This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.
Screwed by the Network
"Starting now on Channel Four is a brand new show that we paid a ridiculous amount of money for which we'll launch in a blaze of publicity, and after a few weeks we'll get bored of it and move it around the schedule where no-one can find it, then we'll brand it a flop, take it off the air for six months, then reluctantly put it back on at three in the morning."
The prototypical network executive's time revolves not around nurturing talent for the benefit of all, but around making him or herself 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. Plus, the people that the executive is trying to convince are his or her fellow executives, who are likewise 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 bodies 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 or in the Friday Night Death Slot, put it up against the other networks' strongest shows... do everything you can for it to build 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, everything will be fine. And that's what this job is about, right? Right?
Okay, okay — not all network executives are like this. There exist the individuals who intentionally seek 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, screwing a show happens more often than you may wish to believe, and typically it's because They Just Didn't Care.
Fox is legendary for doing this. The Sci Fi Channel has a bad score for it, too, but not quite to the "four episodes only, aired on a 'when we feel like it' basis" extreme. Cartoon Network has also gained notoriety for this.
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 itlookslike 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, and Screwed by the Lawyers. 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. Contrast with Adored by the Network.
Examples
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Anime
In a rare subversion, Code Geass seems to be a case where Screwed by the Networkdidn'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 8-10 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 Season 2 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 PM on Fridays to 6:00 AM on Saturdays; its 49-episode run was also cut down to 39 episodes.
Sailor Moon was screwed over in syndication when the episodes were shown in early morning dead timeslots on weekdays only. What kid is going to wake up at 4:00am on a weekday? The show was never successful in the states until it found life on Toonami three years later.
"Hey, I'm Naruto— bringer of ratings for Cartoon Network. I'm going to the UK to make fans happy there! Hey, Jetix UK— I'm so glad you want to show me to UK Fans. ...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.
When the license of Naruto was acquired by Cartoon Network Latin America, many fans rejoiced. However, CN didn't consider airing it until 5 years later (In fact, they did not even start dubbing it before that). So, by the time the first episodes were airing, the rest of the world was already watching Shippuden. As for 2012, it seems improbable that we will reach the last season.
A curious case occurred in Israel with Cowboy Bebop. The then-budding cable comedy channel "Beep" bought the show during the height of anime fever in the early 2000s. The series was aired once, in an after-Midnight slot, presumably due to adult content. Then, after many requests by fans to run it again in a more manageable slot, it was re-aired on Friday mornings — basically the worst time slot for any channel or show on Israeli television. It has not been aired since.
Slayers and Magic Knight Rayearth were both screwed by Fox Kids. Toonami was interested in both shows, but Fox Kids picked up both so that Toonami could never obtain them. What does Fox Kids do? They didn't do anything with them! Fox Kids basically sat on the broadcast rights to the shows until their rights expired and Toonami was no longer interested. Slayers has since been broadcast on the defunct International Channel, Colours TV, and the Funimation Channel. Rayearth, however, has never been shown anywhere.
Cartoon Network also consigned IGPX to death as well. Season 1 aired on Toonami, and when executives weren't happy with the ratings, switched its timeslot to right before Adult Swim in the middle of Season 2. What made things worse was that apart from a few commercials, they pretty much did not inform anybody of this move at all.
You're Italia Uno, an Italian network whose main public is made of young people and children, so everyday you broadcast various cartoons, mostly Japanese, in the after-lunch and pre-evening timeslots, and you also have the obligatory Saturday-morning cartoon marathon. The latter two are directed to more young children, while the first is supposed to appeal to adolescents. Whenever a cartoon in the after-lunch slot manages to have a decent rating (despite the Mackering policy the channel applies to Japanese animation), what can you do to valorize it? Move it to one of the other two timeslots, what else? The ratings decrease because children don't find appealing an anime created for an older public and because on Saturday mornings adolescents are at school? How could this possibly happen?
Cartoon Network showed .hack//Roots at 5:00 AM on Saturday mornings with no advance advertising — or really any mention at all. They also only showed 21 of the 26 episodes, supposedly to avoid airing .hack//G.U. game spoilers. The show vanished eight months later when Adult Swim went to an all-night format.
.hack//SIGN suffered the same fate, first airing on Saturday afternoons in the late afternoon Toonami Slot, then being bumped to midnight.
Note that SIGN changed timeslots right after two female characters started dating each other. Presumably, CN thought this was too much for impressionable youths.
Unlike other countries, Spain did show Pichi Pichi Pitch thanks to Clan TVE. However, in a flash of inspiration, it started in July (Because kids in holidays watch a lot of TV), and while it was on a decent timeslot (11:30 AM), they kept shuffling it a half-hour back or forward every other week, whenever the previous/next show ended its run (Instead of, y'know, putting a new different show on the timeslot of the finished one). All fine and dandy, as long as you checked every Monday's schedule, but then they changed its timeslot on a Wednesday. Why? Because it was October 1, and new month means rearranging the schedule without telling anyone. And since this show just hadn't had enough, they changed it again one week and a half later, this time being shoved to 2:00 PM right against newscasting and The Simpsons. At least this time they bothered repeating the last episode in case someone missed it with so many changes.
Telecinco, another Spanish channel, used to broadcast Pokémon during the height of pokemania, with millions of viewers. The executives didn't like people watching them so they started to broadcast it sooner and sooner and repeating episodes all they could so as to kill any interest. After they managed to put the series at 6AM it slowly died. It is sad because children got up early just to watch Pokémon and it had a lot of audience. They just didn't care, the network just hates anything that is not sensationalist, a talk show or about naked celebrities and it shows.
And when the series finished? Instead of rerunning it (a common occurrence in Spain), they replaced it with... Pretty Cure, a show that had already been shown on two other channels. So if you had missed any episode of PPP (likely), you had to wait several months until they decided to rerun it (without advertising this, of course) and catch the episode. Thanks.
The original Mobile Suit Gundam practically embodies this Trope. Originally meant to run for 52 episodes, low ratings caused the plug to be pulled after 39 episodes; the staff, however, managed to get a one month extension to 43 episodes in order to finish the story.
In America, it never even got to finish its first airing as Cartoon Network used September 11th as an excuse to remove it, mostly due to low ratings.
Canada's YTV so completely screwed its Bionix anime block that it almost makes Cartoon Network's screwing look minor in comparison. The block originally ran from 7:30 to 10:30 on Friday nights and aired five different shows. However, when Death Note and Gundam SEED Destiny ended, YTV failed to pick up any new shows to replace them with that had been picked up in the States, such as Code Geass or Gundam 00. As such, the block was significantly shortened and moved to Saturday nights, isolating more of its viewing audience. After Avatar: The Last Airbender ended, they did pick up Blue Dragon but the run was short, barely lasting 15 or 20 episodes. All they had left at that point was Naruto, Bleach, and Zatch Bell, and they cut Zatch Bell a few months later. With only Naruto and Bleach left, they shifted what was left of the block to run from Midnight to 2:00 AM, pretty much killing off what was left of the audience. Not only that, but both series were in filler hell, meaning that nobody would really want to watch anyway. And to complete the screwing over of this block, once the filler episodes ran out, they simply went back to reruns. That's right: no Shippuden, and no Arrancar Saga. With that, YTV pretty much had the perfect excuse to cut anime altogether. Where Bionix once was is now sitcoms and reality shows.
Prince of Tennis and Märchen Awakens Romance had an unusual version of this Trope happen to them. Sure, they got a decent time slot, but Cartoon Network randomly skipped episodes. Since these were serials, nobody could follow the plot. Eventually, they started over from Episode 1 and aired them in order, but by then it was too late. They were removed from the lineup, and eventually removed from being aired online, too.
Anime in general on [adult swim] is considered as this these days, partly due to Cartoon Network's Network Decay. It was somewhat admitted in a [adult swim] bump that at times a kind of programming spring cleaning is done every few months by Cartoon Network to see which shows to keep airing, air later, or get rid of and never even bother showing again. The cleaning process is created by a evaluating combination of ratings and audience online based reaction. Thus shows like Lupin and Reign are very little or no longer aired. Even to AS' chagrin many of the shows that they themselves would have liked to kept on the air are cast by the wayside. However another reason for anime not getting much love is that one of those in charge of [adult swim]'s programming doesn't like it. With the exceptions of Cowboy Bebop, FLCL and InuYasha, many Anime titles these days are given little chance. Adult Swim has often rather been vocal about their increasing dis-contempt about Anime and the block. Bumps regularly criticize it, commercials show their Narm moments and episode descriptions on their website tend to read like "Vampires, robots, big hats!". Perfect Hair Forever basically boils down to several hours of Take That against the whole genre.
The Big O is a specific example to this. Despite that it was a popular show and the ratings of [adult swim] airings were the sole reason the series even got a second season in the first place, the premiere of the second season was around the same time Adult Swim began its Network Decay, and they ended up screwing up the airing of a couple episodes (including accidentally airing a repeat over the finale) and ended up canceling the show before a reportedly expected third season, despite it having paid off financially.
Speaking of Cartoon Network's Network Decay, the canceling of the Toonami block (and this also applies to Western Animation as well). The decay began when It was moved from every weekday to Saturdays only, and the block's time slot was cut in half; its schedule eventually consisted of reruns, filler, and Naruto; it was replaced by the network's new darling (Miguzi) the week following its move to Saturdays-only...the list goes on and on. Long story short, it was canceled by Cartoon Network, which was supposedly due to bad ratings, despite the fact they were the ones causing them.
One might say that Toonami's decay began as early as 2000-2001, when Kids' WB! forced Cartoon Network to cut its 3-hour Toonami back down to 2 so they could air their own Toonami, canceling a few long-runners like Tenchi Muyo! and Sailor Moon. It picked up when 9/11 helped cause the cancellation of the original Mobile Suit Gundam and had its entire run filled with Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.
Animax Latinamerica —beginning with its Network Decay— did this:
Fate/stay night and Black Cat, originally getting decent time slots on friday night were moved to saturday mornings at 8:00 AM for the second half of each series' run.
It also killed any chances that they'll air more new Bleach episodes.
Nodame Cantabile was supposed to get a spanish dub, but it's now canceled and it turns out that only 6 episodes were recorded.
Nodame Cantible WILL air on Animax Latinamerica after all! Except it'll air on mornings...
To add shows that were supposed to air were Hell Girl's second season, Gallery Fake, Monkey Typhoon, Requiem for a Phanthom and Dancouga Nova. Now THAT'S getting screwed.
YTV's dub of Futari wa Pretty Cure is getting a nasty case of this. To make it worse, YTV is the studio making the dub.
Yu Yu Hakusho's run in America was screwed by a huge time slot move. Originally aired on [adult swim], it was moved to a fairly steady time slot on Toonami. Then, for a reason still unexplained, it was removed from Toonami near the end of the show, and moved to 4:30 in the morning on Saturday. Many people weren't even aware it was moved, and those who did had to be pretty dedicated to stay up for the remaining episodes.
Kids' WB! screwed around with Pokémon, airing as many new episodes they could, and then airing reruns for several months (often airing episodes Out Of Order or certain ones to death) when they exhausted them. They did this for a few years until fans started to get annoyed and move on to other shows, and Pokémon itself declined in popularity.
Meanwhile, back in Japan...MBS, the station responsible for airing Puella Magi Madoka Magica refused to air the final two episodes, citing the recent earthquake as a reason. The fandom has been upset, but mostly understanding. Even so, the announcement that the episodes would air back to back on April 21 was met with much rejoicing.
It's slightly more complex—as the page for the series notes, the episode that ran the same day as the quake was awkward, not to mention possibly setting a record.
Syfy's anime block is horribly in this funk. Starting off as a Monday anime block entitled "Ani-Monday" for famous anime movies and such —- it later became "Ani-Tuesday" around the time their hit Monster ended. It got worse. They decided to play motion comics, which completely makes "ani" look like it means nothing. Around the end of Ani-Tuesday, they changed their schedule to play Chrono Crusade and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Tuesday nights at 11 PM. Then Thursday nights at 11 PM. Then Friday mornings at...2 AM. Then, of course, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was replaced with Star Blazers, an old 70's toon. Two weeks after the Star Blazers premiere, the block went on a "hiatus", which was later confirmed to be an outright cancellation.
Megaman NT Warrior deserves a mention, its time slot was constantly being shifted, and new episodes tended to be delayed, sometimes cycling between new episodes and reruns without warning, and then delaying it for weeks before going back to new episodes, and then taking it off the air completely before deciding to air the third season, when the third season came, Kids WB moved it to a weekday afternoon time slot, at a time when most kids were still in school, and then moved it back to Saturday mornings, then cancelling it, never airing the remainder of the third season, what's worse is that the later seasons were not even dubbed thanks to the cancellation.
Tokyo Mew Mew AKA Mew Mew Power was 4KidsTV's highest rated show on its Saturday morning kids block at one time, however, only 26 of the 52 episodes were dubbed into English, and only 23 were actually broadcast in the US. The reason? Apparently, 4Kids cared a lot more about merchandise sales than ratings. The show wasn't able to get a merchandise deal at all in the US because its modest 52 episode run being too short compared to the giant franchises that dominated the toy shelves, and basically, no licensor was interested in it. Despite the show's ratings success, 4Kids pretty much stopped caring about it, and never bothered to license the second half of the series for an international release. What's worse is that episode 26 ended on a sharp cliffhanger complete with a To Be Continued message! 4Kids spared US viewers from this by not showing the last 3 episodes, and instead ending on a typical "Monster-of-the-Day" episode. However, all 26 episodes of Mew Mew Power were broadcast in Canada, Australia, the UK, and pretty much... every other country around the world! That's right! 4Kids pretty much screwed over the show in close to a dozen foreign languages that were based off of their version, complete with the cliffhanger ending!
4KidsTV also screwed over Kirby Right Back At Ya and Shaman King, airing them at the same time that Kids WB ran Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, 4Kids' biggest cash cows. 4Kids knew they couldn't compete with them, so they sacrificed Kirby and Shaman King to the competing timeslots, knowing they would be killed in the ratings.
Stitch! in the US on Disney XD. After 4 episodes, it got cancelled for maybe a few weeks. Maybe it was because it was broadcast when most kids were in school!
Or maybe Disney XD is just re-doing their schedule like they do every few months. Both Stitch! and fellow bad-timeslot show Recess (though it's in reruns) aired for four days and were removed, but they might be put back on once Disney XD fixes their schedule.
Inazuma Eleven's UK inception is, frankly, a Shakespeian tale of woe and woe. In short, the game was released in English in Europe at the start of 2011, however, Nintendo of Europe decided the UK needed to air the dub of the anime first (In a country that is notorious for not giving anything more Intellectual than Pokemon a look anime wise) and then the anime only aired for a month in the summer. Oy vay.
Super Book is still screwed on TBN's Smile of a Child in every morning timeslot and it's started at 3am CT/4am ET.
Card Games
The Pokémon Trading Figure game in America. Fans got excited for it in 2006 when Pokémon 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 Pokémon) 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.
Comics
Several X-Men books have suffered this over the year:
"Mutant X" was never supposed to replace X-Factor; it was supposed to run for 12 issues before going away and being replaced with a relaunched X-Factor comic. But early sales for Mutant X were far better than X-Factor's sales at the time, so the book lasted for 32 issues before being cancelled.
Deadpool and X-Force (under Peter Milligan and Mike Allred) were cancelled and relaunched as "Agent X" and "X-Statix" as part of a scam to screw Rob Liefeld of royalties from the book. The relaunches for both books failed and while Agent X was thankfully mercy-killed, X-Statix rebounded from a god-awful first year with an arc involving the resurrection of a vain, self-righteous pop musician. Unfortunately, the singer was SUPPOSED to be Princess Diana but was changed at the last minute. As a result, Milligan and Allred became disillusioned and asked to leave the book, which was promptly cancelled with issue #26.
