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"I want you to cancel that crappy sci-fi show, FarGate!"
"Well, cancel the crappy one!"
The prototypical network executive's time revolves not around nurturing talent for the benefit of all, but around making himself look competent.
That means appearing responsible for every success and innocent of every failing that the network might have, irrespective of whether this was actually the case. Note that the people that the executive is really trying to convince are his fellow Execs that are, to a man, also having the exact same neurotic crisis day in and day out.
Nevertheless, the need to keep their channels populated with new shows means that their commissioning bods will keep putting forward all kinds of shows that may or may not appeal to the network executives' sensibilities.
For this reason, the execs will sometimes find themselves in the unfortunate position of being in charge of a show that they do not understand and therefore do not know what to do with. This presents them with a tricky situation: if the show is a failure they risk losing face, but if the show is a success then they'll look redundant.
Alternatively, the show may be a legacy commission under your predecessor, which is worse - because if it's a success they'll have one up on you, but if you cancel it straight off, you'll lose all plausible deniability when people call you petty and small.
The answer to both of these problems, of course, is to screw the show over completely. Put it in a different time slot each episode, show it in the wrong order, bury it at midnight, put it up against CSI... do everything you can to stop it from building up a regular viewing audience that's not quite big enough to warrant the budget, but just big enough to cause some trouble when you cancel it for not "attracting the right audience".
Then wipe your beaded brow, pop a few pills, put on your best happy face and chant your power mantra. So long as you look good in the eyes of others then everything will be fine. And that's what this job is about, right? Right?
Okay, okay - not all network executives are like this...as "all" would mean every last single one, and not just most. There exists the exceptionally rare individual who intentionally seeks out creative people to make shows that don't just Follow The Leader, and as they get promoted, they may become the very predecessors these shows are inherited from. However, this happens more often than you may wish to believe.
Fox is pretty much considered to be the king of this sort of programming decision, so much so that ratings for new shows on Fox are usually comparatively low, since most people know they'll just be canceled within 10 shuffled-around episodes anyways.
Please try to avoid listing shows as being "screwed" just because of a disagreement over the reasons for their cancellation. Plenty of shows are canceled simply because they just weren't making any money even with the network backing it. This is about intentional sabotage (or at the least making decisions so stupid it looks like it was intentional), not "the mean network executives canceled my favorite show".
Often the cause of Follow Up Failure. Compare Executive Meddling, Executive Veto, Too Good To Last, Invisible Advertising. Also compare No Export For You, though that doesn't affect the actual production, but the export of a given product.
Rarely, the situation will invert itself with Network To The Rescue.
Examples
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Anime
- In a rare subversion, Code Geass seems to be a case where Screwed By The Network didn't end up killing the show. Reportedly, Sunrise was wary of giving too much leeway and many resources to a director like Goro Taniguchi, still relatively untested and with a reputation for absolute perfectionism. According to the staff, in the early days of the show they had to share offices (and copiers) with other productions, and were only about three episodes ahead in terms of writing, while most shows are eight to ten episodes ahead. On top of all this, Sunrise only gave Taniguchi half of the fifty episodes he wanted...but the runaway success of the show convinced them to give it an Oddly Named Sequel. But after this announcement, they then changed the time slot for the sequel from after midnight to 5:00 PM Sunday, which forced the staff to alter their original plans for the second season and made them tone down parts of the series. For many fans the most notable casualty ended up being the second half of Code Geass R2, whose rushed pacing was a result of having to rewrite much of the first half in order to allow newcomers to understand what was going on.
- After War Gundam X suffered this in Japan when it got moved from 5:00 p.m. on Fridays to 6:00 a.m. on Saturdays; its 49-episode run was also cut down to 39 episodes.
- * "Oh Hey, I'm Naruto bringer of ratings for Cartoon Network, I'm going to the UK to make fans happy there! Oh hey Jetix UK, I'm so glad you want to show me to UK Fans, oh wait, what's that rusty kni-?"
- Naruto's mangled corpse was found in a graveyard slot. No one attended the funeral because their parents would rather have dinner parties in Coronation Street and Albert Square.
- and some people think that fears over Naruto shippuden on disney XD are overreactions
- Bobobobo Bobobo, Viewtiful Joe and Digimon were found in said graveyard slot as well. Digimon was found in a state that suggests that it was locked in a cellar a little after its fourth birthday.
- Meanwhile, back in America, when Cartoon Network kicked Toonami into the can, Naruto went with it.
- And you know who picked it up? DISNEY XD is now carrying Naruto Shippuden. Can a Network Screw itself? Cartoon Network is certainly giving it a try.
Live Action TV
- The granddaddy of all Screwed By The Network examples: the original TV run of Star Trek. After two seasons of middling ratings, NBC announced its intent to cancel the show. However, a national campaign of letter writing, led by a fan named Betty Jo Trimble, resulted in an unprecedented backdown by the network. NBC renewed the show for a third season ... but also cut Star Trek's budget by approximately half and placed the show in the Friday Night Death Slot, when the show's demographic was likely to be doing anything but watching TV. Both episode quality and consequently ratings suffered meteoric falls (although it was responsible for some of the series' most memorable episodes), followed by cancellation at the end of the third season.
- Interestingly, many of the cast and crew involved in the show later declared that the show's cancellation was the best thing to happen to the franchise - instead of the slashed budget taking its toll and resulting in a steady decline in quality, Star Trek cemented itself in the public consciousness as an excellent show killed before its time, which left fans clamoring for more and led to the creation of eleven films and four subsequent series, one of which would win critical acclaim and eighteen Emmys in the process.
- The show Quantum Leap was also moved around to different time slots, and fans overwhelmed the network with mail to keep it on the air. The series finale was just supposed to be a season finale, which had to be altered a bit to finish the series.
- What more can be said about Jericho? When it got cancelled the first time, CBS decided not to announce its impending doom until AFTER the cliffhanger season finale aired (it made the nuts all the more necessary).
- The only consolation prize from all of this was that the writers were prepared for an either-or situation (two different endings) and that CBS informed them of their cancellation before airing the final episode. Notice how networks now are giving more of their serial dramas (and their fans) ample warning of likely cancellation BEFORE their season finale episodes air to give writers some time to wrap up major storylines. I would like to think that Jericho fans may have caused a major influence in this change which would make this seem like a bittersweet victory for fans of quality tv story-telling.
- Wonderfalls (aired on Fox, of course!) 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, a stroke of genius that 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 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 Grace, Fox finally moved the show after its third week to Thursday, where it would ostensibly get better ratings... of course, they did this without telling anyone, so it kind of defeated the purpose.
- Firefly was supposed to begin with a double-length pilot episode that set up the complex universe that the series was set in, along with the various characters' relationships. Then the network decided that the pilot wasn't action-oriented enough and should be shelved and asked 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 The Previously scenes that wouldn't air until the following week. There was almost no commercial promotion whatsoever following the premiere, episodes were pre-empted for sporting events on numerous occasions, and the pilot movie wasn't even aired until after the series had been cancelled. Not to mention, it also aired in the Friday Night Death Slot.
- Drive's first three episodes were aired over two nights; the fourth aired a week later, and then it was cancelled, giving all of four episodes and nine days. This after the initial thirteen episode order was split in half, so even if it hadn't been cancelled, it would have run for a month, followed by a three-month hiatus. This proves once again that Tim Minear (who also produced both Wonderfalls and Firefly, see above) and FOX go together like peanut butter and nitroglycerin. This editor wonders if he's some kind of masochist... Or perhaps if he repeatedly ran over a FOX Network Executive's cat/dog/child. Minear is reportedly now two shows into a six-show deal with FOX.
- In 1985, BBC controller Michael Grade postponed the original series of Doctor Who — a show he reportedly loathed — for 18 months until a high-profile campaign brought the show back on air. He was also responsible for firing then-star Colin Baker. He later claimed that he did the former out of spite and the latter out of dislike for the actor's style. He also scheduled the show against popular Soap Opera Coronation Street, which was partly responsible for the show's drop in viewers.
- If you're ever wondering why Michael Grade is the only BBC controller not to be knighted, keep in mind that the Queen is a HUGE Doctor Who fan.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 was victimized twice by network heads (Doug Herzog at Comedy Central and Bonnie Hammer at Sci Fi Channel) who professed not to understand the show's sense of humor and clearly resented having it left to them as a legacy program from previous executives; they wound up fighting a war of attrition against the show's small but vocal fan base while looking for an excuse to cancel the series. Despite this, the show enjoyed a ten-season run, plus almost five years of reruns on the Sci Fi Channel, before finally signing off for good in 2004. The Movie is well known for being screwed by the studio.
