionism. According to the staff, in the early days of
the show they had to share offices (and copiers) with other
productions, and were only about three episodes ahead in terms of
writing, while most shows are eight to ten episodes ahead. On top of
all this, Sunrise only gave Taniguchi half of the fifty episodes he
wanted...but the runaway success of the show convinced them to give it
an Oddly Named Sequel. But after this announcement, they then changed
the time slot for the sequel from after midnight to 5:00 PM Sunday,
which forced the staff to alter their original plans for the second
season and made them tone down parts of the series. For many fans the
most notable casualty ended up being the second half of Code Geass R2,
whose rushed pacing was a result of having to rewrite much of the
first half in order to allow newcomers to understand what was going
on.
Noon on Saturday isn't necessarily a bad time; Saturday mornings used
to be full of kids' shows and cartoons, and even today there are still
some.
Cartoon Network aired Hamtaro, a children's anime, on Toonami
alongside all of the other animes (most of which were action series).
Because of this, most of the people that watched it were around age
13-15. Then they moved it to early mornings, and finally moved it to
mid-day, when all the people who actually DID watch it were still in
school.
Lampshaded by TOM being utterly confused during the show's intro, and
the "up next" bumps implying the other shows were attacking Hamtaro.
Adult Swim is constantly taking flack from fanboys posting on internet
foums- and the occasional hijacked article on TV Tropes- over showing
anime at unreasonable hours and with little promotion. Whether or not
all this is a cause of their anime's low ratings, and effect of it, or
some sort of Vicious Cycle is a matter of debate. In their defense the
Lupin III cycle is often brought up. Lupin was originally broadcast on
AS at midnight- not great, but reasonable for the time- with a fair
deal of promotion. It was cancelled and brought back several times,
which lead to AS snarkily observing the following sequence of events:
A) Lupin On-Air; B) Ratings substandard; C) Lupin Cancelled D) Fans
bitching; E) Repeat.
Detective Conan in the US: They put it on weekdays at eleven-ish on
Adult Swim and after a very short time no advertising. Then they
cancelled it. It (and a bunch of other Funimation distributed shows)
was placed on a really out of the way channel called Colours. Then
they cancelled the dailiy anime block on said channel and put on
Chinese Communist propaganda. I'm not happy with that.
Conan's a hard one to peg, due to Japan generally having more relaxed
standards than US blocks. It looks like a children's show at first
glance, and carries the tone of your average Shonen anime, but then we
get into all the smoking and drinking and bloody murder and suicide
attempts and adultery... So Yeah.
YTV's run of it didn't go any better. They ordered 26 episodes, but
before they could even finish, they abruptly drop it in favour of some
Canadian made live action shows in order to appeal to Can-con
requirements. And everyone knows live action Canadian shows are just
the thing for an anime block. Anime in general on YTV hasn't done so
well. A very nice Friday night block has been shoved to Saturdays, and
cut down to about half of its old length.
In Venezuela, any channel who wasn't Televen or La Tele treated anime
in this way, either putting it at 5:00AM on Saturdays, or cutting the
emission just because, or macekered them horrifically, or just
promising and not delivering (a joke in the local fandom is " When
RCTV is going to finally play Sorcerer Stabber Orphen? Same day Duke
Nukem Forever goes out, maybe"). One of this troper friends has a tape
from that one time certain network premiered Ranma One Half; during
the seventh chapter, the network went into a "Extra newsflash", and
never put Ranma back after it.
Cartoon Network screws shows all the time. In fact, get this: in
Cartoon Network Australia (the CN for Oceania), they moved One Piece
to 8:30 a.m. on weekdays. It was moved to a time where no one can see
it!! Then when Cartoon Network acquired a new season of One Piece,
they thankfully over it to 9:00 pm where it should have been all this
time!!
Oh yeah, during that time there were only 3 anime shows on Cartoon
Network Australia: Naruto (Season 2, well overdue Season 3), Pokemon
Diamond and Pearl and One Piece. Back then Cartoon Network focused too
much on Ben10, hoping that show alone will carry the network's
success. Cue Taps.
After War Gundam X suffered this in Japan when it got moved from 5:00
p.m. on Fridays to 6:00 a.m. on Saturdays; its 49-episode run was also
cut down to 39 episodes.
In 2001, Cartoon Network brought on the original Mobile Suit Gundam
with much fanfare and hype. After September 11th, the show was removed
from the air along with Cowboy Bebop without much of any warning.
Unlike the latter, though, MSG never came back officially—CN skipped
straight to the final episode without any advertising in the middle of
a random Toonami block in 2002, but that was it; the series never ran
in its entirety.

Comic Books
The Sinestro Corps War story in the Green Lantern title was widely
considered one of the best arcs of 2007, but most of DC's marketing
went to the Countdown weekly series, which was... less than
impressive.
DC did kind of realize their mistake halfway through, though, and
quickly reshuffled their advertising to focus on Sinestro Corps, even
rushing out a series of special tie-in issues. Of course, by then the
story was half over, but at least they tried.
Thanks to the success of Sinestro Corps (and perhaps in an effort not
to repeat past mistakes) DC is giving its sequel, Blackest Night, a
huge marketing push and turning it into their big company event for
2009, when originally it was conceived as just a story that would run
in the Green Lantern books.
And proving what a copycat industry the comics biz is, Marvel did the
exact same thing (minus the part where they realized their mistake)
around the same time; pushing the critically panned Civil War event
over the vastly superior Annihilation.
Blue Beetle was cancelled just before Batman The Brave And The Bold
premiered and showed Jaime on TV for the first time, the kind of thing
that can (and did) inspire increased interest in the character and the
comic they're from. Great timing there guys.
From all reports, DC tried to keep that series running for as long as
the storyline allowed it and it was just a bad coincidence that it
died before BATB. That said, the fans had thier unwanted say with
thier wallets over the idea that there was a Blue Beetle that wasn't
Ted Kord.

Film
Never let it be said Fox doesn't let its corporate mantra reach every
division. Mike Judge has been twice stung, with Idiocracy only being
released in enough theaters for contractual obligation. It's said this
is a particular case of the hand of Murdoch.
Recently, I saw the movie appearing on movie channels and it earned a
premiere on Comedy Central on Febuary 13, 2009. NOW they recognize
genius.
You do realize that Fox and Comedy Central are planted firmly on
opposite sides of the political spectrum, right?
That's nothing compared to the butchering Fox did to Fight Club.
"Murder, Mayhem, Soap." The trailers and ads for the movie made it
seem like some sort of slacker movie. Of course, nobody saw it. Fight
Club never ceases to amaze people who actually watch it.
I wouldn't think lazy marketing trumps not releasing the movie. It was
widely considered Bill mechanic took a lot of risks not interfering
with the production of the movie at all.
This troper ignored Fight Club, thinking it a dumb fighting or boxing
film When he saw it 5 years later my god he was blown away.
Likewise, there's the X-Men film series. Has an A-List franchise ever
been treated less like one? The first movie was rushed into production
and received a relatively small budget compared to other tentpole
movies. Even when it proved a hit twice, the director wasn't
immediately signed on, so the Superman producers grabbed him. A third
movie was rushed into production, and half the cast was taken out of
action.
More than anything, the third movie read like the star vehicle that
I'm sure Hugh Jackman (and Halle Berry - the primary reason why Alan
Cumming did not return) insisted it become, instead of being an
ensemble piece. Of course, the entire series seems to run on
Wolverine, but at least in the first two there were other characters
instead of the wooden sterotypes they became.
To make matters worse, they've now created a new animated series that
seems like a loose combination of the movie chronology and the Joss
Whedon run of 'Astonishing X-Men,' but with Wolverine leading the team
- at Xavier's insistance via telepathy *from 20 years in the future.*
Good thing for all involved the cartoon is so bloody good, eh?
Although, scroll down to the "Animation" for more.

