 This is the SF Productions Podcast Network. What might have been? From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. You can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics on iTunes, or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. The TV execs make 100 Decisions a day, all the way from casting a guest star to passing on a series. Sometimes, they live to regret it. In 1969, NBC made the call to cancel the original Star Trek after three years on the air. This show had already been on shaky ground with only a massive fan campaign saving it the previous year. The question is, would Star Trek have become the phenomenon it became had it continued for a longer NBC run? It can be argued that the last season was the poorest of the three with goofy storylines like spots, brains, space hippies, etc. and reduced budgets. So what do you think? I know you don't believe it would have been. I think if it had gone on, the quality would continue to go down. Roddenberry had already basically unplugged. He was moving on to something else. And you would have ended up with a show that wouldn't be nearly as well remembered. And it wouldn't have really helped them in terms of their initial syndication because they already had three seasons. A fourth or fifth season wouldn't have significantly changed that formula. Okay. The same though might be said for other shows which we'll talk about as we go on. Yeah. In 1982, ABC Green lit a series from the people who brought you the airplane movies, a parody of police shows. Despite positive reviews, Police Squad only ran six episodes. It's hard to sell parody on TV. The producers turned that around and created the Naked Gun franchise and made a lot of money. In 1994, NBC was in the middle of pilot season when they choose the shows to kick off the new schedule. Part of this involves test audiences where people off the street were asked to watch a pilot and rate it. One pilot that year scored only 41 out of 100. They found the characters smug, superficial and self-absorbed. The focus on Gen X characters too narrow and the show not very entertaining, clever or original. They found the copy house setting to be confusing. Despite this, and mostly due to the fact that NBC was not doing well at the time and needed something to fill the slot, they went forward with the show anyway. Friends, which would anchor NBC's Must See Thursday for a decade. NBC made two other moves with shows already on the network, which turned out to be costly mistakes. In 1989, an action-adventure series based on a California beach wasn't doing too well in its first season. 73rd out of 103 series. Plus, the production company running it went out of business, so the show was dropped. The star of the show and the executive producers thought they could turn things around and move the show to first-run syndication, airing once a week, whenever the local station wanted. That show would become the biggest show on the planet, at one point registering 1.1 billion weekly viewers. The show was Baywatch, it aired for 11 seasons total, and spun off Baywatch Nights and three direct-to-video films. Surprisingly, despite all the cheesecake, the audience tended to be female since the women on the show were heroes and equal to men. I think this was also a case where the show would not have been as successful if it continued on the network. Hmm, why is that? Because the network couldn't air it when people would watch it, they would only air it at one point. True. And I think that by having it in different markets, at different times you were able to appeal to the people who wanted to watch it rather than to the audience who expected to get it. At the one specific point. Yes. Which is what would be on network. That makes sense. Yeah. In 1996, a military courtroom drama action series was doing okay in the ratings. By the way, twice the numbers of the number one show today. But it was rather expensive so they dropped it after its first season. CBS decided to save the show and made some cast changes. That show was Jag, which would run for ten years and more importantly, spawn the NCIS franchise that continues to rule the ratings now. In 1999, a show about high school in the early 80s from an up-and-coming producer with what retrospective was a stellar cast only lasted a season. Judd Apatow's Freaks and Geeks quickly got the axe from NBC. He went on to define comedy in the 21st century while the cast, Seth Rogen, Jason Siegel, Busy Phillips, Martin Star, James Franco and Linda Cardellini, have become sought after performers and the actual show creator, Paul Fig, hasn't done badly either. In 2003, Fox had an animated series in its third season that had already been canceled once, then given a reprieve. But the ratings didn't improve and it was sent packing. Reruns of the show moved over to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim where it became a huge hit. The nascent TV DVD market was also showing major sales for this series, so in 2005, Fox again brought the show back. Family Guy has been running since then and is now on season 19. It's a staple of TBS's lineup and has won eight Emmys to date. We also have to talk about Fox and their systemic, systematic cancellation of genre shows in the early 2000s. At the time, the network's strategies seemed to be to promote the hell out of an upcoming series and as soon as the show premiered, drop all promotion and see if the show thrived. If not, it was gone. This became such a known syndrome that when Family Guy returned to the air, Peter Griffin listed in an aside all 29 shows that had also been canceled since their hiatus, including Dark Angel, Wonder Falls, Freaky Links, The Lone Gunman, Harsh Realm, The Tick, True Calling, and of course, Firefly. The cult space western ran for only 14 episodes with three of them not seen on Fox. The episodes were shown out of order, so the pilot, normally designed to introduce the characters and concept, aired later in the run. Less than successful films Serenity followed. Browncoats continued to berate the network and demand the resumption of the series 18 years later. Fox would much later cancel a cop-based comedy partly due to the fact that the show was produced by a rival studio and hence, Fox had to split the profits. So NBC, the home studio, snapped up Brooklyn Nine-Nine within days of its initial cancellation. CBS almost let a golden goose get away in 2007. A pilot about geeky guys was rejected partly due to concerns with the female lead. She was recast, new characters were added, and a second pilot made it to air. The show ran for a short eight-episode season with middling ratings. Then a writer strike later that year halted most new programming, forcing the network to re-run the show over and over. This filled up an audience starving for new content and meant that the Big Bang Theory would run for 12 seasons in the top 10 for eight of them. The introduction of the streaming era has allowed series rejected by traditional broadcasting cable networks to thrive. A creepy show about kids in the 80s? That'll never work. 15 networks turned it down before Netflix picked up Stranger Things. All these new viewing options have allowed series a second life. There's the one day at a time reboot, canceled by Netflix, picked up by Pop TV, and now being shown on CBS. Lucifer, picked up by Netflix after Fox canceled it. He expands, canceled by sci-fi, but picked up by Amazon. I don't know about that. Makes a lot of people happy when their favorite shows are picked up again. But that's what you get when you have so many networks and so many outlets, you can't appeal to a more niche audience. I think that if this market had existed when Firefly was canceled, somebody would have picked it up. Oh, absolutely. Especially now that Joss Whedon has more of a reputation. Right, sure. Of course, what kind of a reputation? So you can go check out some of those shows, or you can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife 3 Comics, on iTunes, or on our website, SFpodcastnetwork.com. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. Thanks for watching.