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Screwed By The Network / Western Animation

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Due to the inherently high costs of animation and many executives often viewing animation as being "lesser" and more "expendable" than live-action media (especially if it isn't Merchandise-Driven and aimed at kids), cartoons are amongst the most prone to this from networks and studios, and not even highly successful shows are safe from being screwed over for whatever reason. Whether it's because the Animation Age Ghetto kicked in, the show became too costly to maintain, the merchandise wasn't making enough money (if it had The Merch at all), or some other reason, there is no shortage of promising cartoons that got Screwed by the Network.

The following networks have their own pages.

ABC is split in two, due to its ownership by Disney. Prime-time SBTN events have their own page. Everything else is on the Disney page linked above.

    open/close all folders 

    CBS 
  • In 1998, CBS had a block of Saturday Morning cartoons, CBS This Morning for two hours, then another two-hour cartoon block led off by Birdz. Creator Larry Jacobs wrote on the IMDb that his show got canceled because of its terrible time slot. Complicating the situation, in some markets, it was actually seen much earlier, for example, WLNS in Lansing, Michigan aired the show at 7:00 AM. Ouch. Replacing Birdz was a cartoon based on Fisher-Price's Rescue Heroes toys.
  • The history of Cookie Jar TV is rife with this, thanks to CBS's increasing apathy:
    • It premiered in 2006 as KOL Secret Slumber Party after America Online's children platform and DiC Entertainment's in-house girl group The Slumber Party Girls; prior to this, the block was a rerun dumping ground for Nick Jr. shows. Once CBS split from Nick's parent company Viacom, they would just wait for the rights to lapse. While the group breaking up after just one year and a single albumnote is obviously not CBS's fault, the network still shot itself in the foot by failing to actively promote it, instead having DiC do all the heavy lifting. Additionally, it wasn't acknowledged that America Online was at the time a subsidiary of TimeWarner-with whom CBS had just formed The CW that same year giving them a stake in Kids' WB! in addition to KOLSSP. Instead of invoking their stock and demanding for DiC and Warner Bros. to jointly program/market their respective blocks as a single brand, they let both companies do their own thing: Kids' WB stuck with a boy-centric block, which they'd been very successful with in the past, while DiC ran with a girl-centric block that was mainly focused on fulfilling the E/I requirements. CBS ended up being largely uninvolved with either block. The result: A Saturday morning joint venture that was actively fighting with itself, each side refusing to even recognize the other. While Time Warner must share much of the blame for failing to invoke the corporate synergy that might've let it stand a chance (which was sadly par for the course for the company prior to its sale to AT&T), it was ultimately CBS refusing to pull ranknote  that enabled this disaster in the first place. In the end, KOL pulled out of the block after a season, as its ratings cratered compared to the aforementioned Nick Jr. reruns. The block relaunched the following year with a new branding partnership with now-defunct teen magazine KEWL (which DiC had a stake in), becoming KEWLopolis.
    • And when Cookie Jar Entertainment bought DiC in 2008, the latter company's cartoons including Strawberry Shortcake got the short stick. While most of the shows have already ended production and fully aired at least once when KEWLopolis got rebranded as Cookie Jar TV, Strawberry Shortcake had just finished airing its third season and was about to air season 4, the final season, when it got the boot. Adding to the complication was the four-way lawsuit between American Greetings, DiC, Cookie Jar, and Moonscoop over the franchise' ownership. Luckily though, the DVD releases did not stop — and it became the only way Americans could watch the fourth season, which only wrapped up in 2012, 5 years after the Grand Finale aired in Europe.
  • Two years of production issues and delays, along with the failure of Fish Police during that time, killed CBS's interest in Family Dog. By the time it was finally ready to air, they ran it on Wednesdays opposite Unsolved Mysteries reruns in the little-watched summer months. Five weeks and ten episodes later, and it was off the air for good.
  • CBS screwed over its cartoon lineup in 1994 with budget cuts, so it could have a live-action line-up to compete with TNBC. It was really bad in the case of Garfield and Friends which was still going strong in the ratings after seven seasons, the show's creators decided to end the show rather then letting it suffer from budget cutbacks, especially since the strong ratings of its syndicated reruns made pushing forward new episodes under a reduced budget seem like an unnecessary hassle. These budgetary cuts were spoofed in "The Discount of Monte Cristo", one of the segments aired on the show that season. For unknown reasons the planned live-action block never materialized, with a revamped cartoon block taking over. In a bit of irony, the show that replaced Garfield and Friends in its time slot, according to producer Mark Evanier, "cost about a third of what our show cost them and got about a third of the ratings".
  • All shows fell prey to this on CBS when their Saturday morning block was Nickelodeon themed.
    • As Told by Ginger and Pelswick, both of whom were part of the inaugural line-up, were subject to being pre-empted by the channel’s NFL coverage. Pelswick lasted two months on the block before being replaced with a second Hey Arnold! episode. When the football season ended on February 1, 2003, Nick on CBS (the name of the network’s Saturday morning children’s block at the time) removed the second Hey Arnold! and Ginger in favor of Rugrats and ChalkZone as part of a schedule overhaul.
    • Rugrats itself only lasted five months on the block, thanks to so much misfortune being flung at it: to begin with, its default timeslot was 7AM, when its target audience was still asleep. Second, its initial CBS broadcast on February 1, 2003 was preempted 15 minutes in on the East Coast for breaking news coverage on the breakup of Space Shuttle Columbia, pushing its full nationwide debut back a week. Third, not all stations aired Rugrats at the 7AM timeslot, for instance, San Francisco owned-and-operated station KPIX aired it in the afternoon at 3:30PM, while KIRO in Seattle aired it at 5AM on Sunday mornings, when absolutely no one would be awake. In certain markets, CBS' Rugrats airings had to compete directly with Nickelodeon's Rugrats airings, one of these markets was Buffalo, New York, where WIVB aired the show at 8AM, the same time as the Nickelodeon broadcast. Finally, CBS only aired the same few Rugrats episodes, consisting of seven regular-rotation episodesnote  and four seasonal-broadcast episodesnote .
    • Additionally, due to the tenuous nature regarding the E/I-compliant content within them, some of the older-skewing Nickelodeon shows on the block were frequently preempted by certain CBS affiliates (for example, WUSA 9 in Washington D.C. refused to air All Grown Up! and The Brothers García during their runs on Nick on CBS, despite them still being advertised within the block’s promos) in favor of broadcasting more educational programming syndicated from other studios.
  • Project G.e.e.K.e.R. did well in the ratings, but cancellation came because it had the misfortune of airing right before the FCC's new Edutainment Show rules came into effect. CBS tried to pass the show around as an E/I program, but the FCC declined to classify it as such, resulting in CBS not renewing the series for a second season.
  • Rescue Heroes received no advertising whatsoever, and aired right after what was now The Early Show on the 11:00 AM time slot. Combine the two together, and you have confused-as-hell kids wondering when the show was going to air, and wondering if the episode was new or not. And just like its time-slot predecessor, it also faced early airings in some markets, this was exactly what WWJ in Detroit (an owned-and-operated station!) did, airing the show at 8:00 AM. Needless to say, CBS killed the series among others when their contract with Nelvana expired. While the show was later renewed for a second season prior to cancellation, it would take over a year for The WB to take notice and save it.
  • According to Rugrats fansite Rugrats Online, Santo Bugito spent much of its only season being shuffled around the CBS Saturday morning schedule, when affiliates didn't preempt it for sports, making it hard for audiences to catch it.
  • Timon & Pumbaa got the ax after two seasons on CBS, not because of ratings issues or anything, but because Disney bought ABC by the time the second season started airing. Not helping matters was that the two seasons were split into "mini-seasons" of sorts, with one episode per week on Disney's syndicated weekday block The Disney Afternoon, and another for CBS on Saturdays.note  A third season, produced two years after the show left CBS and considerably longer, was only made due to the show's popularity overseas, being dumped to Toon Disney in the US for most of 1999 with virtually no promotion.