Live Action TV
The granddaddy of all Screwed By The Network examples: the original TV
run of Star Trek. After two seasons of middling ratings, NBC announced
its intent to cancel the show. However, a national campaign of letter
writing, led by a fan named Betty Jo Trimble, resulted in an
unprecedented backdown by the network. NBC renewed the show for a
third season ... but also cut Star Trek's budget by approximately half
and placed the show in the Friday Night Death Slot, when the show's
demographic was likely to be doing anything but watching TV. Both
episode quality and consequently ratings suffered meteoric falls,
followed by cancellation at the end of the third season.
What more can be said about Jericho? When it got cancelled the first
time, CBS decided not to announce its impending doom until AFTER the
cliffhanger season finale aired (it made the nuts all the more
necessary). This trooper sense new troubles when the CBS agreed to
give the show an awkwardly small order of seven episodes and depended
on the fanbase and ratings to do the rest to gain viewers. How could
things get worst for a show which was given a bad timeslot upon
return? How about airing the episodes in some random time in the mid-
season calendar with little to no fanfare? (Troper sensed the second
sign was no recap special of season one before season two aired). I
think the biggest insult to injury was the horrid lead-in of one of
four Big Brothers mindlessly airing during the week on that network.
(CBS was fully aware of the worse-than-Jericho ratings Big Brother 9
was getting during the period BEFORE Jericho's season two aired but
decided to let the poor ratings of Big Brother 9 ride in their
respective timeslots.)
The only consolation prize from all of this was that the writers were
prepared for an either-or situation (two different endings) and that
CBS informed them of their cancellation before airing the final
episode. Notice how networks now are giving more of their serial
dramas (and their fans) ample warning of likely cancellation BEFORE
their season finale episodes air to give writers some time to wrap up
major storylines. I would like to think that Jericho fans may have
caused a major influence in this change which would make this seem
like a bittersweet victory for fans of quality tv story-telling.
Wonderfalls (aired on Fox, of course!) had its first four episodes
shown out-of-order, despite the fact that they had constantly
developing plotlines, and was canceled after four weeks, one of the
quickest deaths Fox has ever managed to give a show. But that was only
the last of a number of choices on the part of the network that led to
the show's demise: first, the show was developed at the same time as
CBS' Joan Of Arcadia, to which at first glance it may seem strikingly
similar in theme. Supposedly fearing it would draw too many
comparisons, they held off the premiere for an entire year, a stroke
of genius that led some to think it was a deliberate copy (as opposed
to a coincidence), especially as Joan had proven successful and was
still on the air. Worse, it started airing 8 PM on a Friday, which had
the dual misfortune of not only being the same time as Joan aired on
CBS, but of also being the infamous Friday Night Death Slot, whose
name tends to be especially apt for non-family friendly fare... which
of course, describes Wonderfalls. In a sort of Coup De Grace, Fox
finally moved the show after its third week to Thursday, where it
would ostensibly get better ratings... of course, they did this
without telling anyone, so it kind of defeated the purpose.
The order the episodes aired was correct — they just got moved around
for the DVD because one of the creators wanted to push his episode
forward. They did do an encore airing of the pilot, which was nice,
but when the ratings didn't show up immediately, everything went
downhill pretty quickly.
Firefly was supposed to begin with a double-length pilot episode that
set up the complex universe that the series was set in, along with the
various characters' relationships. Then the network decided that the
pilot wasn't action-oriented enough and should be shelved and asked
the show's creators to make a new first episode, giving them just one
weekend to write it. After that premiere, Fox completely ignored the
arc and aired the episodes in seemingly random order, in some cases
resulting in episodes showing The Previously scenes that wouldn't air
until the following week. There was almost no commercial promotion
whatsoever following the premiere, episodes were pre-empted for
sporting events on numerous occasions, and the pilot movie wasn't even
aired until after the series had been cancelled. Not to mention, it
also aired in the Friday Night Death Slot.
And early commercials hyped the "girl in the box" event, not only
spoiling a plot point in the original pilot (which subsequently didn't
air until the end of the series), but referencing a one-time event
that never occurred during actual airings because they didn't show the
episode it happened in. It's worthy of pointing out too, that the ad
also made it look more derivative of the then-popular-on-cable anime
series Outlaw Star (also a Sci-Fi Western) than it really was, turning
off additional audiences that assumed the whole thing was a cheap
knockoff of Outlaw, as opposed to a very different SF Western series
that happened to include a very brief homage to Outlaw Star.
To be fair, it turned some segments of the audience, such as this
troper, on to the show in the first place. Outlaw Star with Joss
Whedon's sense of humor? Awesome.
It's very, very unlikely a show flopped on a primetime network because
people think it tread ground they already saw in Japanese animation.
In fact, it's hard to argue being too familiar is an impediment to a
show at all
Drive's first three episodes were aired over two nights; the fourth
aired a week later, and then it was cancelled, giving all of four
episodes and nine days. This after the initial thirteen episode order
was split in half, so even if it hadn't been cancelled, it would have
run for a month, followed by a three-month hiatus. This proves once
again that Tim Minear (who also produced both Wonderfalls and Firefly,
see above) and FOX go together like peanut butter and nitroglycerin.
This editor wonders if he's some kind of masochist... Or perhaps if he
repeatedly ran over a FOX Network Executive's cat/dog/child. Minear is
reportedly now two shows into a six-show deal with FOX.
Don't forget that the brilliant reasoning was that 24's ratings were
lower that week, the blame for which must lie on Drive's time slot
preceding it. And also don't forget that Nathan Fillion can't catch a
break.
"Hi, I'm every sci-fi show on Fox that isn't The X-Files. I'm just
visiting for a month, so please don't get too attached."
We'll have to see about that. They certainly have promoted "Fringe"
enough... (read: too much)
... until they decided to leave it off the air for an extended period
of time to show American Idol.
"Fringe", aka. The X-Files: Volume 2. Ooh snap!
Arrested Development was nominated for 22 Emmy awards over the course
of its three-year span, and won six of them. It also received critical
acclaim from almost every quarter. Despite this, Fox gave the show
almost no publicity, failed to capitalize on its acclaim, and cut the
number of episodes with each passing season (down to 18 in season two
and 13 in season three) before canceling it. Not to mention, when it
was actually advertised during its run, it was made out to be the
dumbest show ever created. The coup de grace being bundling the last 4
episodes together and showing them during the opening ceremony for the
Winter Olympics, just to make sure no-one would see them.
When the show reached the UK, the BBC did the same. With almost no
promotion, it was confined to the late evening hours on BBC 2 at ever-
changing timeslots and with occasional re-runs shown at even later
timeslots on BBC 4 (the network's somewhat highbrow digital channel).
This troper was a regular BBC 2 viewer, but only discovered Arrested
Development by accident when the first season was released on DVD.
In 1985, BBC controller Michael Grade postponed the original series of
Doctor Who — a show he reportedly loathed — for 18 months until a high-
profile campaign brought the show back on air. He was also responsible
for firing then-star Colin Baker. He later claimed that he did the
former out of spite and the latter out of dislike for the actor's
style. He also scheduled the show against popular Soap Opera
Coronation Street, which was partly responsible for the show's drop in
viewers.
Torchwood was screwed over when it reached Australia's Channel Ten.
While it was already somewhat screwed on arrival, given that Doctor
Who-the show that gave rise to it-aired on ABC (a non-commercial
channel), it was further screwed by the show being aired initially
around 10pm on Monday, but then randomly shoved around until it ended
up at almost midnight. Needless to say, it didn't do well. The fact
that it was promoted as a generic crime show (albeit with sex) didn't
help.
Is this why I could never watch Torchwood on Sci-Fi, because I was
expecting it to be at a normal TV hour? Those bastards.
Channel 10 also dumped a ball of hate on Battlestar Galactica. After
reasonable promotion and an 8:30pm timeslot for the Miniseries and
beginning of series 1, it slowly dropped back to 9:30 and then 10:30.
And then season 2 aired at midnight on Wednesday. Mercifully, and
ironically, the whole of season 2 was released on DVD only a few weeks
after it had begun airing.
Heroes is in the midst of a network screwing on Australian television
as we speak. Initially promoted well by Channel 7, and showing at
around 8:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night, over its three seasons it has
been mercilessly bulldozered further and further back into the night.
The last episode thus far has been shown at 11.30 p.m. To make way for
such essential TV as the two millionth season of The Amazing Race and
a second serving of Bones in one week.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 was victimized twice by network heads
(Doug Herzog at Comedy Central and Bonnie Hammer at Sci Fi Channel)
who professed not to understand the show's sense of humor and clearly
resented having it left to them as a legacy program from previous
executives; they wound up fighting a war of attrition against the
show's small but vocal fan base while looking for an excuse to cancel
the series. Despite this, the show enjoyed a ten-season run, plus
almost five years of reruns on the Sci Fi Channel, before finally
signing off for good in 2004. The Movie is well known for being
screwed by the studio.
In addition, Bonnie Hammer and Mark Stern, while separating the
schedules of Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica in what would end
up the last season of the former and penultimate season of the latter,
put the former after a bad remake of Knight Rider (oh, and put it
against Monk, which not only tops Nielsen cable ratings but is also on
USA, whose scheduling is also done by WolframHammer and HartStern) and
delayed the latter's season premiere until six months after the finale
last season. When the ratings fell, they canceled the former (on the
200th episode airing party, no less) and moved the latter to an even
worse timeslot. (A copy of TV Tropes sent from the future in a dodgy
wormhole stated that these two people were killed by a giant poster of
Ben Browder. Dropped by the ghost of Isaac Asimov.)
Oh, Bonnie Hammer = Satan has been around awhile. Ask any Forever
Knight about the treatment their show got on USA Network. (Little
known fact: FK's last four episodes were the first original dramatic
program on the Sci Fi Channel... because USA Network dumped the last
four episodes on a channel that, at the time, had about 500,000
subscribers.)
It's not like the TV adaptation of The Dresden Files was high art, but
it deserves a mention here. Sci Fi didn't exactly slit the show's
throat, but they did stab it in the femoral artery by being remarkably
tight-lipped about whether or not the show was renewed. When it got to
the point that the guy playing Harry Dresden was shopping around for
another series, the creators decided to just call it a day.
Sci Fi's excuses about why they refused to renew a series that had
developed a good-sized cult following? The numbers weren't there. Fans
became suspicious of this excuse when Sci Fi then not only renewed a
