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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?"
I read an article several weeks ago saying that Dollhouse may be still alive because of lower expectations on Friday night. If it were to pull in the viewers it did on say a Tuesday night it would already be gone. Also I never recall watching new episodes on a day other than Friday and that was long before Tivo.
And that's maybe another reason they do it. A lot of service provided DVR's won't record shows if they appear on other time slots than their usual runs. DVR's mean that people can time shift and skip the ads (at least I do). They want people to watch the shows WITH the ads so if they change the schedule the DVR won't record and you'll be forced to watch the show on reruns.
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Firefly's handling was a travesty. Great show that was scheduled to death.
But Dollhouse sucks on its own. It's Fantasy Island with anorexic girls.
Yes, the problem with Fringe is that it is awful. I haven't watched Dollhouse, but I haven't seen anybody raving about how awesome it is either.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Success for the network does not mean success for the executive. While the network may thrive from an excellent show in an excellent time slot, the executive does not if he is not responsible for the show. The only reason Simpsons wasn't moved around is because whoever moved it would be committing career suicide.
Fox is NOTORIOUS for not sticking with their series (and have been for at least 15 years now).
Agreed.
The first thing I thought of when I saw TFA was Space: Above and Beyond, from back in the mid-90s. It certainly had some weak points, but I would definitely have been interested in seeing more of it.
I think Fox just doesn't have the stomach to gamble on high-cost programmes. Sci-fi has got to be one of the most expensive genres to film (properly), and it usually takes awhile for a new series or film franchise to build up a following.
I was honestly shocked when The Sarah Connor Chronicles got a second season out of Fox. I really liked the first season. I think if the second one is doing poorly, it has less to do with the timeslot and more with the glacial pace of the story arc. I'm still enjoying it (minus the mercifully brief UFO convention side-trip), but I also think it should have taken half as many episodes this season to get to where it is.
I don't know if that's the fault of Fox or the production team. Either way it seemed more crisp when it was under the gun of being a season one Fox sci-fi series. I just hope that if it does get axed, there is proper finale instead of a never-finished cliffhanger like too many other one- or two-season productions.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Fox did the same Episode Shuffle with Dollhouse that was done with Firefly. I heard a critic say that the Bow Hunter episode was originally episode 6, and some of the plot had to be cut out because it involved stuff that hadn't occured yet being the second episode. Also, the very beginning of the series, the motorcycle sequence, was a complete addition by the executives at fox.
/rant
But yes, Dollhouse is no Firefly, due to Dr. Dusku's Horrible acting ability, and the fact that the only real "character" is the programmer guy. A blank slate is not a character.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
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.
The network starts looking at that time slot and sees that it can put in 2 sitcoms, or a Law and Order, or a CSI and make twice as much money. At that point the show has to die.
In the case of classic Glactica they put the show in hiatus. Then brought it back without advertising, they changed what time it was on. They changed what night it was on. The fans were to loyal. They would hunt the show out and find it each time. The ratings were not dropping fast enough. They had to convert the show into "Galictica 1981" (shudder) to finally kill the thing.
As with most business decisions. Follow the money.
vi +
My understanding is that thus far the shuffling has been largely done by Whedon, despite a lot of claims to the contrary. Whedon rejected the pilot, for example, as it just didn't fit together. The major issues with Dollhouse are that Fox has been, apparently, very heavy handed with the first few episodes (and given thus far we've had one good one, one OK one, and two dreadful ones [2, 4, 1 and 2, respectively], it's safe to say they've not done so to the show's credit. Supposedly Ep6 or 7 is where it starts getting "good".
BTW, does anyone else have problems with the notion that Fringe is "Sci-fi"? To my mind, paranormal investigations are anti-sci-fi. But, whatever. I hope Fringe dies. And T:SCC, well, I think Friedman's entirely to blame what happened to it, not scheduling. The show has been utterly awful this season, seventeen shows (well, minus that cool one with Cameron spending her evenings in the library investigating the robot from the 1920s) of utter, unrelenting, depression. Unfortunately, I can't see how this could have turned out better, given that if Fox or WB had decided to take it over, we'd probably have a Ted McGinley terminator chasing the Connors by now, with the Connors defending themselves using their hilarious new canine terminator.
Someone give Friedman some anti-depressants.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I know a guy who was president of Fox TV in the 90's. I used to get the impression (listening to him) that the network was always working against itself (they had had something like 6 presidents in a row lose their jobs in brief stints). I recall talking about Jennifer Love Hewitt's failed series that was a spinoff from "Party of Five". When I asked him about show he said "They guessed her horrible. They should have put her in a tube top and forgot about it". Since then whenever I hear the expression "screw up a wet dream" I think of Fox Entertainment.
