Don't F*** With River! [Firefly]

[Ranger REG]

The last few posts seem to be pretty close to what I'm thinking. Someone also mentioned FOX going towards reality shows. when you realize that the cost of "reality programming"(I prefer unscripted television)is much cheaper than shows that require say actors or some such, you realize they don't need to pull in that many viewers to make a solid profit.

On the greener side of the fence, more people will turn off their TV for more roleplaying game sessions.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Good grief, some of you are belligerent. You need to step back and look at this objectively. Fox is trying to make money, they would not engage in some conspiracy to pull Firefly off the air after investing millions of dollars in it. While they did make some mistakes, network TV is facing competition now. Marginal ratings are not good enough when they can spend $5 and throw another reality show on and pull the same. Even with the enhanced awareness of Firefly from the DVD release, I wonder if it could pull large enough ratings for its giant budget.

Actually, while you're entirely right that ultimately, Fox has the right to seek the most profit possible for the lowest cost, it's also true that the execs there have been known to make things difficult for shows they don't "get." Their mistakes in how they marketed Firefly, how they showed the episodes, etc. weren't just lapses in judgment. They were at least partly the result of execs who, at best, couldn't be bothered to try to see (and thus share) the appeal of the show, and who, at worst, wanted it out of the way so they could replace it with cheaper programming.

 

[John Crichton]

Good grief, some of you are belligerent. You need to step back and look at this objectively. Fox is trying to make money, they would not engage in some conspiracy to pull Firefly off the air after investing millions of dollars in it. While they did make some mistakes, network TV is facing competition now. Marginal ratings are not good enough when they can spend $5 and throw another reality show on and pull the same. Even with the enhanced awareness of Firefly from the DVD release, I wonder if it could pull large enough ratings for its giant budget.

Mouseferatu hit most of what I wanted to say but I'll add my bits.

Fox certainly didn't "get" the show they paid money for. If they got it they wouldn't have made the writers create a new pilot over the course of a weekend. The network did run commercials for the show but hardly showed any clips. Joss' name was never thrown around (which would have brought in a few more viewers), the eps were shown out of order and the time slot was simply terrible. They mismanaged the show more than anything. I don't think there was any conspiracy but I do think they dropped the ball.

 

[Aulayan]

Actually, Joss' name was thrown around before the show premiered. The ads kept saying "From the mind of Joss Whedon" or something along those lines.

 

[Lazybones]

I'd heard some comments elsewhere that the show's message also may have been a contributing factor. Especially in the post-9/11 world; the show glorifies essentially criminals (if noble criminals), and demonizes a quasi-fascist government that strongly controls civil liberties and restricts access to wealth and power. The show's message is basically defiance of authority and a glorification of individualism over collective values. There's prostitutes (who are considered "good guys"), foul language (admittedly in Chinese ), and a big corporate bad guy. I can see why a bunch of suits who just want a cheap show that won't offend anybody might not "get it".

I do notice how "The Simpsons" gets away with bashing Fox whenever it can, so maybe my tinfoil hat just needs adjusting.

 

[Aulayan]

Amazingly, most of the Chinese in the show wasn't swearing. Most of it could have been said in English. Some of it was even complimentary.

 

[Ranger REG]

Fox certainly didn't "get" the show they paid money for. If they got it they wouldn't have made the writers create a new pilot over the course of a weekend. The network did run commercials for the show but hardly showed any clips. Joss' name was never thrown around (which would have brought in a few more viewers), the eps were shown out of order and the time slot was simply terrible. They mismanaged the show more than anything. I don't think there was any conspiracy but I do think they dropped the ball.

Hmm. This has a familiar ring, if not exact. It happened to one sci-fi TV series back in the 60's.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The last few posts seem to be pretty close to what I'm thinking. Someone also mentioned FOX going towards reality shows. when you realize that the cost of "reality programming"(I prefer unscripted television)is much cheaper than shows that require say actors or some such, you realize they don't need to pull in that many viewers to make a solid profit.

I think one of the important part of this reality programming is in fact that they don´t need real actors or comedians do to it.
There are currently one or two popular examples of "unscripted programming" with comedians on German TV. I think they probably cost more than Big Brother, just because the comedians already have names and talents...
I am not exactly a regular watcher of this type of shows, but I think the concept is quite interesting.
Anyway, it´s definitely not the only thing I want to see on TV.
Today, there are dozens of reality based shows, most of them simply suck and I will never care and/or watch them, no matter how desperate the situation is.
But I wonder if there are enough people to do it to make these shows even more dominant, at least on commercial channels. They are extremely cheap compared to a well-made (let alone Sci Fi) series, and maybe that will always compensate for the lower ratings, even if they decrease further in a few years after the viewers are saturated. I hope not, but if, this might actually make TV uninteresting for many people...
It could also just change in a different direction - maybe actors and other professionals will have to accept lower rates. I guess most of the FX on TV and cinema is so costly because of the prices the professionals ask, not neccessarily for the Hardware it needs...
But maybe we are learning now why so many Sci Fi settings seem to lack TV shows

 

[Pielorinho]

Good grief, some of you are belligerent. You need to step back and look at this objectively. Fox is trying to make money, they would not engage in some conspiracy to pull Firefly off the air after investing millions of dollars in it.

[Hijack]In the late nineties, I subcontracted for IBM writing a three-day course on Web marketing: how to globalize and localize your Internet presence, the differences between opt-in and opt-out advertising, the various formats for Internet advertisements available at the time, the virtues and pitfalls of intrusive ads, etc.

Per IBM's standards, the course was written in their equivalent of PowerPoint. For each slide, I had a relevant graphic and some stats; the notes for each slide were very extensive, usually half a page of crunchy stuff. Students in the course would receive a notebook with all the graphics and notes.

During the final revision to the course, a couple of new management-types reviewed what I'd done, and told me that there were too many notes: they wanted me to slash most of the notes in the student copy, leaving them only in the teacher copy.

I asked why, and they explained: the department of IBM that was budgeting the course's development would then be "charging" other IBM departments to participate in the course. If the student notebook contained all the information, then someone from another department could take the course, then go back to her department and teach it to everyone else. In other words, the course was too useful in its current format, and they needed me to make it less useful, so that their department could maintain its budget.

Ever since then, I've had no confidence whatsoever in the ability of large organizations to act rationally.

I don't think that Fox tried to torpedo the show, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that, say, a mid-level executive was assigned to the show after she'd predicted doom and gloom for space-shows in some meeting, and that this executive torpedoed the show in order to make her prediction come true.

Daniel

 

[Henry]

In other words, the course was too useful in its current format, and they needed me to make it less useful, so that their department could maintain its budget.

Why does this remind me of the old column from the Onion: "Justify your Existance?"