Rowdy C's TV Trash: 10 Most Screwed Over Shows [Archive] - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

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05-15-2013, 03:31 AM

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10. The DC Nation shows Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series got hit by this. The first season of Young Justice took over a year to air due to multiple hiatuses, and the second season began airing with little fanfare the week following the season finale. Green Lantern ran its first 13-episode arc without interruption before a break. Young Justice then went seven episodes before getting slapped with another hiatus. After coming back from the summer hiatus, along with the premiere of the next Green Lantern arc, the entire block was pulled a mere two episodes in, scheduled to return in January 2013. The schedule change happened on the very day that new episodes were supposed to air, and not even the showrunners were told. Three weeks after they returned, Cartoon Network sprang on their viewers that both shows have been cancelled, their final outings making the whole block's Humiliation Conga that much more bitter.
The worst thing of it all is that what ratings data is available for Cartoon Network indicates that Young Justice is consistently among the network's ten highest rated telecasts on a weekly basis, both before and after the fall 2012 hiatus, with Green Lantern generally not too far behind.
Basically, if you like action Cartoons, expect it to get cancelled or replaced nowadays. Apparently Cartoon Network wants more Humor based shows than Action, so Young Justice fans for example are SOL.

9. How about an entire company screwed by the network? In 2001, AOL Time Warner was openly looking to sell WCW, producer of the highest-rated shows for TNT (WCW Nitro) and TBS (WCW Thunder). A group of investors, lead by WCW head booker Eric Bischoff, had a deal in principle to take over the company and absorb the production costs that the network had been covering. However, with WCW eating up two hours of prime-time and the company millions of dollars in the red with no evidence things were going to get any better, Jamie Kellner, then the Turner Networks CEO, decided to cancel all WCW programming from Turner networks, torpedoing the deal. Vince Mc Mahon (head of WCW's longtime rival World Wrestling Federation) then swooped in and bought out WCW's remaining assets (mostly wrestler contracts and its deep tape library) for pennies on the dollar. That said, Kellner had wanted to cancel the unprofitable company for a quite a while, and the only reason WCW stayed on TV for as long as it did was the intervention of Ted Turner, who had a soft spot for wrestling. Once Turner was out of power at the network, Kellner was supported by just about everyone at the company.

8. The CW rented out the Sunday-night slots for the 2008-09 season to Media Rights Capital. The shows — 4Real, In Harm's Way, Easy Money, and Valentine — scored such terrible ratings that The CW repossessed the timeslot and put in reruns of The Drew Carey Show and Jericho, plus movies. The ratings immediately jumped back to pre rent-a-block levels (although still test-pattern low), and after the season The CW gave up completely on Sundays and gave the time back to their stations.
Valentine was critically-acclaimed, but despite liking the premise nobody tuned in. Why? No advertisement whatsoever.

7. Arrested Development struggled in the ratings despite being a critics' favorite, a problem FOX compounded when they continually moved the timeslot around.

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6. This was what happened behind the scenes of the original Battlestar Galactica. The short version: ABC expected the series to fail, and that they could make money from its failure. The series succeeded, so ABC found a way to make it fail anyway — and they ultimately failed to make any money in the end. The long version: Battlestar Galactica was a very expensive series, and ABC executives only greenlit it because they thought it would flop. Space Operas were huge at the moment (Thanks, Star Wars!), but execs were expecting audiences to get bored with the genre very quickly. ABC wanted a loss-leader to take advantage of this trend: the logic was that people would tune in for Galactica, then stick around for one of ABC's cheap sitcoms once they got bored with sci-fi. No other sci-fi TV series since Star Trek had lasted beyond one season, so Galactica flopping seemed like a good bet. In spite of the prevailing wisdom, Galactica proved to be huge hit, putting ABC in the position of having a show that was too popular to cancel, but too expensive to continue producing. ABC resorted to screwing the show over to drive down viewership to the point where they could cancel it without completely losing face. And the real kicker: the stunt didn't help the ratings of ABC's sitcoms at all. None of that season's new series were hits, and last season's big hit, Mork And Mindy, bled ratings thanks to a bad re-tooling.