- In addition, Bonnie Hammer and Mark Stern, while separating the schedules of Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica in what would end up the last season of the former and penultimate season of the latter, put the former after a bad remake of Knight Rider (oh, and put it against Monk, which not only tops Nielsen cable ratings but is also on USA, whose scheduling is also done by
WolframHammer and HartStern) and delayed the latter's season premiere until six months after the finale last season. When the ratings fell, they canceled the former (on the 200th episode airing party, no less) and moved the latter to an even worse timeslot. (A copy of TV Tropes sent from the future in a dodgy wormhole stated that these two people were killed by a giant poster of Ben Browder. Dropped by the ghost of Isaac Asimov.)
- Oh, Bonnie Hammer = Satan has been around awhile. Ask any Forever Knight about the treatment their show got on USA Network. (Little known fact: FK's last four episodes were the first original dramatic program on the Sci Fi Channel... because USA Network dumped the last four episodes on a channel that, at the time, had about 500,000 subscribers.)
- It's not like the TV adaptation of The Dresden Files was high art, but it deserves a mention here. Sci Fi didn't exactly slit the show's throat, but they did stab it in the femoral artery by being remarkably tight-lipped about whether or not the show was renewed. When it got to the point that the guy playing Harry Dresden was shopping around for another series, the creators decided to just call it a day.
- Sci Fi's excuses about why they refused to renew a series that had developed a good-sized cult following? The numbers weren't there. Fans became suspicious of this excuse when Sci Fi then not only renewed a show that had been doing more poorly than The Dresden Files, but praised it for doing so remarkably well. When Dresden Files fans pointed this out, Sci Fi then trotted out the amazing notion that the show had been canceled because it was attracting the wrong demographics. Sci Fi wanted to attract young male viewers, and The Dresden Files was attracting women of 18-40.
- That's the exact same reason Stargate SG-1 was canceled and Atlantis was renewed. Even with the efforts to make the numbers plummet, SG-1 was still doing better—but they wanted to keep the "action" male-oriented newer show and drop the larger audience, huge fanbase, increasingly popular older show because too much of SG-1's audience was women. Now, they've got no shows with any audience.
- Phil Of The Future was cancelled because Disney thought the revenue from the show would be better used for a creation of another show.
- Crusade, the sequel to Babylon 5, suffered all of these from the ground up, complete with Executive Meddling writ large. JMS later learned that TNT, the network airing the show (which had also aired the Post Script Season of B5), had done research and learned that the B5 and Crusade audience was completely failing to make the jump to the rest of the network's programming, and vice versa. It decided to scrap the sequel, even as it was in production... except that they couldn't do it without breaching their contract with Warner Brothers. So, they decided to make it impossible, giving unbelievably bad notes (including demanding a fist fight in the first episode). The production team did its best, but the show was quite literally doomed from day one.
- Paramount attempted to screw WWE by moving their program SmackDown! into the famed Friday Night Death Slot (where it would face not only constant pre-emptions for local sports, but the loss of a good portion of its audience to people getting out and doing stuff on Friday nights), in order to try and pressure WWE into keeping Monday Night Raw on Spike TV. However, thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign by WWE (even rebranding the show Friday Night SmackDown!), the show managed not only to not lose any viewers, but gained enough ground that it was one of the few UPN shows picked up by the post-merger CW Network.
- They ultimately wound up screwing them anyway, but it took a few years; when it came time to renew contracts, Paramount wasn't interested despite the high ratings and so Smackdown is on the path to the much-less-notable My Network TV.
- Since Smackdown's premiere on My Network TV, they are beating The CW in ratings by a good margin.
- And with the complete economic meltdown of 2008 ripping through the entertainment industry threatening the very existence of My Network TV this may end up a case of Screwed By The World.
- Despite having its episodes aired horrendously Out Of Order, Tremors the TV series managed to become Sci Fi's highest rated program at the time. Nevertheless, it was cancelled on the grounds that it didn't hit the demographic that Sci Fi wanted.
- This becomes doubly brain-wracking (if perhaps somewhat karmic) when one considers the demographic in question was the audience that had already been watching Farscape ... which Sci Fi canceled without warning (leaving the series ending on a cliffhanger) to replace with Tremors.
- NBC seemed determined to use this trope to kill the original Law & Order series. In March 2006, they announced that the show would be moved from Wednesdays at 10pm (where it had been a ratings winner for over a decade) to 9pm in order to premiere Heist. Two weeks later (after Heist tanked in the ratings and fan outcry reached deafening levels), they moved it back. The following season they tried again - shifting the show to the near-doom slot of Fridays at 10pm (head-to-head with NUMB3RS) and moving sister show Law & Order: Criminal Intent to Tuesdays at 9pm. Both shows suffered ratings drops as a result (especially Criminal Intent). Then after the season was over, NBC banished Criminal Intent to USA and offered Law & Order a midseason slot on Sundays at 9pm once football season was over. Of course, the WGA strike put them back on in the old Wednesday time slot and the show is again a standout. At least until they move it again for Jay Leno's new 10pm talk show...
- Attempts to bury a series this way aren't always successful. When M*A*S*H was first aired, there had never been a successful series spun off of a film, and the majority of the execs were aghast that the decision to base one on that particular film (one wonders if it would have been aired at all if they'd read the original novel, which was even more irreverent but lacked most of the political aspects which made the film a hit). It was very deliberately scheduled against Dragnet and The Wonderful World Of Disney, a slot which had ruined everything else CBS had put there. But both of those shows had been on the air for many years, and the audiences were wearing thin, so when bored viewers decided to look at this new controversial comedy to see what all the fuss was about... well, the rest is history.
- The first three seasons of 24 were routinely put on hiatus for up to a month at a time in favor of baseball, American Idol, and other new shows that nobody remembers anymore. In this case, Fox eventually realized the error of its ways, and subsequent seasons have been shown without interruption.
- Covington Cross (1992) received the same treatment, airing only 6 episodes over 8 weeks, being constantly pre-empted and/or moved due to sports programming. After the "dismal" ratings after these episodes, it was canned by the network.
- When the BBC originally aired Monty Python's Flying Circus, they broadcast it at inconsistent hours and preempted it with the Horse Of The Year Show. (This is the reason for some of the show's Biting The Hand Humor and malicious jokes about BBC television programming.) Worse, according to Terry Jones, the BBC tried to tape over the master recordings and it is only due to the Dallas/Fort Worth PBS station, which saved backups and pimped the series to the rest of the United States, that the series still exists. That's right, Texas saved Monty Python. Remember that next time you start insulting Texans.
- A German example: RTL airs self-produced sitcoms on Friday (half of these are So Bad Its Horrible). Then we get the not half-bad "Herzog", which is basically about an Allen Shore ripoff who is highly chauvinist, though amusingly so. The show was highly recommended by several TV magazines and to this day still has a small but loyal following. Why it still bombed? It was placed directly after the show "Angie", which was basically a show for women in their mid-30s.
- Cupid was bounced around from the Friday Night Death Slot to Saturday (the two nights nobody is ever home to watch a romantic dramedy) to Thursday against NBC's Must See TV , justifying its cancellation before the end of the first season. Oddly enough, the show may be Un Cancelled as ABC has given its creator permission to try again.
- Angel was suddenly canceled to the confusion of those making the show, as it was consistently high-quality and high-ratings. The reason the network gave was even more confusing: that the show was so popular and good, that they wanted the series to end on a high note instead of letting it die in obscurity. Possibly the only example of a show being canceled (ostensibly) because everyone liked it too much.
- A theory for its cancellation: Angel had been getting consistently good ratings - no matter where they moved it (from Wednesday to Monday to Sunday), the fans seemed to follow it. However, The WB was also currently developing a new series of Dark Shadows and didn't want competing vampire shows on their network, so they canceled Angel. The new Dark Shadows, as you are probably aware, was never made and thus the shaggy vampire was shot.
- Nowhere Man was one of UPN's highest rated and critically acclaimed shows. But it was cancelled after one season only to be replaced by Moesha and Homeboys in Outer Space. Homeboys only lasted about four episodes. Some people wish that Moesha had only lasted that long.
