Screwed by the Network/Live-Action TV


 * The granddaddy of all Screwed by the Network examples: the original Star Trek the Original Series. After two seasons of middling ratings, NBC announced its intent to cancel the show. However, a national campaign of letter writing, led by a fan named Betty Jo Trimble, resulted in an unprecedented backdown by the network. NBC renewed the show for Season 3... but also cut the show's budget by approximately half and placed the show in the Friday Night Death Slot, when the show's demographic was likely to be doing anything but watching TV. Episode quality, and consequently ratings, suffered meteoric falls (although it was responsible for some of the series' most memorable episodes), followed by cancellation at the end of the season.

Interestingly, many of the cast and crew involved in the show later declared that the show's cancellation was the best thing to happen to the franchise -- instead of the slashed budget taking its toll and resulting in a steady decline in quality, Star Trek cemented itself in the public consciousness as an excellent show killed before its time, which left fans clamoring for more and led to the creation of eleven films and five subsequent series, the second of which would win critical acclaim and eighteen Emmys in the process, and another of which would garner the highest critical ratings of any Trek series and pioneer Character Development and serialized plotlines and Myth Arcs several years before that became common on network television. "Daniel Tosh: "We'll be right back with more...I'm not happy about this one...The Sarah Silverman Program.""
 * That the latter writing campaign saved Star Trek is a myth created by Roddenberry, who also organized the fan campaign, in reality it had little to no effect (and why would it, NBC knew how many people were watching, these numbers don't magically change if the audience starts writing letters). Though Lucille Ball did make a big stink and threatened to leave which shook the house. But according to Inside Star Trek the true reason Star Trek: The Original Series got a third season was because back then NBC's parent company was RCA, which owned the patent for color television. Star Trek was one of the biggest reasons why people bought color TV sets, and RCA made more money by selling them to Star Trek fans than NBC lost by airing Star Trek instead of something else.
 * In a tragic and unexplainable move, NBC decided to move The Tonight Show, hosted by Conan O'Brien, from its regular 11:30 timeslot to 12:05. Because he knew it would push out Late Night, do more harm to The Tonight Show than help, and because he was just plain tired of being dicked around by the network, Conan threatened to quit the show and leave the network in protest. NBC paid him a penalty of $44 Million to leave while Jay Leno took The Tonight Show back. Conan was so badly screwed by the network that even his direct competitors are furious on his behalf: David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, George Lopez, and Jimmy Kimmel have all directly reamed NBC for their atrocious behavior.
 * Not to mention, in a rare example of knock-on screwing effect, the ill-advised decision to park Jay's talk show -- and promote it exclusively and not Conan, even in the nightly lead-ups -- five nights a week at 10:00 PM managed to screw Conan and every NBC station due to the decision to cancel five nights of prime-time scripted drama, causing ratings for the late local news to tank across the country. It arguably didn't help Jay, either.
 * Supposedly, the reason for this change was because NBC was tired of shelling out money for prime-time dramas that no one watched and ended up tanking, and realized it was cheaper to just produce a variety show for Jay (who was leaving The Tonight Show anyway) so he could stay with the network.
 * Conan and Andy did "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour" from April-June, then moved to TBS.
 * Conan got screwed by NBC again with the handling of his production Outlaw, which not only got the Friday Night Death Slot but got canceled after just five episodes due not getting the desired 18-49 demographic (who probably doesn't even watch TV on Fridays). Its replacement, School Pride, has gotten far worse ratings but does not seem to be on any sort of cancellation threat (it was finally canceled, but only because the producer died).
 * The Network started the whole Tonight Show mess by not renewing Leno's contract (even though the show was #1) & giving the show to O'Brien. Rumor was that the Tonight Show was a bribe to keep O'Brien at NBC & not do a competing show on another network.
 * Things are not looking so great for Community. Despite critical acclaim, a cult following,and getting picked up for a fourth season it seems that NBC are trying to screw this one over.
 * First the 4th season was cut from the regular 24 episodes to 13.
 * The series was then moved to the infamous Friday Night Death Slot
 * To add insult to injury, creator and showrunner Dan Harmon got replaced without his knowledge.
 * Quantum Leap was also moved around to different time slots, and fans overwhelmed the network with mail to keep it on the air. The series finale was just supposed to be a season finale. A rather depressing title card was added to the very last shot of the series in order to wrap things up.
 * When Jericho got canceled the first time, CBS decided not to announce its impending doom until AFTER the cliffhanger season finale aired (it made the nuts all the more necessary).
