One of Fox's biggest successes as a production company was, to speak of the devil again, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Of course, it was successful for WB and not Fox, but that's beside the point. Because of Buffy, Joss got the green light for Firefly. Fox promptly killed Firefly by airing the episodes out of order, thus screwing the show's continuity. Now Fox, because of Firefly's cult appeal, gave Joss the green light for Dollhouse, which is on TV's death night.
Would Fox like to see its sci-fi shows succeed like Buffy and The X-Files? Of course they would. However, the Fox Network is a different place than it was in 1993 when The X-Files got years plural to prove itself. Fox is a company that, like all the other networks, needs instant results. If they can't get instant results, then they can sabotage other networks.
I think that Fox likes to keep big name creators like Whedon and Abrams tied up and off the competing networks by any means necessary. Fringe and Lost would be huge back to back. You don't think the CW would love to have a Joss Whedon show to give it an actual audience to go alongside Supernatural? You don't think NBC would love to have something (anything) to put on the air instead of the awful Knight Rider or another iteration of Law & Order? The CBS show The Big Bang Theory promoted Sarah Connor more this week than Fox has in a month simply because they had Summer Glau as a guest star!
By green lighting shows and deliberately tanking them, Fox keeps potentially successful programs away from the competition while still being able to say, "Hey, we're big sci-fi fans, you're just not watching the shows we put on!" Why else would they take a show doing fairly good ratings and move it to Friday, or take a show that should do better and start it out on Fridays? Why would they completely preempt an otherwise successful show for American Idol unless they wanted it dead?
In television, it's succeed right away or die. If a show like Fringe does good numbers, but not the expected or hoped-for great numbers, the easiest thing to do is save some money and kill the show. Rather than give Fringe a decent lead-in with a carry-over audience like House, Fox can just cram House and 24 together on Mondays to kill Chuck and Heroes and give Fringe... what exactly? Oh right, a vacation. Or worse, a completely unrelated lead-in show so that when Fringe loses half of American Idol's audience, Fox can justify shuttling the show off to Friday to replace whichever one of its Friday sci-fi shows dies first.
I wish I could give sci-fi fans some note of hope, but the shows that should live on get put on networks that conspire to kill them, and shows that should've ended two seasons ago (I'm looking at you, Smallville) linger on because their home network has nothing better to show. Fox's new network slogan should be, "If we can't have it, no one can!"
Issue: 111 | April, 2010