Not suprising at all.


I find the fact that Futurama hit it big someplace besides FOX to be sweet revenge. Its for all those times football carried over, for all those times a newer Simpsons rerun was shown, or for the times FOX just didnt want to air the show.

I'm going to be contrarian here... I think the reason Futurama got cancelled is that it wasn't a hit, never was a hit, never could have been a hit and was never going to be a hit on Fox. The pre-emptions were annoying but the show never, at any time, had the kind of broad appeal that would have justified its huge price tag. It's the sort of show that does very well on cable or on DVD, because all you need there is a niche audience. But as a big network show, the thing was a doomed proposition. Sci-fi shows are not particularly popular with most of the audience (you wouldn't know this on the internet, because people who post on the internet are themselves a niche audience); sci-fi comedies almost always bomb. Futurama was wrong for Sunday nights on Fox, which mostly features sitcoms about suburban families (Simpsons, King of the Hill, Malcolm in the Middle), and it didn't really have any place else to fit in. (IMO Fox was moving it around not because they wanted to kill it -- you have to be seriously nuts to believe that a network would renew a show several times if they're trying to kill it; in real life, if a network wants to kill a show, it gets cancelled, even if the ratings are better than Futurama's were -- but because they were looking, ineptly and ineffectively, for a place where it could actually be a hit.)

It's a bit like FAMILY GUY, really. Because of the smash success of that show with the relatively small portion of the mass audience that watches cable and buys DVDs, everyone now says that show could have been a hit if Fox had treated it right. It's not so. Setting aside the point that Family Guy mostly sucked (the mass audience was right to reject it), it had no appeal beyond its little niche of fans. A show needs mass appeal to succeed on a broadcast, advertiser-led network. The possible exception is BUFFY, which looked like a hit even though it never was (I can name dozens of shows that were more popular with more people than BUFFY ever was, like "JAG"), but that was on a small upstart network that didn't need much of an audience beyond that small but powerful niche.

I guess what I'm saying here is that while I don't like to see FUTURAMA go, I think there are perfectly good reasons why it was cancelled. Indeed I'm surprised it wasn't cancelled earlier, considering that it was never popular enough (with a broad audience, not just a small but vocal portion of the audience) to justify its cost.

Wow a new member that sounds like a Fox troll.

I think that no one here feels that Futurama or Family Guy had a chance to be a hit, and the success they are receiving in syndication backs this argument up. Reread this post as everyone else has made all these arguments already.

As you can see from the CN running of this show, it can indeed be a hit and no niche market in itself would have made it a hit on cable in itself simply because the production cost is far more then what a cable station could afford on one show. Fox canceled for other reasons. Mainly, they never gave it a chance. You don't throw a show on sunday at 7:00 when it can be the target of pre-emptive games and then throw a rerun episode of the simpsons in the 7:30 time slot. your two statements go against each other. if it was never a mass appeal hit it would never make it to dvd. there is a market for this. Fox just doesn't care enough to give shows a chance to grow. Can we name the shows that died when they were picking up in ratings before being tossed on a different time slot.

as for the sunday night line up, it's not a family orinated night. Amazing enough X-files survived for many many years and it's theme was no were near close to a family setting.. not unless you count "HOME" as a family episode. Guess what, that's a sci fi show aswell. hmmm guess all sci fi shows are doomed to fail on sunday nights right? -ohbfrank- . Fox jumping it around.. well no. Fox really didn't care enough. this post is really not worth responding to since really, the arguements against you have been stated so many times already.

One could say the same derogatory things towards a cartoon with yellow people, that seem counter-culture, and were originally created to be filler material for a sketch comedy show.

[Shill]

As much as I love Futurama, I'm gonna have to agree for the most part with tobiagorrio. If you remember, initial reviews of Futurama were mostly negative due to the fact that it didn't have the charm of The Simpsons (the critic on the Chicago Tribune stated that it lacked the imagination of one James L. Brooks). Also, after the pilot episode, ratings dropped big time, even when it was on after The Simpsons. Therefore, FOX had to move it to a different time-slot (abeit a very crappy one).

In short, Futurama is a very good show, but not a very popular one.

Thanks for the backup, Simpson Purist.

Everything I've said is of course debatable and could be outright wrong -- but I find it hilarious to be accused of being a FOX shill. I mean, I don't work for Fox, I don't like Fox's "When Babies Attack" approach to programming, and I can name many boneheaded Fox programming moves (remember moving The Simpsons to Thursdays? Though of course that show survived the crushing move). But I don't think there was a Fox conspiracy to kill Futurama, so I suppose I am a shill... Still, I'll just clarify that I like Futurama and (unlike Family Guy) am sad to see it go. I just don't think Fox was out to destroy it.

