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Groening Confident on Futurama Relaunch
friedo writes "Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama, says there may yet be hope for a renewed Futurama series, thanks to high DVD sales and syndication ratings. Comments from David X. Cohen: 'Three months ago, I would have said we were going to start tomorrow ... And one month ago I would also have said we were going to start tomorrow. So...my current estimate is that we're starting tomorrow.'"
The Family Guy came back because of the demand of the fans. Futurama can do it too! Too bad FOX wasn't smart enough to realize they should have never cancelled either of them. But what can you do? It's FOX.
Don't get me wrong, I love football. I'd rather see the end of a good football game then the start of Pollyanna. Or even Futurama. But almost every week, the late Fox game would end before Futurama was scheduled to begin on the East Coast, and they still insisted on doing a meaningless postgame show afterwards. CBS, on the other hand, has been showing games that ended after 7:00 for years, and have always begun 60 Minutes immediately after the end of the actual game, without even cutting any of the show.
I was actually shocked this week when Fox managed to show all of it's Sunday night programming despite the President's address. I really expected the local news to come on at 10:00, forcing me to wait for Cartoon Network to air the end of American Dad in 2 weeks. Some idiot at Fox must have gotten replaced with a trained monkey or something.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Yet another Fox series brought back from the dead by Adult Swim.
I disagree. In most markets the popularity of a product drives sales, which in turn determines if an item will continue to be available. Up until the publishing of series on DVD became popular, however, this mechanism was completely absent from the television market. Since no one could buy just the shows they wanted, decisions about whether or not to cancel a show were made based upon guesswork and Nielson ratings. In most cases this is still true. Now, TV executives are starting to get feedback via DVD sales indicating that they have been making really crappy decisions, including canceling some of the most popular shows. This is just the invisible hand of the market using greed to give people what they want. If we really want better quality shows, the answer is simple. Move to a model where shows are purchased individually and let the market decide. Personally, I'd much rather that greed drives TV executives to give people what they want, rather than greed driving them to make arbitrary guesses without any feedback.
As an aside, guess how many of the ten most popular TV series of all time were cancelled, or scheduled to be cancelled, and then saved at the last minute by some random event? TV executives tend to cancel anything different or novel, since it seems risky. DVD sales, like those of Futurama, are just a way for them to be told not to cancel something different, since it is in demand.