The Firefly Effect

"Sometimes, viewers are so afraid that a show will be Screwed by the Network that they refuse to watch it, even if it sounds appealing to them."

The Firefly Effect refers to viewers being afraid of committing to a new series because they don't believe the series will last long enough to make up for the investment of time and emotions. "The network is just going to cancel this, so I'm not giving it my heart." If enough viewers think this way towards a particular TV series, it may become a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy — people don't watch because they think the show will be canceled, and then the show is cancelled because no one is watching it.

Television executives don't tend to want to invest in intelligent or overly complex series, because they worry that the given show will be less popular (and thus draw in less money from ratings) if viewers are required to use their brains. As well as the Trope Namer Firefly, Star Trek: Voyager was a quintessential example of this trope. It had an initial premise which was very similar to that of Firefly in some respects, and although the show didn't get cancelled, said initial premise was basically scrapped; as well as the series being made a lot less intelligent, and more violent. Jeri Ryan was initially intended to be brought to the show as an exploitative element due to her figure, which ended up backfiring due to the fact that, as well as being beautiful, she turned out to be a very talented actress.

This trope usually only applies to science fiction, or anything similar which is likely to be weird, non-mainstream, or otherwise cause the suits to worry that it won't rate well. It can be a real problem for all the Lost clones and other Ontological Mysteries, which aren't worth watching if they don't get more than one season, and especially if they don't even get a full season—and they often don't. That is also the sort of TV shows most likely to be hit by this effect, but it can hit any show that makes it clear upfront that you need to be involved in the characters or the overarching plot to make sense of the show in the long run. That demand up front plus the uncertainty that there will be a long run allows The Chris Carter Effect to start before the TV show does, meaning the fans never start watching...

In contrast, people usually don't think that they'll get overly attached to Crime procedurals, Sitcoms, Soap Operas or even Reality Shows; thus, they'll feel free to watch episodes 'casually' until the attachment to the show (or characters) sneaks up on them.

Even some shows that seemed feasible only over one (22-ep) season (such as Reunion, Day Break, Kidnapped, Vanished, and Drive) suffer from this effect, due to the episode order getting shortened to 13. In Reunion's case, the producers didn't even bother finishing the storyline, because it only made sense over a full 22 episodes rather than the shortened 13.

Incidentally, many of these shows (including Trope Namers Firefly) were on FOX — basically because Fox was likely to give the sort of show that gets this effect an initial run, but tended to be too Nielsen-sensitive to be patient. In the 2010s FOX has been experimenting to test the nature of this effect, as evidenced by Fringe (which seems to have escaped this trope, beginning its fifth season in the fall of 2012) and Dollhouse (if The Firefly Effect can apply to a show that has run for more than one season, then Dollhouse is it).

The rise of Streaming services like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime had deprecated but not totally eliminated this effect. For one side, streaming services tend to order full seasons and then release them in one go, making people feel more confident on invest themselves on series, fully confident that they will not be cancelled mid season. On the other side,there is equally probable that these series end not renewed for new seasons or even eventually removed from the service for lack of viewers.

Live-Action TV

 * Dollhouse may very well have suffered from this. A show on the infamous Fox by the writer of the Trope Namer, Joss Whedon? Viewers were probably half-convinced it wouldn't last half a season even before the Executive Meddling affecting the pilot was revealed. This may very well have contributed to the low ratings.
 * This could be the result of a different sort of "Firefly Effect", as FOX's president of entertainment explained the decision to renew it with the logic that "if we'd canceled Joss' show I'd probably have 110 million e-mails this morning from the fans." Apparently, Firefly's cult status may have shown that even if they never become mainstream hits, Joss Whedon's shows will get enough fans to justify keeping around. (They did cut the budget, however, because they're not going to invest big-hit bucks on what they expect to be nothing more than a cult hit that will hold down a less-than-desirable slot and nothing more.)
 * It's worth noting that Whedon himself was convinced the show was going to get cancelled, in the face of the myriad statements issued by Fox that there was no way it was getting the chop, to the point that the first season's final (unaired episode) is designed to resolve the entire plotline and contains a fourth-wall breaking jab at Fox ("There's butchers in the green room - nothing but dumbshows out here.")
 * Oh, and then it was cancelled as of November 11, 2009. :(
 * Switching networks, there originally was some reluctance over the internet concerning ABC's V, considering it was sci-fi, had an overarching plot, and a remake. V pulled in record numbers for its premiere, but lasted only two seasons.
 * FlashForward, on the other hand, suffered from dwindling viewership through its entire one-season run, ending up with less than a third of the viewers it started with.
 * The strange scheduling FOX followed with Glee during its first season -- putting the show on a four-month break between the pilot and episode 2, and then putting the series on hold for another four months during American Idol season -- led some devoted Glee fans to panic that FOX was trying to "pull another Firefly." As it turned out, the hiatus was because Fox had originally ordered a half-season, then decided they had a good thing going and ordered nine more episodes.  Since the episodes take a ridiculously long time to make, the hiatus was required to film the new episodes that Fox ordered.  And of course, as it turned out, Glee ran for six successful seasons.
 * The Netflix Marvel series like Jessica Jones, Daredevil and the adaptation of The Defenders suffered on public interest as their seasons went and people realized that the characters were not going to be incorporated to the main MCU as originally promised, thus lessening viewers' engagement.