 * The only consolation prize from all of this was that the writers were prepared for an either-or situation (two different endings, both filmed) and that CBS informed them of their cancellation before airing the series finale. Notice how networks now are giving more of their serial dramas (and their fans) ample warning of likely cancellation BEFORE their season finale airs to give writers some time to wrap up major storylines. The Jericho fans may have been a major influence in this change, which would make this seem like a bittersweet victory for fans of quality TV story-telling.
 * This occurs in-universe in Seinfeld. Jerry and George had been pushing for a long time to get their "show about nothing" approved by NBC. Finally, their first episode is aired and is successful. However, at the same time, the head executive who had approved the show goes AWOL and is replaced by a vindictive woman who cancels the show out of spite.
 * The popular hit Fox show New York Undercover, though it could be argued that it was screwed by the writers, rather than the network. In the third season, the show introduced audiences to Tommy McNamara. From that season onward, the show focused more around him, than the two original main characters, Julius Clearance and Eduardo Torres. As a result, the show lost ratings and was eventually cancelled.
 * Wonderfalls (aired on FOX, of course!) was canceled after four weeks, one of the quickest deaths Fox has ever managed to give a show. But that was only the last of a number of choices on the part of the network that led to the show's demise: first, the show was developed at the same time as CBS' Joan of Arcadia, to which at first glance it may seem strikingly similar in theme. Supposedly fearing it would draw too many comparisons, they held off the premiere for an entire year, which backfired and led some to think it was a deliberate copy (as opposed to a coincidence), especially as Joan had proven successful and was still on the air. Worse, it started airing 8:00 PM on a Friday, which had the dual misfortune of not only being the same time as Joan aired on CBS, but of also being the infamous Friday Night Death Slot, whose name tends to be especially apt for non-family friendly fare... which of course, describes Wonderfalls. In a sort of Coup De Grace, Fox finally moved the show after its third week to Thursday, where it would ostensibly get better ratings... of course, they did this without telling anyone, so it kind of defeated the purpose. Fox also ran promos for the fifth episode, only to pull the series before it aired.
 * Firefly was supposed to begin with a double-length pilot episode that set up the complex universe the series was set in, along with the various characters' relationships. The network decided that the pilot wasn't action-oriented enough and should be shelved, asking the show's creators to make a new first episode, giving them just one weekend to write it. After that premiere, Fox completely ignored the arc and aired the episodes in seemingly random order, in some cases resulting in episodes showing "Previously On..." scenes that wouldn't air until the following week. There was almost no commercial promotion whatsoever following the premiere (and even the commercials that did show downplayed the series strengths to "broaden the appeal",) episodes were preempted for sporting events on numerous occasions, and the pilot movie didn't air until after the series had been canceled. Not to mention, it also aired in the Friday Night Death Slot.
 * Drive's first three episodes were aired over two nights; the fourth aired a week later, and then it was canceled, giving all of four episodes and nine days. This after the initial thirteen-episode order was split in half, so even if it hadn't been canceled it would have run for a month, followed by a three-month hiatus. This proves once again that Tim Minear (who also produced both Wonderfalls and Firefly, see above) and FOX go together like peanut butter and nitroglycerin. Minear is reportedly now two shows into a six-show deal with FOX.
 * In 1985, BBC controller Michael Grade (you know, the one Chris Morris called a c**t) cancelled the original series of Doctor Who -- a show he reportedly loathed, until public pressure resulted in the cancellation being modified into an 18-month hiatus. To his credit, he allowed the series to continue afterward, but is blamed for the decision to fire then-star Colin Baker. He later claimed that he did the former out of spite and the latter out of dislike for the actor's style. He also scheduled the show against popular Soap Opera Coronation Street, which was a major factor in the show's 1989 death. He didn't escape entirely unscathed for this -- apparently he was unaware that Doctor Who was a favorite series of the Queen, and as a result is the only BBC head never to receive a knighthood from HRM.
 * The new series was not immune to this too. The series debuted on the US Syfy in 2006 and was screwed from the start. Varying minutes of material was cut from episodes for time, ("Journey's End", originally 65 minutes, was cut down to 45 minutes. Editing over-kill.) the trailers for the show the channel ran often revealed hefty spoilers, and finally they got rid of the show completely in 2009. BBC America picked it up and have been treating it much, much better than Syfy did.
