I know that executives can run their businesses any way they want as long as they stay within confines of the law. I have no problem with that.
So it’s very simple, really: A law must be passed that forbids Fox from handling science fiction series. Lobby your congressmen. Write your senators. This whole Iraq business must take second chair to the far more pressing problem of Fox’s inability to broadcast, handle or support SF.
This is nothing new. It goes all the way back to their first SF series, “Alien Nation.” Innovative, brilliantly handled, transcending the patchy film on which it was based…and prematurely cut down by–if memory serves–the same TV exec who fingered the original “Star Trek” for cancellation when he was at NBC. Then there’s “Futurama,” a show pre-empted so routinely that there’s enough unshown episodes stockpiled for an entire season…most of which will likely be pre-empted if history is any judge. They could start releasing it on DVD and likely have all the episodes into the marketplace before they’ve ever aired.
Now there’s “Firefly.” Two whole episodes aired (the second of which I thought was quite good), and suddenly double-preempted: First out of its Friday slot by the baseball playoffs, and then stared twenty minutes late on Sunday (frustrating anyone who set their VCR for 4 to 5) because of football. Yes, I understand that football is more popular with Fox viewers than SF. But the consistent targeting of SF as sacrificial gridiron or diamond lamb is bordering on the pathological. Or they simply give it no time to build its audience whatsoever. Even tangentally related shows, such as “The Tick,” get short shrift. “Hey, let’s take this quirky, different kind of series and put it up against Must See TV. That’ll work!”
I now comprehend why Chris Carter steadfastly maintained that “X-Files” wasn’t SF when it so obviously was. He knew the moment it was labeled as such, Fox would say, “Oh my God…kill it. Slot it for Sunday at 1 AM. Pre-empt it until January. Do *something* to it.”
Am I the only one sick of execs who claim that a show never found its audience when the audience was never able to find the show?
PAD
• 
I honestly don’t think it’s SF as much as it is “any show that interferes with sports.” Sports is Fox’s biggest revenue earner, particularly football. Since the infamous “Heidi game” ain’t nobody EVER gonna cut away from an important game (and EVERY game in football is now counted as important) to a regular series.
So the problem you need to address is the time slot, not the cutaway/pre-emption problem.
Firefly wasn’t preempted in all markets. In the Washington DC area, it was shown on Friday night at its proper time – 9 PM. So, it was a local problem this past weekend.
It is not scheduled at all this coming weekend, though due to the playoff game being definitely on (as opposed to just being a contingency).
Neil
I all fairness to Fox, it was not the network but the local affiliate that bumped Firefly to after the Giants football game. In most of the country, Firefly and John Doe ran as scheduled and the baseball game was only on cable (which as a sports bothers me a good deal for other reasons). It’s only us New Yorkers that got doubly shafted. Now since the local Fox station is owned by the network and is essentially the flagship station, we can blame the network. But my sense is that the affiliate, even in this case, makes the choice.
I think there is also a rule that any cable-based baseball playoff game must air on free TV in the home market, and I would guess that Fox got first rights to show what probably drew better ratings than anything else on Friday night. So I’m not sure I blame the NY affiliate, or else the game may have shown on another channel.
This doesn’t make the way that Firefly and John Doe are being handled any better. I wish Fox had waited till after the World Series to premiere them, the way that David E. Kelly’s new chick-lawyer show is waiting. I wish that the NY station had pre-empted Cops to show our shows. And I agree that Fox’s track record with SF is bad, although at least Fox has SF when the “big three” have none.
But there’s a lot of blame to spread around.
The third episode of Firefly aired just fine Friday night on my FOX affiliate and in others, so it was just a regional thing. I’m not sure if FOX Corporate is to blame, I don’t know how those arrangements work.
And since you brought it up, Futurama is being released on DVD in Europe already (not compatible with most American DVD players). Season 1’s already out, and Season 2 comes out next month. I missed the season finale last season because of local FOX affiliate technical difficulties, and I’m not sure I even want to bother with trying to keep up with the erratic airing schedule around football this season. I’ll just wait for the DVD sets (I have a multi-region DVD player).
Corey
And then there’s the whole Sci-Fi Network / Farscape debacle: “We have a show now that bumps Farscape to #2 in our ratings. If we claim that Farscape isn’t finding an audience — which is bull because even when we moved it, all the viewers followed — we can get rid of the show’s big budget and thrive in the short-term on Stargate money.”