- Max Headroom, anyone? Give it promotion no series could live up to (come on, a Newsweek cover?) and then drop it opposite the wildly successful Miami Vice.
- Miami Vice itself was screwed by putting it on opposite Dallas, then moving it to Sunday night.
- Max Headroom is somewhat different, though, as the reason it was screwed was not due to incompetence or office politics so much as the content of the show, which pretty much did everything it could to spit in the face of the execs & their way of life. The fact it was ever greenlit at all in the first place is nothing short of a miracle.
- How about an entire company screwed by the network? March 2001: AOLTimeWarner was openly looking to sell World Championship Wrestling, producer of the highest rated shows for TNT (WCW Nitro) and TBS (WCW Thunder). A group of investors, lead by WCW head booker Eric Bishoff, had a deal in principle to take over the company (absorbing the production costs that the network had been covering). Then Jamie Kellner, then Turner Networks CEO, canceled all WCW programming from Turner networks (which he had wanted to do for years, but was blocked by his predecessor, network founder Ted Turner), removing WCW's most valuable assets and single-handedly torpedoing the deal. Vince McMahon (head of WCW's long time 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.
- And then there's American Gothic. The show premiered, if this editor recalls correctly, at 11 PM EST on either Thursday or Friday nights. Either way, a fairly good time slot. There was plenty of press, promotions, a lot of hype. The show airs, gets rave reviews from critics and fans alike...and then, for no apparent reason, scheduling issues begin cropping up. Whether the executives in charge at CBS changed and wished to do away with the success of their predecessors, didn't understand how good a thing they had, or didn't understand the show at all, all sorts of problems began plaguing the show. It would be preempted; there would be no episode shown, something else randomly stuck on in its place with no explanation; there would be gaps of several weeks in between new episodes, sometimes filled by reruns but usually not; episodes were shown out of order, or never aired at all. Then, without warning, the show was completely yanked from the line-up and vanished for many months. Granted, the show was unusual, not for everyone, and very different from most of CBS's usual fare, but with so many praising it for its daring and disturbing nature, you'd think they'd have gotten a clue. It was certainly Too Good To Last. Luckily the creators knew long enough ahead of time that the plug was being pulled, and managed to wrap up the main plot points (well, sort of...). But even these final episodes were withheld for a long time, then suddenly plunked on TV one right after another as a three-hour movie 'event'.
- Robot Wars suffered this at the hands of The BBC around the time of its 5th season which had already aired on BBC Choice but not on BBC 2. The BBC were trying to use it to get people to get satellite or cable to get their extra channels. The result was that they aired Robot Wars Extreme twice and by the time season 5 did air season 6 had already been filmed (and started immediately after the 5th season ended).
- After the Channel Hop to Channel 5 Robot Wars was constantly shunted around the schedule on either Saturday or Sunday, this was its last season.
- According to legend, the Robert Stack show Most Wanted was canceled by the network right after a bad meeting with the show's producer, who threw an ashtray.. which bounced off a table and hit network executive Fred Silverman right in the chest. If you don't want to be Screwed By The Network, don't bend over.
- Americas Most Wanted (no relation to Most Wanted), with John Walsh, was canceled in 1996, replaced with Married With Children and other sitcoms. Not only did the replacements get poor ratings, protests from the public, law enforcement, and 37 state governors brought it back. It is a long runner, approaching its 1,000th episode.
- People forgot to tune into the new show Valentine when it first aired, despite liking the premise. Why? No advertisement whatsoever.
- The CW seems to be good at doing this often these days. Like Valentine, Life Is Wild premiered in a Sunday night time slot and was sure to be canceled after the first season. And then it DID, as well as Hidden Palms.
- It turns out the CW doesn't even broadcast on Sunday nights. They rent it out to another company.
- That didn't go well. The outsourced shows, including Valentine, scored such terrible ratings that the CW repossessed the timeslot. They filled it with reruns of The Drew Carey Show and Jericho, and movies. The ratings have, thus far, failed to improve.
- And you haven't even mentioned The CW's most impressive feat—screwing over two shows with one move. In the final year of The WB, much was made of the countdown to the Series Finale of 7th Heaven, as Season 10 was planned to be the final season. Then, about three days before the finale, they decided to bring it back for an eleventh season to help kick off the new network—but didn't really promote this. Did we mention that the reason they were planning to end it after 10 seasons was due to budget issues? 7th Heaven got a crappy eleventh season that nobody watched (because after initially renewing it to place in the Monday night slot in which it had grown famous, they moved it to Sunday), and Everwood got screwed out of a slot in the new network's lineup. Two shows, no winners.
- Reaper, anyone? Because, despite garnering higher ratings than Gossip Girl or {{90210}} (while airing opposite American Idol!), the CW canceled it after its second season. Why? It's not a campy, over the top, high school drama they can market to naive teenage girls, of course!
- ABC originally scheduled Twin Peaks against Cheers (against which it actually performed admirably). Later ABC shifted the show's timeslot repeatedly.
- After critical praise, Emmy wins, and an heavily marketed first season, Pushing Daisies was poorly marketed in its second season, and as of the writing of this edit, it is unknown if the final three episodes would be shown at all.
- It probably didn't help that ABC thought it would be a good idea to air Pushing Daisies in the same timeslot as House did on Fox.
- In 2006, the National Hockey League lost its TV contract with ESPN and was banished to OLN/Versus, a channel that few providers offered. When NBC finally offered to air the 2007 NHL playoffs, they cut away from a series-clinching playoff game IN OVERTIME to show 90 minutes of pre-race coverage of The Preakness.
- ESPN and ABC aren't exactly blameless for losing their NHL TV rights, though. Once they pulled some duplicitous tactics to yank broadcast rights away from Fox, both ESPN and ABC proceeded to ignore the league, giving it absolutely no advertising time on ABC and the bare minimum on ESPN. This behavior accelerated when ESPN and ABC got the rights to broadcast NBA games (coincidentally, the NHL's direct competitor for the winter months), with both networks making it clear they were prioritizing basketball over hockey. Then right as the 2004-05 NHL lockout started, ESPN canceled their NHL recap show NHL2night and refused to revive the show when the League approached them for a new cable deal after the labor dispute ended. With this kind of network screwing over a 6-7 year period, you cannot possibly blame the NHL for jumping to a more caring TV partner in OLN/Versus (although going with NBC is still inexcusable, as shown above). This blog entry
 goes into more detail about how Disney's networks screwed over the NHL, as well as the aforementioned dirty tactics used to screw Fox out of any TV rights.
- The Arena Football League may be another one screwed by NBC. After the network lost its NFL games to CBS in 1999 and the 2000 XFL debacle, NBC signed what looked like a good deal with the Arena League at the time (both sides would split ad revenues 50/50 instead of one side getting rights fees). NBC even convinced the league to move up its normal summer schedule, saying the league could be promoted better if it started the week after the Super Bowl. But then, the NFL came calling back to NBC in 2006, the network promptly forgot about the Arena League, leaving it to play at a time of year where it had to compete with the NBA, NHL and college basketball for viewership. After returning to ESPN, the league suspended operations in 2009.
- Feeling that the network wasn't promoting it enough, Stephen King paid hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to buy print ads for Kingdom Hospital. The network then changed the timeslot to compete with CSI, meaning all the ads he ran gave the wrong time.
- Subverted in a good and bad way by Lost. The good: ABC and its president, Stephen Mc Pherson, are in love with the show, even going in an unprecedented direction by announcing a 2010 end date so the show can wrap up properly no matter how well it's doing and rarely ever meddling in the creative process. The bad:
- ABC will commonly flat-out lie about the show's ratings ("20 million [read: 11.5 million x two episodes] viewers returned to the island last week...")
- ABC uses the show as a ratings guinea pig. Wondering how well a drama might do at Wednesday/10PM, Wednesday/11PM, Thursday/9PM, or any other random timeslot? Throw Lost in and find out! Every damn time ABC does this, the show loses viewers like a man who's fallen from a Beechcraft plane loses blood. This then forces ABC to lie about the ratings as seen above.
- ABC's apparent reaction to Commander In Chief winning Emmys for its acting was to kill the show. They put it on hold during the Winter Olympics, then moved it to a different timeslot afterwards without properly announcing this. Ratings suffered, so they canceled the show.