    Comedy Central 
  • The syndicated version of BoJack Horseman started off with a decent amount of on-air advertising (though the show was advertised primarily as a comedy, obscuring the darker aspects that made the show popular), one premiere a week at 10:30PM following new episodes of South Park, and one rerun late at night. The episodes were Edited for Syndication, which resulted in some dialogue being cut out, as well as the theme song. By the second and third seasons, however (which premiered the following spring), network premieres had been pushed past midnight. This may be justified as most Netflix viewers had already binge-watched the show to that point a couple years prior, but for non-subscribers who'd never seen the show before, it made the acquisition practically pointless. By the next year, BoJack wasn't even included on Comedy Central's "Destination Animation" block with their other syndicated programs, with reruns being practically nonexistent.
  • The network abruptly stopped airing Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist in July, 1999. On Christmas Eve of that year, the network ran a marathon of 9 new episodes, which then never aired in the US again. Three final episodes were finally aired two years later on February 13, 2002. For many, these last 12 episodes, which represents 2/3rds of the series' sixth and final season, went unseen until the complete series was eventually released on DVD in 2007.
  • Comedy Central's broadcast schedule for season three of Drawn Together was quite erratic. When new episodes were not being screened, the show would often be off the schedule for months. Many viewers assumed the show was canceled long before it actually was.
  • Many of their recent shows such as Jeff & Some Aliens and Moonbeam City became screwed by the network because they weren't doing well either critically or commercially, which is why they were both canned after their first seasons, or in the case of Legends of Chamberlain Heights and TripTank, two seasons.
  • King of the Hill's treatment on Comedy Central was horrific compared to how FX and [adult swim] treated the show when both networks had the rights to the show. Comedy Central frequently put reruns of the show either on the mornings or the really late hours of the night. The network gave up the rights to the show a year later and instead chose fellow failed Fox cartoon The Cleveland Show to be a permanent part of the schedule, despite that show having far less episodes and way less acclaim than King of the Hill ever had, and no other network bothered picking up the cable rights to the show until the show's new corporate owners at Disney decided to air the series on one of their own channels. As a result of this, FXX began airing the series on September 20, 2021, and so far, the series has been given much better treatment on that channel. Adult Swim was able to reacquire a portion of the show's cable rights, leading to the series' return to AS in November 2021.

    Corus Networks (YTV and Teletoon) 
  • The Fairly OddParents! caught a case of this on YTV in Summer 2016. Unlike Nick, which shuffled reruns over to Nicktoons, YTV still aired the show... at 5 in the morning.
  • ANY Marvel show from Disney XD that airs on Teletoon may qualify. Those looking forward to Guardians of the Galaxy enjoyed being able to watch new episodes on Disney XD Canada day-and-date with the American channel. Meanwhile, season four of Ultimate Spider-Man debuted on Teletoon seven months after its U.S premiere, while season three of Avengers Assemble premiered in November. While this is common for international broadcasts, what really makes this jarring is the fact that Corus Entertainment owns both channels.
  • Oggy and the Cockroaches aired on YTV for two years in one timeslot. While the later seasons made a brief return on Nickelodeon in the US (only to be quickly pulled due to controversy) anything past season 1 remains unaired in Canada.
  • My Life Me is infamous for having many detractors, but there may have been more bitterness coming from Teletoon's part over this show, given the fact that it was delayed for over a year, and then given only a short run when kids were in school, and in some nondescript Saturday afternoon time slot. Every episode was burned off in one month, and the show was swiftly removed from the schedule in short time afterwards.
    • Consider Metajets, which was given a rare early morning repeat on Teletoon and Cartoon Network Canada, whereas My Life Me didn't return to the schedule until 2017, where it aired in a post-Teletoon at Night timeslot.
  • Pirate Express was only on the air for a single week in April 2015, in which Teletoon dumped the entire series in episode blocks aired in the middle of the day, and they haven't aired it again since.
    • The same thing happened to several episodes of Endangered Species, and the second season of Oh No! It's An Alien Invasion, after its Channel Hop from YTV; dumping multiple episodes of both shows in the afternoon. While Teletoon kept Endangered Species on the schedule, neither the dumped episodes nor Oh No! have aired again since.
    • Freaktown suffered the same fate. After airing the show on Mondays during the Summer of 2016, Teletoon suddenly aired multiple episodes of the show on the last Saturday of August before going on hiatus. The rest of the show's only season was dumped onto Saturday afternoons in October 2016, appropriately enough, with the last episodes being aired on a lone Sunday afternoon.
  • An entire network was screwed over in Fall 2015, when Teletoon Retro was shut down to make room for the newly launched Disney Channel and its siblings, as well as increase distribution for Cartoon Network and [adult swim]. However, as a result, Teletoon returned to airing classic cartoons and introduced modern versions of classics (like Wabbit: A Looney Tunes Production, Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!, and ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks). Plus, Teletoon at Night was pushed back to a shorter runtime on Mondays-Thursdays, allowing Teletoon to air more action cartoons, some of which (like Beware the Batman and Green Lantern: The Animated Series) have previously been screwed over. Though they ended up screwing over Teen Titans Go!, Teletoon would bring back the original Teen Titans animated series in reruns, so at least something good came out of it.
    • As part of the Fall 2015 switch, Corus Entertainment (Teletoon's parent company) moved all of Cartoon Network and [adult swim]'s shows over to their recently expanded Canadian counterparts. However, for some reason, reruns for Cartoon Cartoons and other contemporary shows from CN were removed from Cartoon Network Canada's schedule for a whole year. note  Instead, Corus used the channel to burnoff recent Teletoon programming (to fulfill CanCon requirements). Even worse, for months after the switch, the channel never aired one single episode of Adventure Time nor Regular Show.
    • Another downside to the switch was that, while Cartoon Network now has wider carriage, it was still a higher-tier network on some providers. This means that if CN wasn't in their current package, subscribers would have to pay extra. Plus, whereas [adult swim] launched their own (now-defunct) SVOD app in Canada to allow Canadian fans to legally watch their original programming, including shows that weren't being aired on the Canadian version or Teletoon at Night note , Cartoon Network programming couldn't be streamed anywhere. Perhaps realizing this, Corus would slowly phase Cartoon Network programming back to Teletoon over the next year.
    • The seventh season of Archer was originally planned to air on [adult swim]. But because Archer was the only major show Teletoon at Night had left, it was decided at the last minute the show would remain on Teletoon at Night.
    • While all of the other Cartoon Network shows aired on Teletoon were treated well by the channel. Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones? was screwed HARD by Teletoon. Not only was it only on the channel for a month (shortest amount of time any Cartoon Network show aired on Teletoon) its timeslot was at 7AM on weekends, where almost no kid would be awake to see it.
  • The Secret Files of The Spy Dogs only aired on YTV at 7:30 AM on weekends, a time where hardly any kids would be awake to see it.
  • Growing Up Creepie only aired on YTV in an early morning timeslot on Sundays (since they wanted to focus more on Nickelodeon shows on Sundays) and only for a few months. As such, most of the series was unaired in Canada.
  • After giving it decent timeslots on Sunday mornings and weekday afternoons in The Zone, YTV gave one heck of a goodbye to ChalkZone when they aired the final episodes in the fall of 2007, the show was aired 12:00 weekday afternoons-a time where the show's target audience would be in school.