show that had been doing more poorly than The Dresden Files, but
praised it for doing so remarkably well. When Dresden Files fans
pointed this out, Sci Fi then trotted out the amazing (to this troper)
notion that the show had been canceled because it was attracting the
wrong demographics. Sci Fi wanted to attract young male viewers, and
The Dresden Files was attracting women of 18-40.
That' the exact same reason Stargate SG-1 was cancelled and Atlantis
was renewed. Even with the efforts to make the numbers plummet, SG-1
was still doing better—but they anted to keep the "action" male-
oriented newer show and drop the larger audience, huge fanbase,
increasingly popular older show because too much of SG-1's audience
was women. Now, they've got no shows with any audience.
Phil Of The Future was cancelled because Disney thought the revenue
from the show would be better used for a creation of another show.
You mean like the one about the family of witches that's EXACTLY THE
SAME?
Only it tossed out ANY originality Phil Of The Future had?
Replace Phil Of The Future with every Disney show since Even Stevens.
They believe in the 65 episode ceiling so much that it took a letter-
writing campaign the likes of which God Himself has never seen to get
a Post Script Season of Kim Possible.
Crusade, the sequel to Babylon 5, suffered all of these from the
ground up, complete with Executive Meddling writ large. JMS later
learned that TNT, the network airing the show (which had also aired
the Post Script Season of B5), had done research and learned that the
B5 and Crusade audience was completely failing to make the jump to the
rest of the network's programming, and vice versa. It decided to scrap
the sequel, even as it was in production... except that they couldn't
do it without breaching their contract with Warner Brothers. So, they
decided to make it impossible, giving unbelievably bad notes
(including demanding a fist fight in the first episode). The
production team did its best, but the show was quite literally doomed
from day one.
Paramount attempted to screw WWE by moving their program SmackDown!
into the famed Friday Night Death Slot (where it would face not only
constant pre-emptions for local sports, but the loss of a good portion
of its audience to people getting out and doing stuff on Friday
nights), in order to try and pressure WWE into keeping Monday Night
Raw on Spike TV. However, thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign
by WWE (even rebranding the show Friday Night SmackDown!), the show
managed not only to not lose any viewers, but gained enough ground
that it was one of the few UPN shows picked up by the post-merger CW
Network.
They ultimately wound up screwing them anyway, but it took a few
years; when it came time to renew contracts, Paramount wasn't
interested despite the high ratings and so Smackdown is on the path to
the much-less-notable My Network TV.
Since Smackdown's premiere on My Network TV, they are beating The CW
in ratings by a good margin.
And with the complete economic meltdown of 2008 ripping through the
entertainment industry threatening the very existence of My Network TV
this may end up a case of Screwed By The World.
Pro wrestling tends to do this to itself. Take WCW in the late-'90s,
when it seems that anyone who wasn't in the nWo would somehow be de-
emphasized. Chris Jericho, who got over on his own as a comedy heel
"paragon of virtue," never really made it past TV title status. He was
actually put OFF television for awhile, though it was when his
contract was about to be up. Another example would be Norman
Smiley....as his "big wiggle" dance was starting to get over, somehow
it was deemed "inappropriate" for television for awhile.
Of course, this didn't start with the Monday Night Wars "boom." Take
Hulk Hogan's debut with the company in 1994...after which Ric Flair
was pretty much made to look like a joke compared to Hogan, and more
importantly, Hogan's friends (mainly ex-WWF stars) were pushed over
most of WCW's homegrown talent. The moment that defines this was when
Hacksaw Jim Duggan beat Steve Austin in *30 seconds* for the U.S.
title.
And ever since the WCW buyout, WWF/E is VERY often guilty of doing
this to anyone who isn't one of their main eventers. Triple H "glass
ceiling" anyone? And let us not forget their frequent refusal to push
talent that was bred in other companies (the infamous "WCW inVasion"
is a glaring example of this, and the subsequent years when they
brought in some of WCW's bigger names. It's all pretty much a big Take
That)
Despite having its episodes aired horrendously out of order, Tremors
the TV series managed to become Sci Fi's highest rated program at the
time. Nevertheless, it was cancelled on the grounds that it didn't hit
the demographic that Sci Fi wanted.
This becomes doubly brain-wracking (if perhaps somewhat karmic) when
one considers the demographic in question was the audience that had
already been watching Farscape ... which Sci Fi canceled without
warning (leaving the series ending on a cliffhanger) to replace with
Tremors.
NBC seemed determined to use this trope to kill the original Law &
Order series. In March 2006, they announced that the show would be
moved from Wednesdays at 10pm (where it had been a ratings winner for
over a decade) to 9pm in order to premiere Heist. Two weeks later
(after Heist tanked in the ratings and fan outcry reached deafening
levels), they moved it back. The following season they tried again -
shifting the show to the near-doom slot of Fridays at 10pm (head-to-
head with NUMB3RS) and moving sister show Law & Order: Criminal Intent
to Tuesdays at 9pm. Both shows suffered ratings drops as a result
(especially Criminal Intent). Then after the season was over, NBC
banished Criminal Intent to USA and offered Law & Order a midseason
slot on Sundays at 9pm once football season was over. Of course, the
WGA strike put them back on in the old Wednesday time slot and the
show is again a standout. At least until they move it again for Jay
Leno's new 10pm talk show...
Attempts to bury a series this way aren't always successful. When
M*A*S*H was first aired, there had never been a successful series spun
off of a film, and the majority of the execs were aghast that the
decision to base one on that particular film (one wonders if it would
have been aired at all if they'd read the original novel, which was
even more irreverent but lacked most of the political aspects which
made the film a hit). It was very deliberately scheduled against
Dragnet and The Wonderful World Of Disney, a slot which had ruined
everything else CBS had put there. But both of those shows had been on
the air for many years, and the audiences were wearing thin, so when
bored viewers decided to look at this new controversial comedy to see
what all the fuss was about... well, the rest is history.
The first three seasons of 24 were routinely put on hiatus for up to a
month at a time in favor of baseball, American Idol, and other new
shows that nobody remembers anymore. In this case, Fox eventually
realized the error of its ways, and subsequent seasons have been shown
without interruption.
Covington Cross (1992) received the same treatment, airing only 6
episodes over 8 weeks, being constantly pre-empted and/or moved due to
sports programming. After the "dismal" ratings after these episodes,
it was canned by the network.
When the BBC originally aired Monty Python's Flying Circus, they
broadcast it at inconsistent hours and preempted it with the Horse Of
The Year Show. (This is the reason for some of the show's Biting The
Hand Humor and malicious jokes about BBC television programming.)
The show didn't reach popularity until is was picked up by the Dallas/
Fort Worth PBS station, at which point the rest of the world only
North America and the UK went "HOLY CRAP THIS IS AWESOME!" That's
right, Texas saved Monty Python. Remember that next time you start
insulting Texans.
A German example: RTL airs self-produced sitcoms on Friday (half of
these are So Bad Its Horrible). Then we get the not half-bad "Herzog",
which is basically about an Allen Shore ripoff who is highly
chauvinist, though amusingly so. The show was highly recommended by
several TV magazines and to this day still has a small but loyal
following. Why it still bombed? It was placed directly after the show
"Angie", which was basically a show for women in their mid-30s.
Cupid was bounced around from the Friday Night Death Slot to Saturday
(the two nights nobody is ever home to watch a romantic dramedy) to
Thursday against NBC's Must See TV , justifying its cancellation
before the end of the first season. Oddly enough, the show may be Un
Cancelled as ABC has given its creator permission to try again.
Angel was suddenly cancelled to the confusion of those making the
show, as it was consistently high-quality and high-ratings. The reason
the network gave was even more confusing: that the show was so popular
and good, that they wanted the series to end on a high note instead of
letting it die in obscurity. Possibly the only example of a show being
cancelled (ostensibly) because everyone liked it too much.
It happens frequently in the world of Disney cartoons. Pretty much all
series stop dead at the 65th episode for precisely this reason.
Supposedly, Michael Eisner came up with this philosophy.
This Troper heard a different reason for its cancellation: Angel had
been getting consistentally good ratings no matter where they moved it
(from Wednesday to Monday to Sunday), the fans seemed to follow it
everywhere. However, The WB was also currently developing a new series
of Dark Shadows and didn't want competing vampire shows on their
network, so they cancelled Angel. The new Dark Shadows, as you are
probably aware, was never made and thus the shaggy vampire was shot.
Another, simpler explanation, its veracity dubious, was that despite
the show's popularity it was simply too expensive.
Nowhere Man was one of UPN's highest rated and critically acclaimed
shows. But it was cancelled after one season only to be replaced by
Moesha and Homeboys in Outer Space. Homeboys only lasted about four
episodes. Some people wish that Moesha had only lasted that long.
Max Headroom, anyone? Give it promotion no series could live up to
(come on, a Newsweek cover?) and then drop it opposite the wildly
successful Miami Vice.
Miami Vice itself was screwed by putting it on opposite Dallas, then
moving it to Sunday night.
Max Headroom is somewhat different, though as the reason it was
screwed was not due to incompetence or office politics so much as the
content of the show, which pretty much did everything it could to spit
in the face of the execs & their way of life. The fact it was ever
greenlit at all in the first place is nothing short of a miracle.
How about an entire company screwed by the network? March 2001:
AOLTimeWarner was openly looking to sell World Championship Wrestling,
producer of the highest rated shows for TNT (WCW Nitro) and TBS (WCW
Thunder). A group of investors, lead by WCW head booker Eric Bishoff,
had a deal in principle to take over the company (absorbing the
production costs that the network had been covering). Then Jamie
Kellner, then Turner Networks CEO, canceled all WCW programming from
Turner networks (which he had wanted to do for years, but was blocked
by his predecessor, network founder Ted Turner), removing WCW's most
valuable assets and single-handedly torpedoing the deal. Vince McMahon
(head of WCW's long time rival World Wrestling Federation) then
swooped in and bought out WCW's remaining assets (Mostly wrestler
contracts and its deep tape library) for pennies on the dollar.
And then there's American Gothic. The show premiered, if this editor
recalls correctly, at 11 PM EST on either Thursday or Friday nights.
Either way, a fairly good time slot. There was plenty of press,
promotions, a lot of hype. The show airs, gets rave reviews from
critics and fans alike...and then, for no apparent reason, scheduling
issues begin cropping up. Whether the executives in charge at CBS
changed and wished to do away with the success of their predecessors,
didn't understand how good a thing they had, or didn't understand the
show at all, all sorts of problems began plaguing the show. It would
be preempted; there would be no episode shown, something else randomly
stuck on in its place with no explanation; there would be gaps of
several weeks in between new episodes, sometimes filled by reruns but