The early-1990s Justice Society of America series by Len Strazewski and Mike Parobeck was practically canceled before it started, despite selling well. Strazewski said in an interview that the decision to cancel was made personally by Mike Carlin because he didn't like Parobeck's artwork or Strazewski's writing and believed that senior-citizen super-heroes was not what DC should be publishing.
The Red Circle DCU revamp of the MLJ/Archie heroes has plenty of these: The original plan of using the original versions in The Brave and the Bold was scrapped in favor of launching them in a series of one-shots that immediately spun off into a pair of ongoings that debuted in the midst of Blackest Night and were the only two books to not tie in to that event, which crippled sales for them right out of the gate. It also had the $3.99 cover price with second feature format which also turned off readers. The only mainline DC book to give a major guest spot was when the Shield showed up in the low-selling Magog. DC is currently publishing a Mighty Crusaders mini-series to finish off the deal.
And DC has ended the Red Circle deal, and the rights are reverting back to Archie Comics!
And to make matters even worse, DC solicited the Mighty Crusaders mini-series (and the accompanying introductory special for the series) as a trade paperback, but cancelled it because it did not garnered enough pre-orders!
According to the Word Of God, the Red Circle heroes (as well as most of the heroes) were barred from appearing in other titles due to the fact that DC would have to pay royalties for each guest-spot. So that's why save for Static, the Milestone and Red Circle heroes rarely got to appear in other, more popular titles.
Technically, DC's deal for the Red Circle heroes will end on January 2012!
Archie themselves are reviving the heroes in 2012 as The New Crusaders... as part of a web-only subscription service where the new stories are six pages each!
To make it less annoying, the six-page installments of The New Crusaders are going to be WEEKLY, which means 24-30 pages a month for the series, at a subscription fee of $2.99-$3.99 a month, plus thousands of pages of classic stories, as well!
At least Archie is offering a free print preview of The New Crusaders as part of the upcoming Free Comic Book Day version of Mega Man #1!
Film
The fantasy/comedy film by Terry GilliamThe Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a rather infamous example of this. The original distributors were bought out by Sony who dumped into 117 theaters and gave it next to no publicity and as such made only 8 million against a 46 million budget. Ironically, it was nominated for multiple Academy Awards and was a huge critical success, today considered one of Gilliam's best films.
The 1992 slapstick comedy Brain Donors (a modern-day Three Stooges-meets-The Marx Brothers film starring John Turturro) was originally produced by David and Jerry Zucker as Lame Ducks for Paramount. However, when the Zuckers left for another studio, Paramount scrapped the planned publicity campaign, changed the title, and withdrew the film after its initial screenings. It sank into obscurity and has since developed a cult following due to the VHS/DVD releases.
The indie horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane got screwed out of an American release when the Weinstein Company, which had spent three million dollars for the rights to it, suddenly canceled its planned 2007 release after seeing the disappointing box office returns of Grindhouse and other horror films early that year. The proceeded to sell the rights to Senator Entertainment US, which has since gone out of business, leaving the film in limbo. To this day, it has not seen the light of day in America outside of bootlegs and festival screenings, and until somebody takes care of the legal mess the film is in, it's unlikely that it ever will. Fortunately, this tale has a Bittersweet Ending — the film wasreleased in Britain, where it proceeded to make back its budget two-and-a-half times over.
Also, the film is fairly easy to find online.
Fox is rather infamous for this in film as well as television. Some examples include:
Tigerland: dumped into 5 theatres with no advertising.
Ravenous: dumped into 1,000 theatres with limited advertising (and mismarketed as a teen-oriented horror film).
Idiocracy: dumped into 100 theatres with no advertising (due to studio politics and choosing to promote The Marine instead).
Perfect Creature: dumped into regional release for one week and then released straight-to-DVD.
Sunshine: dumped into 500 theatres after one week of successful limited release and left to die against The Simpsons Movie (Fox apparently did this as they didn't like the international numbers).
Babylon A.D.: taken away from the director, heavily re-edited and released with limited marketing to poor numbers (the director and star later disowned the film).
Whip It: dumped into under 2,000 theatres as Fox spent more time promoting Jennifer's Body (also Fox only sneaked the film to bump up the latter's numbers).
127 Hours: dumped by Fox in favor of Love and Other Drugs due to uneasiness over the film's content. Sabotaged again after Oscar announcements when Fox announced the DVD release two days before a hastily scheduled wide release. However, the film has managed to be a hit in the UK (where it was distributed by Warner Bros.)
The Big Year: dumped by Fox despite having three bankable names in the lead roles, an established supporting cast and a director whose last two films grossed over $100 million. The studio also released a trailer that misrepresented the plot of the film and had almost no promotion done for it.
Here is one infamous example not from Fox: Mission: Impossible II was taken away from Director John Woo and was heavily re-edited as studio executives were skeptical on the elements of the film. It believed that Woo had been locked out from the editing room to prevent him from interfering with their progresses.
Dimension Films does this more then any other film company - they chopped 20 minutes off of The Crow: City Of Angels, (most of which were character development scenes and very important plot points) then they released Crow: SalvationDirect-to-Video after poor test screenings, they cut the planned 2000+ screen wide release of Equilibrium down to less than 300 screens because the film was already in profit from international distribution deals and spending money on additional prints or advertising might have ruined those profits, they shelved films like Texas Rangers and My Boss's Daughter for over a year with little explanation. Some films, like Venom and DOA: Dead Or Alive were barely advertised at all and given a very limited release. And releasing Scream 4 during the Easter period while all the others were kept for winter (and notably giving it little publicity outside North America - tellingly, this was the only film of the series where none of the cast did any British promotion)? Bad move.
Disney released the remake of Winnie the Pooh on the same weekend of the final Harry Potter movie, leading some to suspect that its poor showing would give them further reason to shelve 2D animation films for good.
It probably won't kill 2-D animation since it had a low budget (only $30 million, compared to Tangled and its $260 million budget) and will more than likely break even on DVD. The reason for Disney's bleak outlook on the film was actually due to its disappointing international numbers (where it flopped against Rio and Hop) and because other Pooh movies haven't fared well theatrically (but did nicely on DVD).
Attack the Block has been dumped into just 11 markets with almost no advertising by Screen Gems despite having mostly excellent test screenings and word-of-mouth. Supposedly, Screen Gems wanted to build Paranormal Activity-esque hype on the film but their choices of theatres has been completely random and entire markets have been shut completely out on the film. There is also no website that lists when theatres will be getting the film.
Trick 'r Treat was supposed to come out in theaters October 2007. It got dropped from Warner Bros.' schedule, with the guesses being either Warner didn't want it to compete against Saw IV, or they were upset with Michael Dougherty for the poor box office on Superman Returns. It eventually got put out on DVD in October 2009.
Postal, Uwe Boll's film based on the video game, was originally scheduled to be released in 2007, then pushed back to 2008. Three days prior to the U. S. premiere date, its theatrical run was reduced from 1,500 screens to 21. In addition, it was opened against Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. To say it was buried at the theatre is a gross understatement.
Paramount did this to Hugo after picking the film from Columbia (due to the film's producer/co-financer wanting to open the film on Thanksgiving and Columbia wanting Arthur Christmas for that spot). Examples include: mismarketing the film as either a comedy or an Inception-style thriller, barely marketing the film before the release, reducing the film's theatre count from 3,000 theatres to just 1,200 a week before opening and choosing to go with a quiet expansion rather than spreading awareness. Not even the film's massive critical acclaim and awards nominations and wins helped Paramount change their minds.
Paramount also did the same thing to The Adventures of Tintin in the US by choosing to open the film on the same day as the expansion of Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. While Mission: Impossible got trailers months in advance, a large IMAX push, heavily-promoted advance screenings and deluxe treatment by Paramount, Tintin was treated as an afterthought with a light marketing push, limited awareness and Paramount having IMAX cancel evening showings on their screens. All despite having none other than Steven Spielberg as the film's director and the premiere of the trailer for The Hobbit on select prints. As a result, the film got outgrossed on opening day by the third Alvin and the Chipmunks (which has been considered a flop by many box office pundits).
Happened with The Iron Giant. When Quest for Camelot was a failure, Warner Brothers studio assumed it was because traditional animation was dead and not because the movie had many flaws. As a result, the studio gave very little advertising to The Iron Giant, making it a box office failure. Ironically, it was met with extreme critical praise, having a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It did get better treatment for the video release, but the damage was there and the movie didn't gain much of an audience following until later years.
Planet51 was released on the same weekend as Twilight Saga: New Moon, and only made 12 million dollars.
The granddaddy of all Screwed by the Network examples: the originalStar 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 Season 3... but also cut the show'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. 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 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, the first one of which would win critical acclaim and eighteen Emmys in the process, and another of which would garner the highest critical ratings of any Trek series and pioneer Character Development and serialized plotlines and Myth Arcs several years before that became common on network television.
That the latter writing campaign saved Star Trek is a myth created by Roddenberry, who also organized the fan campaign, in reality it had little to no effect (and why would it, NBC knew how many people were watching, these numbers don't magically change if the audience starts writing letters). Though Lucille Ball did make a big stink and threatened to leave which shook the house. But according to Inside Star Trek the true reason Star Trek got a third season was because back then NBC's parent company was RCA, which owned the patent for color television. Star Trek was one of the biggest reasons why people bought color TV sets, and RCA made more money by selling them to Star Trek fans than NBC lost by airing Star Trek instead of something else.
In a tragic and unexplainable move, NBC decided to move The Tonight Show, hosted by Conan O'Brien, from its regular 11:30 timeslot to 12:05. Because he knew it would push out Late Night, do more harm to The Tonight Show than help, and because he was just plain tired of being dicked around by the network, Conan threatened to quit the show and leave the network in protest. NBC paid him a penalty of $44 Million to leave while Jay Leno took The Tonight Show back. Conan was so badly screwed by the network that even his direct competitors are furious on his behalf: David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, George Lopez, and Jimmy Kimmel have all directly reamed NBC for their atrocious behavior.
Not to mention, in a rare example of knock-on screwing effect, the ill-advised decision to park Jay's talk show — and promote it exclusively and not Conan, even in the nightly lead-ups — five nights a week at 10:00 PM managed to screw Conan and every NBC station due to the decision to cancel five nights of prime-time scripted drama, causing ratings for the late local news to tank across the country. It arguably didn't help Jay, either.
Supposedly, the reason for this change was because NBC was tired of shelling out money for prime-time dramas that no one watched and ended up tanking, and realized it was cheaper to just produce a variety show for Jay (who was leaving The Tonight Show anyway) so he could stay with the network.
Conan and Andy did "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour" from April-June, then moved to TBS.
Conan got screwed by NBC again with the handling of his production Outlaw, which not only got the Friday Night Death Slot but got canceled after just five episodes due not getting the desired 18-49 demographic (who probably doesn't even watch TV on Fridays). Its replacement, School Pride, has gotten far worse ratings but does not seem to be on any sort of cancellation threat (it was finally canceled, but only because the producer died).
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. A rather depressing title card was added to the very last shot of the series in order to wrap things up.
When Jericho got canceled 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, both filmed) and that CBS informed them of their cancellation before airing the series finale. Notice how networks now are giving more of their serial dramas (and their fans) ample warning of likely cancellation BEFORE their season finale airs to give writers some time to wrap up major storylines. The Jericho fans may have been a major influence in this change, which would make this seem like a bittersweet victory for fans of quality TV story-telling.
This occurs in-universe in Seinfeld. Jerry and George had been pushing for a long time to get their "show about nothing" approved by NBC. Finally, their first episode is aired and is successful. However, at the same time, the head executive who had approved the show goes AWOL and is replaced by a vindictive woman who cancels the show out of spite.
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, 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... of course, 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.
Firefly was supposed to begin with a double-length pilot episode 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 The Previously scenes that wouldn't air until the following week. There was almost no commercial promotion whatsoever following the premiere (and even the commercials that did show 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.
Drive's first three episodes were aired over two nights; the fourth aired a week later, and then it was canceled, 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 canceled 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. Minear is reportedly now two shows into a six-show deal with FOX.
In 1985, BBC controller Michael Grade (you know, the one Chris Morriscalled a c**t) cancelled the original series of Doctor Who — a show he reportedly loathed, until public pressure resulted in the cancellation being modified into an 18-month hiatus. To his credit, he allowed the series to continue afterward, but is blamed for the decision to fire 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 OperaCoronation Street, which was a major factor in the show's 1989 death.
The new series was not immune to this too. The series debuted on the US Sci Fi Channel in 2006 and was screwed from the start. Varying minutes of material was cut from episodes for time, ("Journey's End", originally 65 minutes, was cut down to 45 minutes. Editing over-kill.) the trailers for the show the channel ran often revealed hefty spoilers, and finally they got rid of the show completely in 2009. BBC America picked it up and have been treating it much, much better than Sci Fi Channel did.
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.
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 remake of Knight Rider (and 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.
Bonnie Hammer = Satan has been around a while. Ask any Forever Knight fan about the treatment their show got on USA Network. The 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.
Not to outdo themselves, they seemingly swore to repeat history with Stargate Universe and Caprica, after a first season in the usual franchise timeslot for the former and an inexplicable seventh month hiatus for the latter, both shows were shoved into arguably the worst possible timeslot, Tuesday nights, against some of the most popular shows on television, left to die while the "Scifi Friday" timeslot was given away to...wrestling.
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 (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.
And that's without mentioning TNT's plan to ensure that the show couldn't move to another channel (namely Sci-Fi, who wanted it) and become a success by insisting that they would only allow that to happen if the other channel also took on the B5 re-runs, and then slapped a massive price tag on them that no channel could possibly afford to pay. Sci-Fi, not surprisingly, passed and the show was lost forever.
Despite having its episodes aired horrendously Out Of Order, Tremors managed to become Sci Fi's highest rated program at the time. Nevertheless, it was canceled 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.
Sci Fi also didn't promote the series, deciding instead to promote Earth Sea, and effectively threw Tremors under the bus. They didn't hit a big enough demographic, because a lot of Sci Fi fans didn't know the show was even on the network.
Covington Cross (1992) received the same treatment, airing only six episodes over eight weeks, being constantly preempted and/or moved due to sports programming. After the show's "dismal" ratings, it was canned by the network.
It was also expensive to produce (shot on location in England), and a prime target for Moral Guardians due to its violent content.
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.
Mind you, it wasn't unusual in the 1960s and 1970s for the BBC to tape over or simply throw away master tapes of shows they A) weren't intending to show again or B) couldn't sell abroad. Just ask any Doctor Who fan about this and retreat to a safe distance...
Nor was it entirely uncommon stateside — this is why many of the original episodes of Soap Operas exist only in scripts and some of the first few Super Bowls exist only in highlights.
A nearly-complete tape of the first Super Bowl surfaced in 2011.
It's not Texas, it's Pythons themselves that saved the show. Terry Jones repeated the story about a friend from BBC informing him that tapes were about to be erased upon which Pythons rushed to the station and managed to make a deal and buy the tapes which were terribly expensive at the time. He recalls having an entire room in his house filled with large tape rolls for years after that. The Texas story is that a network executive found some long-ago acquired episodes of Python on the shelf, and after watching it decided to buy and air the entire series, which jumpstarted their popularity in USA.
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 season. Oddly enough, the show may be Un Cancelled as ABC has given its creator permission to try again.
An awful revival series was made. It bombed. End of story.
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 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 was never made and thus the shaggy vampire was shot.
Word Of God says that WB wanted to wait until the end of the season to consider renewal. Joss demanded an answer at mid-season and Jamie Kellner cancelled it.
Worse. Word Of God was that this had happened for the last several seasons of the show. Joss finally snapped, since the show was, as established, quite popular. For some reason the network dropped the ball on what probably would've been the best season yet, for fear of Joss actually gaining enough leverage to know if those scripts he'd been writing for next season were a waste of time or not.