- When Due South first premiered on CBS in 1994, it produced higher-than-expected ratings for the network (and for the CTV station in Canada). Because one of the CBS executives who endorsed the series was fired, the show was cancelled. Then, after CBS' fall lineup became DOA, the show was brought back again. After several months of beating Friends, of all series, the show was cancelled once more. This came after a press release praising the show's critical acclaim. It's a good thing the series was then picked up by Canadian and foreign investors.
- Medium is one of NBC's strongest performers (Which isn't saying much), but was constantly put on hiatus and was treated like filler on its Monday lineup. Then CBS picked it up and wins the Friday Night Death Slot.
- One word: ALF. As the fourth season came to an end, NBC was not guaranteeing another season, but they did promise at least one extra final episode to resolve the cliffhanger the season ended on. They gave the show NOTHING in the end, and the series ended with ALF becoming a military prisoner
- Wasn't there a follow-up TV Movie a few years later that finally did resolve it? I seem to recall such a movie.
- There was. It was called Project: ALF. It featured Alf, still a prisoner but generally all right and still his old irreverent self, but the rest of the cast was written out with a one-line Put On A Bus. Also, it didn't even air on NBC, but on its rival ABC.
- While the screwing may not have been deliberate, The Mole fell victim in its 5th season when ABC's marketing department did so little to promote the show that even many die-hard fans of the series were completely unaware that the show had returned for the first third of the season.
- This is thought to be the cause of Carol Vorderman's departure from British game show Countdown: When the show's budget was going to be cut by 33%, Vorderman was willing to lower her salary by 33% as well. But the network allegedly went up to her and said what boiled down to "We're going to take off a trailing zero from your salary next year. Take it or leave it, you have two days to respond." Did I mention that Carol Vorderman is about as famous in Britain as Vanna White and Bob Barker are in the US?
- Power Rangers is not case of SBTN, but rather a case of screwed by the parent company, With a premiere of an Boys-oriented network, the show seemed like a shoo-in, but Disney removed all remaining reruns from the schedule(the non-Disney seasons already off the air, for over a year at that point.) To make matters worse, the new season Power Rangers RPM was delegated to a Saturday morning spot where it is constantly pre-empted in the West Coast, and have many stations either showing it during ungodly hours, or not at all. and it's been stated by RPM's first showrunner, that Disney is embarrassed to show the series, not to mention produce it.
- And before the Disney era, another case of screwed by the parent company: Power Rangers Lost Galaxy had the highest ratings of any Power Rangers opening, especially since it came on the heels of the awesome Power Rangers In Space. However, Saban decided to promote Digimon over this, thus, ratings went lower and lower as the show continued.
- Any (UK, at least) programme on the subject of videogames, ever. Apart from Games Master.
- Sometimes this is happily avoided: In the early 1990s, the Australian version of The Late Show was put in a dead-end timeslot (9.00 PM Saturday) but it attracted the attention of parents that had to stay home to look after their kids. (This editor watched the show on DVD and liked it, only to discover his mother used to watch it when he was young.)
- Despite having been written by a lauded Canadian author (Douglas Coupland, who remained involved during production), jPod was treated incredibly poorly by the CBC, despite the fact that it was exactly the sort of relevant, thoroughly Canadian drama they are meant to promote. It was moved to the Friday Night Death Slot, and the twelfth episode was never aired - in it's place, the CBC ran half an hour of men's figure skating and a re-run of Air Farce. jPod just happened to be the only show targeted at the younger demographic...
- For some reason, ABC decided to screw Samantha Who?, which was undoubtedly one of their most successful shows with high ratings and an award winning cast. The deathblow? In its infinite wisdom, the network decided to to move the show from its popular Monday timeslot (right after Dancing With the Stars) to a Thursday timeslot right after In The Motherhood, a complete flop that turned off most viewers.
- When Kings first premiered, NBC had put it in the 8:00 PM Sunday timeslot. However, despite the show's unique concept, strong cast, and high production quality, NBC decided to relegate the fledgling series to Saturday nights after airing just four episodes, where steadily declining ratings eventually killed it.
- Every GSN original, ever. The typical formula for an original game show on this network is to a.) Introduce it with some fanfare, b.) constantly jack its time slot around, c.) show a metric buttload of reruns while the show's still making new episodes, d.) not announce the new seasons at all, e.) gradually stop making new episodes. Lingo, being the longest-running original series on the network, suffered the most in its five seasons (which somehow took more than six years).
- Tee Nick (formerly known as The N) is quickly shaping up to be the teenager's equivalent to Fox when it comes to screwing shows over. If you're a show that airs on the N in the US and your name is not Degrassi, you will get screwed. Examples range from the canceled South Of Nowhere and O'Grady to the not-canceled, but completely forgotten about until they suddenly decided to drop the next season in a frenzy of new episodes about a year and a half too late, Beyond The Break. The majority of the network's non-Degrassi schedule? Reruns of shows that originally aired on other networks, only about half of which came from their own parent network, Nickelodeon.
- Speaking of Nickelodeon, a lot of nickshows are being screwed by the network. Since the regular channel's flooded with Sponge Bob Square Pants, The Fairly Oddparents and iCarly, most small-time cartoons like Kappa Mikey or Catscratch are booted to the premium channel Nicktoons Network, the Alternate Company Equivalent to Disney XD (and its' predecessor, Toon Disney). Mind you, Nicktoons Network is flooded with Avatar The Last Airbender.
- Which is thoroughly ironic due to how much Avatar got screwed over on the main channel, mainly in it's third season. Execs got scared of how serialized Season 2 was and made them turn the middle third of the next season into an apparent clone of the same portion of the first. Then once the show started to pick up speed for the finale, hiatuses between episodes grew to multiple months. And when a timeslot was labelled to show a new episode, it would either be a rerun or some other show altogether, like Zoey 101 or Spongebob. At the same time, volumes of the third season were being released on DVD, and with no word on new aired episodes, it seemed the end of the season (and more importantly the SERIES) would premiere on DVD. Thankfully, Nick pulled their act together enough to air the last half dozen or so episodes over the course of a week, in time for the DVD. Now they've shuffled it completely to Nicktoons Network, where it has thrived in reruns. Which is probably a better fate than staying on the main channel due to it's previous treatment.
- FOX's Titus was well-written, witty and fresh. Executive Meddling was therefore inevitable. But instead of easing it off with the usual Fox treatment, the show was simply shot down, no questions asked, mid-season, because of an episode's off-color jokes involving Middle-Eastern terrorists on a commercial airplane (The FOX execs had previously had disagreements with Christopher Titus, who was arguably one of the best comedy writers to step into the network in years). Its replacement? ''The Pitts,'' one of the biggest failures FOX has ever forced on-stage, running five episodes before the time slot was shuffled into the Sitcom Laundromat.
- Another contribution to Titus' cancellation came when creator Christopher Titus got called in to meet one of the head honchos at Fox. Turned out that the exec wanted to break up Erin and Titus as they had done with Dharma and Greg. Titus naturally objected as the show was based on real life, and Erin and Titus had never broken up in real life. Seems Titus' objection was a little too rough for the execs as the next week all the promos completely stopped and the show ended up cancelled not long after that.
- Whose Line Is It Anyway never had a chance to be a really big hit in the US. It was a very funny show and fairly successful for a British import, but ABC never really showed any real care for it. It was considered a cheap throw in for whenever they needed some time to kill. Usually, this was Thursday nights during the 8-9pm slot against Friends and Survivor at their peaks. There were episodes that were postponed, episodes that were moved around, and even a couple that never even showed. There was also even a slight Misaimed Fandom due to its time slotting since the humor wasn't exactly as kid friendly as it seemed. ABC canceled the show due to low ratings in 2003. If ABC actually showed some care for the show and didn't realize how well liked the show really was until after the fact, they could have had something really big on their hands.
- It didn't help at all that ABC mangled the recording format: the UK version of the programme was set up as three hour or longer blocks of content, edited down to the best of the lot. In the US, ABC insisted that the show be aired as recorded, meaning if a sketch went flat, it still aired, which watered down the quality substantially.
- Also, the "special guest stars" stunts which were just annoying in about 60% of the cases. Yes some were pretty funny like Richard Simmons, Robin Williams, and Sid Caesar but others were just added nothing. Not to mention it took away a lot of time from the rotating fourth guys, Greg and Chip in particular.
- Sometimes trying to watch the show was like playing Hide and Seek given the way the Network would schedule it. It was mainly on Thursdays but near the end it jumped so often between Thursday, Friday, Saturday and the occasional Tuesday that people gave up on finding trying to find it.
- What, no mention of Dead Like Me? The show whose executives meddling caused the writer and team to split after three episodes?
- Many PBS shows die this way due to the unique way in which the network is funded. Reading Rainbow was ended after 26 years because nobody, including the pseudo-government figure Corporation for Public Broadcasting, would pay the six-figure number required to keep it going. Others die for more political reasons, particularly among some people who prefer a more traditional approach to running a TV network.
- Joss Whedon has recently joked that Dollhouse's (aired in the infamous Friday Night Death Slot) unexpected renewal was the network screwing him around, saying that they told him, "whoops, we forgot to cancel your show, you're going have to make more episodes".
- A very slight, yet still loomingly large version - "Married...With Children" suffered from this, in regards to the Series Finale. Not only did Fox waffle on whether or not they'd renew the series - they didn't even tell the actors before announcing the cancellation. Christina Applegate expressed the surprise she got when they heard about it on the radio first, while Ed O'Neill was told about it by two fans he met in the parking lot at a bed and breakfast. O'Neill replied that he was glad he heard it from them first.
- When The Colbert Report was first aired in the UK, it was shown at midnight, the day after being aired in America. For some reason, FX pushed it further and further back into the wee wee hours of the morning, and then quietly dropped it.
- FX = FOX. Reason now apparent.
- The BBC agreed to co-fund Rome with HBO, to the tune of $15 million per season (which is a lot of money to a British broadcaster), but treated it like an embarrasment when it came time to air the show. They decided to play up the sex scenes in all the promos and re-edited the first three episodes into two, losing an hour of character and story development in favour of the sex scenes and blood, to the utter fury of the director. The British audience was not impressed and immediately tuned out, resulting in poor ratings. The BBC, apparently unrepentent about their mistake, then pulled out of funding for the third season and put the second season on at about 11pm on Friday nights on the smaller channel BBC-2.
- The BBC's withdrawal concerned the higher-ups at HBO, who consulted the accountants. The accountants informed them that they could not afford the show without the BBC's 15% budget contribution, and the show had only gotten good American ratings for the first season due to a strong lead-in from The Sopranos, which would not be airing ahead of the second season. HBO decided to pull the plug before the second season was written, giving the producers plenty of warning (but only 10 episodes) to resolve the 24-odd further episodes of plot they had planned. Of course, when the second season aired, it maintained its audience and HBO could have afforded to have kept it on the air even without the BBC, but it was way too late by that point as the cast had scattered to other projects.
- Classic sitcom Gilligans Island, despite having decent ratings, was cancelled because one network executive hated the premise and wanted to give its timeslot to Gunsmoke, which was the show that originally was going to be cancelled. Luckily for James Arness, the exec's wife was a fan of the western show.
- This came back to bite CBS on the ass. Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of the show, was so angry at the network that he vowed not to work for it again. The next show he created ran on ABC. Maybe you're familiar with it.
- Southland was plowed over to make room for Jay Leno's daily 10pm show.
Music
- They Might Be Giants had the full support of the executives for their first three albums on Elektra Records (Flood, Apollo 18, John Henry). But while they were recording Factory Showroom Elektra's parent company fired all the executives, and the replacements didn't care for TMBG. As a result, Factory Showroom received almost no promotion when it was released, and the band asked to be released from their contract shortly after that.
TabletopRP Gs
- At the heyday of Advanced Dungeons And Dragons 2nd Edition in the early-mid 90s, TSR had a completely incompetent CEO, Lorraine Williams, who made no secret her disdain both for gamers and the people that worked under her. Among many things that caused Dungeons and Dragons and TSR to be run into the ground before being mercifully bought out by Wizards Of The Coast were:
- Suing people left and right, including people who ran message boards for talking about Dungeons And Dragons on the internet on the basis that it was their intellectual property. This prevented new people from discovering the game through internet word of mouth and gave their competitors who were using the new medium to promote their products an edge.
- Lorraine Williams devoted a great deal of company resources to publishing and promoting the Buck Rogers RPG. It just so happened that the heiress whose estate owned the rights to the Buck Rogers IP got royalties for every Buck Rogers supplement published and sold. That heiress? Lorraine Williams.
- TSR's solution to declining sales was to publish new settings. The problem was that the settings, modules, and rules that governed them were so incompatible with each other that the player base became fragmented. For instance, a Planescape fan would have no use for modules meant for the Birthright setting.
- Licensing terrible terrible games, with Baldurs Gate being a notable exception and becoming the string holding the franchise together. It probably could have gotten more people into the hobby if message boards about the game didn't have to censor comments about the tabletop version for fear of lawsuits.
- Nepotism ran rampant in the company, which resulted in unqualified managers.
- Game designers were often forbidden by Williams to use company time to play test products on the reasoning that playtesting was just an excuse for the peasants to get paid to play games.
- The Pokemon Trading Figure game in America. Fans got excited for it in 2006 when Pokemon USA announced it- a collectible figure game with high quality figures produced by noted Japanese company Kaiyodo, and featuring actual trainers from the game as figures- but the release was a disaster. All the strategy of the Japanese counterpart had been stripped, turning it into a strange hybrid of the TCG and the failed collectible coins game (essentially, it was Rock Paper Scissors with Pokemon) and even then, the figures were impossible for collectors to find, were often broken IN THE PACKAGING, and hardly advertised. In early 2009, after much delaying of the second expansion's release, it was officially announced as discontinued.
Video Games
- Bernie Stolar was infamous within the video game industry for his policies that he maintained when he worked at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) and Sega of America. It was the latter where this trope came in play, though. While the Saturn was pretty much dead in the water from a purely business perspective by the time he was brought in as a CEO, he made the stupid mistake of alienating both a whole bunch of third party developers and the devoted fanbase all at once. He single-handedly killed off the system, blocking a lot of potentially high quality releases for dubious reasons, imposing utterly draconian policies against developers, and badtalking the system at every turn. The last straw came when he ended production of the Saturn in both the United States AND Japan (despite its being far ahead of the Nintendo 64 in sales there), calling the system "still-born" and rushing the company towards releasing a new system. There's a reason they call Bernie Stolar Satan of Saturn, and it's not just because he bears a faint resemblance to Ming the Merciless from the Flash Gordon movie.
- When presented with a completely reworked Conker's Quest, now titled Conkers Bad Fur Day, Nintendo of America was reportedly horrified to discover that the formerly aggressively cute, child-aimed Banjo-Kazooie clone had been replaced by something inspired by South Park, R-rated movies, and the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons from The Simpsons. In response, they gave the game very little advertising (sticking mostly to men's magazines, whose target demographic probably wasn't interested in cartoon talking squirrels), an ugly box with a giant M rating plus a warning stating that it was very clearly "not for anyone under 17," and had Nintendo Power magazine refuse to acknowledge its existence, only doing a story on it two consoles later in July 2008. Rare was understandably upset with this treatment, likely softening the company up for a buyout by Microsoft.
- The back of the game box actually tries to persuade the reader NOT to buy the game. And not in the cutesy sarcastic "this is the game mom and dad don't want you to see!" way you'd expect. The copy's lack of enthusiasm for the product is very apparent.
- The game got somewhat better treatment in British video game publications, most probably because Rare is a British company and, at the time, most British Nintendo magazines practically worshipped the ground they walked on. The UK magazines seemed more interested in getting Nintendo into the mature gamers spotlight.
- Its X Box remake, Live and Reloaded, also has a warning label, but as a whole Microsoft was much kinder to it than Nintendo.
- Let's not forget Sony's alleged anti-2D bias (see Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, Contra: Shattered Soldier, Mega Man, etc. And not to mention.... SNK.)
- They really did have a bias at first - Capcom had to hold the then-hypothetical sequel to ResidentEvil ransom in exchange for the right to make Mega Man X4. After the latter game became a monster hit, they became much more friendly to 2D games.
- Or for that matter, their alleged bias against any voice-acted game that doesn't have an English voice track.