You know, i get the impression that Fox is still in its experimental phase. They green-light a lot of off-beat, innovative shows, but also are quick to cancel. Every year it`s the same thing to them, like its a whole unending necessery chain. They simply don`t care. The Fox Network is disposable trash, there to make a quick buck. Hence all those awful reality shows, and those shock shows and tabloid journalism. It`s a fact, and it won`t change tomorrow.
What`s annoying is how can someone be attached to a particular show when more than the magority of the times it won`t last until next season? I wonder what happened to the Andy Richter thing, and that “Bunny” muppet show…?
At least there`s Bernie Mach…
My TiVo was expecting FIREFLY to be shown at 5 p.m. Thankfully, I just happened to have the TiVo tuned to Channel 5 while I was watching a Beat the Geeks episode on TiVo at 4 p.m. Imagine my surprise when the show had started 40 minutes early. Thankfully, TiVo had recorded everything past 4. Whew.
I missed the second episode due to my own stupidity, but found a pretty clear copy of it on Kazaa over the weekend.
Yes, the Friday night FOX deathtrap goes back to Fox Time Immemorial. They shafted VR.5, too, in their own way, choosing the insipid SLIDERS for renewal, instead, despite similar ratings with a much better lead-in. (SLIDERS had BH90210. VR.5 had whatever was on the local affiliate at 7:30.)
-Augie
It wasn’t just NYC that got double-shafted…LA did, too. Ironic, isn’t it? Joss couldn’t watch his own show if he had wanted to.
So, for those of you who did see it, how was it?
I think instead of concentrating on how many genre shows Fox has cancelled, we should look at how many they’ve tried. Fox has attempted more off-beat or genre type entertainment than the big 3. Fox is still a business and businesses like to make money. Sci-fi shows are more expensive to produce than your average sitcom, so they have to do well ratings wise or the network starts losing money. While there have been some ludicrously fast cancellations (Harsh Realm comes to mind), Fox usually waits at least through several episodes before making a decision. X-Files, Sliders, Space: Above and Beyond, Firefly, John Doe, 24, Brimstone, Strange Luck, Dark Angel, The Visitor, Freakylinks, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., The Tick, Mantis (God help us), and many more. Now, these shows lasted from a few episodes to many seasons, but at least they were given a shot. I’d bet most would have never made it past the pilot on the other networks.
Richard wrote:
So, for those of you who did see it, how was it?
Not to rub it in, but it was excellent. The main plot was cute but the important thing is the scripting, which was as good as anything Joss has ever done. I really hope you find a way to catch it.
On an ironic note: this episode is episode five. Fox moved it up (to a night where most of the market would likely miss it) because they felt it was so much stronger than episodes 3 and 4.
Scott
I agree with R. Todd Tyler who gave Fox credit for trying, though I’d like to follow up on his discussion of Mantis before moving to (yet) a(nother) rant of my own.
I remember watching the pilot movie with some enjoyment, and then being _appalled_ by the ensuing series.
The pilot movie would seem familiar to people who’d read Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns, but it was fairly experimental for TV. A crimefighter who’s non-violent approach (paralysis darts and chemical hypnosis) was still criticized for making things worse, and the system that restored his mobility in the short term was ruining his recovery in the long term.
So whoever approved it for a series must have said “get rid of the moral ambiguity, it’ll confuse the audience. Oh, and have him jump around like a bug and hit people, more dramatic..”
Fooey.
As a parting shot, I’d lke to point out that Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone,” which is well-acclaimed even among internet discussion boards, often used _no_ SFX. Fantastic elements were implied far more than they were shown. Remember “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” “Mr. Death” (the one with Robt Redford), or the one with the temperature changing because the earth is knocked out of its orbit?
Good drama could be even cheaper than reality shows. Just cut down on the eye candy.
Fox hasn’t been able to program Friday nights effectively since they broke up the best combo they ever had… I’m referring to the ’93-94 season with Brisco County Jr. and The X-Files…
They may *try* new stuff right and left, but that doesn’t do much for me if they don’t let the bloody things at least air more than once or twice…
Fenn
Fox’s Friday night has a long list of interesting shows that could still be on the air today if given half a shot to find an audience. “Brimstone” is one that especially gnaws at me. “Millenium” only lasted as long as it did because Carter’s influence was at its peak during this period.