    The CW 

    Discovery Kids/The Hub/Discovery Family 
The problem with shows failing or being screwed on The Hub and Discovery Family is so prevalent it's much easier to list the exceptions. Let's generally say that anything that wasn't My Little Pony or even closely related to it was sure to have a pretty short shelf life one way or another on either network. Transformers: Prime was shown sparingly on the network after its finale, Littlest Pet Shop was only able to last for four seasons, and Friendship is Magic had a robust run but couldn't carry it forever, finally calling it a wrap after nine seasons.
  • After the second relaunch, it was revealed that Care Bears: Welcome to Care-a-Lot had been put on the chopping board despite decent ratings, possibly because Hasbro has lost the master license rights to Just Play, most likely for mistreating the license (they obtained the rights to the franchise along with Strawberry Shortcake in late 2008, but didn't have a show until 2012, and toys only appeared in late 2013, and even then it was only distributed in the US, Europe and the Pacific, despite Hasbro having a worldwide presence). The show was rescued by Netflix however, who commissioned the Sequel Series Care Bears & Cousins, as well as acquiring the repeat rights to the show.
  • Dan Vs., despite high ratings, just stopped after 13 episodes in season 3. It was stated there would be a season 4 later in 2013, but Dan's VA, Curtis Armstrong, later confirmed otherwise on Facebook.
    • On October 6, 2014, just a week before The Hub would become Discovery Family, the network stopped airing it entirely, took it off their website, and its single spot on early weekday mornings was replaced with a second episode of The Super Hero Squad Show. Starz Media would later put up every episode of the show on YouTube before taking them down a few months later, and as of 2017 only season 1 is available on DVD (though they are all available on iTunes, Google Play, and Prime Video).
  • Dennis and Gnasher was given a decent treatment at first, but later on it was then pushed to awkard hours and was given little to no advertising and was eventually taken off American air-waves completely by October 6, 2013. In fact it was screwed over so badly, many people don't even remember it airing on the channel at all, even people who watched it religiously back then.
  • Reruns of Jem were taken off the schedule, thanks in no small part to its film adaptation tanking; its time slot was handed over to Transformers Prime. The only silver lining was that its 2015 comic book adaptation did well.
  • Kaijudo, after having been previously swept under the rug, only lasted for one particular weekend before it was taken off the schedule after the relaunch, a fate it shared with G.I. Joe: Renegades at the same time (the latter would later get an hour-long spot on weekday mornings before being replaced with the original G.I. Joe series).
  • Littlest Pet Shop (2012) proved to be a viable counterpart to My Little Pony and initially ran for a solid three seasons, but the fourth season ended up being the last because of its toyline not doing well enough. The franchise would then be rebooted with Littlest Pet Shop: A World of Our Own, which didn't fare much better and only lasted three seasons in total.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Believe it or not, the show was hardly the poster child for Discovery Family (then known as Hub Network) during its first season; the show aired on Fridays when most of its target demographic was in school and was barely advertised, with Transformers Prime getting plenty of attention (and inexplicable logo bugs counting down to its next airing). This all changed shortly after the first season finale, when Discovery Family's schedule changed and MLP moved to a much better timeslot, only gathering more air time from there and a steady stream of advertising.
    • After four seasons of successful ratings, the fifth season is said to have fallen to this territory, though fans have contested this designation. There was a hiatus from season four to season five that lasted a full year, despite a relatively strong advertising campaign. By that time, the network was relaunched from The Hub to Discovery Family (which may have played a role in the hiatus). Later episodes were very rarely promoted on the channel, aside from episode clips posted online. Despite this, the season 5 premiere promo ran nonstop every time a new episode was broadcast, weeks after the premiere originally aired. The seventh episode, which aired after a week-long hiatus to show My Little Pony: The Movie (1986), ended up posting the what was then the lowest ratings ever for the seriesnote . After the eighth episode it took a three week hiatus before the show's 100th episode was shown, after which ratings again took a hitnote . Ratings did start to stabilize after that, but then the season finale beat out the seventh and tenth episodes of season five as the lowest ratings ever for the series, which is incredibly unusual for past season finales in general (though some can also blame the fact that it aired on a Thanksgiving weekend).
    • Adding salt to the fans' wounds, the popular episode streaming website CinemaQuestria was struck with the legal hammer following the release of the seventh episode's ratings, and later on Hasbro began taking down episodes off Dailymotion.
    • In July of 2015 it was announced that season 6 would be starting before the end of the year. This turned out to be a mistake: season 5 was being split in two with the second half airing at the end of the year. Reaction from the fanbase has been predictably negative, though it's unclear if this situation is more the fault of Discovery or Hasbro. Fortunately, unlike season 5, Discovery Family began promoting season 6's premiere weeks before it aired. Later seasons of the show went through mid-season hiatuses every summer.
    • When Baby Looney Tunes and The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries premiered in May 2023, the My Little Pony franchise's broadcast time on weekends was reduced to 90 minutes per day. Ironically, this did not prevent the network from airing Equestria Girls movies or Rainbow Roadtrip, thus resulting in the show sometimes not airing at all in one day.
  • My Little Pony: Pony Life was doomed to fail. Its American release date was postponed by five months; shortly after it premiered in 2020 on Discovery Family, it quietly faded into the background and ended after its second season.
  • Secret Millionaires Club had sporadic airings, with the episodes being aired as much as months apart on a seemingly random basis, despite advertisements saying new episodes every Saturday. The series didn't finish its run by the time the relaunch happened, with only 22 out of 26 episode having aired. The final four episodes wouldn't see the light of day until Qubo picked up the series two years later, with the remaining episodes airing in 2017.
  • SheZow got screwed pretty badly by The Hub: it had limited airings during its initial run, then after it was dropped from the schedule entirely in April 2014, it later came back airing only on Sundays as reruns. It later found a place at 9:30 AM EST on weekdays, thankfully around June so the problem of its target audience not being able to watch it was mostly circumvented, with reruns of Teenage Fairytale Dropouts taking its spot on Sundays, then in July it lost that spot too and was pushed to a 4:00 AM EDT graveyard slot on weekends.
    • Made even worse by the fact that a second season was commissioned by The Hub in October of 2013, before they reversed the decision only a month later. The network dropped the show in October of 2014, and the slot it had left was replaced with reruns of Kaijudo. Though not renewed, it was later brought back in an early morning slot on Sundays in November 2015, where it stayed until a few months into 2016.
  • Despite airing no new Hasbro-owned programs after Pony Life, Discovery Family is still refusing to sell its distribution rights of older programming from Hasbro. Their current contract with the company is not scheduled to expire until March 31, 2025. This has resulted in all of Hasbro's shows (except Pony Life) to be the oldest programming still airing on the channel as of 2023.