usually not; episodes were shown out of order, or never aired at all.
Then, without warning, the show was completely yanked from the line-up
and vanished for many months. Granted, the show was unusual, not for
everyone, and very different from most of CBS's usual fare, but with
so many praising it for its daring and disturbing nature, you'd think
they'd have gotten a clue. It was certainly Too Good To Last. Luckily
the creators knew long enough ahead of time that the plug was being
pulled, and managed to wrap up the main plot points (well, sort
of...). But even these final episodes were withheld for a long time,
then suddenly plunked on TV one right after another as a three-hour
movie 'event'.
11 PM Eastern, on weeknights? Isn't that usually the local news on
most broadcast stations?
Film At Eleven, I believe, answers your question.
Robot Wars suffered this at the hands of The BBC around the time of
its 5th season which had already aired on BBC Choice but not on BBC 2
(this Troper has read that the BBC were trying to use it to get people
to get satellite or cable to get their extra channels) the result was
that they aired Robot Wars Extreme twice and by the time season 5 did
air season 6 had already been filmed (and started immediately after
the 5th season ended).
After the Channel Hop to Channel 5 ''Robot Wars was constantly shunted
around the schedule on either Saturday or Sunday, this was its last
season.
Shunted, or matilda'd?
Does anyone remember Techno Games? It was supposed to be the Robot
Olympics but then BBC Two axed it after only three or four goes round!
What a magnificent event that was.
I do! Mainly because one of my best friends entered as part of my
school's team. Much as I enjoyed it, it was always second place to
Robot Wars, and I don't recall any advertising for it.
According to legend, the Robert Stack show "Most Wanted" was cancelled
by the network right after a bad meeting with the show's producer, who
threw an ashtray.. which bounced off a table and hit network executive
Fred Silverman right in the chest. Oops.
This troper forgot to tune into the new show Valentine when it first
aired, despite liking the premise. Why did I forget? No advertisement
whatsoever. Despite actually liking it so far, even though I've only
seen the last half, I've accepted that the second it came here, it was
sure to be cancelled.
The CW seems to be good at doing this often these days. Like
Valentine, Life Is Wild premiered in a Sunday night time slot and was
sure to be cancelled after the first season. And then it DID, as well
as Hidden Palms.
It turns out the CW doesn't even broadcast on Sunday nights. They rent
it out to another company.
That didn't go well. The outsourced shows, including Valentine, scored
such terrible ratings that the CW repossessed the timeslot. They
filled it with reruns of The Drew Carey Show and Jericho, and movies.
The ratings have, thus far, failed to improve.
And you haven't even mentioned The CW's most impressive feat—screwing
over two shows with one move. In the final year of The WB, much was
made of the countdown to the Series Finale of 7th Heaven, as Season 10
was planned to be the final season. Then, about three days before the
finale, they decided to bring it back for an eleventh season to help
kick off the new network—but didn't really promote this. Did we
mention that the reason they were planning to end it after 10 seasons
was due to budget issues? 7th Heaven got a crappy eleventh season that
nobody watched (because after initially renewing it to place in the
Monday night slot in which it had grown famous, they moved it to
Sunday), and Everwood got screwed out of a slot in the new network's
lineup. Two shows, no winners.
ABC originally scheduled Twin Peaks against Cheers (against which it
actually performed admirably). Later ABC shifted the show's timeslot
repeatedly.
After critical praise, Emmy wins, and an heavily marketed first
season, Pushing Daisies was poorly marketed in it's second season, and
as of the writing of this edit, it is unknown if the final three
episodes would be shown at all.
ITV's airings in the UK indicate that they have no idea what to do
with it either. 9pm on a Saturday night is an astonishingly random
time for it (plus it gets screwed by Casualty and BBC's Big Drama).
The second series currently airs at 10pm on Fridays, with negligible
advertising (this troper found it by accident in a TV guide) where
it's being whomped into the ground by, of all things, BBC News.
It probably didn't help that ABC thought it would be a good idea to
air Pushing Daisies in the same timeslot as House did on Fox.
The National Hockey League lost its TV contract with ESPN (which
admittedly was their own damn fault) and was banished to OLN/Versus, a
channel that few providers offered. When NBC finally offered to air
the 2007 NHL playoffs, they cut away from a series-clinching playoff
game IN OVERTIME to show 90 minutes of pre-race coverage of The
Preakness.
NBC does a terrible job promoting sports that aren't the NFL or
Olympics (which need virtually no advertisement given the juggernauts
that they are). Along with their bad handling of the NHL, they did
nothing to promote their coverage of Arena Football, NASCAR, and yes,
even the XFL (Yeah, I know about the XFL, but they could have at least
TRIED.)
ESPN and ABC aren't exactly blameless for losing their NHL TV rights,
though. Once they pulled some duplicitous tactics to yank broadcast
rights away from Fox, both ESPN and ABC proceeded to ignore the
league, giving it absolutely no advertising time on ABC and the bare
minimum on ESPN. This behavior accelerated when ESPN and ABC got the
rights to broadcast NBA games (coincidentally, the NHL's direct
competitor for the winter months), with ESPN dropping the number of
NHL games they broadcast year by year, changing the days of the week
they were broadcast on, and booting most games to ESPN 2 in order to
make room for NBA games on the main channel; and ABC trumpeting the
fact that they were the home of the NBA Finals, while hardly making a
peep about how they also broadcast Stanley Cup Finals games. Then
right as the 2004-05 NHL lockout started, ESPN canceled their recap
show NHL2night and refused to revive the show when the League
approached them for a new cable deal after the labor dispute ended.
With this kind of network screwing over a 6-7 year period, you cannot
possibly blame the NHL for jumping to a more caring TV partner in OLN/
Versus (although going with NBC is still inexcusable, as shown above).
This blog entry goes into more detail about how Disney's networks
screwed over the NHL, as well as the aforementioned dirty tactics used
to screw Fox out of any TV rights.
Feeling that the network wasn't promoting it enough, Stephen King paid
hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to buy print ads for
Kingdom Hospital. The network then changed the timeslot to compete
with CSI, meaning all the ads he ran gave the wrong time.
Subverted in a good and bad way by Lost. The good: ABC and its
president, Stephen Mc Pherson, are in love with the show, even going
in an unprecedented direction by announcing a 2010 end date so the
show can wrap up properly no matter how well it's doing and rarely
ever meddling in the creative process. The bad:
ABC will commonly flat-out lie about the show's ratings ("20 million
[read: 11.5 million x two episodes] viewers returned to the island
last week...")
ABC uses the show as a ratings guinea pig. Wondering how well a drama
might do at Wednesday/10PM, Wednesday/11PM, Thursday/9PM, or any other
random timeslot? Throw Lost in and find out! Every damn time ABC does
this, the show loses viewers like a man who's fallen from a Beechcraft
plane loses blood. This then forces ABC to lie about the ratings as
seen above.
ABC's apparent reaction to Commander In Chief winning Emmys for its
acting was to kill the show. They put it on hold during the Winter
Olympics, then moved it to a different timeslot afterwards without
properly announcing this. Ratings suffered, so they canceled the show.
This troper's entire family is still mad.
When Due South first premiered on CBS in 1994, it produced higher-than-
expected ratings for the network (and for the CTV station in Canada).
Because one of the CBS executives who endorsed the series was fired,
the show was cancelled. Then, after CBS' fall lineup became DOA, the
show was brought back again. After several months of beating Friends,
of all series, the show was cancelled once more. This came after a
press release praising the show's critical acclaim. It's a good thing
the series was then picked up by Canadian and foreign investors.
Medium is one of NBC's strongest performers (Which isn't saying much),
but is constantly put on hiatus and treated like filler on its Monday
lineup.
Channel 7 in Australia feels the need to put Boston Legal, a show that
has won several Emmy's, ressurrected William Shatner's career, and is
at turns hilarious and deeply moving, at Bloody 10:30PM. Did I mention
just about every person I know who's seen the show loves it?
One word: ALF. As the fourth season came to an end, NBC was not
guaranteeing another season, but they did promise at least one extra
final episode to resolve the cliffhanger the season ended on. They
gave the show NOTHING in the end, and the series ended with ALF
becoming a military prisoner
While the screwing may not have been deliberate, The Mole fell victim
in its 5th season when ABC's marketing department did so little to
promote the show that even many die-hard fans of the series were
completely unaware that the show had returned for the first third of
the season.
This is thought to be the cause of Carol Vorderman's departure from
British game show Countdown: When the show's budget was going to be
cut by 33%, Vorderman was willing to lower her salary by 33% as well.
But the network allegedly went up to her and said what boiled down to
"We're going to take off a trailing zero from your salary next year.
Take it or leave it, you have two days to respond." Did I mention that
Carol Vorderman is about as famous in Britain as Vanna White and Bob
Barker are in the US?
Power Rangers is not case of SBTN, but rather a case of screwed by the
parent company, With a premiere of an Boys-oriented network, the show
seemed like a shoo-in, but Disney removed all remaining reruns from
the schedule(the non-Disney seasons already off the air, for over a
year at that point.) To make matters worse, the new season Power
Rangers RPM was delegated to a Saturday morning spot where it is
constantly pre-empted in the West Coast, and have many stations either
showing it during ungodly hours, or not at all. and it's been stated
by RPM's first showrunner, that Disney is embarrassed to show the
series, not to mention produce it.
Any (UK, at least) programme on the subject of videogames, ever. Apart
from Games Master.
Sometimes this is happily avoided: In the early 1990s, the Australian
version of The Late Show was put in a dead-end timeslot (9.00 PM
Saturday) but it attracted the attention of parents that had to stay
home to look after their kids. (This editor watched the show on DVD
and liked it, only to discover his mother used to watch it when he was
young.)
Despite having been written by a lauded Canadian author (Douglas
Coupland, who remained involved during production), jPod was treated
incredibly poorly by the CBC, despite the fact that it was exactly the
sort of relevant, thoroughly Canadian drama they are meant to promote.
It was moved to the Friday Night Death Slot, and the twelfth episode
was never aired - in it's place, the CBC ran half an hour of men's
figure skating and a re-run of Air Farce. jPod just happened to be the
only show targeted at the younger demographic...
For some reason, ABC decided to screw Samantha Who?, which was
undoubtedly one of their most successful shows with high ratings and
an award winning cast. The deathblow? In its infinite wisdom, the
network decided to to move the show from its popular Monday timeslot
(right after Dancing With the Stars) to a Thursday timeslot right
after In The Motherhood, a complete flop that turned off most
viewers.
When Kings first premiered, NBC had put it in the 8:00 PM Sunday
timeslot. However, despite the show's unique concept, strong cast, and
high production quality, NBC decided to relegate the fledgling series
to Saturday nights after airing just four episodes, where steadily
declining ratings eventually killed it.