Has anyone at Fox realized that Friday is probably not the night for sci-fi? “X-Files” was an anomaly (you’d think the one in — what? — fifty track record would have proven this fact).
Oh well.
It’s not just FOX. The idiots at Sci-Fi Channel don’t know how to handle Sci-Fi.
Their seemingly random method of choosing shows to keep and shows to kill is the most infuriating thing ever, and blame is usually handed to their merry-go-round management.
Take MST3k, one of the most popular genre shows out there. It had an enormous audience, which was growing larger as the anti-Mike faction began to warm up to him, it was going strong, it even did well enough that SF let them start doing non-SF movies…
Then the head of the network changed, and the new guy didn’t think it was funny, so he cut it. They’ve renewed the contract to broadcast the episodes (which they have done randomly since their initial broadcasts, even though they FORCED them to put a linear story into the show) three times now, and they’ve been letting their episodes degrade steadily ever since (I also have Tivo as well as digital cable, and all but two of the episodes they’ve run since I got them look like crap. I like to think it’s not the fault of my digital cable, which is supposed to have BETTER reception).
Then there’s Good vs. Evil. A fantastic show by all accounts: it was funny, it had a nice sense of self-effacing humour, and the action was well done, all of it on the cheap, but it still looked good. There was no way that show cost them more to produce than the show they replaced it with.
The Invisible Man, the show that replaced GvsE, was actually a better show. I refused to watch it for some time after it started because I was pìššëd at them for cancelling my favorite show. Eventually I warmed up to it, and after a few months of really getting into this brilliant piece of writing (which had a very large, vocal core audience of women rivalling the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade), they cancelled the dámņ show so they could run their new Outer Limits show. Whee! Remakes of episodes of the show that wasn’t quite as good as the Twilight Zone! Hooray! @#!% that noise. It wasn’t even a good show.
Compared to that, Rupert Murdoch is the patron saint of SF television.
I miss Brisco County, Jr. I caught a small bit of one episode on TNN a few weekends ago, but wasn’t able to watch more than a minute or two. I wonder if it’ll ever come out on DVD…
Sliders, meanwhile, got short-changed from the beginning. It was a mid-season replacement for both of its first two seasons, and I don’t think the total number of episodes was more than twenty, if that. Fox gave the show a full third season, but, if I recall correctly, moved it around the schedule a lot. And then they didn’t renew it.
All that, however, is *nothing* compared to the major retcons the Sci-Fi Channel forced onto the show when it got a hold of it. UGH.
So what did happen in the last twenty minutes of FIREFLY?
I don’t know if this “bumped up” episode is better than episodes three and four, but there’s been a steady improvement over the past three weeks, and this episode had some of the best dialogue Joss has written in a while.
–Daniel
Yep, this episode of Firefly was quite good (and, as a side note, the opening episode of Angel was *very* good). Spoilers for the last while of it at the end.
The Tick was clearly a show that was never going to be renewed. It was held in anticipation of the (didn’t happen) writer’s strike, and by the time it was put on the air opposite Friends, pretty much all the contracts had to have expired as it’d been over a year since they’d filmed the last episode. Unless it somehow leapt over Friends in the ratings, it was toast from the second it aired.
Firefly spoilers:
Not recalling just when 20 minutes was in the plot, Saffron is in Captain Mal’s quarters, naked, asking him to at least indoctrinate her into womanhood before dropping her off on a planet. Muttering about how he’ll be going to a very bad place for this, Mal kisses her…and promptly falls over, unconscious.
Saffron then goes to the bridge and tries to seduce Wash the pilot. Being married (to a woman who could and probably would kill him), he doesn’t succomb, although he does have some nice dialogue about why their marriage works. So she kicks him in the head and sabotages the ship.
On her way to steal a shuttle, Saffron runs into Inara, the companion. Saffron tries to seduce her too, but in a nice bit Inara doesn’t fall for it as you can’t play a player. Inara comments about how they both apparently got the same training at an academy, and then Saffron manages to get past her and into a shuttle.
Inara runs to Mal’s cabin, and thinks he may be dead and kisses him on the mouth. She then yells for help, goes “Oh crap” (or equivalent), and passes out herself.