    MTV 
  • The MTV/Warner Bros. co-production 3 South fared no better than the other college-themed Undergrads, as it was given no advertising for the network, hence why it suffered from such low-ratings and was eventually canceled after one season.
  • The Canadian co-productions Clone High and Undergrads both were canceled after only a few of their 13 episodes aired in the U.S., the former receiving complaints from Indian citizens about the depiction of Gandhi. Only eight episodes have aired in the United States. Both series were minor cult hits in Canada as Teletoon frequently aired the shows on their now-defunct late-night block in order to fulfill Canadian content laws, with an Undergrads movie being in the works after a successful crowdfunding project and Clone High was revived in 2020 by MTV Studios, premiering on Max three years later.
  • 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 (save for the releases of the TV movies Is It Fall Yet? and Is It College Yet?). It was rerun on the teen channel The N, but nearly all the episodes were edited for content or banned. It wouldn't be until many years (and many hours of trying to edit out the music due to copyright/licensing issues that were preventing the series from getting released in the first place) later that Daria would get the DVD release it deserved.
  • Downtown received rave reviews and was nominated for an Emmy in 2000, but its last episode aired in November 1999 after frequent time slot changes and subsequent iffy ratings. MTV's dicking around annoyed co-creator George Krstic to the point that he stuck a bunch of thinly veiled Take Thats to MTV in a later series he co-created, Megas XLR.
  • In late 2011, MTV started to redeem themselves with Good Vibes and brand-new episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head. It didn't last for long though, as of 2012, both of them were taken off the air so MTV could make room for more reality shows. Good Vibes was on Thursdays, but it was aired at a time in which most people would be away from home or possibly asleep. All episodes of the latter from the second episode onwards were aired Out of Order rather than in chronological order.
  • Spider-Man: The New Animated Series saw a good chunk of the episodes for its only season burned through by MTV debuting two episodes on the same night for weeks in addition to little promotion by MTV.

    NBC/Universal/NBCUniversal/Sprout 
  • During the final three years of NBC's orignal Saturday morning block, all of its programming outside of Saved by the Bell suffered constant Executive Meddling. First, NBC canceled The Smurfs (1981), at one time considered NBC's staple animated program, and gave it the rerun treatment for a year while struggling to headline newer shows, like Captain N: The Game Master and the Animated Adaptation of The Karate Kid, the latter of which was promptly axed due to low ratings. Both shows had to rely on word-of-mouth as NBC chose to spend their resources headlining Saved by the Bell. Then, a year later, Kissyfurnote  was axed and its time slot replaced by NBA Inside Stuff, a recap program of NBA basketball gamesnote . At the same time, NBC exhausted more advertising revenue toward Saved by the Bell, causing drastic budget cuts for cartoons airing on the block. Potential viewers would either move to other blocks, such as newcomer Fox Kids, or watch Nickelodeon instead. Then, in the block's final year, Captain N was shortened from an hour to a half-hour, and both Alvin and the Chipmunks and the obscure Gravedale High were canceled in favor of new shows like ProStars and Yo Yogi!, both of which were critically panned and proved to be the final straw. As a result of the persistent ratings failures and continued pressure within the children's television market, NBC ordered all Saturday morning programs canceled, save for only Saved by the Bell since it was the most successful show of the block. They continued airing reruns of the shows until August 1st, 1992, when a teen-oriented live-action block named TNBC and a Saturday morning edition of Today took its place. Saved by the Bell and NBA Inside Stuff were the only programs to survive the transition. NBC's decision to drop their Saturday-Morning Cartoon block is widely viewed as the beginning of the end for the format.
  • When NBCUniversal's parent company, Comcast, purchased DreamWorks Animation, they received ownership of the children's-oriented DreamWorks Channel in Southeast Asia, resulting in a shift to airing more mainstream family programming and animated films. The fixed daylight hours time slot for preschooler programs was broken up and made completely random and unintelligible (with most of the preschool shows scheduled for past midnight, and only small chunks between 9-11 AM and 2-4 PM weekdays), with daytime slots dedicated to shows that they think will be popular, like Noddy: Toyland Detective. Slice of Life fans are not pleased with this change.
  • God, the Devil and Bob received rather favorable reviews and had quality comparable to Fox's animated sitcoms like The Simpsons and Futurama. Sadly, NBC canceled it after only four episodes due to a combination of lackluster ratings and pressure from Christian conservative groups, who saw it as mocking Christianity. The network, who reportedly never liked the series, used the controversy as a convenient excuse to kill off the series. The remaining nine produced episodes were doled out to [adult swim], eleven years later.
  • They somehow managed to screw up a partnership with Hallmark, causing the shuttering of Hallmark Channel Asia. Back in the early 2000s, Hallmark and NBCUniversal had a joint-venture and they carried a whole lot of PBS Kids programming as part of the "Hallmark Kids" block on the channel, including Caillou. While a lot of the programming managed to find new homes in Asia upon the channel shuttering (notably, most went to Playhouse Disney Asia when that channel was launched), Caillou couldn't find a new network and thus has not aired in the region since, although one could stream Caillou on-demand since 2017, when DHX via the WildBrain subsidiary made the streaming app available in the region. The shuttering also had a proactive reaction in the region, as many Hallmark holiday animated specials produced since are not screened in the region simply because there is no outlet to screen them.
  • NBC managed to screw over an entire western animation network. Namely, KidsCo, which was a joint-venture between NBCUniversal (NBC's global arm), Nelvana and Cookie Jarnote . Shortly after DHX Media bought over Cookie Jar and made them pull out of the dealnote , NBCU pulled out as well. Instead of KidsCo, NBCU wanted to focus their efforts on Sprout back in the US, which they bought off PBS just a few weeks before. This led Nelvana to shutter the operations as they determined that it is infeasible to continue solo, due to financial issues and lack of variety in content. To rub salt on the wound, they had just moved the operations into a new high-tech broadcasting facility just months prior to the shuttering. Granted though, DHX is also a major culprit herenote , but it was NBC's withdraw from the operations which led to the final decision to shutter the channel.
  • Make Way For Noddy and Zou both got this treatment on the NBC Kids block. They aired at the very end of the block, and often got pre-empted for sports. Even worse, both shows never aired their full run of episodes.
  • PBJ, a joint venture network of Classic Media (part of DreamWorks Animation) and broadcaster Luken Communications, was aired on 19 affiliates nationwide, but cable providers found the channel to be worthless and refused to carry it. The network shut down abruptly after five years of operations due to catastrophic ratings, and any talk of the network being resurrected was silenced when NBCUniversal took over DreamWorks, taking Classic Media with them.
  • Sammy, initially being greenlit as a sister show to God, the Devil and Bob, was treated even worse. After the latter show crashed and burned, NBC had no interest in prime-time animation and kept delaying the premiere until August, gave it little advertising, and quietly gave the show the boot after only airing two of its thirteen produced episodes, with some affiliates not even bothering to air those two episodes.
  • NBC's handling of the UK/New Zealand production Stressed Eric consisted of removing nearly every trace of the show's cultural identity and turning it into a ripoff of The Simpsons. Burned off into the summer of 1998 (and banned by some NBC affiliates), it was lambasted by critics and died quickly. The second season never aired in the US.
  • Back when they had a qubo block, VeggieTales was treated this way after two seasons, despite it being the second-highest-rated show on the block after 3-2-1 Penguins! A third season of the show was planned and created, but never aired;note  NBC decided to re-run the first two seasons for the 2008-09 season instead. The show was pulled from the block a year later; coincidentally, all this happened before NBCU ended up owning both shows after snapping up DreamWorks Animation.
  • In addition to Network Decay, some already considered the Sprout channel's rebrand as Universal Kids in September of 2017 as this. Sprout remained on the new channel as a preschool programming block that aired from 3am to 6pm, taking up the majority of the channel's airtime, while Universal Kids programs the remaining hours; similar to how Cartoon Network and [adult swim] operate. note  Most Sprout viewers had already given up hope, considering NBCU's horrible tendency to screw over their networks or make changes to their programming that just makes things worse for everyone, and coming off a more extreme instance of this happening with the now defunct NickMom block on Nick Jr..
    • Case in point: the Sprout branding was retired in January 2018, yet preschool programming still dominates Universal Kids' schedule.
  • While Fifi and the Flowertots was adored by Sprout for some time, it eventually fell prey to this. Sprout only had the rights to the first two seasons; in the later years they held the rights to the show, they barely did anything to promote it other than telling viewers that it was up next.
  • Little People (Egmont): The new series apparently became the first casualty of Universal Kids, with the show vanishing off the network's schedules, mentions of the show disappearing from the website, and Fisher-Price dumping the episodes in a timed manner onto Youtube. In reality, trouble had been brewing for the show since February 2017, with the show being constantly pre-empted up until its removal immediately after the Universal Kids rebranding.
  • School of Roars had the misfortune of premiering at the exact same time Sprout re-branded. As a result, the show was shoved into an early-morning time slot to make room for the tween-oriented programming, and was pulled from the schedule by the end of the year.
  • Terrific Trucks, which also premiered around the same time as School of Roars, got poorer treatment than that show. The episodes were burned off in marathon blocks before vanishing off the schedule for repeats of Caillou, Kody Kapow and Noddy, Toyland Detective.
  • On Sprout, Yaya and Zouk was first aired with a marathon of episodes on a Saturday afternoon. After those episodes, Sprout moved it to a 6 am time slot weekday mornings, and the show got removed later.