The theory that a "Dark Shadows" revival series was responsible for the cancellation of the show is just Internet rumor. There's no reason both shows couldn't have been made and aired. After all, "Buffythe Vampire Slayer", "Angel" and "Charmed" all aired on the network at the same time. The same network now airs "The Vampire Diaries", "The Secret Circle", and "Supernatural" at the same time. There's no reason to believe that they would be adverse to airing multiple supernatural shows, or even multiple vampire shows, at the same time.
Nowhere Man was one of UPN's highest-rated and critically-acclaimed shows, but it was canceled after one season only to be replaced by Homeboys in Outer Space, which barely lasted any longer.
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.
This 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 and their way of life. The fact it was ever greenlit at all in the first place is nothing short of a miracle.
Miami Vice itself was screwed by putting it on opposite Dallas, then moving to Sunday night.
And then there's American Gothic. The show premiered at 10:00 PM on Fridays, a fairly-good time slot. There was plenty of press, promotions, a lot of hype. The show aired, got rave reviews from critics and fans alike...and then, for no apparent reason, scheduling issues began cropping up. Whether the executives in charge at CBS changed and wished to do away with the success of their predecessors (though CBS was transitioning from the disastrous cheapskate Tisch era of the network to Westinghouse ownership; the final-year Tisch era had left a Fox-lite schedule with post-NFL transition disasters such as an Andrew Dice Clay sitcom and Central Park West with the new owners), 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 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' 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. 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 Season 5 (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 Season 5 ended).
After the Channel Hop to Five, Robot Wars was constantly shunted around the schedule on either Saturday or Sunday. This was its last season.
Life Is Wild premiered in a Sunday-night timeslot, and was sure to be canceled after the first season. And then it did, as well as Hidden Palms.
Both of them were victims of The CW deciding to throw out the WB's plan to expand their horizons and go into more expensive programming (UPN was infamous for spending as little on their shows as possible). As Life is Wild was shot in South Africa on location it was screwed from the moment UPN and WB executives walked out together on January 24, 2005.
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.
The CW started screwing over a LOT of shows, particularly their half-hour comedies. Everybody Hates Chris, as well as The Game got cancelled. Another show, Aliens In America, despite receiving good reviews and having decent ratings, got the worst treatment by not only being moved to the Sunday slot, but the later episodes were never advertised. (needless to say, its ratings were pretty much destroyed. Doesn't help that the Writers Strike caused the last few episodes of its first and only season to never be finished). While Reaper, a Dramedy about a young slacker who must be Satan's bounty hunter, did get the dignity of a second season, it still got screwed over by CW. Like the many other shows they screwed over, Reaper suffered mostly through lack of advertising. Go look at the ratings for each season 2 episode. They PLUMMET, and plummet hard, about halfway through.
The last seasons of Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars had so much executive meddling from Dawn Ostroff and the other people at UPN who somehow fell upward into the executive suite of the new network, that the slam-dunk "Girl Power Tuesday"' dream lineup which had been gushed about by critics and fans at the time of the merger ended up failing miserably, with both of them considered universally the worst seasons by the fanbases. This was due to The CW forcing the shows to hire writers that didn't know anything about either show's canon (certainly not helping was The CW not allowing Amy Sherman-Palladino to continue with Gilmore Girls), insulting the intelligence of their fanbase by hyperfocusing on the lead actors of each show when both programs had been built on ensemble casts, forcing Veronica Mars to abandon the season-wide arcs of the past for reviled "crime of the week" episodes, and finally the "Content Wrap" (an annoying advertising concept created by the network putting a brand front and center in a non-subtle way) deal with American Eagle Outfitters which forced the Aerie Girls onto fanbases that considered them vapid, annoying, and completely against the spirit of both series, all in the name of selling overpriced underwear.
New Amsterdam was screwed over (by Fox, of course) before it even made it to air! The network decided last-minute to scrap the show, even after they produced eight episodes and started to promote it. The only reason it made it to air was the writers' strike.
American Dreams by NBC - the show performed fairly decently in its original Sunday night timeslot, but it wasn't enough. NBC played a wise move and moved the show to Wednesday nights at 10 in direct competition with CBS' Surviver: Palau and ABC's Lost. The show was canceled despite many fan campaigns, but the producers were able to film a brief finally to wrap it up, but NBC ultimately decided not to broadcast the finale, leaving many viewers hanging.
ABC originally slotted Twin Peaks against Cheers, against which it actually performed admirably...then shifted the show's timeslot repeatedly.
Feeling that ABC wasn't promoting it enough, Stephen King spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to buy print ads for Kingdom Hospital. The network then decided to change the timeslot to compete with CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, meaning all the ads King bought gave the wrong time. King was probably pissed-off at this.
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 it.
When Due South first premiered on CBS in 1994, it produced higher-than-expected ratings for the network (and for the CTV network in Canada). Because one of the CBS executives who endorsed the series was fired, the show was canceled. Then, after CBS' Fall lineup became DOA, the show was brought back again. After several months of beating Friends(!), the show was canned 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 was 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.
Reportedly, this is happening to Legend of the Seeker. The rumor going around is that the fans of Terry Goodkind's book series are so furious at the way the books have been adapted for TV, Disney-ABC is afraid to advertise it. However, the ironic twist is that the show has possibly taken the advertising budget, poured it into show quality, done some interesting stunt casting (Charisma Carpenter and Jolene Blalock, for starters), and have caused the ratings to slowly climb in its second season. Of course, the show's trapped in a syndication nightmare, so Season 3 is still in limbo.
ALF. As Season 4 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 ended up giving the show nothing in the end, and the series ended with ALF becoming a military prisoner.
There was a follow-up TV movie a few years later called Project: ALF. It featured Alf, still a prisoner but generally alright 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 ABC.
There was also that talk show on TV Land, but... er, let's not speak of that.
Disney originally was pretty nice to the Power Rangers franchise, going so far as to show episodes on three different channels. Ratings declined eventually (which many blame on the Dork Age of Bruce Kalish), and the last season, Power Rangers RPM was delegated to a Saturday-morning spot among tween sitcoms, where it was constantly preempted in the West Coast because of football and golf, and have many stations either showing it during ungodly hours, or not at all (thank you, FCC educational programming guidelines and parental television groups!). It's been stated by RPM's first showrunner that Disney is embarrassed to show the series, not to mention produce it.
Even more, after Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, Disney tried to take control of the Super Sentai portion of the series to tone down the violence. Toei wasn't thrilled.
On the note of Disney, SO R@n:D0ᴟ started off pretty decently, but eventually it was moved to 7:30 PM, and during the summer, it had been consistently getting less than 3 million viewers per episode. *
Case in point: Once an episode got exactly 2.4 million viewers (2.399, close enough), only to be followed by a new Good Luck Charlie which got over 4 million.
It might be that people aren't as pleased with Demi leaving the channel, but still.
Though since the fall has came back it seems to be making its way back up rather quickly.
Any (UK, at least) programme on the subject of video games, ever. Apart from Games Master.
The Canadian station CBC has a reputation for nurturing critical and commercial hit series - then treating them like absolutely dirt for no discernible reason. Many series produced and aired by CBC over the years have enjoyed massive critical acclaim (some of which have gone on to be classics in the genre), a meaty percentage of the Canadian viewing audience and tons of overseas sales. Then, whatever the reason, the shows are abruptly yanked off the air with no fanfare whatsoever. Alternately, they're starved of air time, given just 13 shows one season, 9 the next, a TV movie the next, and then drop dead of malnutrition. It's been speculated by many fans and media outlets that this happens because the network has a middle-school corporate culture, and a powerful political movement that wants to eliminate public broadcasting. Notable examples include:
This Is Wonderland: A show that garnered a whopping twelve Gemini Awards during its run, the series launched to a massive wave of critical acclaim. After the third season finished, the network yanked it off the air with no explanation.
Despite having been written by a lauded Canadian author (Douglas Coupland, who remained involved during production), jPod was treated incredibly poorly by the network, despite the fact that it was exactly the sort of relevant, thoroughly-Canadian drama they promote. It was moved to the Friday Night Death Slot, and the twelfth episode was never aired — in its place, the CBC ran a half-hour of men's figure skating and a re-run of Royal Canadian Air Farce (which was also cancelled just a couple seasons later for no explanation). jPod just happened to be the only CBC show targeted at a younger demographic.
For most of its seven-season run, Da Vinci's Inquest was the most-watched show on Canadian television. The second the show's ratings started to drop (when it relaunched as Da Vinci's City Hall, the show was yanked from the schedule. Better yet, a TV movie wrapping up all the plot threads from the series, The Quality of Life, was kept on hold for four years due to Executive Meddling, and finally dumped on a Friday night with no promotion.
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? 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.
Ugly Betty was screwed over by ABC. Its first three seasons aired consistently on Thursday nights at 8:00pm. However a slight drop in ratings resulted in the show being shunned to the Friday Night Death Slot at 9:00pm in favor of "Flash Forward" taking its place (which ended up being canceled). ABC was clearly trying to end Ugly Betty. Betty's ratings were cut in half after the night and time switch, and its fans spoke out. Betty was then moved mid-Season 4 to Wednesday nights at 10:00pm with other comedy shows. Even though Betty's ratings improved, it was too late. The show officially ended at the end of Season 4, not finishing its original ordered run. The show did get a story sendoff, but it was rushed, and many plot points were never explained.
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.
Nickelodeon has several examples of screwing shows:
TeenNick (and its predecessor, 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-the-network-suddenly-decided-to-drop-the-next-season-in-a-frenzy-of-new-episodes-about-eighteen-months-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 Nickelodeon (like Drake & Josh, Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, and Zoey 101, along with the occasional iCarly or Big Time Rush).
And even Degrassi doesn't get off all that easy. The N's broadcasts were heavily bowdlerized, the most notorious example being when they refused to air a two-part episode about abortion out of fear of the moral guardians. It Got Worse once the show became really popular in America, which meant that The N was now forced into a position of pushing for creative changes on the Canadian writers.
True Jackson, VP is rarely shown on the network (but mostly shown on TeenNick). Whenever a new episode is scheduled to air, no "new episode" promo is shown until THE DAY OF the airing and whenever a rerun airing of the show is scheduled to air.
The Troop is also treated pretty badly by the network, resulting in both shows being called the Red Headed Stepchildren of the network.
Nickelodeon was a bit more kind to The Troop in the second season, giving it a plush Saturday-afternoon timeslot, right after Power Rangers Samurai . However, they decided to screw it even there by pre-empting the new episodes with Sponge Bob Square Pants reruns! However, it was because the show was moved to a prime-time timeslot on Saturday nights!
For the network as a whole, it's incredible decline in ratings in 2011 can at least in part be put down to it's odd treatment of it's flagship live action show iCarly. From advertising two separate episodes as the 'season premiere', advertising the series to run back to back, only to stop that after 4 episodes, airing episodes with no advertising, and weird timeslots like the 28th of December for the second blooper episode and New Year's Eve for iPsycho 2, it's ratings have been hammered with several episodes dropping into the bottom 5 rated ever, and the series as a whole dropping the average ratings of the rest of the show by over a million viewers.
FOX's Titus was simply shot down, no questions asked, mid-season, because of the show's twisted humor (culminating in a two-part episode about Titus and his friends being accused of hijacking a plane and a Missing Episode where wild teen Amy confronts the male babysitter who sexually molested her as a kid). Its replacement? The Pitts, one of the biggest failures FOX has ever forced on, running five episodes before the timeslot was canned and forgotten (save for a quick, cheap mention on Family Guy).
Another contribution to the 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 canceled not long after that. Ironically, Titus did break up with Erin Carden in 2006 (according to the comedy special Love is Evol) and now Titus is looking to create a Spiritual Successor to his first sitcom, which shows Titus as a divorcé dating a 29-year-old model with a Badass Family).
Dead Like Me's executives meddling caused the writer and team to split after three episodes.
The Practice was having great success for six seasons. Then ABC decided to move it from Sunday nights to Monday. ABC wanted the Sunday night position for the new show The Lyons Den. 'Lyons Den' was cancelled in less than one year. 'The Practice' suffered a huge drop in ratings during that year. At the end of the seventh year, ABC refused to renew the show unless its budget was severly cut, citing "poor ratings". As a result, six of the main cast members were fired. Ironically, the show was put back on Sunday nights for its final season, and to show that David E. Kelley can make lemons into lemonade, he introduced a new character, Alan Shore, played by James Spader. The final season mostly dealt with Shore being wooed by a rival law firm, led by Denny Crane, portrayed by special guest star William Shatner. Spader and Shatner both won Emmys later that year for their performances, and both characters and actors were spun off onto a new show, Boston Legal, which lasted for several years.
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.
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 embarrassment when it came time to air the show. They decided to play up the sex scenes in the promos and re-edited the first three episodes into two, losing an hour of character and story development in favor of the sex scenes and blood, to the utter fury of the director Michael Apted. The British audience was not impressed and immediately tuned out, resulting in poor ratings. The BBC, apparently unrepentant about their mistake, then pulled out of funding for Season 3 and put Season 2 on the smaller BBC-2 at about 11:00 PM on Friday nights. (Actually, Rome was always only on BBC 2 - few imports/co-productions air on the main channel nowadays, with Damages being the only recent exception.)
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 Season 1 due to a strong lead-in from The Sopranos, which would not be airing ahead of Season 2. HBO decided to pull the plug before Season 2 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 Season 2 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.
Incidentally, the BBC claimed the initial editing was done because British audiences were aware of the historical background, unlike their American counterparts; director/executive producer Michael Apted claimed it was done in the name of ratings. Who was right? Well, the BBC screened all four seasons of the famously low on historical accuracy and high on sex appeal The Tudors, which unlike Rome is set in Britain...
Gilligan's Island, despite having decent ratings, was cancelled because one CBS 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 the network 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, which you may be familiar with.
Arguably, both sides got something out of this. Gunsmoke ran for 20 seasons, more than twice the running time of Gilligan/BB combined. However, The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island became two of the most syndicated shows of all time. Alongside spin-offs, reunion movies, and the nineties films of The Brady Bunch that were a good-natured parody and deconstruction of the series, in the long run Gilligan/BB have been much more successful.
The Partridge Family was a modest ratings success its first 3 years, debuting at #26 and breaking the top 20 in seasons 2 and 3. Then ABC moved it to Saturday nights, opposite All in the Family (in the middle of 5 consecutive seasons at #1). Ratings tanked, and the show was canned.
Southland was plowed over to make room for Jay Leno's daily 10:00 PM show, and didn't come back when the Leno show failed.
Although it was picked up by TNT.
The Australian run of Veronica Mars — late at night on Fridays, stopping mid-season for months at a time because of Big Brother.
Heck, even the American run of Veronica got screwed. Networks claim they gave it the best spot possible — against House, a show that pretty much commanded Veronica's demographic, as these guys will tell you.
For its first 11 years, Murder, She Wrote dominated its timeslot of Sundays at 8:00 PM, always finishing in the Top 20 (and often in the Top 10) each year. Then, for Season 12, CBS abruptly moved it to Thursdays at 8:00...against NBC's Friends, which was already the #1 show in America. Of course the ratings for Murder tanked, and of course the show was cancelled at the end of the season. The result was so predictable and blatantly obvious that the only rational explanation for the move is that somebody at CBS wanted to create an excuse to kill Murder. There really could be no other reason.
At that point, even Angela Lansbury had been considering it. She had just turned 70, and the demands of a series were beginning to wear on her. The last few seasons had several episodes which were Poorly Disguised Pilots, where Jessica Fletcher was telling the story as a Frame Narrative. Had it not been cancelled when it was, it would have been soon after.
Programme creator Phil Redmond felt that this was the very reason that his Soap OperaBrookside was cancelled by Channel Four in 1993.