I watch almost all of my tv through hulu now, so the time slot shuffling isn't much of an issue for me; I like their queue implementation - new episodes of shows I pick automatically get added to my queue, so when I'm looking for something to watch I just check what's available from that.
OTOH, I'm not sure if hulu counts as viewership to the networks, though - I've read that online programming isn't making much money compared to regular tv.
Fox is like Circuit City. They cut their good stuff and bring in new and inexperienced stuff because it's cheaper. Every time a show becomes more popular, with each renewal, writers, actors and others negotiate for higher pay. Fox does not look for viewer loyalty and clearly does not see this as important to their bottom line. They, instead, seem to be focused on short-term gains and returns. They are the most capitalistic of the networks and the results speak for themselves.
It doesn't matter to them that viewers who care about the long term enjoyment of a series will often avoid getting hooked into a show because it is run by Fox as there are plenty of people who are willing to watch and their numbers are sufficient and their advertisers don't seem to care either, which leads me to the next point. If you would like to teach Fox to behave and keep their best series, you have to complain to the ADVERTISERS, not to Fox. Fox will not listen to viewers -- they are short-sighted to the point that they take viewers for granted.
I wonder actually how much has to do with Rupert Murdoch (say his name three times and he appears, so be carefull.) There was an interview a few days ago in "Portfolio" with Paul LaMonica's discussing his new book, "Inside Rupert's Brain." From the article:
MM: You describe Murdoch has having almost a kind of attention deficit disorder -- he gets obsessed with something for two or three years, then forgets all about it and moves onto something else. Recently, he's been taking a lot of criticism for his fixation on newspapers. Is it just a phase?
PL: That one I think is going to be a little more difficult for him to outgrow. Clearly he did kind of have that phase with satellite television and with online media...but with newspapers, simply because it is a business he grew up in, it may be a little harder for him to let go that infatuation, especially since The Wall Street Journal is something he's hungered for for at least two decades. Anything that's a kind of ego-driven type of media business, which in many cases books and newspapers are, it may be difficult for him to give that up even if it's not fiscally a growing part of his business.
Bark less. Wag more.
Yes you should know better especially since often a series can be cancelled in the sense that the network won't be ordering further episodes, rather than in the sense that they are yanking the show from the lineup that day.
For instance, Firefly was canceled after episode 11, but went on to make three more to finish the contract. If you buy the DVD's you can listen to the commentary for episode 12 where they talk about how some of the shots reflect that.
"They moved it around to death!"
And they wonder why people P2P TV episodes.
If it's easier to look for a torrent, and download it than to just sit on a couch and watch your favorite show, then the TV people are doing something wrong.
To be fair, it's not easier if you have a DVR. Which a lot of people do, and the networks know that. There's not as much loathing of moving things around on the schedule anymore because the execs know that DVR's will find these shows automatically, so they're not as concerned about the con of potential audience loss anymore. The potential benefits outweigh the risks now.
In a sense, executives are doing what people here have always said they should do, which is moving away from schedule-based programming where you're expected to be in your seat at a specific, regular time each week to watch a show. They want to go all on-demand, and DVR's are part of that. It would solve a lot of their problems, like having to commit to full or half seasons and filming them all in sequence at roughly the same time. They'd love nothing more than to be able to do 2 or 3 episodes here and there and just put them on whenever they feel like it, knowing the fans will receive them automatically via "subscription".
There is one inherent flaw with this strategy, though, that nobody talks about. Even if everybody was on board with this, including the public, it still couldn't really work. Because the bottom line is there is still going to need to be a date and time that a new episode is released. People aren't going to stay interested in a show forever without knowing when or if it's going to come back, so you can't just have a couple month hiatus for a show and then suddenly dump 10 episodes out there all at once and expect people to even notice or care. Plus, whatever interest that does generate will dissipate once people have digested those episodes. It makes more logical sense to roll them out on a regular basis.
That means that fans will always be waiting for the next episode, and they will always know approximately when they're coming (and will get frustrated if the schedule isn't fairly regular). In the end, you are back to scheduled programming. I mean, even most web-only series operate on a schedule for those reasons. What you are talking about with p2p'ing is more of the post-release rental or purchase market; it's no different than renting a season of a show from Netflix or buying it as a box set. p2p, VOD and DVR's haven't changed that, just as they haven't changed the need for scheduled programming.