    UPN 
  • UPN started airing Dilbert, an animated adaptation of Scott Adams's mega-hit comic strip. At first they seemed very proud of it, the series premiere was their highest rated of the season and all advertisements for all their network shows ended with "On UPN: Dilbert's network". In its' second season, Dilbert moved to Tuesdays following 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"; both series went on a temporary hiatus during the spring. The show not fitting in with UPN's then-current demographics (12-34 males and minorities) didn't help.
  • Another show affected by the Dilbert screw, by virtue of airing right after it, was Home Movies. Its original run on UPN started in a bad time to start a series, in late-April 1999 and ratings were very low. This would carry on for 4 more weeks until UPN ultimately decided to cancel it with only 5 episodes aired.

    The WB 
  • After being Adored by the Network for a couple years, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain suffered this near the end of their original runs. Jamie Kellner, who was at the helm of The WB at the time (and thus Kids' WB! as well), apparently ignored the very high ratings among older audiences both shows had and used the low ratings with younger audiences to justify cancellation. The former was canceled entirely and the latter was retooled into Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain featuring Elmyra from Tiny Toon Adventures. The low ratings caused the show to get canceled after airing five episodes and was moved into an installment show called The Cat & Birdy Warneroonie Pinky Brainy Big Cartoonie Show. The fact that Warner Bros. found out they could license Pokémon: The Series, which became a big hit for Kids' WB!, on a discount instead of continuing to produce expensive productions like Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain certainly didn't help matters either.
  • Freakazoid! was terribly screwed over due to being popular with attracting the wrong demographics — at least, in the eyes of the network executives. As noted in the first episode's audio commentary:
    Paul Rugg: The WB. Can we talk about how supportive they were? No.
    • The executives didn't like how the ratings skewed much higher than they intended. It ultimately ended after two seasons when a regime change in studio management decided to clear just about everything out of their Saturday-Morning Cartoon lineup. To justify this, they instituted an ad gimmick called "Big Kids Come First", where all the adult-skewing cartoons were aired earlier than the ones skewing for younger kids, making sure that nobody watched anything and ensuring that ratings dropped low enough to justify a massive overhaul. Not just it led to the cancellation of that show, the same happened to Road Rovers as well.
  • Both Baby Blues and The Oblongs were quickly axed by the network before finishing their first-and-only season due to low ratings, although The Oblongs was by far the most successful of the network's failed attempts of an hit adult-animated series, although not by a long shot. Like with Mission Hill, the remaining episodes of both shows would later air on [adult swim] in 2002.
  • The WB wasn't very kind to Channel Umptee-3, which was co-produced by legendary TV producer Norman Lear. After 13 episodes, The WB declined to renew the series for a second season, resulting in its abrupt cancellation. Some speculate that the depiction of network executives as villains may have offended The WB's censors (despite the fact that several of their shows mocked them to no end and got off scot-free, though given that they were in-house productions, bias may have played a part in that), but no official reasoning for its cancellation has ever been made public.
  • Invasion America, the second TV work from DreamWorks Animation (the first being Toonsylvania on FOX) before their jump to movies, was given a thirteen-episode order by The WB. Since the show's content was too dark for it to air on the network's Kids' WB! block, they decided to burn off the series for prime time in the summer of 1998. With mediocre reviews and poor ratings, the series was quickly canceled, and after a second run on the Kids' WB! block (albeit with some content edited to fit the block's guidelines) the network forgot that it existed.
  • Mission Hill had a nasty case of this from The WB. According to the producers, the show staff was told their upfronts "didn't matter", and so they slapped together a poorly edited two minute preview of the show and submitted it. Advertisers panned it, and when The WB failed to prepare an episode for their schedule preview event, critics demolished the show, going off of the terrible two minute clip. Then, like salt in the wound, The WB placed it in the "death slot" for the target audience, 8 PM on Friday evening, directly before the beginning of a block of black sitcoms, which was a completely different audience then Mission Hill's demographic. Even worse, The WB then put the show on hiatus after only two episodes, sat on it for eight months, then re-premiered it during the summer, aired another three episodes, then finally canceled it. The remaining episodes were unaired until [adult swim] aired them in 2002.
  • Phantom Investigators: According to series co-creator Stephen Holman, the show was doing very well in the ratings, but Kids' WB! gave it the axe after running for a month in June 2002. The reason being that they were number one in the ratings with males in the six-to-eleven demographic, but Phantom Investigators was doing better with girls instead of boys. WB, not wanting to lose its number one spot with young boys, canceled the show after thirteen episodes and it has never aired on television again, nor received any VHS or DVD releases.
  • After getting rescued from CBS, Rescue Heroes ended up getting this treatment from their new home at Kids' WB!. By the time it premiered on the block in July 2001, it had the same time slot as originally on CBS (11:00 AM on Saturday morning), but had a nice advertising campaign and variety of other Kids' WB programs to go with it, giving it a much better treatment. But two months later, the series moved to Wednesdays at 3:00 PM, this time with little advertising. This was to make up for the batch of new series premieres for the block that were preempted by 9/11 (they eventually premiered on September 29th of that year, two weeks after planned airdates). RH returned to Saturdays at 8:00 AM for repeats in May 2002, then was pulled again to conclude the second season of The Zeta Project. It was canceled later that year due to low ratings generated by its Wednesday afternoon slot, a time where most of its target demographic are still at school.
  • The final episode of What's New, Scooby-Doo?, "E-Scream", was supposed to air on Kids' WB on April 23rd, 2005, but ¡Mucha Lucha! ended up pre-empting it. The episode never saw the light of day until it was included on the DVD volume "Zoinks! Camera! Action!" in February 2006, and finally had its television premiere on Cartoon Network in July 2006, over a year after the series wrapped up production and was already in reruns.

