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Comment by cgriswald | Hacker News Reader

The browncoat hate for Fox isn't just that the show was cancelled but that it was aired somewhat out of order in inconsistent timeslots and then cancelled it.

Fox has set up numerous shows for failure, including Arrested Development, which was aired against Monday Night Football and wasn't aired during sweeps week. How does a show succeed, no matter how good, when it's never given a chance to develop an audience?

You're being overly generous to Fox. It's not enough to "try" crazy shows. They're dead in the water if they're set up for failure this way by extremely short term thinking.

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Somebody should compile a list of all the stupid decisions networks have made, because they all seem to make a lot.

Mork & Mindy (RIP Robin Williams) became the #3 show in America in its first season. Come season 2, the network (ABC) fired the entire supporting cast and changed its timeslot to go up against Archie Bunker. Even back then, most people had enough sense to know to not mess with something that worked, but you wouldn't know it from the network executives. The show was never able to recover.

ALF was moved from Monday to Saturday and the ratings crashed. The show ended on the cliffhanger where ALF is caught by the military. Everybody assumed the show would be renewed, but it was cancelled. NBC exec Brandon Tartikoff later regretted cancellation feeling the show should have gone another season or two.

> Fox has set up numerous shows for failure

Seems like a dubious claim to me, since it's not in their interest. My guess is that since the most coveted timeslots are a finite resource, they need to make hard calls about placing stable earners in them vs. new shows, for example, or bank on audiences finding those new shows anyway, via directed marketing effots. "Giving a show a chance to develop an audience" is technically achieved by airing it at all, and it's not the only thing they need to get done in a day.

You can criticize individual decisions they make, but only if you take that full picture of everything they need to accomodate into account. There can be good reasons why a network doesn't place your favorite show in your preferred timeslot.

Nobody's claiming that Fox made the decisions out of spite. Just that those decisions happened to greatly contribute to Firefly's failure.

> "Giving a show a chance to develop an audience" is technically achieved by airing it at all

Nah. You might get away with that now with DVRs and streaming and Twitter word-of-mouth, but not in 2002.

Without commenting on Firefly specifically, one hears a lot of comments in the vein of: "They needed to just give this show another season so that it could find its voice/find an audience/develop its storyline/etc." Personally as a viewer, especially these days, you have very little time to grab me given how many options there are--and how relatively little time I spend watching TV. I'm not going to give your show 3 seasons, even if the network is willing, to hope it turns into something interesting.

Consumer's life is fast and boring, so he cannot wait to entertain himself. I think it is called positive feedback.

This is exactly right. The X-Files had a shitty Friday night time slot when it first aired, and grew out of it to a prime slot on Sundays.

> Fox has set up numerous shows for failure, including Arrested Development, which was aired against Monday Night Football and wasn't aired during sweeps week. How does a show succeed, no matter how good, when it's never given a chance to develop an audience?

This is revisionist history. Fox pushed AD hard during season 1 and discovered that it was the ultimate cult show, with a small but devoted audience and no reach chance to expand it's base. Fox pushed it into the dead zones of the schedule because they knew the audience would follow it anywhere. Internally, AD had huge champions which is why it got far more episodes than it would have rationally deserved if you just looked at ratings.

There's no real way Fox could have turned it into a viable hit if only it had treated it better. Like later critically adored darlings like Community of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, there was a natural ceiling to its viewership that was never going to fit into the business model of an early 21st century network channel.

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