When Mal revives, we learn that he was drugged by a chemical on Saffron’s lips. Inara insists that she tripped and hit her head. All three victims relate their stories. Turns out that Saffron’s working with a group who captures ships using an electric web that shorts out the ship and kills those on board; the ship’s heading straight for the web and can’t be fixed in time.
Jayne uses his gun to shoot out one of the terminals on the web, shutting it down (in a nice bit, he says his gun needs air to fire, so he ends up enclosing it in an evac suit and firing it through the suit). He then takes out a window in the web device that vacuumizes the station and kills the shipjackers.
Cut to a rural planet. Mal bursts into a house to confront a very tarted up Saffron (note: Am I the only one who thought the actress looked a *lot* better as the lightly made-up psuedo-Amish type than as the “paint an inch thick”
tart?). Basically they discuss ethical points for a bit, Mal asks her what her real name is, then knocks her out with a blow to the head, muttering “She would’ve lied about it anyway”. He recovers the shuttle and goes back to Serenity.
There’s a final scene between Mal and Inara. He explains that she’s the most graceful person he’s ever known, and he doesn’t believe she slipped and fell. She’s about to admit she kissed him, when Mal says “I knew all along you kissed her” and walks off whistling, blind to Inara’s obvious feelings for him.
Brisco County Jr. was great — right up to the end of the Orbs-John Bly storyline. Then it collapsed into mediocrity and Terry Bradshaw appearances. Unlike Joss Whedon and Buffy, Carlton Cuse had nothing to follow up his original Big Bad…
Even so, it would be a proud addition to my DVD shelf when it comes out (and I get a DVD shelf).
And Friday’s Firefly was the best of the three broadcast — the dialogue was first rate. My nitpick is this: What was Saffron doing on that backwater planet in the first place? If the goal of the shipjackers is to capture and strip spaceships, surely they would have better odds than placing their best field operative deep undercover at a place ships rarely visit…
Oh, and why aren’t they afraid of the Reavers? These guys are (in a way) competitors, and their web broadcasts EM noise like a beacon…
I thought Friday’s Firefly was very enjoyable. Very witty dialogue throughout.
And Inara is quickly becoming my favorite character on the show.
Off topic a bit, but am I the only one who hates that Angel and Alias are on at the same time? Gotta love the creator of recording devices.
Bobby
Same here. In Massachusetts baseball didn’t run. I watched Firefly and John Doe in their regular time slots.
As far as killing sci-fi shows, to be fair more than a lot have been crap to begin with.
EVERYBODY: FOR FUTURE REFERENCE! I don’t know about stations in the DC or NY area, but here in L.A. after it was apparent that Firefly would be pre-empted by the Angels/Yankees game I merely checked the stations website, in this case http://www.fox11.com, and right there on the front page it said that Firefly would be shown in its entirety at 11:00pm that night.
Part of the issue is that this particular game was show non Fox Family for most of the nation, but the broadcast rules stipulate that the two teams’ local areas (L.A. and N.Y. in this case) can have the game broadcast on their local Fox affiliate. Therefore most of the country got to see Firefly at it’s normal time and the two biggest metropolitan areas in the nation were screwed.
What is really moronic, however, is that Fox (and the other networks) only allot three hours of time for football and baseball games, though only rarely is a playoff game completed in that time. Playoff baseball games routinely take almost four hours, so anything scheduled to be shown after completion of a game is suspect. Check the stations website and if they haven’t posted information about when a pre-empted show will air, call or write them and ask. Granted, depending on the network and the show in question, they may not even re-schedule it, but there are no hard rules as to how the affiliates handle these situations.
As others have said, it was a regional pre-emption.
Aired right on time here.
Not sure how much longer I’ll stick with it, though, as the pacing is tedious, too many characters are mercurial and unfocused, and the level, dispersal and availability of technology seems random and without explanation for the inconsistencies.
But, then, I’m one of those (few, admittedly) who has been physically unable – ever – to watch more than 5 minutes of any episode of Buffy without reaching for a barf bag and grabbing the remote to turn the TV off. Just. Can’t. Stand. That. Show.
I’m not knocking anyone who likes BTVS (nor trying to change anyone else’s opinion of the show), so please don’t attempt to convince me otherwise. It’s just not my cup of ichor.
As for not being able to handle SF, Fox doesn’t hold a candle to TNT (Babylon 5, anyone? – among too many others to bother mentioning) or Nickelodeon (Space Cases).