- Going further back in history, there's the late lamented Infocom, which produced classic text-only Interactive Fiction games. However, Infocom, under advice from one of its founders, attempted to branch out into the business software market. Most of the money the Games Division made from hits like Zork and Planetfall was used up by the Business Division, which poured tons of money and effort into a database program called Cornerstone. It bombed, and as a result Infocom had to find someone to buy the company to avoid going under completely. The company was then purchased by Activision, by an executive who seemed to get it and encouraged them to make even more text adventures. Unfortunately, Activision replaced him with a different executive, who evidently did not at all understand the appeal of Infocom and had been against Activision's purchase of Infocom from the start. Infocom's last year was plagued by Executive Meddling, resulting in four text-graphic hybrid games being released before Activision pulled the plug on it, and the name Infocom became just a label within Activision marketing.
- Fallout may just be the ultimate example of this trope, though screwed by incompetence and not malice. With "Van Buren" (the reputed Fallout 3) nearly completed, Interplay pulled the plug on Black Isle Studios when going bankrupt - but kept the Fallout IP. Two games were released without the input of Black Isle: Fallout Tactics, which was a respectable tactical strategy game but lacked the freedom the series was renowned for, and Brotherhood of Steel (which officially does not exist, and, despite its nonexistence, may be the source of a significant part of the resentment of Fallout fans). There is.. more than a little trepidation on the part of many fans now that Bethesda is releasing Fallout 3.
- Bethesda, by all accounts thus far, did ok with their version. Not what old fans would, perhaps, have wanted, but better than Brotherhood of Steel (which still doesn't exist).
- What about Legacy of Kain?
- Arguably, after EA bought them, every Origin franchise that wasn't Ultima, and every Ultima game that wasn't Ultima Online.
- If mods count, a very excellent System Shock 2 total conversion was under development as a mod for Doom 3...until EA decided this would infringe on the IP they owned and were completely intent on ignoring to death.
- Similar to the story of Lorraine Williams in the tabletop games listing, Jack Tramiel's takeover of Atari was seen by many as the beginning of the end for the company. Since he was the creator of and had a controlling stake in Commodore, he pretty much tried to kill off the gaming side of Atari and turn them into a budget computer outfit to complement his maiden company (which explains most of the aborted and/or half-assed attempts at making Commodore 64 clones in the late 80s.) He would sue lesser companies into oblivion, employee turnover became insane because the millions wasted on computer development meant they couldn't keep anyone around, and nepotism ran rampant within the company.
- After Humongous Entertainment went independent again (after going through Infogrames and Atari ownership), it sold off four of its five best-selling franchises and ruined the other one forever.
Western Animation
- Cartoon Network has an annoying habit of airing any Transformers series it gets at six A.M. on weekdays. Except on Fridays. Do they want to damage the franchise, or do they just think nothing can? To be fair, thus far it's just been Armada, Energon and Cybertron, and they might treat the next show better since they had a hand in making it.
- At least they gave Transformers a regular time slot.
- Transformers Animated is getting the same treatment as before. Once again, it's being aired at 6:00 AM on weekdays (although it's two episodes instead of just one), and the weekend premieres are now one week behind schedule (apparently because The Return of the Headmaster was pre-empted for an encore showing of Ben 10: Alien Force). As a result, Canada is now eternally one episode ahead (no offence to them, of course, but still).
- ...aaaaaand Animated has now officially been screwed. Despite the idea being initially unpopular among the adult fans, the show quickly attracted a Periphery Demographic for its first two seasons. For Season 3's new episodes, it's been moved from its relatively late-morning Saturday timeslot to 8am, when none of the older fans are likely to be awake. Apparently CN wants the show gone before the new movie premieres, because that's certainly not going to bring in new viewers or anything.
- You do realize that Hasbro screwed Cartoon Network once they were able to get their own channel? Animated was either going to die or move to a less-received cable network...and be done by a different studio and crew. Possibly even voice actors. Better for the show to have ended, then for later seasons to possibly be bad.
- Armada and Energon were also screwed over in another way, in that Cartoon Network's policy of requiring a certain number of episodes to be picked up forced the dubbers to rush the production. The result was a lot of name errors, inconsistent writing, getting incomplete animation that was finished for the Japanese airing, and a lot of shit that just plain didn't make sense.
- King Of The Hill seems to have somehow managed to survive the typical Fox treatment.
- Family Guy barely did, constantly being cancelled or moved. It resurrected only after a cult fan following developed through Adult Swim's reruns.
- Family Guy has become a relative darling of the network since its revival, but King Of The Hill remains a red-headed step-child. Usually, commercials for Fox's Sunday-night animation block will start with a detailed teaser for the new episode of The Simpsons, and merely use a token "After a new King Of The Hill..." line as the lead-in to to a detailed teaser for the new installment of Family Guy, making it blatantly obvious that Fox doesn't care about Kot H at all.
- And now they've officially cancelled King of the Hill, which is a shame. Though it will also be returning on Adult Swim, like Family Guy did. I smell deja vu.
- Maybe Adult Swim is planning something along the lines of a revival. Adult Swim officially picked up King Of The Hill only one month after the cancellation was announced.
- Cartoon Network also consigned IGPX to death as well. The first season aired on Toonami, and when executives weren't happy with the ratings, switched its timeslot to Adult Swim in the middle of the second season. What made things worse was that apart from a few commercials, they pretty much did not inform anybody of this move at all.
- And now, there is no Toonami. Yeah.
- So I'm not the only one with that theory it seems. Misdirected frustration from the bags of money they've spent I bet.
- Fox even sabotaged its kids' shows, specifically, the girls' half of the 4Kids TV block. Because girls don't watch TV. Ever. Out of Winx Club, Mew Mew Power and Magical Do Re Mi, only the first has as much visible merchandise in stores as the boys' series. As well, the shows were aired at the beginning of the day, long before most kids are even up (especially in the Western side of the continent), and comparing the state of Macekre in WinX, Tokyo Mew Mew and Ojamajo Doremi to that of the boys' shows (with the exception of One Piece), apparently, girls are more intolerant, Americanized, and moronic than boys are. And don't forget the tendency to air the first few episodes over and over again until the ratings drop far enough.
- Of the six episodes of Clerks The Animated Series that were actually made, only episodes four and two were actually aired, in that order. This despite the number of RunningGags and ongoing plotlines that the series had, and the fact that the second episode only makes sense if you have seen the first. (It's a parody of clip shows, because they only have one episode to mine for clips.) All six episodes - with vitriolic commentaries - were later released on DVD.
- Comedy Central later showed all six episodes in 2002, before also shoving the series aside. Adult Swim picked it up in November 2008, airing one episode every Friday night for, so far, six months straight.
- In the early 1990s, new episodes of the series Gargoyles were played at 3:00 PM, the perfect hour to just be missed by kids getting out of school.
- To be fair, the show wasn't on networks. It was syndicated for its first two seasons.
- Disney might not have been directly responsible for that one, but they've done their share of screwing with Gargoyles. When they moved it out of syndication, they let go of the original production team and brought in a new one that really didn't grasp the show's intricacies and nuances; the quality dropped and the third season is considered Dis Continuity. Then Disney started to release the show to DVD, but are dragging their feet with Season 2, Volume 2 due to "low sales" of the first two box sets. Who in the world stops with just half a season (that counts) to go?!
- They do the same thing with the Power Rangers DVDs. They release only 5 volumes and then stop, regardless of whether or not there's more episodes beyond that. What's more, the only seasons they'll release are the ones produced after they took over the show. The original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, which is the series people actually WANT on DVD, has not had an American release.
- Actually, Disney's done this with pretty much EVERY show of theirs that they've ever put out on DVD — for instance, Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, Tale Spin, and Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers have yet to have their final DVD sets released, screwing over fans of those shows who want the entire run on DVD. And then, of course, there's the shows they have yet to release in "volume" or "season" collections (the most notable of that camp being Kim Possible), choosing instead to just release single DVDs with a few episodes...or no DVDs at all. Oh, and did I mention that, with the exception of the Gargoyles set, there's no extra features on their volume/season sets? And that there's no cleaning up or remastering at all? And the episodes of their older cartoons that they release have been the Toon Disney/Disney XD versions (many of which have been horribly edited in one way or another since their original airdates)? For all the love Disney gives its classic movies when it comes to DVD, their TV division is essentially a red-headed stepchild in comparison.
- And now the Gargoyles comic book is getting screwed; the publisher won't renew the license because Disney set the fees too high.
- Danny Phantom had even worst treatment than that. Not only did its third season also have months long gaps between episodes, the episodes were never shown in order. Most viewers didn't know that DP had a Myth Arc.