The Screen Savers, among most other Tech TV shows. When G4 "merged" with Tech TV, it was a merger in name only. In everything else, it was a thinly veiled example of a textbook hostile takeover. The G4 execs fired most of the existing Tech TV talent (the shining example being Leo LaPorte), moved some shows around, canceled other shows, and eventually turned The Screen Savers into Attack of the Show!. The only show still surviving from Tech TV is X-Play. As if to add insult to injury, the "G 4 Tech TV" name of the merged channels was then changed to G4. This is how you kill a competing channel and become loathed by those who might have been your audience.
Doesn't help that G4 was owned by Comcast and Comcast decided to drop Tech TV, possibly to lower its price before the merger.
The Goodies were shafted by a BBC executive who never liked them. They were denied funding and retreated to ITV, who cancelled them after a season or two.
In 2000, Nippon TV joined the list of people screwing All Japan Pro Wrestling. They canceled the weekly TV show, which they had aired for nearly 30 years and signed a deal with former AJPW president Mitsuharu Misawa, now head of Pro Wrestling Noah. However, Nippon kept their 15% share of the company and made it so they could not get a TV deal with another network, taking the once-large company off the air. Keep in mind that this was about a week after Misawa announced he was leaving the company and taking almost all of its employees to NOAH, and at the time Baba only had three people under contract (two wrestlers and a referee) with free agents and independent wrestlers rounding out the rest of their cards.
Nippon TV actually backed the separate promotion a year before it happened (and it only happened in 2000 as opposed to 1999 out of respect for AJPW owner Giant Baba, who died that year). This is not appreciably different from Baba's split with the earlier Japan Wrestling Alliance in 1972, which was also coordinated with Nippon TV (leading to their stake in the company).
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles opened with strong numbers, only to be interrupted by the writers' strike which sidelined its planned lead-in to 24. Instead of trying to gain viewers in Season 2, FOX shoehorned it into a lead-in spot for Prison Break (which had seen a dramatic crash in viewership and popularity). The show was then put on a three-month hiatus and upon its return, rather than being scheduled as the lead-in to the returning 24, FOX moved it to the Friday Night Death Slot and needless to say it was over from there.
Noah's Arc (essentially Queer As Folk with Blacks and Latinos) was canceled by Logo after its second season, despite being the highest-rated and most critically-acclaimed show on the channel and bringing some much-needed representation to gay media. Network execs were shocked by the outcry from fans, and said they'd bring it back if The Movie was a success. It was, but Logo didn't keep their word.
Tales of the Gold Monkey. Cast and crew members cited a lot of hostility by ABC at A) the tone of the show (the network wanted Lighter and Softer), B) the high budget, and C) "culture clash", as the South Seas Retro setting of the show didn't mesh with ABC's at-the-time "modern urban" sensibilities. It experienced Executive Meddling in scripting from the start and was canceled after a single season even with growing ratings and the rival networks certain it would be ABC's flagship.
Lexx managed an aversion; fan support kept it around for Season 4 when news of cancellation got out. It may have helped that the creators intended Season 4 to be the last anyway.
The CBS Prime Time Soap2000 Malibu Road was cancelled after just six episodes...but not over ratings, which were quite fine — it was because Aaron Spelling didn't want it competing against another of his shows.
Important Things With Demetri Martin got this treatment in the middle of its second season. They took a hiatus and got moved to a 3:00 AM death slot for seemingly no reason at all along with The Sarah Silverman Program. It does re-run, but only at 7:00 AM.
Unfortunately this is pretty much par for the course with Comedy Central, hence why it gets a Once an Episodelampshading (and occasional lament) on the very much Adored by the NetworkTosh.0 which will go to commercial by replacing its own name with that of a show the network previous screwed.
Daniel Tosh: "We'll be right back with more...I'm not happy about this one...The Sarah Silverman Program."
Farscape was renewed for a fourth and fifth season by the Sci-Fi Channel, and the show's writers plotted out the fourth season under the assumption that story threads, including the season cliffhanger, would be resolved in a fifth, final season. Four days before production ended on the final episode shot of the season (and several weeks after the actual finale had been filmed, owing to episodes being shot out of order), Sci-Fi abruptly cancelled the series. The writers were given a rare opportunity to wrap up the arc in the Peacekeeper Wars miniseries (produced independently and, ironically, broadcast by Sci-Fi) but it was still a case of having to take a full seasons' worth of story threads and condense them down into a four-hour miniseries.
10 Things I Hate About You had solid ratings and good advertising for the first half of season one. (It is ABC Family's habit to split the seasons in half. In this case, the first half was in the fall and the second half was in the spring.) Disaster struck with the second half. This time, there was scarcely any advertising. The half-hour show wasn't paired with anything else and merely showed the same new episode instantly afterwards. The instant followup was also the only rerun that was on at a reasonable time of day. Now in this day and age, if one misses a show, one can catch it online right? Not so fast. The website made people pay a 99 cent fee if they wanted to watch the episode online before Friday(when it would become free), a tactic they haven't used on any other show before or afterwards. The worst blow however, was moving the show from Tuesday night to Monday night, pitting a show still finding an audience against ratings juggernaut Dancing with the Stars. The show still did fairly well considering the circumstances, but dipped below an average of one million viewers, which prompted a swift cancellation.
Breakthrough with Tony Robbins, which aired in the summer 2010 was screwed by NBC because it was the last program approved (for midseason) by programming non-wunderkind Ben Silverman before the merciful end of his tenure as president of the network. As anyone in the entirety of both NBC Universal and the universe but Ben and Tony knew nobody was going to watch what was pretty much a one-hour infomercial in primetime, the program got a cheap budget, the infamously lousy Tuesday at 8pm timeslot, and was absolutely not promoted at all beyond the required synopsis and a Today fourth hour interview with Robbins (you get into Hota & Kathie Lee & Wine territory for a promo interview and you know your show is the network's shame of the moment). It also wasn't broadcast in HD, a Kiss of Death for a program in 2010 unless you're on public access. It died a swift and merciful death after two weeks to be shoved off to shame on NBC.com.
My Name Is Earl in Germany got the worst treatment in existence. The first run of season one was at 11PM at Fridays. The show got cancelled after 6 weeks due to low ratings. Two years later they brought it back at the smart timeslot of 1AM in the night of Friday to Saturday. Surprisingly, it worked, and the show has better ratings than the ten viewers before. They aired 2 and a half seasons at this timeslot and occasionally had a rerun at saturday afternoon, which seems to have drowned because of the more popular rival channel having Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother at that time. They now announced to show the remaining episodes, now in Saturday/Sunday nights at 3AM. I have no idea how a show could generate viewers at these slots, or do they accept Tivo now?
The show also got screwed in the US when NBC chose not to renew it for a fifth season in favor of the failed Jay Leno Show experiment. TBS was offered a chance to pick it up but turned it down and creator Greg Garcia chose to do Raising Hope instead.
Garcia was aware that the show's ratings had declined in the fourth season. He asked the network if they were going to renew or cancel the series. He said he could make the final episode of the fourth season a series finale that wrapped up various plotlines or a cliffhanger that would hopefully draw viewers for the fifth season premiere. NBC told him the series would be renewed and he should make the cliffhanger. Garcia did and then NBC cancelled the series.
In the United States, FOX Family Channel (now ABC Family) only aired the first two seasons of The Adventures Of Shirley Holmes on Saturdays and Sundays before it stopped airing the show. To add insult to injury, the episodes were usually aired out of order. The third and fourth seasons never saw the light of day in the US.
Shall no one mourn the loss of Kyle XY?. After 3 successful seasons (which most people agreed that it really didn't degrade in quality at any point) it appeared that mainly after the slow decline of Heroes and Smallville viewers ABC Family decided that Superhuman Realism based shows weren't really their bag anymore. So Kyle was suddenly canceled and "several" new dramatic based shows mainly The Secret Life of the American Teenager along with several press statements that ABC Family would be focusing on more realistic shows in the future.
ABC Family also said Kyle XY was axed due to low ratings. It is true that ratings dropped after Secret Life premiered, but Kyle was still pulling in an average of 1.5 million. That's pretty good for ABC Family, but since it wasn't Secret Life's average of 3 million, it was "low ratings" and worthy of cancellation.
Contractual obligation with the network's original founder Pat Robertson is the only thing keeping The 700 Club on ABC Family. In the meantime, the network is doing everything it can to discourage people from watching it, airing it at 11 pm and putting disclaimers before it that its views do not reflect that of the network. Some would call this entirely Justified due to Robertson's laundry list of controversial statements, especially since 9/11, making this a rare case of Screwed By The Creator.
E!'s The Daily 10 was announced for cancellation coincidentally, about a week after guest host "Psycho" Mike Catherwood made an extremely crude and lame "prison rape" joke about Adam Lambert, who is openly gay. Naturally, regular hosts Catt Sadler and Sal Masakela are screwed out of a job because of what Catherwood did.
Finally, in an example of an entire network screwing its own self, the UPN Network, a broadcast channel created by Paramount Studios that was supposed to become the new FOX Network. Unfortunately, that never happened, and the only reason the network stayed alive at all for just a little over 10 years (even after airing shows that were either universally panned or just hardly watched at all) was simply Star Trek. Basically Star Trek: Voyager was (and for most critics of the channel still is) UPN's flagship series, and the strong Trek fanbase and viewership was truly the sole thing keeping the small network's head above water (but just barely). After Voyager's end season many wondered if UPN would survive. Fortunately a strong vocal campaign to create a new Trek series was heard and Enterprise was created. Unfortunately, many believe that even Enterprise was screwed over in its own way by the network leading it to become the 2nd shortest running Trek series (next to The Original Series itself). Simply by sheer irony, by screwing over Star Trek they essentially screwed themselves into network cancellation, and finally merging with its main competitor the WB.
To expand on Enterprise being screwed over, an ongoing issue with the series was the fact UPN apparently had little control over what its affiliates actually aired. As a result, the series was chronically preempted in major markets in favor of local sports coverage, with Enterprise (and other UPN shows) being rescheduled to local-specific timeslots that were not counted by Nielsen ratings. UPN itself also aired a rebroadcast of Enterprise on the weekend, and this too was not counted in the Nielsens despite anecdotal evidence indicating many viewers were choosing to watch the weekend broadcast instead of the Nielsen-counted timeslot (the evidence for this is provided by series co-star Connor Trineer who, shortly before the series was cancelled, took to the pages of Starlog magazine to plead with viewers not to watch the weekend showing but instead watch the showing that counted). The fact UPN failed to achieve nationwide coverage was also blamed for the show's lower-than-expected ratings (in some markets it aired on local versions of the Home Shopping Channel!). To be fair to UPN, however, Enterprise wasn't all that popular with the Star Trek fanbase, so it's possible UPN adjusted its efforts accordingly.
The Growing Pains spin-off Just the Ten of Us was screwed by its network ABC because of politics. Although Just the Ten of Us did well in the ratings on Friday nights (and frequently won its 9:30 p.m. timeslot), ABC wanted all shows in the TGIF block to be produced by Miller-Boyett Productions (as was the case with Full House, Family Matters and Perfect Strangers). Ultimately, after finding no other suitable timeslot for Just the Ten of Us in time for the 1990-91 season, the series was canceled outright and replaced by a short-lived series called Going Places (which lasted only one season).
Caprica. Very much so. For a breakdown of how it was Screwed By The Network, see here.
And now, although one of the reasons that factored into Caprica's cancellation was promoting Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome from a web series to a backdoor pilot movie and not having two Battlestar spin-offs airing at the same time, we hear that the executives are considering demoting it back to a web series. Why does Syfy hate this Peabody Award-winning franchise?
And now Universal is planning another reboot, as a film directed by Bryan Singer. I guess Universal just wanted space battles and lots of CGI.
Channel 4's 2004 comedy series Garth Marenghis Darkplace, a spoof "rediscovered" forgotten low-budget British horror-fantasy show from the '80s, failed to find many viewers and subsequently only had a single series. This was largely blamed on Channel 4's mysteriously failing to do much in the way of promotion for the show, despite signing-up the Perrier award-winning character of the title (played by comedian Matthew Holness). Despite only attracting a small audience on its initial broadcast, word of mouth and DVD sales brought a strong cult following. Even more absurdly, Channel 4 responded not by commissioning a second series but by instead commissioning a spoof chat show (Man to Man with Dean Learner) featuring many of the same actors playing the same characters. Not only did this also flop but it attracted nothing like the cult following or appreciation of the "parent" series. Why Channel 4 didn't just recommission Darkplace remains a mystery.
Norm Mac Donald was fired from the "Weekend Update" segment of Saturday Night Live in 1997 at the insistence of NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer, who claimed that Mac Donald was "not funny," despite his popularity: Norm's appearances in sketches and on "Weekend Update" were frequently greeted with extended applause breaks, to the extent that he once had to quiet down the studio audience during a mid-monologue sketch involving host Sarah Michelle Gellar by saying, "Alright, I've gotta do this skit now." He later got his revenge by being asked to host SNL a couple of years later, during which he poked fun at his firing, and said that while he still wasn't funny, it was okay because the show had gotten "really bad," thereby making him look much funnier by comparison.
Robin Hood had arguably already killed itself with the death of Marian, but The BBC didn't help matters at all with its 'promotion' of the third series, which essentially amounted to one trailer for the series (and a few other episode-specific ones), and Jonas Armstrong and Joanne Froggatt guesting on The Paul O'Grady Show. This They Just Didn't Care attitude culminated in the final episode being shunted to BBC Two in favour of tennis just hours before it went out (not that it mattered much, since the series had been released on DVD prematurely). Irrespective of fandom's reaction to series 3, it's hard to deny that it got a raw deal from the network.
Central Park West is an interesting case. The show was originally a way for CBS to bounce back after their disastrous 1994-1995 season. The network threw their entire marketing clout behind the show, which was touted as the hottest and sexiest drama to ever air on a network, and bolstered it with a massive advertising campaign - huge banners on buildings, bus advertisements, commercials, you name it. For a reason only known to the executives, CPW's first two episodes were scheduled against anniversary episodes of the two biggest primetime soap operas airing at that time (Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place). The show was trounced in the ratings, which would have led to its cancellation had CBS not already invested so much money into the program (roughly $13-15 million for the first season alone). The show was continually pre-empted, aired on different days (which led to its being trounced by Party of Five) and then taken off the network while the show was retooled. When it came back, half the cast was gone and the series' theme was changed to a Dynasty-esque clone. However, it didn't last even a handful of episodes before CBS pulled the plug for good.
Eleventh Hour The US Version had consistently good ratings, but was cancelled by CBS because it essentially didn't get the ratings of its lead-in CSI.
Jonny Zero While no means a great show, it suffered at the hands of FOX as well. It was aired completely out of order and was stuck in the Friday Night Death Slot.
Friends spin-off Joey got screwed by NBC in its second season when it was moved to the timeslot opposite American Idol (a fate nearly as bad as, if not worse than, the Friday Night Death Slot) and of course its ratings soon declined considerably. Even worse, the show was suddenly cancelled mid-season with no warning, leaving eight episodes unaired in the U.S. The only way to see them (other than downloading them of course) is to import the somewhat pricey season 2 DVD from Canada.
Arrested Development was initially saved by FOX, as they kept it around a year longer then they planned to because of its critical acclaim, but they soon screwed it over by changing its timeslot constantly and barely giving it any advertising.
The show that replaced it, The War At Home didn't fare much better, while FOX did somewhat unexpectedly renew the show for another season, it soon declined in ratings when it was abruptly moved from Sunday nights to Thursday nights and FOX did little to promote it, because of its low ratings, the show was not renewed.
