cactusoly

My Name is Earl

BrewCrew

Just the Ten of Us

mortalplague

Of Course they will, Look at Flash Forward, they hyped that one up when it started and then cancelled it.

rfduncan

But they never aired the episodes already in the can. I kind of wonder what kind of numbers FOX genuinely expected to get for any original programming aired in primetime on a Friday night.

Jericho was done IMHO. They needed to wrap things up and stop spinning their wheels.

Freaks & Geeks was a real pity. I only wish I had watched it when it was on. I would also say the same for My So Called Life.

Finally, I will have to add Kyle XY which I just watched on Hulu.. Sure it was getting a little ridiculous, but I would have appreciated giving them a chance to resolve all the storylines.

Groucho

One I don't understand is Deadwood (or any other show on a subscriber network). Since HBO's income is based on subscriber dollars, not on advertising, wouldn't their income be the same whether 1 person watched, or 100 million?

cornflakeguy

My So Called Life, ding ding ding!!!

Flash Forward. I loved it...!

Superman07

Keen Eddie. It was fun, kwirky, face paced and had some good leads.

Timber

Karen Sisco
Related
Tru Calling - While I didn't watch this one while it aired I got the DVD's and the end of the first season/second season was really headed in a good place.

Trevor

Police Squad

Groucho

Sorry, but I just don't see any way those characters and situations could ever have been commercially viable.

nateman

Boomtown
Law & Order
Third Watch
NewsRadio
Scrubs
Pushing Daisies
Life
Dead Like Me
My Name is Earl
The Riches

AndyCleveland

i am shocked no one has mentioned The Comeback (HBO). Lisa Kudrow was perfect in it. Here's hoping her new Shotime series Web Therapy is as good but more successful.

Superman07

I don't understand putting shows on a list that were on for years. In some instances it wasn't cancelled so much as "we talked and we're done". Scrubs particularly comes to mind - season 8 was it?

Trevor

But they still have to make shows that customers like, that earn new subscribers at a good cost ratio. I'm not saying that customers didn't love it of course, but I'm sure their data showed that it either didn't bring in many new subscribers, or that the cost per episode versus subscriber retention/gain wasn't worthwhile.

Either that or they finally said one too many f u's.

MrSmearkase

Absolutely in agreement on Journeyman. The 10PM time slot was unneccessary, and should have gone to a different day at 8 or 9PM. Man, I miss that show

Other shows I sorely miss;

Lucky Louie (Granted, Louis CK has a new, admittedly better, show on FX, but how much could this show have been costing HBO?)
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Back to You (A welcome return to the 3-Camera workplace comedy, although if this show had continued, we probably wouldn't have Modern Family)
The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien
Better Off Ted

starman9000

Pushing Daisies for sure as well as Farscape, just one more season would have been great to wrap up the Peacekeeper Wars.

To add another long running show, I wish they would have kept cranking out SG-1 or Stargate Atlantis. Their ratings were fine, but I understand those shows get more expensive every year.

Mysteryfan

Journeyman
Moonlight
Drive
Terminator
Firefly
Kidnapped
Karen Sisco
Touching Evil

Popular shows that were cancelled:
The Unit
Angel

Double_Oh_7

Freaks and Geeks
Twin Peaks
My So-Called Life


And why FOX cancelled Futurama, yet kept King of the Hill on the air for YEARS AND YEARS afterward, I will never understand.

Double_Oh_7

I think the point of the thread is shows that should have been given time to find an audience, or shows that still had some life/potential in them.

islandclaws

The top 2 answers in my mind are Twin Peaks and Freaks & Geeks.

Mikael79

Family Guy

mphtrilogy

+1
that was a crime.

I would have loved to see at least 3 seasons of Franz and Caruso on NYPD Blue, that was a major blow.

Michael Corvin

For me:

Not mentioned:
Sports Night - it had its flaws in both seasons (laugh track in 1, inconsistent characters in 2) but I think they could have ironed things out in season 3. Plus, since it's basically a fake sports news show, it could have gone on for years like the show it mimicked, Sports Center.

and others mentioned:
Arrested Development - hard to feel bad about this one given how amazingly excellent it was all the way to the end and it had the perfect finale. Not to mention the fact it could have been canceled halfway through season one.

Firefly - fun ride, and could have gone on for a few seasons if given the chance.

Freaks & Geeks - high school television at its best, at least for comedy. FNL gives it a run for the money in the drama department.

Pushing Daisies - whimsical and original with an excellent cast of characters.

Scrubs - 2.0 - I can go with this, it was really coming into its own at the end

Stargate: SG-1 - sure it was on for 10 years, but like Scrubs there seemed to be a revitalization going on once they dumped the G'ould plots.

Titus - fun and underrated little show. Watching them in a marathon you realize how repetitive the show was, but as a weekly show it was something different.

Undeclared - see F&G, except about college.

The Unit - like Arrested Development, it's hard to complain about this one. We got five great seasons of a kick ass show. It would have been nice to get a final balls-to-the-wall season.

Veronica Mars - I don't know what to say about Ms. Mars, except that it was worthy of all the praise it got prior to me getting into it.

Wonderfalls - Like Pushing Daisies, it was something unique that doesn't come along too often.


I liked Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place, and eventually TG&aG but it wasn't that great of a show. I'd equate it to Two & a Half Men (not because of the numeral in the title), because the humor was pretty generic and nothing really ground breaking.

Geddlo

Definitely Farscape as well.

With regards to ratings and stuff, how many millions of viewers is deemed successful?
To me, 4-5 million is quite a lot. It's just something I don't get.

DJariya

For ratings, it depends on 2 factors:

1) The network
2) The 18-49 demographic numbers

For a network like CBS, anything that gets under 10M viewers and under a 3.0 in the demos is in some danger of getting cancelled. But, the network itself skews really old in general as most of their shows are crime procedurals.

Lost used to get over 20M viewers a week in season 1, but dropped significantly and was barely getting 7-8M per week in the last few seasons. But, what kept the show on the air and advertisers happy was the 18-49 demos as it got 3.5 to sometimes over 4.0.

Overall viewership is nice and dandy, but what keeps the shows on the air is the key demographic. For Lost, the demos mean 3.5 (3.5M of the key demographic) watched out of the 7-8M who watched that episode and that's considered solid.

But going back to the shows mentioned in the OP...All of them did horrible in the overall viewership and the demos. I believe alot of them were under 2.0 in the demos, sometimes under 1.0.