- It's even worse than that. Mexico (all of Latin America, in fact) got the entire third season before the US did... and it was dubbed in Spanish.
- Even worse about the episodes aired out of order is that other times, events in the show aren't drastic enough to confuse anyone by airing out of order. The first season 3 episode they aired was halfway through the season...when Vlad had already become mayor and Danny knew Frostbite for some reason. Oh, the confusion that ensued.
- Even evenly worse when you factor in that said new episodes with month long gaps were populated with week long streaks of new episodes. Streaks with an S, by the way. The second with the Series Finale tacked in on a Saturday.
- But the worsiest by far is that the commercial for the second week of new episodes gave the wrong month for the previous week streak. Now that is how you screw a show.
- Before Arrested Development, Fox gave Futurama the same treatment. You can always tell which shows the mid-level execs at Fox don't like. Futurama was doubly slighted in that its 7:30 Sunday time slot often meant that it was pre-empted by football in most of the country. Also, who the hell airs any current series before 8 PM EST?
- Futurama has got to be one of the few examples of this trope that has also come back with a vengeance. Seriously after four seasons of sometimes inconsistent airing dates, which were often changed due to increasingly poor viewer ratings, which were in fact caused by the continually inconvenient timeslots, Fox just decided to cease production of the show after the episode "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" in 2003. It then proceeded to be constantly rerun for the next four years on Cartoon Network, and thus it seemed the series had no hope... Right up until The Movie came out. After four years of begging, pleading, and threats by the fandom, Fox finally said "We get it, we get it" and allowed 4 new movies (16 episodes when chopped up) to be made. Matt Groening being the kind, understanding, and modest man he is proceeded to rub it in their faces by not only 1) stating in the beginning of Bender's Big Score how 'Box' had cancelled the crew's delivery service, but when their decision was taken back the executives who made the decision were ground up into a fine pink powder with 'a million and one uses'. One of them was being shoved down the Professor's pants so his crotch felt comfortable 2) Constantly using said powder in some of the rudest ways possible but 3) getting a FULL-BLOWN COMIC based on how Futurama came back to life. Its even watchable on the DVD.
- The UK experience of Superman The Animated Series may be instructive; advertised well on Saturday mornings, as a slot within one of the popular Kid's TISWAS clones. Six episodes shown, at varying times in the show, so that those of us who only wanted to watch or tape that part couldn't. No more shown ever. They still hold first run rights, so no-one else shows it and there are no local region DVD's... it's as if it never existed.
- Justice League Unlimited was constantly screwed around by Cartoon Network, with episodes airing outside of their normal timeslot, a frequent 2-3 month break between new episodes, etc. Reportedly, this was because a) Cartoon Network wanted to develop their own properties rather than paying licensing fees to anybody, b) there was a change of executives who wanted to cancel every single show with good ratings so all future successes could be theirs alone and c) the audience for the show skewed too old for the network's liking (after all, teenagers and adults don't buy piles of crappy licensed toys!). Amazingly, despite all these efforts, after being canceled in its second season, the show was quickly Un Canceled for a third due to its surprisingly strong ratings — and proceeded to get screwed even worse, as evidenced by the fact that the final episode aired in Europe a full six months before its American premiere. For that matter, each episode of the third season was aired only once. It didn't even get a repeat.
- Teen Titans was swiftly cancelled for the exact same reasons at the same time, so it was a double-whammy for fans of both shows.
- Wait a minute, CN and WB are under the same umbrella, so why would someone have to pay licensing fees to themselves?
- The companies don't get along too well...So Yeah
- Freakazoid was considered by The WB network to be skewing too old for their liking, and was canceled rather than continued or moved to a later time slot where they did not feel it would be as successful as their other offerings. How the WB's other shows actually did in the evening apparently escaped their notice.
- The WB for their "Big Kids Go First" lineup: The so-called "big kids" are the ones likelier to sleep in rather than get up at the crack of dawn. The so-called "big kids" are also the ones likelier to have stuff going on in the early morning if they are already up, so it was rather obvious to more than one troper that they did it to kill shows they knew the older demographic wouldn't or couldn't get up for. They have, however, seemed to learn their lesson. Most of the older demographic shows on their current 2008 lineup air past 9:30 am. Or not. They did cancel Legion Of Super Heroes, but that was because 4Kids! took over the air-slot.
- Actually, season 2 episodes are not collections of mini-segments because they felt that it was part of the reason it was appealing to an older audience. It was only after that failed that the series was cancelled.
- Similarly to what happened to Freakazoid, The WB kept changing the Saturday morning time slot for Histeria! during its premiere season. Then after Pokemon came around, they removed Histeria! from the Saturday morning block altogether, and its weekday afternoon showings got demoted to coming on in the later half of Kids' WB!'s weekday morning hour, which would be too late for kids to watch it when they were getting ready for school, and too early for them to wake up to on Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter/summer vacation. No wonder people were barely watching Histeria! - Executive Meddling caused us to miss out on it!
- WITCH seems to be a show that was destined never to catch up with the comic it was based on. After the first season saw some initial hype in late 2004 leading up to its January 2005 debut, the series began airing on ABC Saturday mornings with little fanfare. Later in the first season, it was moved to ABC Family, where it completed its first season run there. It would've been cancelled then and there had the second season not already gone into production during the run of the first (thank God for the show's European fanbase). The second season began airing on ABC Family, but shifted to digital cable and satellite only Toon Disney unannounced mid-season, where it finished out its run in prime-time (when kids are likely to be doing homework, sleeping, or watching American Idol). The series technically hasn't been cancelled, and a third season IS possible, but with Toon Disney able to sustain itself solely on the strength of Power Rangers merchandise, it doesn't seem likely to order up another season of something that got understandably abysmal ratings.
- Let's not forget the sadly shelved Megas XLR, quite possibly the best rated show Cartoon Network has ever produced BY THEMSELVES. It was planned for a third season but quietly canceled when the network switched CEOs, because the new head cheese didn't "get it." Plus, a DVD box set was later planned, by the same guy, to satiate all the people who got mad, demanding some kind of revival (new season, video release, made for TV movie, etc.) but this, too, was stymied when yet another netword-head took over, feeling it was a waste of company resources. All this amounts to: Network heads have too much clout.
- Ironically, Megas XLR was more or less a spin-off of Downtown, a cartoon series that got unceremoneously canned by MTV after one season in 1999 (the character Goat is common to both, and both series shared the same writers and producers). In fact, Megas enjoyed frequent Take Thats at the expense of a thinly-veiled parody of MTV called "Pop TV".
- The Life and Times of Juniper Lee virtually got screwed in its second season. In addition to bouncing the show around timeslots. CN hardly advertised for new episodes if not at all, making it impossible for fans to find them. The last few episodes weren't even aired.
- Atomic Betty in the U.S suffered as well ,starting off on a steady timeslot, then being moved to an hour no even up to catch episodes before finally being yanked off the air. What more the second season has yet to air in the U.S.
- The horrific treatment Daria got at the hands of MTV. No consistent time slot, frequently preempted by an episode of The Real World or Road Rules, and finally buried, never to be released on DVD. And THEN there's the fact that the UK's Channel Five (IIRC) placed it in a "children's" time slot, since in Britain, only children ever watch animated shows. Then there's the edits it received during syndication... yeah.
- ReBoot was a famous example, with Executive Meddling affecting the actual production of the show. The ratings were consistently high and was, in fact, the highest rated show on the ABC Saturday Morning block. After two seasons, Disney bought out ABC, who let the show go because they wanted to promote more Disney-produced shows. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, mostly because ABC was not their only sponsor. Alliance Productions sent the show into syndication and a third season aired on YTV in Canada, finally free of ABC's draconian Broadcast Standards & Practices. Cartoon Network then picked up the show and aired it in the U.S., which helped bring back the show for a fourth season. The only downside was still losing a good chunk of the U.S. audience in the 2 year gap and cable TV gap between ABC and Cartoon Network.
- Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! is a little known king of this. First, episodes for the final season were aired way before the US for them in several other countries, namely Poland. Second, the show wasn't renewed at the end of its fourth season, for apparently no other reason than Jetix wanting to put on new shows (the series was only 52 episodes long though.) The end of the 4th season was a massive cliffhanger that was going to lead into the final climax of the series where all the loose plot lines would have been complete. Nice.