5. Wonderfalls was canceled after four weeks, one of the quickest deaths Fox has ever managed to give a show. But that was only the last of a number of choices on the part of the network that led to the show's demise: first, the show was developed at the same time as CBS' Joan of Arcadia, to which at first glance it may seem strikingly similar in theme. Supposedly fearing it would draw too many comparisons, they held off the premiere for an entire year, which backfired and led some to think it was a deliberate copy (as opposed to a coincidence), especially as Joan had proven successful and was still on the air. Worse, it started airing 8:00 PM on a Friday, which had the dual misfortune of not only being the same time as Joan aired on CBS, but of also being the infamous Friday Night Death Slot, whose name tends to be especially apt for non-family friendly fare... which of course, describes Wonderfalls. In a sort of Coup de Grâce, Fox finally moved the show after its third week to Thursday, where it would ostensibly get better ratings...which they did this without telling anyone, so it kind of defeated the purpose. Fox also ran promos for the fifth episode, only to pull the series before it aired. Making matters worse for fans, there was uncertainty for months as to whether the series would be allowed a DVD release, but thankfully this was resolved.

4. Firefly was supposed to begin with a double-length pilot that set up the complex universe the series was set in, along with the various characters' relationships. The network decided that the pilot wasn't action-oriented enough and should be shelved, asking the show's creators to make a new first episode, giving them just one weekend to write it. After that premiere, Fox completely ignored the arc and aired the episodes in seemingly random order, in some cases resulting in episodes showing Previously On scenes that wouldn't air until the following week. There was almost no commercial promotion whatsoever following the premiere (and the commercials that did air downplayed the series' strengths to "broaden the appeal"), episodes were preempted for sporting events on numerous occasions, and the pilot movie didn't air until after the series had been canceled. Not to mention, it also aired in the Friday Night Death Slot.

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3. NBC has gone through two of these in its history.
The first one was in the late '70s and early '80s during Fred Silverman's tenure as president and CEO. Hot off of his success turning ABC into a titan in the early-mid '70s, NBC brought him on hoping that lightning would strike twice. What they got instead was a slew of gimmicky shows that were often canceled after only a season, with failures like Supertrain and Pink Lady And Jeff being among the most notorious. The former hit Saturday Night Live went through its first Dork Age during the 1980-81 season, and was nearly canceled after the F-bomb dropped on the Charlene Tilton episode. Morale at the network crumbled with each passing year spent in a distant third behind ABC and CBS; Al Franken ran the famous "Limo for the Lame-O" sketch on SNL skewering Silverman's handling of the network (which led to Franken getting sacked and, with it, the aforementioned Dork Age the following season), while the production studio and singers responsible for NBC's "We're Proud as a Peacock!" campaign song recorded a hilarious parody version mocking Silverman.

The final straw came when the US Olympic team boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics as a result of the Soviet Invasion Of Afghanistan, resulting in an Eastern Bloc-dominated affair that few Americans were interested in watching — very bad news for the network that had bet the farm on Olympic programming that year to turn its fortunes around. Between that and the financial troubles of NBC's corporate owners, the electronics company RCA, it was speculated that the network would be shut down or sold off in a matter of years in order to prevent RCA from going bankrupt.

Fortunately for NBC, in 1981 they ousted Silverman and brought in Grant Tinker (co-founder of MTM Enterprises) as the new chairman and CEO, and put Brandon Tartikoff in charge of programming duties. Together, despite a few false starts, Tinker and Tartikoff oversaw the beginning of a golden age for NBC that would last for nearly two decades, with the network dominating the ratings and, in particular, being responsible for many of the great American sitcoms of The Eighties and The Nineties.
Alas, those two decades eventually came to an end. Following the end of Frasier and Friends, two of the network's last big hits, in 2004, NBC slipped from first to fourth as its new shows either failed to catch on or experienced Second Season Downfalls, and its attempts to make a reality TV hit like Survivor or American Idol turned out to be laughingstocks. Its Thursday night comedy block was one of its few points of consistent acclaim, and even then, shows like Community and 30 Rock struggled in the ratings.

The low point came in the 2009-10 season, when the Vancouver Winter Olympics proved themselves to be a $250 million money pit for the network, and the failure of The Jay Leno Show left huge holes across a third of the network's Prime Time schedule and caused a "Late Night War" between Leno and Conan O'Brien that left TV fans with a lot of ill will against NBC's executives. Time will tell if the ouster of unpopular CEO Jeff Zucker in late 2010 will see the network get turned around, though things seem to be looking up; The Voice is a smash hit, and the network edged out ABC for third place at the end of the 2011-12 season.

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2. ESPN had a series called Playmakers about five years ago which was a depiction of the behind-the-scenes actions of players of a fictional pro football team (in a fictional league). However, the NFL, who was in the midst of a new lucrative deal with ESPN, were not pleased of a stark and unflattering look at the world of pro football, and pressured the network to scuttle the show after one season, which they obliged. Several pro players like Warren Sapp praised the show for its realistic (to a point) depiction of football players and their shortcomings in the world, and criticized both the league and the network for trying to scrub anything negative about the sport.

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