Music
The band Splashdown released a critically-acclaimed album and EP
before getting signed to a new record company, which then failed to
promote them and never released their next album Blueshift. It then
essentially died. (The music, fortunately, is easily available for
download.)
Moby Grape is the classic music example of this. After building a
strong reputation in the San Francisco music scene (where their
competitors were Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead), they
seemed like a sure bet to hit it big. Unfortunately, their label,
Columbia, tried to turn them into the next Beatles with a ridiculously
overhyped promo campaign. Most infamously, Columbia simultaneously
released five singles from their debut album. Radio stations didn't
know which one to add to their playlist, so they just ignored them
all.
They Might Be Giants had the full support of the executives for their
first three albums on Elektra Records (Flood, Apollo 18, John Henry).
But while they were recording Factory Showroom Elektra's parent
company fired all the executives, and the replacements didn't care for
TMBG. As a result, Factory Showroom received almost no promotion when
it was released, and the band asked to be released from their contract
shortly after that.

TabletopRPGs
At the heyday of Advanced Dungeons And Dragons 2nd Edition in the
early-mid 90s, TSR had a completely incompetent CEO, Lorraine
Williams, who made no secret her disdain both for gamers and the
people that worked under her. Among many things that caused Dungeons
and Dragons and TSR to be run into the ground before being mercifully
bought out by Wizards Of The Coast were:
Suing people left and right, including people who ran message boards
for talking about Dungeons And Dragons on the internet on the basis
that it was their intellectual property. This prevented new people
from discovering the game through internet word of mouth and gave
their competitors who were using the new medium to promote their
products an edge.
Lorraine Williams devoted a great deal of company resources to
publishing and promoting the Buck Rogers RPG. It just so happened that
the heiress whose estate owned the rights to the Buck Rogers IP got
royalties for every Buck Rogers supplement published and sold. That
heiress? Lorraine Williams.
TSR's solution to declining sales was to publish new settings. The
problem was that the settings, modules, and rules that governed them
were so incompatible with each other that the player base became
fragmented. For instance, a Planescape fan would have no use for
modules meant for the Birthright setting.
Licensing terrible terrible games, with Baldurs Gate being a notable
exception and becoming the string holding the franchise together. It
probably could have gotten more people into the hobby if message
boards about the game didn't have to censor comments about the
tabletop version for fear of lawsuits.
Nepotism ran rampant in the company, which resulted in unqualified
managers.
Game designers were often forbidden by Williams to use company time to
play test products on the reasoning that playtesting was just an
excuse for the peasants to get paid to play games.