    Other/Miscellaneous 
  • Virtually every non-Fox animated sitcom such as Father of the Pride, Dilbert, and The Goode Family gets this. Seriously, try to find the one that lasted over a season. note 
  • Russian channel 2x2 started out as a 24-hour adult animation channel. In the beginning, their main selling point was the premiere of an [adult swim] block, which was treated like a separate block with localized Cyrillic [эдалт свим] bug, and was heavily promoted along with an English block. Some time later all promotion died down, the block was kicked to 1:10am and reduced to a half-hour, the English block was pushed even further and became a backburner for shows they don't care to even dub, and now the block is no more. As a result, several shows sat on the sidelines for years without new episodes. When 2x2 finally came around, they couldn't deliver the same voices and ended up skipping seasons.
    • Aqua Teen Hunger Force received this treatment despite Carl from the series being the channel's mascot. The original order was 4 seasons, then they got a movie and season 5 a few years later (minus the episode "Bible Fruit", due to religious content). Then, a whopping 4 years later, they delivered seasons 7 and 8, losing season 6 along with half of the voice actors, notably Master Shake and Meatwad. Another 4 years later they delivered all of the final seasons except season 9.
    • With the block on decline, 2x2 gave The Boondocks special treatment by bringing two fairly famous Russian rappers on board to dub certain characters. The show was broadcasted on primetime and was a big success. When season 3 became available, said rappers quit halfway through the dubbing, which resulted in the other half being finished without them. 2x2 dumped the season premiere on air without any prior announcements whatsoever (you had to check the schedule on their website to notice), and stopped dubbing past season 3.
    • Metalocalypse got 14 episodes from the first season repeated ad nauseam for 4 years. Fortunately, 2x2 woke up and gave people the rest of season 1, season 2 and season 4.
    • Space Ghost Coast to Coast, starting from season 7 (the Adult Swim episodes), got a really small you-blink-you-missed run, to the point there are no recordings of any dubbed episodes on the Internet.
    • Squidbillies dubbing never went past the first two seasons.
    • The Venture Brothers didn't go beyond the original two-season order for a solid four years. When they did, they dubbed season 4. That's right, no season 3, no original voices. In this case fans of the show hated both dubs anyway, since half of the jokes were lost in translation.
    • As of 2019 the only [adult swim] things they care about are Rick and Morty and Robot Chicken. The rest of the schedule is non-stop marathons of The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad! and Futurama with an odd premiere here and there.
    • Surprisingly averted in 2020, when 2x2 launched an [adult swim] streaming service where they managed to finally close almost all the season gaps.
  • The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin was only shown in time slots when the target audience wouldn't be able to watch the show. It would usually air anywhere from 4:00 AM in the morning to 3:00PM in the afternoon. It was quickly forgotten and canceled, and was supposed to air in syndication again for the 1998-99 television season but nobody was willing to pick it up. Teletoon did air reruns in Canada in 1999...but at 10:00 AM on weekdays, when the target demographic was in school.
  • Any non-educational cartoon aired on AFN Family (excluding Littlest Pet Shop and Scaredy Squirrel) will only air at best once every few weeks; at worst once a month. While most networks that air SpongeBob SquarePants treat it with lots of love, AFN rarely airs this show.note  And if you're a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan in the military, it sucks to be you for this reason. Not only that, their run is four years behind, even though they aired Equestria Girls. However, Thursday nights usually consist of Marvel cartoons and Pokémon: The Series, while Friday nights air multiple Nickelodeon and Disney Channel cartoons, along with My Little Pony.
  • Danger & Eggs, despite being received with critical acclaim upon its release and winning a Daytime Emmy, only ever received a single season. No announcement was made as to whether the show was canceled by Amazon or not, but one of the show's creators, Shadi Petosky, spoke out against the company's decision to bring Jeffrey Tambor back onto the cast of another show, Transparent, even after a set of abuse allegations emerged. (Much of the show's crew, including Petosky, would move on to Netflix's Twelve Forever.)
  • Due to failed ratings and copyright claims, the Spanish company Neptuno Films struck down El patito feo, removing it from its catalogue. All ensuing foreign broadcasts did the same, and now the show is Lost Media.
  • In December 2014, Italian channel RaiGulp started airing Gravity Falls and then dropped it after a week, replacing it with reruns of Wolverine and the X-Men (2009).
    • Later, in 2017, they aired The Legend of Korra at 4 AM. While most of the programming in that timeframe is reruns of older shows (such as Code Lyoko or Martin Mystery), this was Korras first airing' outside of pay-TV and DVD releases.
  • By 2005, Happy Tree Friends was at its peak, and G4TV, which at this point was already broadcasting the internet shorts (some of which had just been seen on Attack of the Show!), picked up a TV adaptation of the show, which premiered in 2006. In the months leading up to the TV series' premiere, G4 and the Happy Tree Friends website both comfortably gave it plenty of advertising, with a small number of the TV series' episodes even being given early previews that were sent to subscribers of the show's now-defunct email fan club. Unfortunately, G4 placed first-run episode broadcasts at the highly inconvenient time slot of midnight Eastern Time on Monday nightsnote  with extremely poor promotion, which translated into low ratings, which not only ensured the TV series' cancellation after 13 episodes and the scrapping of a planned second TV season, but also indirectly caused the show's popularity to crash. Making matters worse, the TV series was removed entirely from G4's schedule as soon as the final episode aired, as if it never existed. While it did live on in the internet shorts, those too eventually petered out, with the last handful of episodes being released for purchase in 2016 and for free in 2018.
  • People who live in Portugal and like Jimmy Two-Shoes are very unlucky. It only aired once on SIC in the second half of 2011, around 7:30am.
  • When Showcase Cinemas brought back the Kidtoon Films children's matinee series in 2016, they changed 7 of the TV shows/movies they were going to show. Their Octonauts screening became a Shimmer and Shine screening, the Dora And Friends: Into The City! screening became a screening of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, the Zack and Quack screening became a Transformers: Rescue Bots screening, a screening of Babar became Blinky Bill: The Movie, the Barbie Starlight Adventure screening became a screening of the 2014 Maya the Bee movie, a screening of the 2014 movie of The Boxcar Children got replaced by both Barbie and Her Sisters in A Puppy Chase and Thomas & Friends: The Great Race, and a screening of The Snowman was cancelled with no replacement film before the program went into a brief hiatus. No reasons have been revealed for why the first four were changed or why the screening of The Snowman was cancelled, but there are reasons for why Barbie Starlight Adventure and The Boxcar Children got changed. Starlight Adventure changing was because Fathom Events screened the movie in late July, and the screening of The Boxcar Children got cancelled due to a partnership between Mattel and Kidtoons making one of their films to be replaced with Barbie and Her Sisters in a Puppy Chase.
  • Many animated or kids series airing on Malaysian free-to-air TV are bound to suffer this. Privately-owned NTV7 and the government-owned RTM stations do this very often. Examples:
