Yeah, i'm bummed with the rest of the internet that Firefly got canceled. Some browncoats still have some hate for Fox. But really without fox churning through random ideas, it never would have been made.
Much of the hate for fox is not about trying new things or cancelling a failing show, it's that the way they aired the show gave it no chance: Fox changed the episode sequence (airing it in essentially random order destroying any chance of following the underlying plot), promoted it as an action-comedy series, and often interrupting or dropping it in favour of sports.
There's a reason the show's "cult status" started mere months after it was cancelled.
Fox has set up numerous shows for failure, including Arrested Development, which was aired against Monday Night Football and wasn't aired during sweeps week. How does a show succeed, no matter how good, when it's never given a chance to develop an audience?
You're being overly generous to Fox. It's not enough to "try" crazy shows. They're dead in the water if they're set up for failure this way by extremely short term thinking.
Seems like a dubious claim to me, since it's not in their interest. My guess is that since the most coveted timeslots are a finite resource, they need to make hard calls about placing stable earners in them vs. new shows, for example, or bank on audiences finding those new shows anyway, via directed marketing effots. "Giving a show a chance to develop an audience" is technically achieved by airing it at all, and it's not the only thing they need to get done in a day.
You can criticize individual decisions they make, but only if you take that full picture of everything they need to accomodate into account. There can be good reasons why a network doesn't place your favorite show in your preferred timeslot.
> "Giving a show a chance to develop an audience" is technically achieved by airing it at all
Nah. You might get away with that now with DVRs and streaming and Twitter word-of-mouth, but not in 2002.
Mork & Mindy (RIP Robin Williams) became the #3 show in America in its first season. Come season 2, the network (ABC) fired the entire supporting cast and changed its timeslot to go up against Archie Bunker. Even back then, most people had enough sense to know to not mess with something that worked, but you wouldn't know it from the network executives. The show was never able to recover.
This is revisionist history. Fox pushed AD hard during season 1 and discovered that it was the ultimate cult show, with a small but devoted audience and no reach chance to expand it's base. Fox pushed it into the dead zones of the schedule because they knew the audience would follow it anywhere. Internally, AD had huge champions which is why it got far more episodes than it would have rationally deserved if you just looked at ratings.
There's no real way Fox could have turned it into a viable hit if only it had treated it better. Like later critically adored darlings like Community of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, there was a natural ceiling to its viewership that was never going to fit into the business model of an early 21st century network channel.
My memory is that it shifted from being about her-past towards the snake-people. Along with the more visible rise of mutants? I'm hazy on the finer details, with my overriding memory being that it contained both Jessica Alba, and Michael Weatherly (who went on to become Dinozzo in NCIS.)
So it's a good thing they cancelled Firefly, otherwise there is a high chance it would not have been remembered fondly now.