Video Games
Bernie Stolar was infamous within the video game industry for his
policies that he maintained when he worked at SCEA and Sega of
America. It was the latter where this trope came in play, though.
While the Saturn was pretty much dead in the water from a purely
business perspective by the time he was brought in as a CEO, he made
the stupid mistake of alienating both a whole bunch of third party
developers and the devoted fanbase all at once. He single-handedly
killed off the system, blocking a lot of potentially high quality
releases for dubious reasons, imposing utterly draconian policies
against developers, and badtalking the system at every turn. The last
straw came when he ended production of the Saturn in both the United
States AND Japan (despite its being far ahead of the Nintendo 64 in
sales there), calling the system "still-born" and rushing the company
towards releasing a new system. There's a reason they call Bernie
Stolar Satan of Saturn, and it's not just because he bears a faint
resemblance to Ming the Merciless from the Flash Gordon movie.
When presented with a completely reworked Conker's Quest, now titled
Conkers Bad Fur Day, Nintendo of America was reportedly horrified to
discover that the formerly aggressively cute, child-aimed Banjo-
Kazooie clone had been replaced by something inspired by South Park, R-
rated movies, and the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons from The Simpsons.
In response, they gave the game very little advertising (sticking
mostly to men's magazines, whose target demographic probably wasn't
interested in cartoon talking squirrels), an ugly box with a larger-
than-usual "M-rated" logo plus a caption stating that it was very
clearly "not for children," and had Nintendo Power magazine refuse to
acknowledge its existence, only doing a story on it two consoles later
in July 2008. Rare was understandably upset with this treatment,
likely softening the company up for a buyout by Microsoft.
The back of the game box actually tries to persuade the reader NOT to
buy the game. And not in the cutesy sarcastic "this is the game mom
and dad don't want you to see!" way you'd expect. The copy's lack of
enthusiasm for the product is very apparent.
The game got somewhat better treatment in British video game
publications, most probably because Rare is a British company and, at
the time, most British Nintendo magazines practically worshipped the
ground they walked on. The UK magazines seemed more interested in
getting Nintendo into the mature gamers spotlight.
Let's not forget Sony's alleged anti-2D bias (see Castlevania:
Symphony of the Night, Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, Contra:
Shattered Soldier, Mega Man, etc.) And not to mention.... SNK.
Going further back in history, there's the late lamented Infocom,
which produced classic text-only Interactive Fiction games. First
Infocom tried to get away from game-production by pouring tons of
money and effort into a database program called Cornerstone. It
bombed. The company was then purchased by Activision, who evidently
did not at all understand what they had bought, and systematically
destroyed Infocom's remaining strengths. The company soon was just a
label within Activision marketing.
Fallout may just be the ultimate example of this trope, though screwed
by incompetence and not malice. With "Van Buren" (the reputed Fallout
3) nearly completed, Interplay pulled the plug on Black Isle Studios
when going bankrupt - but kept the Fallout IP. Two games were released
without the input of Black Isle: Fallout Tactics, which was a
respectable tactical strategy game but lacked the freedom the series
was renowned for, and Brotherhood of Steel (which officially does not
exist, and, despite its nonexistence, may be the source of a
significant part of the resentment of Fallout fans). There is.. more
than a little trepidation on the part of many fans now that Bethesda
is releasing Fallout 3.
Bethesda, by all accounts thus far, did ok with their version. Not
what old fans would perhaps have wanted but better than Brotherhood of
Steel (which still doesn't exist).
What about Legacy of Kain?
Arguably, after EA bought them, every Origin franchise that wasn't
Ultima, and every Ultima game that wasn't Ultima Online.

