With eight sci-fi / fantasy shows from the 2008-2009 season canceled, fans are a little dismayed. Is this the new model -- make great, intelligent shows, let them languish unhyped, and then kill them off just as they start to build a fanbase and a DVR audience?
The shock is not that so many fell in this way, but that a few survived.
Fans of this year's fallen are trying, as always, to mount campaigns to save their favorite shows, but attaining the visibility or traction of last year's earnest effort to save Moonlight or the successful push to bring back Jericho, not to mention the famous Tobasco-related renewal of Roswell back in 2000, has been difficult.
The doomed fan campaign, with petitions to bring back a lost show on its old network or a new one, has become an annual event. And the failure of Jericho's second season in particular has induced journalists and network execs to become inured to the fans' pleas, despite this year's big success: the tweeting of internet fans is widely credited with helping to save NBC's well-liked but marginally rated Chuck for a third season despite being pegged as a "bubble show" by bottom-line-conscious programming executives. Some say fan support was a also factor in last month's unexpected renewal of Fox's low-rated Joss Whedon series Dollhouse.
ABC's Many Victims
Some shows have special difficulties. ABC's intelligent Life on Mars, which was canceled in March, had enough time to change the ending of its 17th and, as it turned out, last episode, using the last ten minutes to completely wrap up the series and put a bow on it. That's great for fans who hate being left hanging when shows just stop being produced, but it makes the work of fan campaigns like Save our Sam even harder. Despite petition signatures and professions of love for the show's characters, mysteries, and its warts-and-all evocation of the Seventies, it's hard to get past the way the show ended. Fans insist that since the whole series was in Sam's mind, so might be the last ten minutes, set in the future on a Mars lander.
The window to save ABC Family's Kyle XY, abruptly canceled in March and left dangling on a cliffhanger, also seems to have closed. Still, fan sites like Save Kyle XY, Save the Tub, the Campaign to Save Kyle XY promise "we are not done -- this is only the beginning."
Here's a show that definitely needs to be brought back, if only to resolve all the stuff that was left open. Creator Julie Plec and star Matt Dallas have both moved on to new series (Vampire Diaries and Eastwick, respectively), so putting the show back together would take quite an effort. But Kyle's fans remain dedicated, recently mounting a new letter-writing push in late April to grab ABC's attention.
Moving Beyond the Series
Meanwhile, Pushing Daisies fans, currently drinking in the remaining episodes being burned off by ABC, are acutely aware both (a) that creator Bryan Fuller has moved on after two years of trying to make it work (he returned to the writing staff of Heroes), and (b) that Fuller is making sure Pushing Daisies lives in other media.
Fuller has done up a 12-installment miniseries of graphic novels to resolve the storylines left hanging by the show, and may push for a feature film. "It would wrap up a lot of the unanswered questions that people will have once they finally air our final episodes," said star Kristin Chenoweth recently. "I'm sure that Bryan Fuller wouldn't do it without the six main characters. ... We all want to."
Even whole cable networks sometimes get axed and need fan campaigns to bring them back. Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse are dropping the on-demand FEARnet service from their lineups, leaving network execs gasping. They're trying to get 50,000 sci-fi and horror fans to sign a Facebook petition to get cable operators to return the network to their slates, and they've managed to get some press attention doing so.
Possibilities for the Future
One show that might have a future is Reaper. It has many of the same problems as other canceled series -- co-star Tyler Labine has a new series for the fall, and the creators have a new deal at a competing studio.
Nonetheless, industry reports say ABC Studios is actively shopping Reaper to CW stations as something to plug into their Sunday schedules (which The CW abandoned after the catastrophic failure of its Sunday-night line-up). The affiliates have few options for filling their Sunday schedules, though two-thirds of them have already signed up for an MGM movie package that includes films like Legally Blonde and some James Bond features. Anyway, here's a rare situation where the producers and the fans are on the same page -- trying to find a way to save Reaper by shifting it to first-run syndication.
The Roswell campaign, which saved the show by mailing in little bottles of Tobasco sauce to startled network executives, worked because the tactics involved were groundbreaking. The prototype established succeeded once more, when Jericho fans sent so many crates of nuts to CBS bigwigs that they had to plead with fans to stop sending them. But now the whole sending-tangible-icons thing is overexposed, and the online petition seems ephemeral.
If fans are to save their favorite series, they need new techniques to demonstrate the level of their commitment. Perhaps the Chuck fans' use of wonky/geeky Net 2.0 tools points the way, but it may only work for a self-professed wonky/geeky show like Chuck. How can today's fans save their shows? We won't know until the next time someone manages to do it.