Jack And Bobby wasn't treated very favorably by the The WB It was hardly advertised at all compared to most of the networks other shows, and after winter break, there was NO advance warning of any new episodes airing, so unless you used an episode guide, you'd NEVER know the show was even still on. To be fair it did get a much more significant amount of advertising towards the end of the season, but the damage was already done as the ratings were far too low for it to have a chance of being renewed. Also Jack And Bobby wasn't an exactly an easy show to sell based on marketing, from the ads it looked like a typical WB teen drama, but the commercials didn't even hint at the story of Bobby being president in the future(being told through flashforwards) People looking for a teen drama were caught off guard by the political storyline, and those who didn't mind the politics didn't watch the show because it didn't look too different from every other teen drama on the network. In the end the show's unique premise was its undoing, maybe it would've lasted longer without the future storyline.
Hope and Faith was still getting decent ratings in its third season despite being scheduled opposite American Idol but ABC cancelled it anyways so they could make room for an expanded version of Dancing with the Stars
The WB was quick to cancel Run Of The House. So quick that the show didn't even to get to finish its first and only season (the last few episodes were only ever aired overseas) it wasn't like the shows ratings were that bad either, after all it had What I Like About You as a lead-in.
Twins and Related were also victims of this. Really, WB was almost as infamous as FOX for cancelling shows left and right, and now The CW seems to be following in they're footsteps, given how badly they screwed over Reba, the highest-rated show on The WB.
ABC screwed over Jake In Progress after its second season premiere by replacing its timeslot with The Bachelor and cancelling the show a few short months afterwards, leaving eight episodes unaired, ABC cited lackluster ratings in the premiere as its reason, it also screwed over Emily's Reasons Why Not by cancelling it after only one episode for the same reason, while 6 million viewers isn't a whole lot for a premiere, it hardly seems like a good enough reason for cancelling both of those shows, it seems more like ABC just wanted an excuse to cancel the shows so it could fill the timeslots with more of they're Lowest Common Denominator reality shows.
WAY too much Helena/Reese, too little Barbara/Dinah.
The WB ordered the pilot to be completely reshot just weeks before airtime (The original pilot — now available as an extra on the DVD release — was deemed by the network to be "too dark".)
Network moved show from Toronto to L.A., thereby putting a serious crimp in its budget.
CBS notoriously did this to an ENTIRE GENRE of television programs. Between 1970 and 1972, in what would later be called "The Rural Purge," the network cancelled most of their sitcoms and dramas focusing on country life or country folks living in the city. Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Mayberry RFD, Lassie and Hee Haw were among the shows that got their pink slips during this period as networks began to move away from rural settings to more modern shows set in suburbia and aimed at a younger demographic, such as The Brady Bunch and All in the Family.
Pat Buttram (Mr. Haney on Green Acres) famously said 1971 was "the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it."
It's true that CBS did cancel a number of shows, some of which were still popular. But in the network's defense, the shows they brought in to replace the cancelled shows included All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show, Maude, Good Times, One Day at a Time, and The Jeffersons.
Essentially, this bookends NBC's cancellation of Star Trek- Neilsen's demographic breakdowns of a show's ratings had become more specific between 1968 and 1971, thus if Trek's early demise (good demos but low overall ratings) was the before, the 1971 CBS Rural Purge (of shows with good overall numbers but lousy 18-to-49 ones)was the after.
Lie to Me was continuously screwed by FOX despite a devoted fan following and critical acclaim (mainly for Tim Roth's performance). The show was always near cancellation due to Fox not being happy with the ratings (the show won its time slot or finished near the top most of the time) and a few seasons only got 13 episode orders and didn't premiere until the spring. The show was finally canceled in 2011 along with several other shows that had decent followings (such as Human Target).
ABC screwed over My Wife and Kids by cancelling it after the creators had already been promised another season, thus ending the series on a cliffhanger as a result(though Word Of God's explanation for what would've happened next season lessens the blow somewhat).
The Good Guys was a comedy on Fox featuring the uptight but ambitious Detective Jack Baily and the relic of the 80's, Detective Dan Stark. It featured colorful characters, plenty of action, a great sense of humor, and rather good reviews. However it was given the Friday Night Death Slot at the end of the summer of 2010 and was cancelled later in the year.
Boom Town was an interesting experiment. It featured numerous characters, overlapping storylines, out-of-order timelines, and unusual visual techniques. It could conceivably have caught on as a cult show but unfortunately it didn't find an audience. NBC deserves credit for trying something different and for bringing the low-rated show back for a second season. However, it loses that credit for its attempts to "fix" the series in its second season. It removed all of the elements that made the series interesting and essentially remade it into another typical cop show, which ended up getting cancelled anyway.
Moesha was a very tragic example, as the execs at UPN were the ones that demanded the infamous storyline of Frank's infidelity and Dorian being his son, the series creator strongly objected to the storyline and the Re Tool of the show and was let go. The ratings sharply declined following the introduction of the infidelity plot, and then It Got Worse-UPN cancelled the show on the SAME day that the cliffhanger season finale aired, leaving many loose-ends unresolved(they were supposed to be resolved on the spin-off The Parkers, but that never happened, presumably due to Brandy Norwood getting tired of her character and the show) it's like they had already made up their minds about what they were going to do to the show before the season had ended.
Ironically the show that replaced Moesha-One On One ended up suffering almost the exact same fate(Executive Meddling during the last season, an unresolved cliffhanger) after the UPN/WB merger, the CW cancelled One On One a mere THREE days after the network's debut, the CW execs claimed they intended to renew the show but simply couldn't find a spot for it on their schedule, which sounds like a really lame excuse. It's obvious the CW was more interested in focusing all their attention on the shows carried over from The WB while barely giving the UPN shows the time of day, so the execs more then likely cancelled One On One just so they could free up space for they're new shows.
Eureka was screwed over by SyFy. They ordered what was supposed to be a sixth season - the final one - with six episodes. A week later, they then cancelled the show and took back the season six order, leaving the writers scrambling to wrap up the series.
Fans of Lois and Clark had no reason to suspect Season 4 would be its last, as 4 and 5 had been confirmed for some time as part of a single contract deal. Then ABC got a new executive who wanted the timeslot for a revival of The Wonderful World of Disney, and the contract was reneged on, leaving the cliffhanger unresolved and the hasty removal of "To be continued..." over the last scene.
TNT screwed with Memphis Beat by hardly ever promoting the show during its two seasons on the air (despite the fact that the show starred Jason Lee and had none other than George Clooney as executive producer). Instead, TNT put most of its marketing power on Franklin And Bash and its other in-house productions.
Tower Prep appears to have fallen prey to this. According to Paul Dini, after Unnatural History's average ratings, Cartoon Network gave up Tower Prep before it had even started. They stopped promoting, gave up on recaps, and switched the time slot to Tuesday.
Discovery Channel seriously screwed Dinosaur Revolution. There was originaly six episodes but for some reason there were only a mere four. There also was originally no talking heads, no narration but that was changed too, leading many to people to criticsize the show for having cartoony slapstick. The worst example is the fact the last two episodes were set to air on September 11th, 2011, the aniversery of 9/11 so it was re-scheduled to September 13th, and aired on the Science Channel.
The Fox sitcom The Grubbs was cancelled TWO DAYS before it's premiere(supposedly due to bad reviews) without having even aired a single episode.
Fox did the same thing to The Ortegas a year later, NBC had already screwed over the show (after beating out Fox in a major bidding war for it) by pushing it back to midseason, so the creators decided to approach FOX with the show and they were promised a fall premiere date, but in the end FOX gave them nothing as the show was cancelled weeks before it's premiere, and unlike The Grubbs FOX didn't have the excuse of bad reviews to fall back on.
The Hank Azaria show Imagine That aired two episodes, and that was it.
was no classic, it still deserved better scheduling than it got from The BBC, with episodes being flung onto the lineup at whim (and even going from BBC1 to BBC2 and back) and turning up anywhere from early in the morning ("Family Dog") to mid-afternoon ("The Mission") to early in the evening ("You Gotta Believe Me") to late at night ("Mirror, Mirror"). If anyone managed to catch the entire run when it was screened terrestrially in Britain (Sci Fi, to their credit, gave it a coherent run), you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
Better Off Ted. The critically acclaimed sitcom quickly grew a Firefly-level intense fanbase, and to ABC's credit was given a second season despite low ratings, but the screwing truly began in its second year with the network providing minimal promotion, launching the season in December (exceptionally late for a returning show on the network), airing episodes during the holiday season (even though by 2009 most US viewers had been conditioned to expect new shows to be on mid-season break and so likely did not expect the series to be on at that time), and when the ratings weren't steller began burning off the episodes two at a time in January, cancelling the series before airing the final two, thus giving the show a 2nd season that ran for less than two months. Although not necessarily ABC's fault, the fact the show's second season has (as of the end of 2011) never been released to DVD is seen as further evidence of the trope.
NBC has also managed to screw an actor along with a show. David Tennant left Doctor Who after an acclaimed run to shoot the pilot Rex Is Not Your Lawyer with a guarantee that the show would be picked up. But after the dreaded test screening where audiences didn't exactly understand the concept, they simply canned the show without reshoots and went back on the guarantee. As a result, Tennant was screwed out of not one, but two shows due to focus groups.
She Spies had this happen twice. It started out pretty well, with its first four episodes being aired on NBC. After that, the show was dumped into first-run syndication, with some markets airing it at unholy hours in the morning. However, the show was still pretty successful, and it got renewed for a second season. However, they decided to completley Re Tool the show, taking it from a light-hearted action/adventure/comedy series (like a gender-flipped version of Chuck) to a straight action series (basically, yet another lukewarm rip-off of Charlie's Angels). As it turns out, the comedy aspect was one of the show's strengths. It was canned soon after.
Family Matters, at the very end of its run, was a victim of this. After declining ratings, the series was silently moved from ABC to CBS for its last season, where ratings became almost non-existent. Adding insult to injury, the final episodes aired during Summer 1998 (when TV viewership was typically down due to between-season reruns) and the Grand Finale received little promotion or recognition from CBS. The fact that it aired just a couple months after the Seinfeld finale probably didn't help matters.
It's also an example of an actor/actress getting screwed over by the network. Jaimee Foxworth was inexplicably written off after Season 4, after demanding more money and a larger role for her part. And the rest, they say, is history.
One ABC station in northwest Florida aired 3rd Rock from the Sun at 3:30 AM Central every Saturday/Sunday morning, right between two infomercials.
One My Network TV station in northwest Florida(its sister station) barely aired it in a good timeslot, but it failed...
Of the five series of Would I Lie to You?, it has never once held the same timeslot twice; it has bounced from Saturday at 10PM, Friday at 9PM, Monday at 10:30PM, Friday at 10:35PM, Friday at 9:30PM.
While the screwing may not have been deliberate, The Mole fell victim in Season 5 when ABC's marketing department did so little to promote the show that even many die-hard fans 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 2008 departure from British game Countdown: When the show's budget was going to be cut by 33%, Vorderman was willing to take a 33% salary cut as well. But Channel Four 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." Note that Vorderman's about as famous in Britain as Vanna White and Bob Barker are in America, as she was on Countdown from its 1982 debut.
Duel was bumped to the Friday Night Death Slot for Season 2, against The Price Is Right $1,000,000 Spectacular (itself a death sentence for any game show). Either ABC was deliberately looking for an excuse to cancel it, or they were run by Ralph Wiggum.
Million-Dollar Mind Game, a well-liked quiz imported from Russia and intended for primetime with good...well, everything...was sat on by ABC for some time before being slapped on Sunday afternoons against NFL games (a timeslot usually used for infomercials!) with minimal promotion, and instead chose to focus on promoting and giving You Deserve It primetime space. The result? The burn-off got better ratings!
The original (1957-64) nighttime version of The Price Is Right flourished Wednesdays at 8:30 PM on NBC, making it the top-rated primetime game show. In 1961, the sponsors wanted to tinker with it so NBC moved the show to Mondays at 8:30. Ratings slid, so a year later the show got moved to 9:30 PM Mondays, opposite The Andy Griffith Show. Price hemorrhaged ratings, so on February 1, 1963 it was moved to Fridays at 9:30. NBC wanted a show that attracted a younger audience than Price sponsors wanted, so they optioned the sitcom Harry's Girls to replace Price that Fall. ABC stepped in and acquired both versions of Price for an amount NBC wasn't willing to match. The move was costly, though, as ABC couldn't afford the nighttime show in color and not every market had an ABC affiliate (48 markets aired Price on their CBS station). Nighttime ended in September 1964, and daytime a year later.
NBC head Lin Bolen became the enemy of fans for her insistence on ousting games hosted by middle-aged men on technologically-obsolete sets.
When CBS lifted its ban on big-ticket giveaway shows in September 1972 and introduced three games, Concentration fell victim to The New Price Is Right.
In 1974, she killed the Bob Stewart game Three On A Match, which had done respectably in a slot that had been trouble before it debuted three years earlier. The replacement, Winning Streak, was a failure.
Once TOAM ended, Bolen moved the original Jeopardy! to the 1:30 slot, causing it to lose a good portion of its audience. In exchange for ending Merv Griffin's show a year before the contract stated, the remainder of said contract was given to the culmination of over a year's development and Bolen putting her job on the line — Wheel of Fortune.
Every GSN original, ever. The typical formula for an original game here 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, and E) gradually stop making new episodes. Lingo suffered the most in its original five seasons.
Series/Russian Roulette was similarly screwed, though it perished due to the network's rebranding which killed all the original programming (including Lingo) at the time.
Forever Eden, a rare example of a Reality Show getting screwed, FOX changed its timeslot repeatedly with little advance warning and cancelled the show mid-season before a winner was even announced.
FOX screwed over both Greed and It's Your Chance of a Lifetime because the current network president hated game shows. Chance got it the worst because it was barely advertised, and what little advertisement there was only appeared mere days before the show was due to air. Chance was supposed to become a regular weekly series, contestants were being interviewed and everything, and FOX just pulled the plug for no reason whatsoever. Full details here.
The Chamber also got screwed by FOX, as it was rushed to air ahead of time to compete with ABC's The Chair and ended up getting labeled a rip-off as a result (it's unknown which show began production first)...and then Fox canned it after only airing half of the six shows taped.
CBS screwed over the American Winning Lines by only airing it Saturday nights with seemingly no consistent timeslot, causing the ratings to plummet.
CBS also screwed Million Dollar Password by cancelling it simply because it didn't hit their target demographic, despite the fact that it frequently pulled the highest ratings in its timeslot.
NBC's 2000 revival of Twenty One was performing quite well, yet it was abruptly canned out of nowhere for no reason, and the finale wasn't even advertised.
Many daytime game shows whose network was run by Fred Silverman.
The Hard Times of RJ Berger, the best live-action show MTV has had in years, began with a large viewer rating of 2.6 million viewers, but dropped drastically by the second season, causing the show to be cancelled.
One of Litton's Weekend Adventure shows, Culture Click gets screwed in Atlanta when their ABC station aired it at 4AM Eastern...
Music
They Might Be Giants had the full support of the executives for their first three albums on Elektra Records (Flood, Apollo 18, and 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.
This happens a great deal with many recording artists who find that, either because of cost-cutting measures or a perception of the general public's lost interest in them by the higher ups, their new releases aren't being promoted, then the albums aren't being distributed properly, then they're cut from their recording contract. EMI Records sent a huge percentage of their talent roster packing in the late 1990s - early 2000s because it was hemmoraging money at the time, so a lot of artists who before found a lot of support from EMI ended up signing with considerably less supportive record companies, who screwed them over.
One of the most notorious and tragic musical examples was Big Star. They might have actually been big stars if their albums hadn't been distributed by the crumbling Stax label.
After Splashdown's first album Redshift rapidly sold out, the band made a new album called Blueshift. For reasons that remain mysterious, Capitol Records refused to release the album, but also retained copyright so that Splashdown could not release the album with another record company. Years later, the only way to hear those songs is through illegal downloading thanks to an internal leak. Splashdown split up due to fears that Capitol Records would retain copyright of any of their future songs.
