Poll: Why was Firefly canceled?

[Altorin]

people who like firefly are very loud

and make themselves out to be more legion then they in fact are.

They made enough noise to get a movie made, Serenity.. and that basically bombed too.

Full Disclosure, I hated Firefly, and for one I never saw what anyone saw in it. Me, and about 50 million other viewers. The few hundred thousand that enjoyed the show didn't hold a candle to the huge silent majority that did they're talking just by changing the channel.

We didn't need to go to an internet forum and talk about how bad the show was.. we just had to change the channel, and Fox listenned to that.

And when all of the Firefly fanatics (and I'm going to say fanatics, as they go beyond a simple "fan") got their way and someone produced a movie, we didn't go and see it, because really, we don't care.


edit: As for Family Guy, when it cancelled, it was bombing. It was the immense DVD sales that got it back on the table. If it hadn't been for that it would have sunk away to obscurity.

And Futurama had a decently long run for a cartoon sitcom. It came to a fairly logical close.. and it would have sunk away if it hadn't been for DVD sales.

So the moral of the story is, if you want to see Firefly again, you, and each other fan, need to buy every bit of official Firefly, new, at the store. Buy every DVD, buy 2 or 3 copies.

I thought Family Guy wasn't worth saving until long after it was cancelled.. it's the later episodes that made it good.

 

[Jon Etheridge]

I understand that they aired the series out of order. FOX is not really known for giving a show time to find an audience.

 

[Deleric]

Joss Whedon's record is so inconsistent. Both Buffy and Angel started slow.

Buffy got awesome, then progressively worse.
Angel got awesome, then awesomer.

The reason Firefly seems to be so popular is that FOX cut it before it ever reached a point where Joss gets too attached and starts pulling shit out the ass. The cancelation, in my opinion, is what got it so popular.

And the FUCKING MOVIE. God damn.

 

[Gerazzi]

Never watched it.
So I'm more obsessed with the canceled Pushing Daisies and Arrested Development...

 

[quiet_samurai]

It was a good show, as was the movie. But seriously comrades, it's been damn near a decade. Move along.

 

[Lyri]

No idea, but it's a damn shame.

 

[Shaoken]

It was cancelled because Fox kept meddling with it, airing it at inconsitant hours, airing the episodes out of order which screwed up the myth arc, and generally were dicks about it.

I mean come on; they had arrested development, which won awards, and they kept moving it's air time around and around until finally it got low enough ratings so they could cancel it.

 

[Gawspel]

I'm going to have to go with that it wasn't any good.

 

[PsiMatrix]

Some have said that because the Pilot wasn't aired first. The first episode shown was 'The Train Job' which drops you in the middle of the action, but doesn't do much for back story, so you had no idea who these people were and what was really going on. Strangely the Pilot episode was the last aired episode...

It was explained on one of the DVD promos. Fox wanted them to be pirates/snugglers in space and were rigorously arguing for The Train Job to be the pilot. Joss went along with it but wrote the pilot episode while they were working on TTJ.

What they could've done was ship it international earlier. I didn't see it until late night on SciFi UK around mid-way through as I happened to be channel-hopping in 2005/6. Even without knowing the characters they had chemistry that got me instantly hooked and very few shows have that.