    • Animaniacs lasted only one season on RTM1, airing around the start of 1995, being aired only once a week at an inconvenient time slot of Sundays at 5:30PM, and being yanked by the end of the year.
    • Arthur: Did not make it past season four (though part of season five did air on Disney Channel Asia before canning the show entirely). In other countries, the show has made it to season 20 as of late 2016.
    • Between the Lions: Episodes skipped, random pre-empting of slots and the master tapes were not paused when cutting into ads, causing large amounts of scenes to go missing. Halfway through airing, its slot was preempted for a whopping 6 months. It was on RTM2.
    • Caillou was screwed by NTV7, with only the original five -minute shorts aired. The 40 episodes in-between were dropped and the show was quickly replaced by Rocky and Bullwinkle.
    • Charlie and Lola: Stopped halfway through season 1 and never mentioned again. It was on RTM2.
    • Dragon Tales: Same reason as Between the Lions, and they did not bother bringing in Season 2 onwards.
    • After treating Franklin well for 5 seasons (to give an idea on how well the show was treated, season 5 aired a whopping 2 months before they did on Nick Jr. in the US), TV2 abruptly decided to screw it over and ignored Season 6 as well as its spin-off, Franklin and Friends.
    • Little Princess was screwed over by NTV7 after two seasons and the third season remained unaired in the country.
    • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has the dubious honor of not only being screwed by NTV7, but also to be screwed before it could even air: it was replaced with Lily the Witch in the last minute on the day and the slot it was supposed to premiere. The show ID overlay still read My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic even though the airing show was something different. The show finally started airing in July 2012, but with the same problem that US viewers faced with the Hub two years ago taken to extremes: not only it's aired at 8:30 AM on Saturdays, that's its only one time slot in the week. Missed it? God help you, especially with various online file lockers blocked by the MCMC's internet censorship. Eventually subverted- the network eventually came to adore the show. After the producers caved in to the bronies and dumped all slice of life content, a move which alienated slice of life lovers in the country who were following the news of the production online.
    • Rugrats: When they moved to NTV7 from MetroVision (now 8TV) after a four-year hiatus, episodes were randomly censored (the infamous Zoo Story episode has all scenes containing pigs cut offnote  - despite the same episode airing on Nickelodeon Asia, which is available in Malaysia, uncut). The show stopped airing on Terrestrial TV in Malaysia four years before Nickelodeon would end the show once and for all.
    • TV9 screwed over the 2003 Strawberry Shortcake series right after airing Season 3. This nearly happened on the Playhouse Disney network as well, but a letter-writing campaign in Asia organized by upset fans made Disney bring in the rest of the final season of the show, albeit 3 months after it aired in Europe. However, this was played after the rights of the franchise shifted to Cartoon Network.
    • The Malay dub for Timothy Goes to School only aired on Astro'snote  in-house channel in 2001. The rest of the series later got screwed over and hasn't been aired in that country since then.
    • In 2021, Astro decided to drop Disney Channel Asia and Disney Junior Asia from their channel lineup purely out of spite from Disney planning to launch Disney+ in the country in the near future. Problem is, they had previously monopolized the channels and no other providers had the channels at the time they were dropped…
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic suffered greatly from this in Germany thanks to a case of Poor Communication Kills. Hasbro licensed the show to Viacom Europe, who intended to have it aired on Nickelodeon about a year after the American one. By the time that Viacom started working on the German dub, both Studio B and The Hub were fully aware of the bronies and had already started catering to them. Hasbro, however, had no idea what to do with the unprecedented brony phenomenon which was still "underground" in 2011. Hasbro didn't inform Viacom about the bronydom, nor did Studio B or The Hub because it was probably none of their business. In fact, Viacom wasn't even informed that Lauren Faust had changed My Little Pony's target audience from 4-7 year-old girls to 5-12 year-old girls in addition to their parents. Viacom in turn couldn't inform Nickelodeon Germany, the station to air the show, about any of this. Nickelodeon Germany ended up with a show they didn't know what to do with, much less that it had become a Cult Classic in North America.
  • Cinémoi seems to be doing this with all of the cartoons on their channel, especially The New Adventures of Lucky Luke: they've been showing the same 26 episodes (out of a total of 56) since the channel debuted on DTV in the US, the title of "A Better World for the Daltons" note  was inexplicably changed to "Flower Power for the Daltons" note , "The Daltons' Treasure" has sound-syncing problems, "Indian Roulette" and "The Last of the Buffalo" have commercials airing in the middle of the episode (most episodes wait until after the show ends to air the ads), and "For a Fistful of Daltons" is shown twice whenever the lineup reaches it. The episodes are aired in a completely random order, as opposed to the original series' episode listings, and half the series still hasn't aired (including the episode that "For a Fistful of Daltons" replaces), meaning that, ever since Cinémoi joined DTV's lineup in September 2012, they've aired the exact same episodes at least ten times.
    • The Magic Roundabout got screwed on Cinémoi when its time slots were bumped up an hour earlier, in favor of giving Contraptus a full hour instead of three ten-minute shorts before Lucky Luke. In addition, both shows have fallen victim to the same eternal rerun cycle as Lucky Luke has. Not helping is the fact that these are the only cartoons on Cinémoi, and they only air in the morning.
      • Contraptus is listed as airing for around a full hour on Fridays, even though Lucky Luke still has the timeslot. Looks like Cinémoi doesn't know what to do with the poor lonesome cowboy.
  • The BBC tried to sell Postman Pat to the German and Italian markets in the 90s, but failed. The show finally aired in those markets in 2005-2006.
  • German free-TV channel KIKA at one point commisioned a dub of The Powerpuff Girls (1998), but changed their mind and decided not to air the show. In 2001, Super RTL aired the series instead.
  • A supposed, very brief-lived attempt to air The Ren & Stimpy Show on the Italian RAI happened from 1996-1997. Nobody knows exactly when the series aired, the voice actors of the characters, or anything about the series' Italian version. The only thing known is that some episodes were aired by RAI 2 at 7AM, and then the show, because of either a low audience or Moral Guardians, was swiftly canceled before it could have had a little popularity. There is no trace of an Italian dub on the Internet (save for the Happy Happy Joy Joy's song introduction, which at least demonstrates that it was dubbed), and the little information that can be found about the series in Italy is very vague. Adult Party Cartoon aired some years later on the Italian version of Fox, but even there it got rapidly canceled. The original series finally aired on Nickelodeon Italy in June 2016, but with subtitles, which implies that the Italian dub of the series has been lost.
  • Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World received solid ratings and favorable reviews for its first 2 seasons and had a third in the works, only to be canceled as part of LOGO's shift in programming from LGBT material to mainstream content.