I will admit that Fox gave Family Guy a HUGE backing to start with. It got a post superbowl premier. However, Family Guy takes a little while to grow on you (atleast it did for me). I didn't like it at first, but after a few episode i was hooked. However, Fox dropped it like it had the plague. They shoved it to Thursdays at 8 with no promotions. They moved it around and didn't promote it so unless you were looking for it, you couldnt find it.

networks can hurt shows on purpose, look at Practice

I think what we're seeing with Fox is merely symptomatic of a bigger problem. Yes, Futurama wasn't a 'big hit', although it certainly does have a strong, rabid following. It could be that America just wasn't ready for two primetime animated shows. In some ways I think Futurama is even better than the Simpsons, if only because on F, they took what they learned from creating 11+ years of the Simpsons.
Fox jerked the schedule around in part because of football [which, personally, I'd rather watch snow on tv than waste my time with that, and that really made me mad when they'd preempt or shift Simpsons or Futurama for football.], and never gave it a solid schedule for the average public to find it on.
But the bigger problem is, and this applies to all the networks--impatience. I don't watch much network TV, but I can't tell you how many shows I saw get shifted, 'retooled', or outright cancelled, after as few as three episodes. Usually to be replaced with a crappy 'reality' show. Much like what I call 'Millionaire Syndrome', where they expect a show to be a sudden hit, or more accurately, fad, to the point where they can instantly syndicate it or rerun and milk the hell out of it. It's a rare occurence, IMHO, when a show is a bona fide 'hit' after three or four episodes. Even the Simpsons didn't get really 'big' until season 2, 3, 4...They learned from that, learned what worked and lasted, and it's still on 12+ years later, unlike the flash-in-the-pan Cute-GenX-Relationship-Show-of-the-Week, or Let's-Watch-People-Do-Gross-Things-For-Money which are totally unmemorable.

I think the clover episode is on tonight on CN....that episode shows what animation can be, instead of all this Pokemon and toy-aisle crap.

The luck of the fryish is one of my favorite episodes. :)

I agree with almost everything else you wrote, but "The Simpsons" was actually a monster hit in its first season, a cultural phenomenon -- it was huge. That's why Fox moved it to Thursdays against "The Cosby Show," which hurt both shows and knocked "The Simpsons" out of the top ten (where it had been in season 1) and didn't really help Fox (which never managed to establish a solid base on Thursday nights). That's part of Fox's other big problem, apart from the impatience you've mentioned: They tend to expect a show to do too much too fast. They've repeated the "Simpsons" mistake several times: When "King of the Hill" was a big hit in its first two seasons (people forget this but KotH was becoming a cultural phenomenon in 1997) Fox moved it to Tuesday nights, which nearly killed it. And the "Family Guy" creator has said something to the effect that Fox expected the show to be able to carry its own night, which was more than it could do.

You go by the name "CLOSEDOWN8" on USENET, don't you?

No. The differences, as Bart Simpson would say, are subtle but many. (Besides, there is, believe it or not, more than one person on the net who dislikes "Family Guy.")

Family Guy never did much for me, either....I don't know what it was...maybe their voices were just annoying, or I percieved it as a Simpsons wannabe, but I didn't get into it.

*raises hand* Me too!! I dunno, I've tried watching it, but every single <strike>joke</strike> sight-gag struck out for me. I felt like it was trying too hard to be clever. The baby is kinda funny tho.

Staying on the topic of FOX shows, but moving away from Family Guy and Futurama, I feel as though FOX didn't give enough of a chance to two shows before they were dropped: Dark Angel and Firefly. While I didn't watch all the Dark Angel episodes, the ones I did see were pretty good. I know it lasted through it's first season, and did good numbers on Tuesday against a show that had a similar audience(Buffy), but for whatever reason FOX moved it to the death slot...Friday at 8PM. Or was it the other way around? Of course the show was cancelled after season 2. My question with that is if it did do good numbers in it's first season, despite the timeslot, why did they move it?

I thought Firefly was given more of a chance than it might have received, because it was a Joss show, but I still don't think it wasn't given much of a chance. The timeslot they put it in was horrible and FOX aired the episodes out of order, which is a big no-no with a Joss show, and generally didn't allow the show to gain it's audience. Honestly, the first season of Firefly reminded me a lot of the first Buffy season...and we all saw where that ended up. Also, the show was starting to get a lot better and started to settle into it's "groove" more when it was axed...at least I thought so.

Seeing this I tend to agree with Cameron and Joss on their statements about the FOX TV execs. Their statements were, and forgive me for not remebering exactly what they said, something to the effect that FOX TV execs didn't want to take risks on high production genre shows if it didn't produce right away. Feel free to disagree, like nobody knows that :), or correct me if some of my facts are wrong as I am not involved as closely in the TV/Film business as some of the other posters are.

Yeah what about Undeclared and Andy Richter? They were worth renewing but FOX sucks. Whoever said you could say the same thing about the simpsons as you could futurams (only appeals to a niche market) is wrong. The Simpsons appeals to A LOT of people.

Sorry to go back to Futurama but i am :D

Groening said about the same thing on a Futurama commentary.
He said something like that FOX execs were hoping for a huge smashing success that "The Simpsons" ARE TODAY and were bummed when "Futurama" didnt pull in huge ratings like "The Simpsons" does.

"Futurama" has a much wider appeal to people in and outside of the US because its not a parody of American culture but more Sci-fi. This was shown in the petition to save the show when alot of the sigs were from people OUTSIDE of the US.

Its very hard to take a network seriously when they show tripe like "Glutton Bowl" and "Man vs. Beast"....a redneck eating contest and midgets pulling an airplane? :rolleyes: