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What Has Fox Got Against Its Own Sci-Fi Shows?
brumgrunt writes "Dollhouse. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Fringe. Three science fiction shows that Fox commissioned, put on the air, and — in the case of at least one of them — has won rave reviews. But why does it seem that Fox is trying to kill some of its own shows with crazy scheduling decisions? How can Fringe survive after being pulled for two months, and what hope is there for Sarah Connor and Dollhouse on a Friday night?"
Fox is NOTORIOUS for not sticking with their series (and have been for at least 15 years now). I can name a dozens of great shows just off the top of my head that they've abandoned over the years (usually after moving them around, not promoting them, etc.). In the new millenium, they've gotten even worse. They will cancel series now before they even finish a full season, even if they have the season already "in the can" (Firefly and Wonderfalls are two prime examples). Basically, if you agree to do a show for Fox, you better go into it knowing that it's probably not going to last long (count yourself lucky if they don't pull the plug after just a few episodes have aired).
I once heard an explanation of why networks do this sort of thing. There is a lot of executive turnover at networks, and when a new programming exec comes in, the first thing he wants to do it to advance his own projects. You see, on his own pet projects, he gets to take full credit for them if they succeed. But if one of his predecessor's pet projects succeeds, he doesn't get to take any credit for it. That means that incoming execs have every motivation to kill off all their predecessor's projects (no matter how sucessful they may be) to make room for their own. So they will often take a show that is successful and start fucking around with it, just so they can justify cancelling it. You take your predecessor's big show, move it around to a shitty night, force a bunch of stupid "notes" down the show-runner's throat ("Hey, can you bring in a sassy robot? How about a cute, wise-cracking kid?"), and then don't promote it at all. Bingo! The show's ratings tank, and you get to go before the studio president and say "Gee, look's like my predecessor's show didn't have any legs. Now let me tell you about *MY* great new show..."
Judging by how much this happens at Fox, apparently they have a *LOT* of turnover.
Oh, and a special R.I.P. to my beloved "Strange Luck," cancelled after just 17 episodes.
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With DVR's becoming more and more popular, the time that a show airs is less and less important. Perhaps the execs realize this and are trying to work it to their advantage. Sometimes you need to take some risks to move forward.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
There is a lot of executive turnover at networks, and when a new programming exec comes in, the first thing he wants to do it to advance his own projects.
That does not suffice for an explanation. You see, they must notice that the longer you leave a show in a solid time slot the more your established viewership watches it. Case in point: Futurama. I liked the show but I never knew when it was on so I often missed it when it was on the air. They moved it around to death!
... but I'm not inclined to believe Fox has savvy executives in this respect. For all I know, they're moving around shows based on the number of complaints that are filed with the FCC from conservative Christian groups.
Even if they had put it on Saturday at 2pm I would have known when to watch it. Adult Swim is much the same--bad time slot but I know when it's on so I always watch it. Their shows get moved around way too much and as a result, it's harder for me to grow attached to any one show in a solid time slot.
And don't tell me Fox doesn't know this, their syndication of The Simpson all through high school at 5 & 5:30 on weekdays was very popular. No, I attribute this to just sheer stupidity--maybe even the logic that if they move it around they will collect more viewers who normally don't watch the regular time slots.
You would think thorough statistics would solve this problem
I heard the Futurama folks were looking at doing another TV slot but were just too jaded from their Fox experience to wanna start it again. I think they should get into their contract a solid time slot on a day to ensure success. I wouldn't blame them if they opted to go the straight to DVD route forever or try to work something out with Comedy Central.
My work here is dung.
I tried watching Fringe. It was a crappy low-rent X-files ripoff with little redeaming value.
I tried watching Dollhouse. It was a crappy creepy low-rent show about mind-wiped prostitutes...
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Yeah, just a hunch, but the typical Sci-Fi audience member, is not doing a whole lot on a Friday night that doesn't include painting figurines or rolling dice.
It would already be gone, five episodes in?
That's not investing in a TV show. That's gambling, but with other people's jobs. Besides, how many great shows would have been snuffed with that attitude?
I am a bit ambivalent on Dollhouse. I'm looking forward to when the basic premise kicks in a bit more, with Echo's character recomposition thingamajigg. Until then, it's a monster-of-the-week type deal, which doesn't work well until people already care about the characters.
It almost seems like fox thinks that nerds are more likely not to have plans on Friday night than other groups. Either that or maybe they think nerds are more likely to have DVRs? What are they thinking?
All the TV magazine and blog articles I've read have agreed that that Dollhouse is on Friday night because that's a graveyard shift. NO show attracts blockbuster numbers on a Friday night, so the network wants something a little more high-end than reality programming (to lure better advertisers) that will attract a devoted core. In other words, they know that Joss Whedon's fanbase will watch anything... and is mostly sitting an home on Friday night anyway. If Dollhouse were on any other night of the week, it would have been pulled after the first two episodes.
While I'm at it, I'm as big a Joss Whedon mark as anyone but I'm going to go ahead and say it... Dollhouse simply SUCKS for me so far. With the possible exception of Echo's "handler", all the other characters simply do not interest me. They are one-dimensional stock characters (e.g. the arrogant nerd who tries to be funny, the gruff security guard who always wants to use the violent option, the obsessed FBI agent chasing chasing after Kaiser Soze, etc). Other than Eliza Dusku and her handler, the acting is pretty poor and the premise itself pretty retarded. Nothing has really "hooked" me yet.
Worst of all, the scripts are virtually devoid of wit and humor. WTF?!? That's the whole POINT of a Joss Whedon show... characters that pull you in and make you care about them, and intelligent dialog that catches you off-guard with laughs. Take that out of the equation, and you're just left with goofy sci-fi/fantasy ridiculousness and some mushy political/feminist messages.
Sorry... but if this goes, I won't miss it.
I wouldn't blame them for pulling it. Episodes 1-2 were terrible. 3 was bearable, yet only because of a plot twist. Episode 4 actually went somewhere, finally had some of the clever banter between characters that made Firefly special. Finally starting to care about what happens to them.
I'd say it's entirely Joss's fault if Fox wants to cancel it. I have better things to do than watch garbage like eps 1-2. Had I not gotten bored and ended up watching Ep3, I would have left and never come back. We know what Joss is capable of, and this certainly isn't it.
Yep, fox and other networks do really stupid shit such as cancel good shows and continue running garbage such as Fear Factor and American Idiot.
My wife and I enjoyed viewing the Dresden Files and Moonlight. I wasn't hip to Firefly until after it was canceled, but think it was better than most of the garbage of the airwaves that continues to run for what seems like decades.
Just the other day I was walking through a job site cafeteria and observing individuals viewing repeats of some 10 season long retarded sitcom on fox. The jokes weren't funny, and the canned laughter sounded stupid. Those doing the viewing looked like zombies focused on the green slime coming from the screen. I had the thought that the producers of most shows like this must think the viewing population are morons needing to be shown, by canned laughter, what constitutes entertainment.
If it weren't for the DVR I would sell the flat screen and get a life. Validation of the prose: "Watching TV is the same as giving up."
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
For taking Space: Above and Beyond off the air. Fox has a bad track record with sci-fi shows and I think viewers are a bit wary about getting into new ones on Fox. I know I am.
Part of it is definitely Fox's fault that good shows get canceled 'cause they don't know a good show even when it bites them on the ass (arrested development anybody?). Another part of it though is just the nation as a whole. They flock to those damn reality shows and sitcoms. Sitcoms aren't terrible (some of them are damn good in my opinion, but only a few). People don't want their brain to have to be turned on to understand their shows. They just wanna kinda go along in neutral like your car at a car wash. They feel like its too much effort to follow a show that actually kinda requires you to follow every episode. I think this is a shame. There's really only one show going on right now on the major networks that has this requirement and it's doing just fine. "Lost" is the only show I can think of that has this kind of structure in that if you miss one episode, you *need* to watch it somewhere else before you can catch the next week's or you'll be lost.
Our country needs to wake up and realize that relaxation and fun doesn't necessarily require us to turn off our brains.
Same reason music execs continue to act as they do:
Their medium has (for as long as THEY can remember) been the way it is NOW, and it's going to STAY THAT WAY.
Let's follow a TV executives train of logic and actions:
1. Something worked in the past.
2. If it worked in the past, it will always work at any time.
3. If it doesn't work, blame rivals/Internet/liberals
4. Make random, unnecessary changes, to line-up, encourage shows on-air to add more sassy, one-line spewing half-dressed women in gun-fights, even if it's a sitcom or gameshow.
5. 6 words: "This week's special guest: Justin Timberlake!"
6. Collect bonus.
7. Repeat steps 3 through 6
Fox doesn't hate sci-fi. Fox hates paying for sci-fi. Sci-fi is expensive.
Fox used to ditch any show after a season if it wasn't an instant hit.
Then they realized they could sell DVDs of the shows at a profit.
It's better to have more profit than not. So Fox has started canceling shows after a season or two unless they're raving hits instantly.
They sell the DVDs and make a profit. It doesn't matter if we love the show. If America doesn't love it, it's gone.