  • TBS treated Sherlock Gnomes pretty poorly. Not only did it air in a Saturday morning time slot with no promotion whatsoever (instead, the network premiere of Uncle Drew was promoted), TBS dropped the film from its' dedicated app two weeks after the film premiered on TV (but it would be added back two months later). Its’ second airing was delayed by an airing of a baseball game going overtime and was joined in progress, leading it to be replaced on the West feed by Lost Resort, and the third airing aired at 4:15am. This was averted for the fourth airing, which aired the same day as the third airing at 11:00AM, replacing an airing of Teen Titans Go! To the Movies.
  • Russian channel REN TV went through a management shuffle and rebranding, and ended up deciding that they didn't want The Simpsons anymore. Unfortunately, they had a contractual obligation to air seasons 17 and 18. They burned them off in early mornings and did the cheapest dub possible in-house. Season 17 was somewhat tolerable, although all of the voice actors were replaced. Season 18 had one of the laziest excuses for a dub on Russian television, with all the voice actors replaced again and the scripts reduced to a horrible translation that was (allegedly) done in one take.
    • Another channel, 2x2, picked up the rights and treated the series pretty well, up until it was time to air seasons 17-18. Sure enough, they outright refused to redub REN TV's half-assed efforts because it costs money. They did bring back the original crew for season 19 and beyond.
    • At some point, REN TV had their hands on South Park. They jerked around with voice actors and time slots, and it never really gained any ground. MTV Russia later picked up the series, and it became a smash hit for the network.
  • Dutch channel RTL Telekids severely screwed over "Littlest Pet Shop (2012)". They refused to air seasons 3 and 4 (eventually that also became the case with season 2), and it wasn't even allowed to co-exist on the channel with Littlest Pet Shop: A World of Our Own, which took over the timeslot that the 2012 series used.
  • Sonic Underground had this treatment in the US on the syndication block, Bohbot Kids Network (BKN). Episodes aired on weekdays very early in the morning note  at a time when its target audience were either still asleep or getting ready for school. To make matters worse, the episodes that were originally scheduled to air on Fridays were skipped and replaced with Double Dragon (1993) note  instead. As a result, only 32 of the 40 episodes produced aired.
  • Animax Japan used to play SpongeBob SquarePants for two hours; one hour aired from 7-8AM, and the other hour airing from 3-4PM. Then, they only aired the show twice a day at 8AM (a time when most kids are leaving for school) and 3PM. Then they replaced SpongeBob with Suite Pretty Cure ♪ and Dragon Ball Z reruns and moved it to 6AM on Thursdays, when most kids are asleep, and on Fridays at 7:00AM, competing with TV Tokyo's Oha Suta. Later, it was replaced by its two main darlings, GeGeGe no Kitarō and Chibi Maruko-chan.
  • Italian network Boing used to play SpongeBob four times every day. Then Adventure Time came along, and they now don't air it at all.
  • Hungary's RTL Klub kept endlessly shuffling the airtime of the first season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, at times pushing it back to the early hours or just neglecting to air episodes entirely, completely ignoring their advertised cartoon programming. Not only that, the media watchdogs also lobbied to get the series banned because they deemed its content unsuitable for a Sunday morning time slot (and for other, absurd reasons). Although the rest of the series apart from season 6 did air on Cartoon Network, there was a severe drop in dubbing quality due to CN's more limited budget. It's not unreasonable to think that the 6th season would have been dubbed much faster as well, had the show stayed on RTL. Instead, it debuted only in December 2015 on yet another channel (AXN), by which time several of the voice actors were unavailable.
  • In the Netherlands, Fireman Sam was treated rather poorly when it premiered in 1990 on the VARA. The broadcaster aired the series on sunday mornings, when most people would be sleeping in. As a result, after each of the 15 episodes had aired, there was no need to air reruns, and the series was cancelled and not aired again in the country for a full decade. When it came back on Kindernet after 10 years, it did see two years of airing, but was ultimately screwed over once again in 2002 after Nickelodeon took over the channel.
  • Stripperella got screwed over by Spike majorly. It aired on a late night block with Gary the Rat and Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon". The show was praised for its intelligent humor and well-done animation and was generally liked by those who had seen it, but the fact that Spike had hyped up the show for its nudity turned potential viewers off. Spike started pushing nudity even more in the second half when the ratings were declining (replacing the pixelation with a soft blur over nude scenes), canceled it after 13 episodes, and then gave it a poorly-masterednote  "uncensored" DVD.
  • In Latin America, WordGirl premiered in August 2009 on the preschooler-oriented Discovery Kids channel. Although the channel gave it heavy promotion during the rest of 2009 and most of 2010, by the end of that year they suddenly decided to move the series to a late-night timeslot on weekends. The series received a lot of criticism from Latin American Moral Guardians that felt it was too "violent" and that it encouraged children to lie to their parents (due to the obvious element of Becky having to tell an excuse to her adoptive parents whenever she needs to become WordGirl to save the city), and constantly complained on the channel's now-defunct message boards. This may have been the reason for the channel to move the series to late-nights, until removing it completely in June 2012, with only the first two seasons dubbed and aired.
  • The sad fate of short lived series Tarantula!. Originally intended to be part of an animation block on TBS with fellow shows Close Enough, Final Space and The Cops, the entire block fell apart when Louis C.K. (Who was to voice the lead in The Cops) came under fire for several sexual misconduct incidents. With The Cops, the lynchpin of the block, cancelled, the other three shows fell into limbo. While Final Space would eventually air and Close Enough would find a home on HBO Max 3 years later, Tarantula got the shaft. With the entire season dumped online with zero promotion from TBS. Not shockingly, it was done after 1 season.
  • In France, after Canal+ finished airing the third season of The Simpsons on October 10, 1992, the show stopped airing on the channel completely and was replaced by the French premiere of Rugrats (1991) (in one of it's earliest international broadcasts) the following saturday on October 17. It's possible Simpsons remained off the air in France until season 4 premiered on September 4, 1993.
  • Family Channel (the Canadian equivalent to Disney Channel until 2015 when Canada launched its own version of Disney Channel and all rights for Disney shows in Canada went to Corus) only aired Brandy & Mr. Whiskers on weekday afternoons at 12:00, a time where the target audience would still be in school. As such it didn't last long on the channel.
  • Beast Machines was not initially released in Japan due to the failure of the preceding Beast Wars Neo and Beast Wars Metals (the dub of the last two seasons of Beast Wars), and when it did get released four years later as Beast Wars Returns, it was clear that Takara was not too enthusiastic about releasing a series that had flopped in America. As opposed to airing on TV Tokyo like prior series, Beast Wars Returns aired on satellite networks, ensuring it would get far less coverage, and the dub lacked new a new opening and credits theme along with discarding various plot elements for the sake of comedy. The show was eventually aired on Cartoon Network Japan and other networks... after its accompanying toyline had already been released, which had been exclusive to Toys"R"Us Japan with each figure being limited to 3,000-4,000 units each.

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