Luckily, the latest incarnation of Twilight Zone is awful thus far (derivative, gratuitous, trite, plodding, dull AND predictable all rolled into one package). As it airs at roughly 1:47 a.m. (early on Sunday) locally, can just skip it.
I haven’t seen the second episode of “Firefly”;but *really* enjoyed the third. At 9PM on Sundays, I watch “Sopranos” with my wife; then the videotape of “Angel,”by myself. We have raised 3 sons(24,24, and 14)and for me the true horror of the current “Angel” storyline is not that his son hates him(he’s a teenager, what do you expect?);but that he lost all the years from infancy to teens!
It’s not just a Fox thing – it’s not even just a US thing. Over here, for non-cable viewers, Buffy, most Star-Trek and pretty much all Sci-Fi is shown on BBC 2. They all get pre-empted for ANY sporting event… and BBC2 doesn’t even show Britain’s 2 biggest sports, Soccer (Football to me) or Cricket. No – we lose out to Athletics, Snooker or even (God help me) Bowls!
That’s not the worst part. We had Buffy and Angel on 2 different channels from the start, and both of them did the same thing. They thought “Hey, popular teen show – let’s buy it!” Then they watched the show, realised that it wasn’t suitable for the timeslot they wanted to put it in and so… rather than thinking for a second and then changing the timeslot to fit the show, they changed the show to fit the timeslot. Thus, Buffy was shown at 6:45 pm, edited for a younger audience. then when Channel 4 started showing Angel at 6pm, they did the same thing. Only when they did it, it was edited FAR more, and in a FAR worse manner. Honestly, you’d think that they got the new guy at the editing place to do it, the high-school dropout who can’t spell his own name. It was AWFUL. So bad, that one of the top SF magazines in the UK – SFX – picked up on this, and when people didn’t notice things in shows, they were referred to as having seen a “Channel 4 version” – ie one with several bits missing.
I don’t quite think I’ve put forward just how bad this was… let me spell it out. They started showing 2 episodes back to back, starting at 5:45 and finishing at 7. That’s 2 episodes of a show which usually runs for 42 minutes without ads, in a 75 minute timeslot. Even without ads, that’s an average of 4.5 mins per episode trimmed. But they had ad breaks too! On average, we lost about 10 minutes per episode!
Then of course, there were the episodes they couldn’t trim… maybe the subject matter was too Adult for their supposed audience, whatever… they just skipped over them. Then they started showing them in a late night timeslot (I think it was about 11:45), but only the ones they had missed out, not the ones they had cut to ribbons…
As you can guess, this annoyed quite a few people. There was a write-in campaign to Channel 4, to get them to move it to a better timeslot, and show it uncut. Which, to their credit, they appear to have done from season 2 onward. Me, I donb’t care. I have Cable now, which puts me a month or so behind you guys in the States… which suits me fine!
Am I the only one sick of execs who claim that a show never found its audience when the audience was never able to find the show?
PAD
I had this exact complaint about NBC and “the others” which I loved. They pre-empted it for basketball,awards and the ultra-lame “10th Kingdom” and then cancelled it(with a cliffhanger no less!) claiming poor ratings. Same thing they did with the awesome “Freaks and Geeks”.
As for “Firefly” I have gotten all 3 episodes here in Houston, but its going to be pre-empted next week. I would like it if they would at least air it on Sunday or something. I really like that WB is airing some shows on Sunday,it surely will help build an audience to those shows.
Col
“Am I the only one sick of execs who claim that a show never found its audience when the audience was never able to find the show?”
Not hardly.
Had the same complaint about The Flash – that was, what, a decade ago? Was that program EVER shown consecutively on the same night and time?
But even then, it was nothing new.
1st season of original Star Trek: Thursdays at 9. Steady, if unspectacular, audience.
Second season: Fridays at 9. Lost hefty portion of the adult audience; those who went out on the town on Friday nights.
Third season: Fridays at 10. Lost a lot of the kid audience, who had been trundled off to sleep.
Not to mention the re-runs, which often started on the half-hour (so as, I opine, to avoid getting as much of the audience watching other hour-length shows that began ON the hour elsewhere).
These days, with shows starting at 3 minutes after the hour, 40 minutes past the hour, etc., and being shuffled around on different days faster than cards at the Speed Force Casino, it has simply become too much dang work to try to follow a favorite (or potential favorite), which sucks much of the enjoyment right out of the medium.
