Once upon a time, most quickly canceled TV shows didn’t just die.
They faded away.
Yes, boys and girls, series that failed to reach the magic number of episodes for syndication – usually 100, sometimes fewer – disappeared into the TV-trivia reference books, never to be seen again.
All that, of course, was long ago, before the era of cable and DVD.
Now a network that stomps out a fledgling show can’t necessarily expect it to stay stomped. Indeed, Fox, which has done its share of stomping over the years – and has already recorded this season’s first cancellation, “Head Cases” – ended up bringing back “Family Guy” last spring after DVD sales and cable reruns established it as a hit.
Another Fox show strangled in its cradle, the 2001 Dana Delany soap, “Pasadena,” just started running on SoapNet, where interested viewers will finally get to see all 13 episodes and decide whether the network was right or not to have pulled it after just four.
DVD sales fanned the flames that kept “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator Joss Whedon’s 2002 space Western “Firefly” alive, leading to the big-screen “Serenity,” which landed in theaters last week.
“Serenity,” while a decent film, can’t help but be a bit frustrating for those who loved the original, which developed its characters and its oddball universe far more deeply over 14 episodes than any movie could hope to.
The DVD released in December 2003 (and currently a best-seller on Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s Web sites) contains all 14, including the three that never aired on Fox. I’ve spent most of the past week rewatching it, in the order that Whedon originally intended it to run, and it makes a powerful argument that Fox, which has shown laudable patience with “Arrested Development,” messed up with “Firefly.”
Starting with the decision to shelve the scene-setting two-hour pilot – it eventually aired as the show’s last episode – and continuing through a series of episode shuffles that couldn’t help but confuse some viewers (and I recall being one of them), network suits seem to have tinkered the show to death.
Imagine, if you will, that ABC had decided not to show the plane crash in “Lost,” instead picking up with, say, the episode where the survivors start building the raft.
Or had decided to dispense with the flashbacks for Jack (Matthew Fox) and his companions. Somehow I doubt that more than 23 million people a week would still be watching.
More likely, “Lost,” too, would’ve been lost.
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