Western Animation
Cartoon Network has an annoying habit of airing any Transformers
series it gets at six A.M. on weekdays. Except on Fridays. Do they
want to damage the franchise, or do they just think nothing can? To be
fair, thus far it's just been Armada, Energon and Cybertron, and they
might treat the next show better since they had a hand in making it.
At least they gave Transformers a regular time slot.
This troper once had a bad feeling that Chowder may have been the
latest to fall victim to CN's heavy-handed scheduling issues, despite
it being a hit: after a full week of airing promos for the newest
episode, when it came time for said episode to premiere... it was
inexplicably replaced with a rerun at the last minute. The endless
string of reruns aired at incredibly sparse times over the week
appeared to have diminished a bit of the fanbase it initially built
up, but thankfully the introduction of new episodes over the summer
have given it a bit of reprieve... for now.
Despite the wishes of the troper at the top, it seems as though
Transformers Animated is getting the same treatment as before. Once
again, it's being aired at 6:00 AM on weekdays (although it's two
episodes instead of just one), and the weekend premieres are now one
week behind schedule (apparently because The Return of the Headmaster
was pre-empted for an encore showing of Ben 10: Alien Force). As a
result, Canada is now eternally one episode ahead (no offence to them,
of course, but still).
...aaaaaand Animated has now officially been screwed. Despite the idea
being initially unpopular among the adult fans, the show quickly
attracted a Periphery Demographic for its first two seasons. For
Season 3's new episodes, it's been moved from its relatively late-
morning Saturday timeslot to 8am, when none of the older fans are
likely to be awake. Apparently CN wants the show gone before the new
movie premieres, because that's certainly not going to bring in new
viewers or anything.
Armada and Energon were also screwed over in another way, in that
Cartoon Network's policy of requiring a certain number of episodes to
be picked up forced the dubbers to rush the production. The result was
a lot of name errors, inconsistent writing, getting incomplete
animation that was finished for the Japanese airing, and a lot of shit
that just plain didn't make sense.
King Of The Hill seems to have somehow managed to survive the typical
Fox treatment.
Family Guy barely did, constantly being cancelled or moved. It
resurrected only after a cult fan following developed through Adult
Swim's reruns.
Peter Griffin: Everybody, I've got bad news. We've been canceled.
Lois Griffin: Oh no! Peter, How could they do that?
Peter: Well, unfortunately, there's just no more room on the schedule.
We just gotta accept the fact that FOX has to make room for terrific
shows like Dark Angel, Titus, Undeclared, Action, That '80s Show,
Wonderfalls, Fast Lane, Andy Richter Controls The Universe, Skin,
Girls Club, Cracking Up, The Pitts, Firefly, Get Real, Freaky Links,
Wanda at Large, Costello, The Lone Gunmen, A Minute with Stan Hooper,
Normal Ohio, Pasadena, Harsh Realm, Keen Eddy, The Street, American
Embassy, Cedric the Entertainer, The Tick, Louie, and Greg The Bunny.
Lois: Is there no hope?
Peter: Well I suppose if all those shows go down the tubes, we might
have a shot.
Family Guy has become a relative darling of the network since its
revival, but King of the Hill remains a red-headed step-child.
Usually, commercials for Fox's Sunday-night animation block will start
with a detailed teaser for the new episode of The Simpsons, and merely
use a token "After a new King of the Hill..." line as the lead-in to
to a detailed teaser for the new installment of Family Guy, making it
blatantly obvious that Fox doesn't care about Kot H at all.
And now they've officially cancelled King of the Hill, which is a
shame. Though it will also be returning on Adult Swim, like Family Guy
did. I smell deja vu.
This troper thinks that maybe Adult Swim is planning something along
the lines of a revival. Adult Swim officially picked up King of the
Hill only one month after the cancellation was announced.
Cartoon Network also consigned IGPX to death as well. The first season
aired on Toonami, and when executives weren't happy with the ratings,
switched its timeslot to Adult Swim in the middle of the second
season. What made things worse was that apart from a few commercials,
they pretty much did not inform anybody of this move at all.
And now, there is no Toonami. Yeah.
Fox even sabotaged its kids' shows, specifically, the girls' half of
the 4Kids TV block. Because girls don't watch TV. Ever. Out of Winx
Club, Mew Mew Power and Magical Do Re Mi, only the first has as much
visible merchandise in stores as the boys' series. As well, the shows
were aired at the beginning of the day, long before most kids are even
up (especially in the Western side of the continent), and comparing
the state of Macekre in WinX, Tokyo Mew Mew and Ojamajo Doremi to that
of the boys' shows (with the exception of One Piece), apparently,
girls are more intolerant, Americanized, and moronic than boys are.
And don't forget the tendency to air the first few episodes over and
over again until the ratings drop far enough.
Not to mention that they'd randomly replace an episode of Magical Do
Re Mi or Mew Mew Power with an extra Winx Club with no warning...or
rather, there'd be no warning as to when an episode of one of the
others would actually be showing like it was supposed to.
The practice of putting on anime shows way too early for small
children happens in Australia too. This editor taped Dragonball Z and
watched it after school! (Shut up, I was ten.)
Of the six episodes of Clerks The Animated Series that were actually
made, only episodes four and two were actually aired, in that order.
This despite the number of Running Gags and ongoing plotlines that the
series had, and the fact that the second episode only makes sense if
you have seen the first. (It's a parody of clip shows, because they
only have one episode to mine for clips.) All six episodes - with
vitriolic commentaries - were later released on DVD.
Comedy Central later showed all six episodes in 2002, before also
shoving the series aside. Adult Swim picked it up in November 2008,
airing one episode every Friday night for, so far, six months
straight.
In the early 1990s, new episodes of the series Gargoyles were played
at 3:00 PM, the perfect hour to just be missed by kids getting out of
school.
To be fair, the show wasn't on networks. It was syndicated for its
first two seasons.
Disney might not have been directly responsible for that one (for This
Troper, for example, it always came on Fridays at the end of the
block), but they've done their share of screwing with Gargoyles. When
they moved it out of syndication, they let go of the original
production team and brought in a new one that really didn't grasp the
show's intricacies and nuances; the quality dropped and the third
season is considered Dis Continuity. Then Disney started to release
the show to DVD, but are dragging their feet with Season 2, Volume 2
due to "low sales" of the first two box sets. Who in the world stops
with just half a season (that counts) to go?!
They do the same thing with the Power Rangers DVDs. They release only
5 volumes and then stop, regardless of whether or not there's more
episodes beyond that. What's more, the only seasons they'll release
are the ones produced after they took over the show. The original
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, which is the series people actually
WANT on DVD, has not had an American release.
Actually, Disney's done this with pretty much EVERY show of theirs
that they've ever put out on DVD — for instance, Duck Tales, Darkwing
Duck, Tale Spin, and Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers have yet to have
their final DVD sets released, screwing over fans of those shows who
want the entire run on DVD. And then, of course, there's the shows
they have yet to release in "volume" or "season" collections (the most
notable of that camp being Kim Possible), choosing instead to just
release single DVDs with a few episodes...or no DVDs at all. Oh, and
did I mention that, with the exception of the Gargoyles set, there's
no extra features on their volume/season sets? And that there's no
cleaning up or remastering at all? And the episodes of their older
cartoons that they release have been the Toon Disney/Disney XD
versions (many of which have been horribly edited in one way or
another since their original airdates)? For all the love Disney gives
its classic movies when it comes to DVD, their TV division is
essentially a red-headed stepchild in comparison.
And now the Gargoyles comic book is getting screwed; the publisher
won't renew the license because Disney set the fees too high.
Danny Phantom had even worst treatment than that. Not only did its
third season also have months long gaps between episodes, the episodes
were never shown in order. Most viewers didn't know that DP had a Myth
Arc.
It's even worse than that. According to a friend of this troper,
MEXICO got the entire third season before the US did... and it was
DUBBED INTO SPANISH.
It was all of Latin America in fact. This Troper couldn't avoid
cackling when he discovered that he'd gotten the whole season aired
before US was even halfway there.
This Latin American troper once caught (at an unlikely time slot, of
course) a KND episode she hadn't seen. Much to her surprise, it was
the third-to-last episode, which, according to the official blog,
wasn't supposed to air until months later.
Before Arrested Development, Fox gave Futurama the same treatment. You
can always tell which shows the mid-level execs at Fox don't like.
Futurama was doubly slighted in that its 7:30 Sunday time slot often
meant that it was pre-empted by football in most of the country. Also,
who the hell airs any current series before 8 PM EST?
Futurama has got to be one of the few examples of this trope that has
also come back with a vengeance. Seriously after four seasons of
sometimes inconsistent airing dates, which were often changed due to
increasingly poor viewer ratings, which were in fact caused by the
continually inconvenient timeslots, Fox just decided to cease
production of the show after the episode 'The Devil's hands are idle
playthings' in 2003. It then proceeded to be constantly rerun for the
next four years on Cartoon Network, and thus it seemed the series had
no hope... Right up until The Movie came out. After four years of
begging, pleading, and threats by the fandom, Fox finally said "We get
it, we get it" and allowed 4 new movies (16 episodes when chopped up)
to be made. Matt Groening being the kind, understanding, and modest
man he is proceeded to rub it in their faces by not only 1) stating in
the beginning of Bender's Big Score of how 'Box' had cancelled the
crew's delivery service, but when their decision was taken back the
executives who made the decision were ground up into a fine pink
powder with 'a million and one uses'. One of them was being shoved
down the Professor's pants so his crotch felt comfortable 2)
Constantly using said powder in some of the most rude ways possible
but 3) getting a FULL-BLOWN COMIC based on how futurama came back to
life. Its even watchable on the DVD.
The UK experience of Superman The Animated Series may be instructive;
advertised well on Saturday mornings, as a slot within one of the
popular Kid's TISWAS clones (very popular here then). Six episodes
shown, at varying times in the show, so that those of us who only
wanted to watch or tape that part couldn't. No more shown ever. They
still hold first run rights, so no-one else shows it and there are no
local region DVD's... it's as if it never existed.
Though region one dvds of this show are easily available, this troper,
who lives in the UK, had no problem buying all three volumes.
Justice League Unlimited was constantly screwed around by Cartoon
Network, with episodes airing outside of their normal timeslot, a
frequent 2-3 month break between new episodes, etc. Reportedly, this
was because a) Cartoon Network wanted to develop their own properties
rather than paying licensing fees to anybody, b) there was a change of
executives who wanted to cancel every single show with good ratings so
all future successes could be theirs alone and c) the audience for the
show skewed too old for the network's liking (after all, teenagers and
adults don't buy piles of crappy licensed toys!). Amazingly, despite
all these efforts, after being canceled in its second season, the show
was quickly Un Canceled for a third due to its surprisingly strong
ratings — and proceeded to get screwed even worse, as evidenced by the
fact that the final episode aired in Europe a full six months before
its American premiere. For that matter, each episode of the third
season was aired only once. It didn't even get a repeat.
Teen Titans was swiftly cancelled for the exact same reasons at the
same time, so it was a double-whammy for fans of both shows.
Freakazoid was considered by The WB network to be skewing too old for
their liking, and was canceled rather than continued or moved to a
later time slot where they did not feel it would be as successful as
their other offerings. How the WB's other shows actually did in the
evening apparently escaped their notice.
Several tropers have never forgiven the WB for their "Big Kids Go
First" lineup. The so-called "big kids" are the ones likelier to sleep
in rather than get up at the crack of dawn. The so-called "big kids"
are also the ones likelier to have stuff going on in the early morning
if they are already up, so it was rather obvious to more than one
troper that they did it to kill shows they knew the older demographic
wouldn't or couldn't get up for. They have, however, seemed to learn
their lesson. Most of the older demographic shows on their current
2008 lineup air past 9:30 am. Or not. They did cancel Legion Of Super
Heroes, but that was because 4Kids! took over the air-slot.
Actually, season 2 episodes are not collections of mini-segments
because they felt that it was part of the reason it was appealing to
an older audience. It was only after that failed that the serries was
cancelled.
Similarly to what happened to Freakazoid, The WB kept changing the
Saturday morning time slot for Histeria! during its premiere season.
Then after Pokemon came around, they removed Histeria! from the
Saturday morning block altogether, and its weekday afternoon showings
got demoted to coming on in the later half of Kids' WB!'s weekday
morning hour, which would be too late for kids to watch it when they
were getting ready for school, and too early for them to wake up to on
Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter/summer vacation. No wonder people were
barely watching Histeria! - Executive Meddling caused us to miss out
on it!
WITCH seems to be a show that was destined never to catch up with the
comic it was based on. After the first season saw some initial hype in
late 2004 leading up to its January 2005 debut, the series began
airing on ABC Saturday mornings with little fanfare. Later in the
first season, it was moved to ABC Family, where it completed its first
season run there. It would've been cancelled then and there had the
second season not already gone into production during the run of the
first (thank God for the show's European fanbase). The second season
began airing on ABC Family, but shifted to digital cable and satellite
only Toon Disney unannounced mid-season, where it finished out its run
in prime-time (when kids are likely to be doing homework, sleeping, or
watching American Idol). The series technically hasn't been cancelled,
and a third season IS possible, but with Toon Disney able to sustain
itself solely on the strength of Power Rangers merchandise, it doesn't
seem likely to order up another season of something that got
understandably abysmal ratings.
Let's not forget the sadly shelved Megas XLR, quite possibly the best
rated show Cartoon Network has ever produced BY THEMSELVES. It was
planned for a third season but quietly canceled when the network
switched CE Os, because the new head cheese didn't "get it." Plus, a
DVD box set was later planned, by the same guy, to satiate all the
people who got mad, demanding some kind of revival (new season, video
release, made for TV movie, etc.) but this, too, was stymied when yet
another netword-head took over, feeling it was a waste of company
resources. All this amounts to: Network heads have too much clout.
The Life and Times of Juniper Lee virtually got screwed in its second
season. In addition to bouncing the show around timeslots. CN hardly
advertised for new episodes if not at all, making it impossible for
fans to find them. The last few episodes weren't even aired.
Atomic Betty in the U.S suffered as well ,starting off on a steady
timeslot, then being moved to an hour no even up to catch episodes
before finally being yanked off the air. What more the second season
has yet to air in the U.S.
This particular troper remembers well the horrific treatment Daria got
at the hands of MTV. No consistent time slot, frequently preempted by
an episode of The Real World or Road Rules, and finally buried, never
to be released on DVD. And THEN there's the fact that the BB Cs
channel five (IIRC) placed it in a "children's" time slot, since in
Britain, only children ever watch animated shows. Then there's the
edits it received during syndication... yeah.
ReBoot was a famous example, with Executive Meddling affecting the
actual production of the show. The ratings were consistently high and
was, in fact, the highest rated show on the ABC Saturday Morning
block. After two seasons, Disney bought out ABC, who let the show go
because they wanted to promote more Disney-produced shows. It turned
out to be a blessing in disguise, mostly because ABC was not their
only sponsor, Alliance Productions sent the show into syndication and
a third season aired on YTV in Canada, finally free of ABC's draconian
Broadcast Standards & Practices. Cartoon Network then picked up the
show and aired it in the U.S., which helped bring back the show for a
fourth season. The only downside was still loosing a good chunk of the
U.S. audience in the 2 year gap and cable TV gap between ABC and
Cartoon Network.
Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! is a little known king of this.
First, episodes for the final season were aired way before the US for
them in several other countries, namely Poland. Second, the show
wasn't renewed at the end of its fourth season, for apparently no
other reason than Jetix wanting to put on new shows (the series was
only 51 episodes long though.) The end of the 4th season was a massive
cliffhanger that was going to lead into the final climax of the series
where all the loose plot lines would have been complete. Nice.
Gormiti The Lords Of Nature Return was interrupted at Episode 11
during its first broadcasting... and Italia Uno has only itself to
blame for that, what with the extremely crazy timetable, the airing of
just half an episode per day, and continuously alternating the show
with Scooby Doo movies about which Italians couldn't really care less.
Give yourself a pat on the back, Italia Uno. If there were any doubts
that you're Too Dumb To Live, you managed to dispel them.
"Oh Hey, I'm Naruto bringer of ratings for Cartoon Network, I'm going
to the UK to make fans happy there! Oh hey Jetix UK, I'm so glad you
want to show me to UK Fans, oh wait, what's that rusty kni-?"
Naruto's mangled corpse was found in a graveyard slot. No one attended
the funeral because their parents would rather have dinner parties in
Coronation Street and Albert Square.
Bobobobo Bobobo, Viewtiful Joe and Digimon were found in said
graveyard slot as well. Digimon was found in a state that suggests
that it was locked in a cellar a little after its fourth birthday.
Teletoon seems to want to bury the new Batman The Brave And The Bold
series. It has a 9 am Sunday morning timeslot, pretty much alienating
anyone who would actually understand and appreciate the show (which
includes a reference to The Aristocrats in the first episode, along
with references to the '60s series and classic Doctor Who). They also
aren't advertising it, and are using The Batman to promote their
action programming, despite that show having finished its run.
Family Channel (the Canadian one) not that long ago, took off Yin Yang
Yo, which was still in the middle of its second season, and replaced
it with Digimon Data Squad. Why they didn't replace the already in
reruns Pucca is beyond this troper's imagination.
This troper is still bitter at the rough treatment Hi Hi Puffy Ami
Yumi, a fairly popular show, got from Cartoon Network in late 2006,
the time of its inexplicable cancellation. First, the new episodes
were televised with zero advertisement at three in the morning.
Seriously. Three. Then they got rid of the characters from the
channel's advertising bumps. Then they removed them from the website.
The entire thing was one big, deliberate Orwellian effort to make
people forget it ever existed. And nobody's ever given an accurate
reason as to why... or, heck, even the same one twice.
The 2006 Fantastic Four animated series. Cartoon Network played only 7
episodes and didn't show any more cartoons again for 9 months to time
it with The Movie. When the network broadcast it again, they only
showed 11 episodes, leaving 8 shows never shown on the network.
Don't forget Swat Kats. In its first season it was supposedly the
highest rated syndicated animated show of the year. Yet during the
second season they toyed with doing two shorter episodes rather than
one long plot (putting nails in), then stabbing it down with a
clipshow at the end of season 2. While it was still high rated. This
was claimed to be due to "lack of toy sales" by some sources (a load,
there just WEREN'T that many toys made), a lot of others credit it to
one of the binges against supposed "Cartoon violence." Either way, it
was an idiotic decision on someone's part. And when it was on
Boomerang, they hid it at 10:30ET, before dumping it again lately. And
it was never up for the episode marathons or anything else some of the
OTHER 'action block' shows were. Because they STILL want people to
forget it existed. *grumblemutter* That way they can avoid doing a DVD
of it or anything. By trying to make it vanish completely. Episodes
aren't hard to find on the net though.
Let us not forget about Sonic the Hedgehog, affectionately referred to
as "Sonic SatAM" by its fanbase. This show jumped around in time slots
so much that it could've had legs. More often than not it wound up
being put head to head against the then red hot Power Rangers; if it
wasn't being preempted by some sporting event. And that was merely for
the first season. When the second season was begun, there was almost
no advertising given as to when each new episode would air, making it
very hard to see the whole thing. And then it got canceled with ABC
getting a new "president" after its little merger with Disney. The
reason? "A new broom sweeps clean" as the case may be, with Disney
wanting to concentrate on its "ONE SATURDAY MORNING" timeblock. This
is particularly grating for fans of the show, as the second season
ended with one of the most intriguing cliffhangers of the day. It
became even more so as information was finally released as to some of
the plot points for season 3. Still, this whole situation probably
helped to cement the fanbase into the die-hard community it is today.
In Canada, the show Jimmy Two-Shoes airs at 7am on Saturdays when most
normal people are asleep.
But here in the US, Disney doesn't give it much more respect: they air
it at 9am.
The PJs got this treatment. After winning three Emmy Awards and an
Annie Award, Fox canceled the show after the second season, citing no
reason. The WB picked it up, filmed the entire 16 episode third
season, then showed the first new episode. Two months later, they
aired the second episode. Another month later, they show the next
four, then take ANOTHER two month break before showing six more, never
airing the last three, then cancel the show claiming it costs too much
to produce.
The new Wolverine & the X-Men cartoon had the first season aired in
its entirety in Canada before one episode was shown in the US. After
the three-episode premiere, Nicktoons ran a promo laying plot
points... for Season 2! "Hey fans, wonder what the status quo will be
by the end of the season you just started watching? Wonder no more!"
Now Season 2 has gone all the way through in Canada, and Season 1
still isn't finished in the US. But you're likely to find reruns of
one of the first five episodes (none later) whenever you're flipping
by Nicktoons.
Comedy Central's broadcast schedule for Drawn Together was erratic, to
say the least. When new episodes were not being screened, the show
would often be off the schedule for months. Many viewers assumed the
show was cancelled long before it actually was.