Pro Wrestling
Paramount attempted to screw WWE by moving WWE 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.
They ultimately wound up screwing them anyway, but it took a few years; when it came time to renew contracts, CBS wasn't interested despite the high ratings. SmackDown moved to the much-less-notable My Network TV, and started beating The CW in ratings by a good margin.
Then it got screwed by Memphis and Des Moines when those cities decided to dump My Network TV after they went to a syndicated model in September 2009, however in both cases the CW affiliate picked SmackDown up for Saturday nights and pretty much got station upgrades otherwise. The rest of the My Network TV schedule was blissfully ignored by both of them.
Sadly, high ratings for wrestling mean NOTHING. Advertisers won't touch it (they believe that it's aimed at the lowest common denominator, and that the viewers won't buy products being advertised; the much-publicized switch to TV-PG doesn't change this), and the only real value is to pump up the network average for prime time. Since UPN and its successors-in-interest are already dead last, and WWE numbers are and were low enough by broadcast standards not to make any difference, they have no compunction about moving/canceling wrestling programming.
How about an entire company screwed by the network? In 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 Bischoff, had a deal in principle to take over the company and absorb the production costs that the network had been covering. Jamie Kellner, then the Turner Networks CEO, decided to cancel all WCW programming from Turner networks (which he had wanted to do for years but had been 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 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.
Bear in mind, everything they aired was approved by TNN. Neither side saw the relationship as a long term deal; ECW was trying to build up its TV rep to get on a "real" cable network, and TNN (then a country music station) was just trying to get a piece of the wrestling boom.
Jamie Kellner is famous for two things — saying that Tivo was stealing from the networks, and canceling a long list of TV shows.
Kellner can hardly shoulder all of the blame here. WCW lost enormous amounts of money in its last two years (its losses for 2000 were estimated at $65 Million) and was drawing dismal ratings towards the end (TV ratings are wrestling's only saving grace; most advertisers won't touch wrestling, so instead it's used to pump up network averages to raise ad prices for other shows). Granted, Turner wasn't in a position to block the cancellation as he had several times in the past, due to the AOL Time Warner merger, but WCW was dying and Bischoff's pie-in-the-sky acquisition attempts would have at best kept it on the air another year.
TNA Impact and TNA Reaction air on Bravo in the UK. That channel just got bought out by Sky, who are closing it down. As Sky already air WWE, no room for TNA on their channels, so these two shows have been screwed into a No Export for You situation by the Sky network.
Actually, this is a major aversion. The TNA shows got moved to Challenge, which happened to launch on Freeview at the same time to replace the also closed down Channel One. So TNA went from subscription TV to free-to-air TV, which must've actually increased its audience.
Sports
In 2005, ESPN opted not to continue its relationship with the National Hockey League (fresh out of the lockout that canceled the entire 2004-05 season), and the cable rights were taken over by OLN (now Versus), a channel dedicated to outdoor sports whose distribution was (and still is) not as wide as ESPN's. 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, knocking the remainder of the game over to Versus.
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 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.
In 1991, NBC broke away from the NHL All-Star Game (from 1990-1994, NBC broadcast the All-Star Game, which was pretty much the only time that the NHL was nationally broadcast on over-the-air television in the United States outside of ESPN's paid programming on ABC during the 1992-93 and 1993-94 seasons) in favor of a press conference from the Pentagon regarding the Gulf War. The previously unaired third period was rebroadcast on Sports Channel America. Unfortunately, Sports Channel America (who replaced ESPN as the NHL's primary cable broadcasting outlet in the United States in the 1988-89 season and continued through the 1991-92 season) was for all intents and purposes was a premium outlet that was available to about 1/4 less of the homes that ESPN was in at the time.
The Indy Racing League has had a similar path when Versus picked up the load for most (but not all) of its events starting in 2009: ratings have been substantially lower due to Versus simply not being a well-known network (plus the Executive Meddling by the channel's owner, Comcast) even though viewers agree that Versus gives much better treatment to the series as opposed to ABC/ESPN(2); however, the ABC-aired races in 2009 (the Indy 500 and several other summer events) hadn't had as drastic a dropoff as the cable races and started to put a bit more effort into the broadcasts. Of course, a lot of this stems from Tony George's own Executive Meddling that caused the American open-wheel racing split from 1996-2008.
The Arena Football League may be another one screwed by NBC. After the network lost its NFL games to CBS in 1997 and the 2001 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 when 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.
Major League Baseball screwed themselves with their short-sighted television deals back in the early 1990s. First and foremost, MLB signed an $1.2 billion (approximately) deal with CBS for the next four years. They replaced ABC (who had covered Monday and later Thursday night baseball games consecutively since 1976) and NBC (who had covered Major League Baseball in some shape or form since 1947) as the national, broadcast TV outlet for Major League Baseball. Once CBS came into the picture, Major League Baseball, under the leadership of then outgoing Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, proceeded to systematically destroy the Saturday afternoon Game of the Week (a longtime institution on NBC). CBS became notorious for their sporadic regular season scheduling (often airing golf events on weeks in place of baseball). MLB's logic was that since a myriad of games were going to air on ESPN, the concept of a nationally televised Game of the Week was growing obsolete. When the dust was settled, CBS (who by the end of 1993, had also lost the National Football League to Fox, the National Basketball Association to NBC, and college football) lost at least, half a billion dollars off of that baseball deal. Despite all of this, CBS was willing to renew their contact with MLB for two more years. Unfortunately, mid-way through the 1993 season, MLB was already working on a revenue sharing joint-venture with ABC and NBC called "The Baseball Network". The Baseball Network was even worse than what CBS had to offer (with ABC and NBC each covering six weeks of regionalized coverage following the All-Star Break). Without going into full blown detail (check the Wikpedia article on The Baseball Network to get a proper perspective) here, all that you need to know first and foremost, is that the first two rounds of the playoffs were regionally televised simultaneously. Perhaps the one positive thing to come out of the 1994-95 baseball strike, was that it hastened the premature demise of The Baseball Network (which was supposed to run through the 1999 season). Shortly afterwards, both ABC and NBC (who had to split coverage of the 1995 World Series) publicly vowed to have nothing more to do with Major League Baseball for at least the remainder of the 20th century. NBC however reluctantly (they could only be bothered to show postseason games and the All-Star Game in even numbered years) reconsidered and wound up sharing the broadcast rights with Fox through the end of the 2000 season.
Reluctantly is putting it mildly. When the 1997 World Series ended up being played by two small-market teams (Florida and Cleveland), NBC's West Coast head Don Ohlmeyer publicly declared that he hoped it would end in a four-game sweep, since even a fifth game would mean pre-empting his precious "Must See TV" Thursday lineup. (He didn't get his wish; the Series went the full seven games.)
In Australia, the Seven Network's screwing of the National Soccer League lead to the entire competition eventually collapsing in 2004. The channel bought the rights for a pay tv sports channel, but after they lost the rights to Aussie Rules Football, they shut down the pay tv channel, and never bothered airing the soccer in any regular fashion, and never live. A highlight package after midnight on Wednesdays was the best the coverage got at times.
ONE HD's coverage of The National Basketball League games has fallen into this when it was announcing in October 2011 that all NBL games aired on One HD would be delayed which angered fans. One HD went Beyond the Impossible the following month when they announced that all NBL games would be delayed EVEN FURTHER to 1:00 AM-2:00 AM, Which pissed off more fans. NBL fans are now trying to boycott the channel.
FormulaOne has always had prime spots on the BBC since it's most loved in the UK, showing all the races and qualifying since the start (excusing the brief time it went to ITV (which meant there were adverts during the races)). From 2011 and 2018 only half of the races will be shown on the BBC whilst Sky Sports (a channel one would have to pay a lot for, including their television license) will show all the races and the qualifying. Within the first month a Sports site did a poll to find out people's reaction. Fifty per cent said they refused to watch the races on Sky.
Pro Bull Riding got screwed by the networks. Originally, full events were shown on Versus, but new licensing deals mean events are now shown on NBC, NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus,) CBS, and the PBR's own streaming online broadcast site. Often a single event will be divided up between two of these outlets, making it extremely difficult for fans to keep track of.
Tabletop Games
At the heyday of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition in the 1990s, TSR had Lorraine Williams as their CEO, who made no secret her disdain both for gamers and the people that worked under her. Among many things that caused Dungeons & 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 & 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, gave their competitors who were using the new medium to promote their products an edge, and disenchanted fans.
Lorraine Williams devoted a great deal of company resources to publishing and promoting the Buck Rogers RPG, as 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 games, with {{Baldur's 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.
Alternity was a generic RPG produced by TSR in last few years of their operations. When WOTC took over in 2000, they killed the system and cannibalized the settings into their d20 modern line so that it didn't compete against it.
Video Games
When presented with a completely reworked Conker's Quest, now titled Conker's 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 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 Xbox remake, Live and Reloaded, not only has a (smaller) warning label, but was also (and ironically) heavily censored, thereby losing much of its appeal. And the shutdown of Xbox Live for Xbox 1 screws the "Live" part of the game over.
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 is probably the source of a significant part of the resentment of Fallout fans). There was... more than a little trepidation on the part of many fans now that Bethesda is releasing Fallout 3. (Of course, giving New Vegas to Obsidian was pretty much a cause for squee, so perhaps this no longer applies.)
Arguably, after EA bought them, every Origin franchise that wasn't Ultima, and every Ultima game that wasn't Ultima Online.
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 1980s). 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 was rampant within the company.
Tramiel's motto was "Business Is War", and did he mean it...probably one of the most vicious Corrupt Corporate Executives out there.
If we're going to blame Tramiel for the Atari downturn, I think we're missing something really big here. It's not like Atari was any great bastion of humanity to its developers prior either (Activision had already split off).
Tim Schafer and Double Finethought Brutal Legend had a safe haven under EA... until they completely and intentionally advertised the game as a single player adventure game, rather than a multiplayer Real Time Strategy game, and forced Double Fine to keep quiet about it against their wishes. Tim Schafer did his best to get the word out on his own, but was essentially drowned out by EA's hype machine. Making it worse was the single player demo. When the true gameplay got out, players were divided between those who got the game fully informed by Tim Schafer, and those undergoing a massive Hype Backlash. EA was so unhappy with the game's sales (regardless of high reviews,) they refused to release a highly requested patch for the PS3 that Double Fine created, canceled the sequel, and let Tim Schafer take all the blame for the Misaimed Marketing. The move almost caused Double Fine to go out of business.
And twomore. Both had only one game too, before people started hating them. However, a poll in mid-2011 indicated that most fans wish Atari would bring back Humongous's old series.
The Sith Lords, the highly-awaited sequel to the critically acclaimed Star WarsKnights of the Old Republic, was completely screwed over courtesy of LucasArts pushing its release date to Christmas, giving Obsidian barely a SINGLE YEAR to develop the game after Bioware handed it to them. As a result, the game was heavily unfinished, suffering from unresolved plotlines to noticeable chunks of the game missing outright. While this may be chalked up to standard Executive Meddling, what happened next was what shot this into here: When Obsidian desired to release a whole patch that would, essentially, finish the game and fill in everything that was missing, LucasArtspromptly denied that notion and, therefore, only fan efforts have been able to attempt to fill in the blanks.
Sonic the Hedgehog fans will defend this to great lengths. Right before the Sonic 2006 release, SEGA had undergone a major corporate retool. SEGA’s plan was to disband the Sonic Team all together, and release Sonic games every so often with no running plot or continuity. While Sonic Team didn’t disband, thegamescontinuedtogodownhill (until November 2010), they have only very subtle continuity, are no where near as promoted as they once were, and characters have been forgotten (Rouge, Omega, Jet, Big, Espio, Charmy) or just plain cut (Wave, Storm, Eggman Nega, Chaos, Tikal) from games. Also, the Sonic Central website was not updated for over 4 years until it was gotten rid of.
Yes and no. Sonic Central has been ignored and demolished in 2011, but there are numerous other official websites to promote the games, usually now with each new game getting its own site. Furthermore Sega have been utilising its fanbase to promote the games, with some Big Name Fans now actively working for Sega to promote the games usually in the places most Sonic fans are likely to find out about the new games. The franchise as a whole is still constantly promoted, but not in the same places it used to be. Nowadays ads are more likely to be found in magazines read by 6-10 year olds, not the 15-30's who read more mature videogame magazines. Furthermore, while the consistency and lack of overarching plots has lead to several standalone games, with missing characters and less intricate (and thus debatably worse plots), the quality of the gameplay itself has improved, something most the fanbase, and critics alike have been crying out for. Sega have been promoting Sonic, just in a different way, to try and appease some of there Unpleasable Fanbase.
Sega's non Sonic I Ps have it even worse. See Golden Axe for example. Beast Rider was the last straw: poorly coded, unfaithful to the originals, and poorly marketed.
EverQuest. Oh man. They took the profits from it and created something like seven different games...which all failed. They refuse to spend any money improving EverQuest itself or advertising it. The graphics are ancient and the server and client software is a mess of code. Apparently the idea of investing in a winner to make it even better is beyond them. They are currently spending more money on a new game "EverQuest Next" (working title) instead of fixing EverQuest.
LEGO Island 2 was going to be far more than what it turned out to be. However, anybody who actually wanted quality left the game, and everybody else said "Hurry up and finish the game so we can make money." We ended up with a Contested Sequel.
Activision screwed over True Crime: Hong Kong by cancelling it right when it was nearly complete because in they're words "it just wouldn't sell enough copies" Activision's BS excuses are getting REAL old.
True Crime: HK was recently picked up by SquareEnix although the game itself will no longer be using the name "True Crime" since Square dosen't have the rights to the I.P.
Mega Man Universe was announced as a celebration of all things Mega Man... then unceremoniously cancelled about a year later.
Mega Man Legends 3 was announced in a blaze of publicity with lots of hype about how fans would be able to participate in its development. Then it got cancelled about a year later when someone remembered that the Legends series had been killed because it never had good sales and that the people who were interested in it were a Vocal Minority.
X had been implemented for UltimateMarvel vs. Capcom 3, but was removed because they didn't think fans were interested.
Mega Man finally made it into a Mascot Fighter, Street Fighter X Tekken... as the overweight loser version from the first game's horrible box art. Under the circumstances, not many people are finding the joke funny.
Square Enix's American branch seems content with giving the Dragon Quest series the shaft, with Nintendo ultimately stepping in to localize the ninth and sixth installments, not to mention DQ Monsters: Joker 2.
Though companies such as XSEED have offered to translate some of the Tales games left in Japan, Namco-Bandai (Bandai-Namco in Japan), adamantly refuses, wishing to be the only company to release games in the franchise. Seriously, it's not gonna break our hearts if another company's name appears on and in the game. And even if the games do see foreign releases, they tend not to get very good advertisement, and consequentially sell poorly.
Rayman Origins, a critically-acclaimed game that marks Rayman's return to the platforming genre, Ubisoft chose to release in the U.S. the same day as two of their more anticipated products, Assassin's Creed: Revelations and The Black Eyed Peas Experience. Guess which ones got the higher sales and larger amounts of advertising.
Western Animation
The Brothers Flub, and how. First, its debut was delayed by almost a full year. It got a Sunday timeslot when it finally began in January 1999. It was canceled after only one year (with the network all but pretending it never existed), and NEVER RERUN after that.
Hey Arnold! managed to get a similar fate to Angel (see Live Action TV), as it was also cancelled despite no apparent ratings issues, over a new show that was ultimately never picked up. In this case, the show's creator defected to Cartoon Network to create a show about Oregon settlers, which didn't exactly please Nick, who had wanted to get him to sign an exclusivity contract in exchange for making a (second) Big Damn Movie for Hey Arnold.