I think that, given the economy and all the technological changes happening, a lot of networks are experimenting with things right now to see if there are ways they can break established models. Some of those experiments are ill-advised. Ignoring regular schedules is one of those. Eventually, TV networks will figure out that even in an on-demand world, schedules still matter because the real fans of a show want to see the episodes as soon as they are released. It's no different than a movie, most of which make the majority of their money in the first weekend. That hasn't changed either; if anything, it's a trend that has accelerated over the past couple decades.
The bottom line is we have all these new technologies that allow us to get content in different ways, but the established models of distribution don't exist for purely technological reasons. They exist for behavioral and psychological reasons too, and new technologies won't change that. In fact, all these new technologies have only served to reinforce current models, not undermine them. (The only way they've undermined them is by asking whether or not you should have to pay for all this content. But they haven't changed our behavior in watching it.)
Alright I took time to read the article, and I think it's just a lot of FUD. After all, Terminator and Dollhouse have not been canceled yet. And Friday is not automatically a death slot:
Millenium - three year run
Sliders - three year run on FOX plus two more on SciFi
X-Files - a little known show of moderate repute that lasted 11 seasons
Now granted FOX is known for canceling scifi and fantasy shows throughout the 90s, however Joss Whedon said himself that those execs are long gone. The new executives are willing to stand behind their shows and let them grow, especially if the show has a strong online following, as is the case with Fringe, Terminator, and Dollhouse. Bottom Line: I'm not concerned.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Shows with a story arc must be shown in the same slot religiously. Imagine you missed a few episodes of Bleach. Would you even try to continue watching it?
People with money who are interesting to advertisers who are the actual customers of television (you are the product) tend to have PVRs so they can watch a show if they miss it. People like you who miss a show and then don't follow it are clearly not the advertisers' bitch, thus not worth wasting advertising dollars on, thus not worth pleasing. The mass media industry does not give one fuck about you and will not miss you if you go away.
Uhhh, except that people with PVRs are more likely to just fast-forward through those precious commercials, which is something advertisers are not so fond of. If you want me to see the commercials, it has to be on live TV so I can't fast-forward, and it has to be in a consistent timeslot so I can put it on my calendar and arrange my schedule around it.
A better explanation is that they're catering to people who will just turn on the TV and watch whatever happens to be in front of them, who don't really care what show they're watching. I can see how this wouldn't be a problem for sitcoms, but FOX doesn't understand how to cater to people who are willing to go out of their way to watch a particular show on purpose. I'm committed to watching the show, and am willing to arrange my schedule around it. Even if the show isn't that great, once I've decided to commit to it, I'll go ahead and watch it anyway.
However, if the show I want to watch isn't on, I'm not going to just watch whatever else happens to be there, I'm going to turn it off and do something else. I'm a fan of the show, not the timeslot. If I miss an episode, I'll go watch it online to catch up, but if I miss a lot of episodes, I'll just stop watching altogether - I might enjoy the show, but if it takes effort to watch it, I'm not going to bother.
I still watch Heroes, even though the writers no longer know what they're doing and the show has started wandering aimlessly. Why? Because NBC keeps it at a consistent timeslot that works for me, so I might as well.
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I don't know if I would say "Pro-Confederate", since the Unification War wasn't about slavery (and there are indications in the show that slavery continued well after the Alliance victory on outlying worlds), but more anti-imperialism and with a very strong slant towards libertarianism. I didn't realise how similar it was to Heinlein's work until I read the frontier stories in Time Enough For Love, and that's definitely worth a read if you're a Firefly fan. You can skip the last section of the book, where Lazarus Long travels back in time. It gets a little weird.
Also, the anti-Christian angle is pretty much just Mal, and I'm sure it would have been covered in later episodes. If you watch the beginning of the pilot, you'll notice him take a crucifix necklace and kiss it, IIRC. This indicates that he was probably religious and lost his faith when they lost the war. Joss Whedon is a noted atheist, but he's always come across fairly liberal and non-preachy about it. In contrast to the captain's angry atheism, Inara was a Buddhist, and there was also Book, the preacher with the shady past. Too bad we never got to see their stories play out.
But yeah, there's a lot more depth there than is to be expected from Fox. It's no wonder they canned it.
This poo is cold.
I don't think you can regard British series as an example of anything on this subject. The pressures are very different , especially on the BBC where advertising revenue is not a factor. Short and sweet tends to be the yardstick. some of the best BBC series had very short runs. Fawlty Towers: 12 episodes, Blackadder: 24 episodes, The Office: 14 episodes including a two part Christmas special. Those are three of the greatest sitcoms ever to grace British TV screens. Perhaps they are so good because the creators were allowed to quit before the dead horse flogging started.
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