[Mac Breck]

tmc...@gmail.com wrote:
> http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScrewedByTheNetwork
<snip>

> Wonderfalls (aired on Fox, of course!) had its first four episodes
> shown out-of-order, despite the fact that they had constantly
> developing plotlines, and was canceled after four weeks, one of the
> quickest deaths Fox has ever managed to give a show. But that was only
> the last of a number of choices on the part of the network that led to
> the show's demise: first, the show was developed at the same time as
> CBS' Joan Of Arcadia, to which at first glance it may seem strikingly
> similar in theme. Supposedly fearing it would draw too many
> comparisons, they held off the premiere for an entire year, a stroke
> of genius that led some to think it was a deliberate copy (as opposed
> to a coincidence), especially as Joan had proven successful and was
> still on the air. Worse, it started airing 8 PM on a Friday, which had
> the dual misfortune of not only being the same time as Joan aired on
> CBS, but of also being the infamous Friday Night Death Slot, whose
> name tends to be especially apt for non-family friendly fare... which
> of course, describes Wonderfalls. In a sort of Coup De Grace, Fox
> finally moved the show after its third week to Thursday, where it
> would ostensibly get better ratings...

HA!!! The fourth episode was on across from CSI, Stephen King's Kingdom
Hospital and The Apprentice. Better ratings across from those three?
They've GOT to be kidding!

> of course, they did this
> without telling anyone, so it kind of defeated the purpose.

Oh, that's beside the point. they put it up against CSI (then the No. 1
show on TV), a new Stephen King miniseries, and a Reality TV (back when
it was a lot more popular than it is today.), and then the next week,
they replaced it with an episode of THE SWAN. How much more could they
have crapped on Wonderfalls?

<snip>

> Drive's first three episodes were aired over two nights; the fourth
> aired a week later, and then it was cancelled, giving all of four
> episodes and nine days. This after the initial thirteen episode order
> was split in half, so even if it hadn't been cancelled, it would have
> run for a month, followed by a three-month hiatus. This proves once
> again that Tim Minear (who also produced both Wonderfalls and Firefly,
> see above) and FOX go together like peanut butter and nitroglycerin.
> This editor wonders if he's some kind of masochist...

Anybody who works for FOX is some kind of masochist. Ditto for The
Sci-Fi Channel and TNT.

> Or perhaps if he
> repeatedly ran over a FOX Network Executive's cat/dog/child. Minear is
> reportedly now two shows into a six-show deal with FOX.

Maybe he could get out of it and go work for a better studio and
network?

> And also don't forget that Nathan Fillion can't catch a
> break.

On FOX, because he appears to have caught a break with "Castle" on ABC,
and I wish him the best. I really like that show.

> "Hi, I'm every sci-fi show on Fox that isn't The X-Files. I'm just
> visiting for a month, so please don't get too attached."

Pretty much.

> We'll have to see about that. They certainly have promoted "Fringe"
> enough... (read: too much)
> ... until they decided to leave it off the air for an extended period
> of time to show American Idol.

No, that's so Fringe can lose its audience.

<snip>

> In addition, Bonnie Hammer and Mark Stern, while separating the
> schedules of Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica in what would end
> up the last season of the former and penultimate season of the latter,
> put the former after a bad remake of Knight Rider (oh, and put it
> against Monk, which not only tops Nielsen cable ratings but is also on
> USA, whose scheduling is also done by WolframHammer and HartStern)

There's a better one with Sci-Fi (soon to be Syfy):
Hammered and Howe. ;-)

> and
> delayed the latter's season premiere until six months after the finale
> last season. When the ratings fell, they canceled the former (on the
> 200th episode airing party, no less) and moved the latter to an even
> worse timeslot. (A copy of TV Tropes sent from the future in a dodgy
> wormhole stated that these two people were killed by a giant poster of
> Ben Browder. Dropped by the ghost of Isaac Asimov.)

> Oh, Bonnie Hammer = Satan has been around awhile. Ask any Forever
> Knight about the treatment their show got on USA Network.

Look no further than "Babylon 5 - The Legend of the Rangers" pilot (and
dead end: "To Live and Die in Starlight"), instead of continuing the
story that TNT had messed with and truncated sans an ending. Continue
and finish an existing story, nooooo, we'll start a new story on next to
no budget with a cast of young unknowns and one carryover
actor/character from B5 but we'll give him crappy lines. Oh, and then
we'll discover that Warners lost all of the existing B5 and Crusade CGI
files, most of the wardrobe and props. So, Sci-Fi got a true Sci-Fi
Original Z-Movie. Then, they air it against one of the highest rated
football playoff games in history. How's that for a coup de grace?

> It's not like the TV adaptation of The Dresden Files was high art, but
> it deserves a mention here. Sci Fi didn't exactly slit the show's
> throat, but they did stab it in the femoral artery by being remarkably
> tight-lipped about whether or not the show was renewed. When it got to
> the point that the guy playing Harry Dresden was shopping around for
> another series, the creators decided to just call it a day.
> Sci Fi's excuses

which never have to make any sense, because they're just making shit up.

> about why they refused to renew a series that had
> developed a good-sized cult following? The numbers weren't there. Fans
> became suspicious of this excuse when Sci Fi then not only renewed a
> show that had been doing more poorly than The Dresden Files, but
> praised it for doing so remarkably well. When Dresden Files fans
> pointed this out, Sci Fi then trotted out the amazing (to this troper)
> notion that the show had been canceled because it was attracting the
> wrong demographics. Sci Fi wanted to attract young male viewers, and
> The Dresden Files was attracting women of 18-40.
> That' the exact same reason Stargate SG-1 was cancelled and Atlantis
> was renewed. Even with the efforts to make the numbers plummet, SG-1

> was still doing better-but they anted to keep the "action" male-

> oriented newer show and drop the larger audience, huge fanbase,
> increasingly popular older show because too much of SG-1's audience
> was women. Now, they've got no shows with any audience.

<snip>

> Crusade, the sequel to Babylon 5, suffered all of these from the
> ground up, complete with Executive Meddling writ large. JMS later
> learned that TNT, the network airing the show (which had also aired
> the Post Script Season of B5), had done research and learned that the
> B5 and Crusade audience was completely failing to make the jump to the
> rest of the network's programming

(wrestling, westerns, sports, and Law & Order reruns)

>, and vice versa. It decided to scrap
> the sequel, even as it was in production...

Just five episodes into the production, before any episode even finished
in post.

> except that they couldn't
> do it without breaching their contract with Warner Brothers. So, they
> decided to make it impossible, giving unbelievably bad notes
> (including demanding a fist fight in the first episode). The
> production team did its best, but the show was quite literally doomed
> from day one.

And then TNT aired Crusade in the summer, *five* *months* after its
lead-in movie aired, and promoted it as "A Limited Series" about
"Renegade Rangers" even though almost none of the episodes featured
Rangers, and we never even got close to the point where the crew of the
Excalibur (none of whom were Rangers) went renegade. Also, TNT often
pre-empted Crusade; "The Path of Sorrows" ended up showing at midnight,
after the NBA Draft. Other episodes were either before or after
wrestling, and these shows had mutually exclusive audiences.

<snip>

> Despite having its episodes aired horrendously out of order, Tremors
> the TV series managed to become Sci Fi's highest rated program at the
> time. Nevertheless, it was cancelled on the grounds that it didn't hit
> the demographic that Sci Fi wanted.
> This becomes doubly brain-wracking (if perhaps somewhat karmic) when
> one considers the demographic in question was the audience that had
> already been watching Farscape ... which Sci Fi canceled without
> warning (leaving the series ending on a cliffhanger)

after they'd renewed Farscape for Seasons 4 & 5, and then went back on
the Season 5 part of it.

> to replace with Tremors.

<snip>

--
Mac Breck (KoshN)
-------------------------------
"Keen Eddie" (2004)
Fiona: Get out.
Eddie: Out of the kitchen?
Fiona: Out of the kitchen, out of the flat, out of London, out of the
world. It's full. Get out. Eddie: I can't get out of the world. I
didn't pull the kind of math grades you need to qualify for the space
program.

[Mason Barge]

<tmc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:15700c09-5f32-4b36...@e21g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...
> http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScrewedByTheNetwork

Wowzer!!1! Just in case anybody doubted the creative power of Bipolar II.

I though I'd written rants in my life. Now I feel like the mugger in
Crocodile Dundee.

Even more amazing, it is actually written in educated English. I just can't
comment except to say:

Right On Brother! Give 'em hell! Of everything included in the examples, I
think I am personally most bitter about Wonderfalls, which was given no
chance at all.

[Mason Barge]

<tmc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:15700c09-5f32-4b36...@e21g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...

> http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScrewedByTheNetwork

> The prototypical network executive is a schlub, grown bloated and
> neurotic on expensive meals and drugs, who does not have a creative
> bone in his body and whose understanding of the creative process is
> only marginally smaller than his grasp of what the viewing public
> actually wants.

And this differs from the prototypical US automobile executive -- well, how,
exactly?

[Thanatos]

In article <na6dnSIKM-w0dbbX...@giganews.com>,
"Mason Barge" <mason...@comcast.net> wrote:

Hmmm... this penchant for bad treatment of shows by the network is
apparently annoying to many people.

Maybe we need a federal law that prohibits a network from canceling a
show unless they obtain government permission first.