The Angry Beavers: In the series finale episode "Bye Bye Beavers", the plot consists of Norbert being informed that he is part of a television series that has been cancelled and that he must convince his brother that they are actually fictional cartoon characters. It had apparently violated a rule imposed by Nickelodeon, which was to never reveal the ending of a show. The episode was rejected from being aired, which ridiculed the company's practice of profiting off re-runs instead of new episodes, and the series was cancelled.
Family Guy was constantly being cancelled or moved in its early seasons, and was eventually cancelled. Cancelled twice even. No other show had ever been brought back on the same network after being cancelled twice, as doing so requires too much admission of having made an error. A cult fan following developed through [adult swim]'s reruns and the combination of ratings and phenomenal DVD sales convinced the Fox executives to revive the show, and ironically nowadays it's Adored by the Network.
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 running gags 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.
Not anymore. They ditched the rights, along with those for Mission Hill and Baby Blues. That means that, other than the DVDs or whatever you can scrounge up on the internet, Clerks is gone for good.
Danny Phantom's third season, at least in the US. The "premiere" (actually a mid-season episode that had several episodes to episodes that occurred earlier in the season but weren't aired yet, confusing viewers) had a fair amount of publicity. Then it was on hiatus for a lengthy period of time (meanwhile, other countries had it airing) and then they went through the remaining episodes extremely quickly over the summer.
In the UK, the third season wasn't advertised at all (save for the series finale "Phantom Planet"), and was hastily and quietly aired early in the morning only once, before being shunted off the schedule like it'd never been there.
The Fairly OddParents: After years of being Adored by the Network, it seems that Nickelodeon has forgotten that this show exists; example, in 2010, there were very, very few new episodes shown, at least in the United States. Then, there was supposed to be a year long celebration of the the show starting in March. Nothing of the sort has happened and a number of shows from the seventh season have yet to be aired. The show is now rarely promoted while T.U.F.F. Puppy is; obviously showing where the networks priority is now.
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 airs any current series before 8:00 PM?
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 (but were probably 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 four new movies (16 episodes when chopped up) to be made.
The writers then proceeded to make fun of it by stating in the beginning of Bender's Big Score how "Box" had cancelled the crew's delivery service, but 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 whom was being shoved down the Professor's pants so his crotch felt comfortable). Then they constantly used said powder in some of the rudest ways possible.
Futurama was majorly screwed in other ways too. The DVDs sold more than Family Guy's, fan push was apparently larger, the ratings on Adult Swim were better, but Family Guy was the one that came back first. Also, Adult Swim even offered to fund new episodes and were told no. THEN the network got screwed over when the show they helped try to bring back was ripped away from them and given to another network...
Futurama lampshaded Network Screwing in general in a recent episode where Matt Groening unveiled Futurella. Opening music starts, title appears, CANCELLED. Then he comments on how the process has been streamlined.
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 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 DVDs... 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 Season 3 was aired only once. It didn't even get a repeat...well ok, it did. In November 2009. Three and a half years later. And it was pulled from the schedule after five episodes.
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.
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.
It wasn't too difficult since even the creators were unenthusiastic about the show. Freakazoid was originally meant to be serious before Executive Meddling forced them to turn it into a comedy.
Executive Meddling being Steven Spielberg (though maybe not him alone, and it wasn't particularly "forced" in a harsh sense); the show changed during development. It was given to Tom Ruegger, who previously developed the Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures... there ya go.
The WB in general wasn't particularly good with handling comedy animation in its early days. Pinky and the Brain initially got a primetime run due to its adult appeal. Unfortunately, they put it at 7 on Sunday nights, up against football games and 60 Minutes, so it was doomed to get canceled from primetime, while struggling on Kids' WB! and being put through extensive Executive Meddling leading to the Elmyra fiasco and subsequent death of the show.
Megas XLR, which actually had some fairly decent ratings. 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 network-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 unceremoniously 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.
In the UK, CITV keeps airing the show for a few weeks before taking it off for a few more, then bringing it back again, and so on. They also currently won't air any episode before 214.
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, seemingly never to be released on DVD. And THEN there's the fact that the UK's Channel Five placed it in a "children's" time slot, since in Britain, only children ever watch animated shows (as did Australia's ABC). Then there's the edits it received during syndication... yeah.
MTV has finally gotten around to putting Daria out on DVD, promising a minimal amount of the syndication butchering, though they are replacing the original music from the MTV airings with covers due to the licensing costs.
Other than the aforementioned music changes, and an edited version of Is It College Yet?, there was no evidence of syndication butchering on the DVD set.
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.
Lampshaded furiously in the "Web World Wars" episode when Megabyte's Armored Binome Carriers start shooting at the Mainframe forces, whom they had fought alongside thus far against the Web invasion force: "The A.B.C.s have turned on us! Treacherous dogs!!!"
At least it aired in the US. ITV showed the first three seasons, but to this day the fourth hasn't aired in Britain.
CITV has been somewhat awful (the time Reboot was cancelled for being "too violent") at showing action cartoons without losing control of its bowels. Pokémon is the only action cartoon they didn't up and out cancel before the strand "Evolved" into its channel incarnation (Card Captors got to the second half of the Sakura Card arc before being yanked and Digimon only got three episodes of Tamers out of the gate before it suffered the same fate. Card Captors, at the very least, got to finish its run as filler for F1 Races and on GMTV)
Digimon was probably one of the most poorly handled programmes at CITV, throughout its run the series was treated with little regard, as episodes were repeated to hell, shown once and never again, or just missed altogether. With Digimon Adventure, CITV actually skipped most of the third arc and went straight into the fourth, meaning Kari and Gatomon appeared seemingly out of nowhere and Myotismon's fate went unknown (the arc was broadcast a couple of years later, albeit at a time when it wasn't really relevant anymore). Digimon Adventure 02 got even worse treatment, with the second half of the series being broadcast at a painfully slow, on-and-off rate until, three episodes from the end, CITV dropped the series and aired the first three episodes ofDigimon Tamersin its place! To add insult to injury, CITV never broadcast any more Tamers episodes (or even repeated the three they'd shown already), and never broadcast the concluding episodes of Adventure 02, which they could've shown anyway had they not decided to replace them with Tamers episodes.
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.
Most of the Jetixseries got screwed near the end of Jetix's lifetime. As Disney began to add shows to Jetix, including the various superhero animated series, these shows were pushed back to later and later hours, until they were finally removed, after Toon Disney/Jetix became Disney XD.
Even Power Rangers was removed, which being live action was ironically a better fit for Disney XD than it was for Toon Disney (more info under Live Action TV higher up this page).
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.
Well, about Italia Uno, whenever it comes to an animated series that's not The Simpsons (apparently the only cartoon that has a dignified treatment on Italian TV. If you don't care about watered down dialogues, at least)... where to begin? Maybe with South Park, that the network initially aired at midnight and a half with Mackered dialogues (the curses were changed into more childish preaches. Sometimes it was funny, but most of the time it simply sounded weird, to say the least), only to be gradually postponed without preadvice to 2 am and being totally cancelled, again without pre advert. A similar thing happened to American Dad!, initially broadcasted as filler while the new Simpsons episodes were being dubbed, then booted at midnight. And, as you can guess, it got the same treatment South Park did, postponed and cancelled (to be fair, these days the network is re-running it at 1 pm). Family Guy? It has a better sort than the above mentioned series, to the point to be broadcasted uncut. At 2.30 pm. So Italian viewers could see such infamous scenes like the collective medicine-caused throwing up and Stewie beating the crap out of Brian totally uncut just after lunch.
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 seemingly 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.
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. They 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 AmiYumi got: 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 seemed like 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. They still, however, appear on the sign in front of the Cartoon Network Store in Atlanta.
Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes. 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.
Here are linked examples of shows: Yo Yogi!, Captain N The Game Master, Super Mario World, and other popular animated shows all ended getting spoiled and later axed by NBC because they no longer considered cartoons profitable for them. They cut their budget so drastically that it affected their programs dramatically. First, Yo Yogi! and Super Mario World ended up lasting only thirteen episodes and suffered cheap animation and writing. In addition, Captain N's third season had shorter plots and also suffered poor animation and writing, and it had many key elements missing. After all this madness, NBC scrapped the block entirely one year later and drove away from the cartoon industry.
Swat Kats. In its first season it was supposedly the highest rated syndicated animated show of the year. Then it was cancelled midway through the second season because Ted Turner was pissed off that it was deservedly drawing attention away from his Anvilicious environmental Author TractCaptain Planet.
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 (though that was probably more the fault of the network airing 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.
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.
The new Wolverine and the X-Men cartoon had the first (half of its only) 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 the second half of the season! "Hey fans, wonder what the status quo will be by the end of the (half-) season you just started watching? Wonder no more!"
Now the second half has gone all the way through in Canada, and the first half 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.
With the show's cancellation, there won't be a Season 2.
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).
Talking about Chowder, in Cartoon Network Latinamerica during 2011, the show's last season got little promotion in the channel. So low, that by the time they aired the last episode it wasn't even announced, it was in a Thursday (their old 'afternoon comedy block') and what was worst? They showed the second part of the episode first, to end it EXACTLY at the end of the first half episode. They Just Didn't Care.
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. Talk about screwed. I do believe in season one, they at least put new episodes on about 8:30 - 9pm, 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. At first they seemed very proud of it, all advertisements for all their network shows ended with "On UPN: Dilbert's network". 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.
Dave the Barbarian was a fun show for kids, as well of being chock-full of Parental Bonus and picked up a quite a few non-kid fans. But since it didn't fit in with what Disney thinks are awesome shows for tweens, there were no new episodes ordered, and the timeslot for the reruns was constantly changing. It didn't take long for it to get axed.
In what could be considered a Hilarious in Hindsight moment, several years later, Disney would pick up Phineas and Ferb, which has much of the same Parental Bonus-style humor and attracts a Periphery Demographic, but instead of cancelling it, it's now in its third season, with a fourth on the way. Could they have learned their lesson?
In September 2009, predominantly kid centered channel Qubo started airing the Canadian series Class of the Titans, Being Ian, & Spliced on their network, shows which skewed a little higher than their normal target audience and lacked the educational content that seems to be a requirement to be shown on the network. Six weeks later, the shows were pulled with virtually no fanfare, replaced with more kiddie sweetness and Qubo now seems content to be its typical kid-friendly self.
Then again, Qubo is a case of "Screwed by your local cable operator"; Ion Television has offered almost anything but CEO sexual favors to cable companies to carry their Qubo and Ion Life subchannels (which are both much better in content as they're both infomercial free and don't depend on CBS's schedule from five years back like the main network does) on their cable systems, but most systems have refused, blaming both Ion's "infomercial marathon" reputation and lack of space for not carrying the channels (yet they have room for ten shopping networks?). So it's mostly a case of Ion trying to appeal to anyone to get their channels on cable.
Qubo has yet to entirely end this experiment. Beginning in Fall, 2010, they added several new shows. The Magic School Bus seems to be a fit, but other additions will include Bravestarr, Filmations Ghostbusters, She Ra Princess Of Power, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Qubo also screws several of its own shows by only carrying a very limited library of episodes. This was the case with Babar, but Qubo recently began airing the final season on weekends, much to fans' delight.
Update: as of September 2010, the latter four shows have debuted in a special block called "Night Owl" (which Qubo even acknowledges is for older viewers) which features back to back episodes of each show, airing every day from midnight to 4 a.m. It is still on, as of this writing (although it suffers from the aforementioned, "limited library" problem); also, nearly a year after being cancelled, Spliced returned to the network and airs every night at 4 a.m., after the aforementioned "Night Owl" (and late enough so kids can't watch it, which was probably why it was pulled in the first place).
They have also screwed over "Pearlie", honestly one of the coolest fairy-shows they have. Lasting only one season, it shows in reruns—on a Sunday when most kids are whining to do OTHER stuff.
Nickelodeon's KaBlam! had a lot of bad treatment. There were long gaps between new episodes, the usual "new episode" time slot was 8:00 PM on Fridays, when people usually go out. Reruns were shown during a few timeslots: Sunday at noon (where most people would be out for the day), Saturdays at 9:30 PM (which is a usual bedtime for the six-to-eleven target audience), and weekdays while the target audience was at school until 2002 when reruns stopped.
Nicktoons handled it worse. Not only did most episodes air early in the morning (Your Milage May Vary on 7:00 AM) or when kids 6-17 were in school (except for weekends, which had a good timeslot), but only 26 of all 48 episodes were aired on the channel.
Then there were episodes that only aired once. Episode 29 aired once, angering Nickelodeon, due to it being the Series Finale (until it got Un Cancelled) and Nick didn't want any of their shows to openly say that it's ending. "Just Chillin`!" aired a few times during the show's final year on the air and wasn't shown on Nicktoons (and most international markets).
Not to mention that whenever Nick does anything Nicktoons-related (with all its Nicktoons), KaBlam!'s always left out. Even the first Superstuffed Nicktoons Weekend, which featured the first episodes of each Nicktoon, was missing one. Guess which one? (HINT-IT'S NOT ZIM).
It also had very little tie-in merchandise, and what it did get was a lunchbox, a print center CD-ROM, a "making of" book, a T-shirt, a travel mug, and toys at Burger King. That was it.
As Told by Ginger got some pretty awful treatment in its final season. Season 3 only had about half the season air and even then it was at 6 am. The show did get some re-runs on Nicktoons Network, but again that was at 6 am. What little of the "High School" episodes that did air were aired months apart. It only got two DVDs (unless you count the Nick Rewind one) and only one of those had an episode from Season 3.Thanks Nick.
My Life as a Teenage Robot got a similar treatment. New Episodes Post-Cluster Prime were given little fanfare, the third season didn't even air until around November 2008 on Nicktoons at around 8AM. Current Reruns are usually at 3:00AM and 11:00AM on a school day. 8 episodes are on DVD though (albeit, each on different ones, one not even released to the public, since it was for the Emmy Nomination).
Code Lyoko used to be part of the afterschool block Miguzi before being shunted out to a midday slot, then to a slot at 6:30 AM, then being cancelled altogether. Cartoon Network didn't even show the final 6 episodes before shutting the series down (in which time the largest American CL forum, Tech Links, shut down, therefore alienating an even larger part of the fanbase). CN also inexplicably skipped an important episode in the middle of the final season, making no attempt to air it before the show's agonizing demise. In an attempt to apologize to the fans, they began reairing Season 1 and a little bit of Season 2 at 6:30 AM before finally nailing the hole in the coffin. Definitely screwed by CN.
Compounding to the Transformers entries below: apparently, any cartoon shows whose licensing franchise is Hasbro suffers from this with Cartoon Network. Strawberry Shortcake: Berry Bitty Adventures and My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, both which Cartoon Network just picked up, is going through this right now- both are placed on Boomerang, which is officially off limits to viewers in certain countries, up until they were put under extreme pressure by complaints. Then they announced that they were going to air SSC:BBA and MLP:FIM on CN in addition to Boomerang, in addition to reviving Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot and putting it on both networks as well. Happy endings for all? Nope. The twist is, they're not done with the screwing. These shows were scheduled to air in the dead morning (between 5 AM to 7 AM) and with only one episode a day with no repeats. Comparatively, the shows air at a much more reasonable time slot and with a second repeat airing on Boomerang. And adding insult to the injury, SSC:BBA and MLPL:FIM would be one whole season behind the airing on Boomerang. If Cartoon Network really hates Hasbro's guts, why the heck do they keep buying the rights to their shows?*
If you think about it and apply Insane Troll Logic, CN's reason to screw Hasbro over is very clear, and it appears that Hasbro's management are probably Genre Blind. Cartoon Network and Boomerang are owned by AOL Time Warner. AOL Time Warner also owns DC, whose toy rights are with Hasbro's rival, Mattel. Aggravating things is that Hasbro themselves currently hold the toy rights to DC's rival Marvel, which in turn is owned by AOL-Time Warner rival and former Hasbro broadcaster Disney. Why Hasbro didn't think about this themselves is beyond anyone's guess.