Let’s see… the new TV season began about 2 weeks ago. We should be getting the mid-mid-mid-season replacements any day now.
Remember folks, we’re not just talking about science fiction here. Fox pulled the same exact pre-empt-it-then-change-time-slots-randomly trick with “Family Guy”. Now that was a hilarious show — maybe a little crude and rough around the edges, but much less so than “Greg the Bunny” or any number of other shows Fox tried out in the meantime. Like few other shows, Family Guy was simply hilarious, so jam-packed with gags that even though a lot of the jokes fell flat on their face you were still laughing throughout the whole episode.
Last summer Family Guy was in the ridiculous predicament of having brand new episodes that were supposed to be aired during the previous season aired during the summer. That’s right, the summer, when TV watching is at its lowest. Then come fall, Fox lined up their new season of Family Guy on Thursday nights, the one night of the week where every other channel has their best programming on. Hëll, even UPN has Smackdown, their highest-rated show, on Thursdays.
The remarks people have made about SF shows being more expensive to produce don’t apply to half-hour cartoons, either. This season Fox is allegedly airing new episodes of Futurama, as mentioned above, and not only have they been pre-empted by sports or other shows so far, but since Fox already bought the episodes they’re airing now the Futurama staff are out of jobs. This season is the last of Futurama, folks, unless Fox manages to avoid showing so many that they can overflow to next year again.
I might not even mind the fact that they’re killing these shows if not for the fact that Fox is preventing me from seeing them at all. I’d be willing to buy DVDs of Futurama or Family Guy, like the ones that Fox has already released to Germany and England. They’re already selling a DVD of Twenty-Four’s first season here in the states, I can’t comprehend why they don’t release any of these good cartoons here. Hëll, it’s not like they’d have to create any extra content or anything, the bonus goodies already exist in the European releases. I’d buy those, but my computer can’t play Region 2 DVDs.
No matter how good a show of any type is, it will always be preempted by sporting events that occur in its time slot. Bottom line, sports make money. Quirky cartoons and other genre entertainment do not. Let’s face it plenty of non-genre shows get cancelled all the time, yet noone ever accuses the networks of not knowing how to handle drama or of trying to kill sitcoms. Not every show that we like is going to be successful. Especially when you’re dealing with a populace that makes Will and Grace one of the most popular TV shows and found the plot to the first Mission:Impossible movie “too complicated”.
R. Todd Tyler wrote:
“Especially when you’re dealing with a populace that makes Will and Grace one of the most popular TV shows and found the plot to the first Mission:Impossible movie “too complicated”.”
Thank God. I agree on both counts, and I thought I was the only person in the world who felt that way. At first, I just considered Will and Grace a mediocre show, improved slightly by having James Burrows as a director. But now that the show’s in syndication, the local station has started advertising it constantly, and I’ve discovered I actually HATE Will and Grace.
–Daniel
Well… Being a football/baseball fan as well as a science-fiction TV fan I’ve got mixed feelings.
Now, I missed the 3rd episode of “Firefly” not because of the network, but because I was actually at the Angels/New York game on Friday night. I forgot to set my VCR. Too excited about my Angels being in the post-season.
I’ve been missing my “Enterprise” as well, even though it’s on another network. As long as the Anaheim Angels are in the race for the World Series I’ll be watching baseball.
If I somehow manage to score tickets for this Friday’s Angels/Twins AL Championship game (I got tix for Saturday!) I’ll have to remember set my VCR this time.
Peace…
Dan
Yeah, Fox is great for pre-empting a show again and again and then cancelling it because “no one’s watching it.” They did it to “Titus” last year, too: Took it off in the middle of February sweeps and then burned off the remaining episodes in July, with no promotion.
And how ’bout the second-season opener of “Futurama,” the “Christine” parody? On the East Coast, the football game ran over and they joined “Futurama” “in progress.” They showed the last two minutes of the last act, went to commercial, ran the closing credits, and that was it! And then I think it aired once before the end of football season.
If I remember correctly, the reason given for axing “Alien Nation” wasn’t even that the ratings were bad, just that they weren’t going up.
I’m warming to “Firefly,” but the second I heard it was going to be on Fox on Friday at nine, I thought, “Well, it’ll make a nice 44-episode DVD set in two years.”