The Sci-fi channel decided in the past 2 years to skip well written content in favor of B movies. They figure if it's got aliens and monsters, people will watch. Sci-fi channel thinks people are in it for the aliens and monsters, not the story or production value or plausibility.
and for all you fans of MST3K, it was not sci-fi. It was comedy. Get over yourselves.
They're using their grammar skills there.
People are under the mistaken impression that Fox is an entertainment company producing shows as a product for viewers who are their customers. Incorrect.
Fox is a media company, and their product is viewers, which they sell to advertisers, their actual customers. Apply this knowledge to "news" channels, etc... and you'll understand a lot.
That business model means that any actual quality entertainment is a fluke. Especially if it's something deemed such quality that a small demographic really enjoys it... that is never their goal. Understanding this, one can look for quality entertainment in books, or films and shows *after* they aired and were reviewed well, despite the system.
The interesting question is not "why does Fox screw up at something outside of their goals." The interesting question is "what method of funding and creating shows as quality entertainment might be sustainable as a business that we could flock to?" Distributed digital patronage or something? Maybe I should submit that as an Ask Slashdot.
Simply, I think they don't get SciFi. The SciFi Channel, named after the genre itself ran John Edwards for months and currently devotes at least one day a week to people going around with IR cameras going "I feel a presence". What's another name for "really really bad science fiction movie"? "SciFi Channel Original Feature". I keep waiting for them to redo Night of the Lepus when they run out of types of lizards, snakes, and gothic masonry.
People whose perception of the world is filtered through a layer of ratings analysis are often not the best judge of quality scifi.
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The same thing happened in 1979 with Battlestar Galactica. The network green lighted the show. Heavily promoted it and it was doing well. The demographics were great. Show with the most college graduates watching had the under 35 crowd going for it. So why did it have to die?
In a word, production costs. An hour of Galactica could cost 1 million dollars which would bring in 2 million dollars. Thus a 1 million dollar profit. On the other hand 30 minutes of Happy Days and 30 minutes of Mork and Mindy would cost the network a total of $250,000. But it would bring in 2.5 million.
So do the math. Decent sci-fi show 1 dollar out for every dollar in. Cheap but good rated comedy gives us 2.25 dollars out for every dollar in.
I'm not at all disputing this, but I do want to point out something not mentioned. Keep in mind that at this time TV was very different from how it is now. Ratings were everything at this time. Yes I am quite sure that you are right that it lost out because of costs compared to comedies, but the network used "declining ratings" (without admitting that it was still winning its time slot even while going down in the ratings) to justify the decision. Why? Simple. Higher rated shows charged more for advertising and brought in more revenue. When BG became, I guess, a top 20 or top 30 show instead of top 10 (I am presuming what happened here), it surely lost advertising money so that $1 million dollars of profit quickly became $0.75 million dollars of profit and looked like it was going down even more.
Having lived through this era, although being in high school at the time, I remember that networks were quick to pull the trigger on anything that looked like it was losing in the ratings. You got one year usually, at best, to justify yourself and if you didn't do so, you were gone. End of story. It wasn't until the early 80s that things changed forever for the better and for that we can thank Brandon Tartikoff. He had a Thursday night lineup that included such classic shows as Hill Street Blues and Cheers and nobody except me and a few others were watching. He believed that these were strong shows that could enable NBC to win the ratings, but they just needed time to find an audience. So NBC kept them on, even after mostly disastrous first season ratings and just plugged them all the time and talked about how these shows won the Emmys and were the best shows on TV. Finally America got interested and he was right. The Thursday night lineup started by shows like Cheers and Hill Street Blues formed the basis of a strong network that nobody could compete with and even to this day NBC still operates on a position of strength on Thursday nights as a result. So Tartikoff taught us all that good shows can find their audiences if you stick with them.
For all the criticism of Fox, and a lot of it is well deserved, keep in mind that in the early days Fox also pioneered something that nobody else did. While Tartikoff was the genius who realized that quality could win, do keep in mind that I believe that the ratings began to go his way by year 2 of Cheers. At the time had the ratings continued to be low, he probably would have been forced to pull the shows, probably by year 3. Fox was the first network to realize that you don't have to win the time slot. If you pull in a desirable demographic (ie. men between 18-35) and finish high in that desirable target audience, you can sell enough advertising to people who want to target that group that you can make money on the shows. Nobody, not even Tartikoff, figured out that one earlier than Fox. Shows like Married With Children and The Simpsons survived quite simply because they quickly found a desirable demographic for advertising even though the ratings were poor at first. We can thank Fox for that pioneering effort. Yes, Fox has truly botched a lot of shows, no doubt, but give them credit for Arrested Development. I really don't know what else they could have done. F