Alright, any good animated or kids series airing on Malaysian Free-to-Air TV is bound to suffer this, while the crappy shows always go on for season after season. Privately-owned NTV 7 and the government-owned RTM stations are the worst offenders. Examples:
Rugrats: When they moved to NTV 7 from Metro Vision (now 8TV) after a 4 year hiatus, this happened. Episodes were randomly censored (you may ask: it's a harmless kids cartoon! What could they possibly censor? Well, the infamous Zoo Story episode has all scenes containing pigs cut off among other random cuts. This coming from the very same network that airs Ally McBeal, and oh, Nickelodeon airs the episodes uncut on Pay TV). The show was cancelled by the network about 4 seasons before Nickelodeon cancelled production of the show completely.
Arthur: Did not make it past Season 4 (Though Disney Channel Asia aired it until Season 5 before screwing it over as well). In other countries the show has made it to Season 14 and is on repeats, with Season 15 officially starting in the US soon. It was on NTV 7.
Caillou - only the original 5-minute shorts were aired, 40 episodes in between were dropped and the show was quickly replaced by Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was on NTV 7.
Dragon Tales: Episodes skipped, random pre-empting of slot and did not pause the master tapes when cutting into ads, causing large amount of scenes to go missing. And they did not bother bringing in Season 2 onwards. It was on RTM 1.
Between the Lions: same reason as Dragon Tales, and halfway through airing, its slot was pre-empted for a whopping 6 months. It was on RTM 2.
Charlie And Lola: Stopped halfway through season and never mentioned again. It was on RTM 2.
Godzilla: The Series in the US had the unfortunate timing to be airing on Fox Kids during the Digimon/ Pokémon wars going on at the time. Eventually, it got to that only three episodes were never aired in the US (the last three were aired in Australia).
Transformers Cybertron. Moved from Cartoon Network to Kids' WB after a few episodes because they realized, "Why show the Merchandise Driven series only to people with cable?" This was not the bad part. This was a welcome addition to the after-school entertainment of many. But after episode 26, it was pulled back to Cartoon Network. Why? The toys advertised by the next episode's events hadn't shipped to stores yet. This outraged people because Episode 26 had been a Wham Episode with a cliffhanger ending, and several fans had to wait years to see the rest of the show. After getting yanked back, it got timeslot screwed, eventually relegated to a dead morning slot.
Hell, Cartoon Network treated all of the Transformers series they aired like crap after the first ten or so episodes. Armada and Energon, although both were heavily promoted on Toonami, were eventually relegated to the early morning death slot.
Armada actually got off lucky, despite its constantly shifting schedule (going from memory; first dozen or so episodes aired on weekday afternoons, then moved to saturday mornings, then back to weekday afternoons, then to saturday nights, then back to weekday afternoons AGAIN where it premiered its final dozen episodes.) it was always aired at a reasonable time.
The worst case of this relating to Transformers, however, has to be the tragic case of Transformers Animated. When it was in the making, it had all the makings to be a network star; the team behind Teen Titans, a great team of voice actors and writers... And it not only got an insanely low budget for animation, DESPITE Derrick J. Wyatt's designs being meant for awesome animation on the level of his previous work, but it received barely any advertising other than its premiere episodes, and was shoved to the death slot rather quickly. Despite this and the initial fandom reaction, it quickly won over many fans... But things only went further downhill. Hasbro delayed the toyline for HALF A YEAR because Wal-Mart demanded more Movie toys. The show actually finished its first two seasons by the time the toys were on shelves! By that time, a lot of kids had forgotten about it due to Cartoon Network promoting Bakugan over it, and then, the toyline had only one year until Revenge Of The Fallen reared itself. Despite this, Hasbro promised the fans that the Animated toyline would continue on through Revenge of the Fallen... But then, after the third season, CN axed the show. And things only spiraled out of control. Wal-Mart demanded Hasbro can the rest of the toys for Revenge Of The Fallen toys, and Hasbro did so, delaying anticipated toys like Arcee, Rodimus, which were relegated to being insanely hard-to-find exclusives, and outright never releasing Blackout, Wingblade Optimus, and Hydrodive Bumblebee! Even worse, there were plans for an AWESOME fourth season, and there were two toys, Hot Shot and Marauder Megatron, who never made it past the prototype stage! Then, Hasbro decided after that fiasco to start their own channel, and with a new show, Transformers Prime. However, rights issues further tangled up any possible future toys, and now Hasbroisn't releasing the toys for Transformers Primeuntil after the third movie! And, Derrick Wyatt has hinted Stuart Snyder may have disliked the series.
IDW Publishing didn't give Animated much love, either. When show-runner Marty Isenberg was brought in to write "side stories" to the Animated show in a mini-series entitled "The Arrival", very little effort was made by IDW to advertise it and distinguish it from their crappy screencap retellings of the Animated cartoon itself. To make matters worse, two of the three artists pulled for art duties on the book had a terribly poor grasp of Animated's distinctive style (Boo especially!), and the only decent one (resident Hasbro artist Marcelo Matere) drew only half an issue of the book's short run. Because of the complete lack of advertising for the title, sales were abysmal in spite of very favorable word of mouth, which lead to the scrapping of a proposed second mini-series follow-up.
It seems like this is being pulled again with G.I. Joe: Renegades, the show's being "put on Hiatus" (many interpret this as a thinly veiled way of saying cancellation) for the second live action film, many people have compared it to the treatment of Transformers Animated, except while Animated had three seasons, Renegades only got one.
Oh, and speaking of Transformers Prime? The toys aren't coming out UNTIL DECEMBER. Not to mention the fact that the Hub keeps doing repeats over and over. Fucking Goldner and his fetish for hollywood blockbusters.
American Dad! seems to have become FOX's latest punching bag. New episodes are glossed over in Sunday night previews, and it's usually blasted from the lineup entirely during rerun season to make room for another episode of Family Guy, or when FOX needs room on Sunday night to premiere yet another nuclear bomb of a live action sitcom *Cough Sons Of Tuscon Cough*. Just when fans thought things couldn't get any worse, it was officially condemned to the 7:30 slot (better known as the Futurama Death Slot) after the surprisingly successful premiere of Bob's Burgers. None of this would be so irksome, however, if it weren't for the fact that it has consistently beaten its rival The Cleveland Show in the ratings.
Considering how FOX absolutely loves screwing their best Sunday night shows (Futurama, Arrested Development, King of the Hill, as mentioned above), and this being the best show left on the line-up, I think we all know what's right around the corner...
Actually all three Seth MacFarlane shows are renewed until May 2013; AD may get cancelled but not until 2013.
Greg Weisman is easily a forerunner for having the most shows anyone's directed getting screwed by the network! He quit Gargoyles after the first episode of The Goliath Chronicles and considers everything after that non-canon, was brought in to direct the second season of WITCH and, despite giving it a major Grow The Beard overhaul, it was canceled. Despite popular opinion, though, The Spectacular Spider-Man was more Screwed by the Lawyers than this, as when the deal that Disney bought Marvel came through, Sony chose to give up the TV rights to keep the movie rights.
Yet another Cartoon Network example (seriously, we should have a whole folder for CN shows), Robotomy. Although it was slightly justified due to the show being expensive to produce, Cartoon Network constantly kicked it around by cancelling reruns and not showing many promos for it. After the last episode of the first series was screened. CN dropped the show, removed all evidence that they had ever screened it, and never even showed reruns. TOTALLY screwed by CN.
Still another CN network example, Chowder and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, despite having good ratings, and able to get a lot more out of it, episodes started airing less and less, new episodes stopped being announced, and eventually both shows were forced to air the series finale with no warning to make way for CN's new live-action block.
Sym-Bionic Titan. First, it was moved off the Friday night action block to Wednesdays at 7pm, which is an incredibly awkward timeslot. Then it was moved to Saturday mornings at 9:30am, with absolutely no advance warning. After that, it was cancelled because it wasn't selling toys, even though there no toys even made for it (rumor has it that no toy company would produce it due to a female lead in what would otherwise be a "boys'" property being considered unprofitable) and creator Genndy Tartakovsky has left Cartoon Network for Sony Pictures.
Though given that another CN property has had toys made for its female leads and villains (Young Justice) that excuse seems odd to say the least.
Sit Down, Shut Up (The U.S. series). The show received a ton of promotion and had a nice cozy timeslot sandwiched between Fox's hardhitter cartoons,The Simpsons and Family Guy. Despite this, the show received poor ratings, got largely negative reviews about the show being nothing but a Refuge In Vulgarity with little to no redeeming qualities (despite that there was nothing on the show that hasn't been seen on post-season 9 Simpsons or post-2005 cancellation Family Guy) was relocated to Fox's graveyard hour (the very timeslot that killed our beloved Futurama) and even had an episode removed from airing on Sunday due to risky content (which is ironic considering the generally risque content of their preciousFamily Guy). The show itself was eventually pulled from Sundays and announced canceled. However, the rest of the series was allowed to air on Saturdays at 12:00 AM and continued to rerun there until Spring when Comedy Central picked up the rights to the show.
In short, it is Fox's shortest lived (Not to mention their most underrated) cartoon series ever. If you thought The Critic got screwed over, wait till you see what SDSU went through.
Detention belongs here more than any other Kids' WB! show. Although the short lived Kids WB cartoon had all 13 of its episodes aired on Saturday, the first 8 episodes suffered poor ratings in its 10:30 AM timeslot. So it aired the rest of its episodes on 11:30 AM where the ratings did not improve and the show was eventually canceled. It was, however, relocated to the Kids WB's Toonami block until another episode of Pokémon took its place. Unlike most of its fellow Kid's WB shows, however, Cartoon Network reruns were out the question.
In Poland The Buzz on Maggie aired on Disney Channel from December 2006 to early February 2007 on weekends at 02:25 PM (or 14:25 in 24-hour clock notation). After that it was replaced by The Emperor's New School. I think, that Disney Channel Poland still refuses to put The Buzz on Maggie again in schedule (as of May 2011).
Making Fiends, the webtoon turned Nicktoon, was promoted to air in 2007 on Nickelodeon's main channel. It ended up getting premiered a year later and was shifted to Nicktoons Network last minute. Despite being the highest rated original program on Nicktoons Network, it has only six episodes that have been rerunning on occasional Saturdays for the past years.
Fans are worrying that Young Justice is turning into this. The next episode was set to premiere June 3rd, but the network still kept it on hiatus for yet another month. It finally aired on June 17th. There was no new episode on the 24th though.
Though CN jumped the gun in the first place by airing the pilot episode with only a handful of episodes completed. At least part of the delay has been to give the creative team a chance to catch up.
The first hiatus ended up being six months long, after only 9 episodes aired. During this hiatus, the show was renewed for a 20 episode second season and won an Emmy for character design. After airing episodes 10-17, the show is on another two month (so far...) hiatus. Despite production beginning on the second season and it set to premiere with the new DC Nation block in March, fans are still on edge and biting their nails because a) it's Greg Weisman, b) it's Cartoon Network, and c) it's a comic book adaptation, all of which have notable representation on this page. Still, given the fact that the show won an Emmy and was renewed with only 9 episodes aired, surely it won't hurt that it's taking them nearly a year to air a 26 episode season, right...?
Invader Zim was cancelled from Nickelodeon quite quickly due to the network executives receiving many complaints that it was too scary for children. And also, the Friday Night Death Slot.
It was more complicated than that. The show did recieve a following among the teen and college aged crowds, but it didn't get many viewers in the younger age demographic like Viacom was hoping for. Instead of doing the smart thing and moving it to their time slot that WAS dedicated for older viewers, they used the techniques most commonly used by networks when they want to screw over shows. Combined with the show's high production values, it didn't take long for the ratings to getr low enough to justify cancellation. However, due to good merchandise and DVD sales along with high ratings on the reruns, the network is considering reviving the show.
The short-lived Disney cartoon Nightmare Ned suffered the same fate, but unlike Zim, it never got any DVD releases.
At least Recess was aired on the channel for a while. Which brings us to...
Recess has a mild case of this. While the show was Adored by the Network during its ABC run (and partially on Disney Channel and Toon Disney among the finished shows being re-ran), the sixth season fell under this trope. Recess: School's Out was supposed to end the series...however, due to the sixty-five episode limit that Disney has on their shows, it lasted only a few episodes and were critisized by fans to be Anvilicious (the show had An Aesop in a few (but not every) episodes, and moreso in the early ones, but never to this level). The treatment got better, at least until the timeslot for the reruns became more unreasonable.
Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, in their final season. Cartoon Network damned it to a half-day marathon, then played the final episodes late at night, with the Mask movie following it.
Stroker & Hoop! A second season (Including a series premiere that would have wrapped up the cliff hanger) was planned thanks to good ratings, but Adult Swim thought the show was far too pricey and , as a result, it was canned (Although the aborted cliff hanger resolution was written on the internet).
Stroker isn't the only [AS] example. Lucy, The Daughter of the Devil's second season was canned after going through a two year development hell. A half hour second season was planned along with a new pilot, but both of which were scrapped due to Loren Bouchard and the network having creative disagreements about the show (Although a DVD was released for their shop).
Korgoth of Barbaria and That Crook'd 'Sipp are pilot examples. Korgoth Season 1 was planned due to the pilot being the most successful pilot on [AS], but it was aborted due to lack of funds that the higher ups refused to provide. That Crook'd 'Sipp was to receive 6 additional episodes, but instead it was trapped in limbo until 2009 when it was announced that Freaknik: The Musical would be created instead.
Cartoon Network strikes again with both of the Totally Spies! series. The fifth season original series was held over from the US for several months. Things started to look up when the Spiritual Successor series was ordered....which CN proceeded to pull from the network just after it had started.
Spliced has been plowed through rather quickly, with the first handful of episodes debuting in the U.S. in late 2009 before the official May debut in its native Canada. About half of the 26 episodes so far haven't even aired in Canada at all, and the episodes ended abruptly in December 2010 with absolutely no announcement either way on the show's future.
Biggest reason,,BIRDZ aired on CBS saturday morning at eleven o'clock, after a two hour (adult)news block.. this was complete suicide.. of course there was no audience. ( the adult audience turned off CBS after the news was over)... the kids that may have been watching this network earlier in the day changed the channel already to disney or wb.. no brainer there!.. the show was totally original and had no pre-sold materials, such as books ( no huge publisher behind the show to push for a better time slot)or toys ( no monster merchandiser to persuade the producer to think twice) or movies..
Blazing Dragons, a British animated show that portrayed the knights of King Arthur's Court as a bunch of incompetent dragons, was aired on Disney for a while, but was dropped in a time slot that was so late at night/early in the morning that it was rarely seen before being quietly scuttled away.
Like Fish Hooks? Then you'll hate the Family Channel here in Canada, the Expy of Disney Channel. The show premeired to similar hype as the American release, and advertising. However, come summer, and the show loses its promotion. Right now in fall, the show is non existent on the main website, and the show airs only Weekends at 8:30AM. (If you live in Vancouver and watch the HD version, it's 5:30 AM.)
Virtually every non-Fox animated sitcom such as Father of the Pride, Dilbert, and The Goode Family. Seriously, try to find one that's lasted more than a season.
Does the Nickelodeon Winx Club count? They aired the first episode 5 times, and it never was seen again until a few months later, just like the Stitch! example in Anime and Manga.
Not too long ago, they showed the first three specials at 6 in the morning on school days, but did not air the fourth. And now, they are going to be showing an episode of season 3 every weekday at 3:00 starting November 14th (a Monday). You know, when most kids would be just getting out of school!
Cookie Jar Entertainment is seemingly screwing over its own CBS block by breaking actual promises (like offering original live-action programming) and offering multiple showings of the same shows each week.