- And half-an-hour after that cliffie was first aired in the US, Dragon Booster ended on an episode that promised an eventually non-existent Oddly Named Sequel, for which the series had spent much of its last season setting up.
- Gormiti The Lords Of Nature Return was interrupted at Episode 11 during its first broadcasting... and Italia Uno has only itself to blame for that, what with the extremely crazy timetable, the airing of just half an episode per day, and continuously alternating the show with Scooby Doo movies about which Italians couldn't really care less. Give yourself a pat on the back, Italia Uno. If there were any doubts that you're Too Dumb To Live, you managed to dispel them.
- Teletoon seems to want to bury the new Batman The Brave And The Bold series. It has a 9 am Sunday morning timeslot, pretty much alienating anyone who would actually understand and appreciate the show (which includes a reference to The Aristocrats in the first episode, along with references to the '60s series and classic Doctor Who). They also aren't advertising it, and are using The Batman to promote their action programming, despite that show having finished its run.
- Cartoon Network strikes again, shifting its time slot with The Secret Saturdays semmingly just to screw with the people who wanted to record the show, leaving the first season: last two episodes short of its finale (airing the rest of the season months later, without break). Australia got those two episodes first.
- Halfway into the second season, the series was removed from Friday nights. New episodes premiered in what was its Saturday morning repeat slot (8:30am). Unannounced, out-of-the-blue, and NO REPEATS of the show occurred until late July...days before the season finale was to air. Build up tons of merchandise and barely air the show...BEST. IDEA. EVER.
- Family Channel (the Canadian one) not that long ago, took off Yin Yang Yo, which was still in the middle of its second season, and replaced it with Digimon Data Squad. Why they didn't replace the already in reruns Pucca is beyond imagination.
- Not only that, but a common offense is to, partway through the season, air the new Power Rangers episodes one half-hour earlier, and start reruns in the later timeslot. The also haven't picked up Power Rangers RPM yet, and might not until even after it has finished airing in the States. Meanwhile, one can find RPM merchandise in toy stores.
- The rough treatment Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi: A fairly popular show, got from Cartoon Network in late 2006, the time of its inexplicable cancellation. First, the new episodes were televised with zero advertisement at three in the morning. Seriously. Three. Then they got rid of the characters from the channel's advertising bumps. Then they removed them from the website. The entire thing was one big, deliberate Orwellian effort to make people forget it ever existed. And nobody's ever given an accurate reason as to why... or, heck, even the same one twice.
- Fantastic Four Worlds Greatest Heroes animated series. Cartoon Network played only 7 episodes and didn't show any more cartoons again for 9 months to time it with The Movie. When the network broadcast it again, they only showed 11 episodes, leaving 8 shows never shown on the network.
- Don't forget Swat Kats. In its first season it was supposedly the highest rated syndicated animated show of the year. Yet during the second season they toyed with doing two shorter episodes rather than one long plot (putting nails in), then stabbing it down with a clipshow at the end of season 2. While it was still high rated. This was claimed to be due to "lack of toy sales" by some sources (a load, there just WEREN'T that many toys made), a lot of others credit it to one of the binges against supposed "Cartoon violence." Either way, it was an idiotic decision on someone's part. And when it was on Boomerang, they hid it at 10:30ET, before dumping it again lately. And it was never up for the episode marathons or anything else some of the OTHER 'action block' shows were. Because they STILL want people to forget it existed. *grumblemutter* That way they can avoid doing a DVD of it or anything. By trying to make it vanish completely. Episodes aren't hard to find on the net though.
- Update: It's back on, now at 5pmET. With Centurions on right before it, no less.
- Let us not forget about Sonic the Hedgehog, affectionately referred to as "Sonic SatAM" by its fanbase. This show jumped around in time slots so much that it could've had legs. More often than not it wound up being put head to head against the then red hot Power Rangers; if it wasn't being preempted by some sporting event. And that was merely for the first season. When the second season was begun, there was almost no advertising given as to when each new episode would air, making it very hard to see the whole thing. And then it got canceled with ABC getting a new "president" after its little merger with Disney. The reason? "A new broom sweeps clean" as the case may be, with Disney wanting to concentrate on its "ONE SATURDAY MORNING" timeblock. This is particularly grating for fans of the show, as the second season ended with one of the most intriguing cliffhangers of the day. It became even more so as information was finally released as to some of the plot points for season 3. Still, this whole situation probably helped to cement the fanbase into the die-hard community it is today.
- In Canada, the show Jimmy Two-Shoes airs at 7am on Saturdays when most normal people are asleep.
- But here in the US, Disney doesn't give it much more respect: they air it at 9am.
- The PJs got this treatment. After winning three Emmy Awards and an Annie Award, Fox canceled the show after the second season, citing no reason. The WB picked it up, filmed the entire 16 episode third season, then showed the first new episode. Two months later, they aired the second episode. Another month later, they show the next four, then take ANOTHER two month break before showing six more, never airing the last three, then cancel the show claiming it costs too much to produce.
- Adult Swim seems to be the king of averting this trope, as they're now airing the P Js occasionally.
- The new Wolverine & the X-Men cartoon had the first season aired in its entirety in Canada before one episode was shown in the US. After the three-episode premiere, Nicktoons ran a promo laying plot points... for Season 2! "Hey fans, wonder what the status quo will be by the end of the season you just started watching? Wonder no more!"
- Now Season 2 has gone all the way through in Canada, and Season 1 still isn't finished in the US. But you're likely to find reruns of one of the first five episodes (none later) whenever you're flipping by Nicktoons.
- Comedy Central's broadcast schedule for Drawn Together was erratic, to say the least. When new episodes were not being screened, the show would often be off the schedule for months. Many viewers assumed the show was cancelled long before it actually was. It also had a gap of over a year between the first and second seasons. And one almost as long between the two halves of season 3.
- Chowder was feared by many fans to be the latest to fall victim to Cartoon Network's heavy-handed scheduling issues, despite it being a hit: after a full week of airing promos for a new episode during the first season, when it came time for said episode to premiere... it was inexplicably replaced with a rerun at the last minute. The endless string of reruns aired at incredibly sparse times over the week appeared to have diminished a bit of the fanbase it initially built up, but then came new episodes over the summer, and all was right again — or was it? No, sadly, the most recent season had only nine half-hour episodes ordered, many of them split and premiered only one 15-minute segment at a time (with the second half likely being a re-run). Thanks, Network Decay.
- Not even the Looney Tunes were safe from this. ABC was purchased by Disney near the end of Bugs & Company's network run. As a result ABC began giving more emphasis to newer Disney series as well as veteran "The New Adventuresof Winnie The Pooh", while the "Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show", for the last third of the 1990s, was often scheduled at a time slot where it would often end up pre-empted for ABC college football coverage.
- Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? In season two Cartoon Network thought 10:30pm was an appropriate time to air new episodes with the ONLY reruns being Sunday at 4pm. They also changed Robot's voice to sound like a human kid which was a major turn off for most people (I personally wouldn't have minded it if they hadn't gone back and changed the voice in season one as well). Talk about screwed. I do believe in season one, they at least put new episodes on about 8:30pm - 9-ish. But reruns were rare. The website no longer even mentions the show's existence.
- UPN started airing Dilbert, an animated adaptation of Scott Adams's mega-hit comic strip. Then they moved it up and ran it after a show called Shasta McNasty, which, in the words of Scott Adams, drew the kind of audience "likely to die in a bowling ball cleaning accident." Then they bumped it up even further, putting it after both McNasty and an hour-long program on extreme stunts — which is exactly the kind of slot you want for a sardonic office comedy.
- Dilbert had other problems as well. Apparently a number of Dilbert fans were also fans of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, which the show was up against for a while. When this was realized, the show was eventually moved to another time slot, up against Buffy's spin-off Angel.
- The CGI remake of Captain Scarlet ran into a lot of this- including having the last few episodes aired out of order.
- American Dragon Jake Long, whose positively epic Executive Meddling across the board makes one wonder if Disney had a personal vendetta against the writers. The bits relevant to this trope include bouncing its timeslot around for several months, often not advertising new episodes. The final three episodes of the series, initially slated to be released once a week, wound up getting aired scattershot and indiscriminately over a period of months, with the change being last-minute and largely unadvertised. If I recall, the series finale was aired in evening primetime (a typical screw you for a cartoon), with the several weeks prior not advertising the upcoming Grand Finale, but High School Musical 2, which had already been out for a month and a half.
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