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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Acmite" data-source="post: 591278" data-attributes="member: 183">Zap2it also ran a story--which contains mostly teh same information, but presented in a slightly different way:LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - While there are those legendary tales of shows that have been saved by grassroots campaigns waged by devoted fans to later become hits of their time ("Cagney and Lacey," "Designing Women"), the truth of the matter is more along the lines of "Roswell" and "Once and Again," where series are put on agonizing life support and shuttled from night to night, time slot to time slot, network to network, until no amount of hot sauce in the world can forestall the inevitable pulling of the plug.Really, the only way to save a show is to get a few million of your closest friends to actually watch it. Bring more eyeballs to the screen for advertisers to bombard with their product spots and you've got a good chance of a pick-up. However, if the network is expending more money producing and marketing a show than they are able to collect in ad revenue, it's going to get cancelled.No show creator is immune to this basic rule of economics. Not Joss Whedon ("Firefly"). Not David E. Kelley ("girls club"). Not Aaron Sorkin ("Sports Night").Still, fans continue to fight the good fight.  One of the current objects of devotion is Sci Fi's "Farscape," which will air the last 11 episodes of its fourth and final season starting Friday, Jan. 10 at 8 p.m. ET.Sci Fi President Bonnie Hammer says that the volume of angry emails from viewers that TV critics have been receiving is only a fraction of what she's seen over the past several months. And although the network always wanted to continue the series into 2003, due to its softening ratings they never felt it was appropriate to continue it into '04 and beyond."We love the series; we helped birth the series; it was ours from the get-go, and it wasn't given to us all fully packaged, so it was a very, very difficult decision for Sci Fi," Hammer says. "We loved it. We still do, and we think we have 11 great episodes that you'll be seeing shortly." Although Sci Fi wanted to send "Farscape" off in style, Hammer says that, try as they might, they were never able to crunch the proper numbers to even fund a half season of 13."We wanted to do 13 new episodes of 'Farscape' to end the series the way we felt it should be ended properly, and have the proper finale we would have loved to give it," she asserts. "The bottom line was we couldn't come up with the financial deal that made sense." "You have a choice: if we had a limitless budget, we could be doing everything we possibly could, but we don't and we had to make a decision." Long story short, unless a wealthy benefactor and "Farscape" fan steps forward and writes a big check, viewers will have to savor the remaining few original stories and cross their fingers for future DVD sets. </blockquote>

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