 * Mystery Science Theater 3000 was victimized twice by network heads (Doug Herzog at Comedy Central and Bonnie Hammer at Syfy) who professed not to understand the show's sense of humor and clearly resented having it left to them as a legacy program from previous executives; they wound up fighting a war of attrition against the show's small but vocal fan base while looking for an excuse to cancel the series. Despite this, the show enjoyed a ten-season run, plus almost five years of reruns on the Syfy, before finally signing off for good in 2004. The Movie is well known for being screwed by the studio.
 * Bonnie Hammer and Mark Stern, while separating the schedules of Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica Reimagined in what would end up the last season of the former and penultimate season of the latter, put the former after a remake of Knight Rider (and against Monk, which not only tops Nielsen cable ratings but is also on USA, whose scheduling is also done by Wolfram Hammer and Hart Stern) and delayed the latter's season premiere until six months after the finale last season. When the Ratings fell, they canceled the former (on the 200th episode airing party, no less) and moved the latter to an even worse timeslot.
 * Bonnie Hammer = Satan has been around a while. Ask any Forever Knight fan about the treatment their show got on USA Network. The last four episodes were the first original dramatic program on the Sci Fi Channel... because USA Network dumped the last four episodes on a channel that, at the time, had about 500,000 subscribers.
 * Not to outdo themselves, they seemingly swore to repeat history with Stargate Universe and Caprica, after a first season in the usual franchise timeslot for the former and an inexplicable seventh month hiatus for the latter, both shows were shoved into arguably the worst possible timeslot, Tuesday nights, against some of the most popular shows on television, left to die while the "Scifi Friday" timeslot was given away to...wrestling.
 * Crusade, the sequel to Babylon 5, suffered all of these from the ground up, complete with Executive Meddling writ large. JMS later learned that TNT (which had also aired the Post Script Season of B5) had done research and learned that the B5 and Crusade audience was completely failing to make the jump to the rest of the network's programming, and vice versa. It decided to scrap the sequel, even as it was in production... except that they couldn't do it without breaching their contract with Warner Brothers. So, they decided to make it impossible, giving unbelievably-bad notes (including demanding a fist fight in the first episode). The production team did its best, but the show was quite literally doomed from day one.
 * And that's without mentioning TNT's plan to ensure that the show couldn't move to another channel (namely Sci-Fi, who wanted it) and become a success by insisting that they would only allow that to happen if the other channel also took on the B5 re-runs, and then slapped a massive price tag on them that no channel could possibly afford to pay. Sci-Fi, not surprisingly, passed and the show was lost forever.
 * Despite having its episodes aired horrendously Out of Order, Tremors managed to become Sci Fi's highest rated program at the time. Nevertheless, it was canceled on the grounds that it didn't hit the demographic that Sci Fi wanted.
 * This becomes doubly brain-wracking (if perhaps somewhat karmic) when one considers the demographic in question was the audience that had already been watching Farscape... which Sci Fi canceled without warning (leaving the series ending on a cliffhanger) to replace with Tremors.
 * Sci Fi also didn't promote the series, deciding instead to promote Earthsea Trilogy, and effectively threw Tremors under the bus. They didn't hit a big enough demographic, because a lot of Sci Fi fans didn't know the show was even on the network.
 * Covington Cross (1992) received the same treatment, airing only six episodes over eight weeks, being constantly preempted and/or moved due to sports programming. After the show's "dismal" ratings, it was canned by the network.
 * It was also expensive to produce (shot on location in England), and a prime target for Moral Guardians due to its violent content.
 * When the BBC originally aired Monty Python's Flying Circus, they broadcast it at inconsistent hours and preempted it with the Horse Of The Year Show. This is the reason for some of the show's Biting the Hand Humor and malicious jokes about BBC television programming. Terry Jones even had to buy the original tapes from the BBC to prevent their destruction, as TV studios at the time were in the habit of taping over shows they no longer wanted.
 * Cupid was bounced around from the Friday Night Death Slot to Saturday (the two nights nobody is ever home to watch a romantic dramedy) to Thursday against NBC's Must See TV, justifying its cancellation before the end of the season. Oddly enough, the show may be Uncancelled as ABC has given its creator permission to try again.
 * An awful Revival series was made. It bombed. End of story.
 * Angel was suddenly canceled to the confusion of those making the show, as it was consistently high-quality with high-ratings. The reason the network gave was even more confusing: that the show was so popular and good, that they wanted the series to end on a high note instead of letting it die in obscurity. Possibly the only example of a show being canceled (ostensibly) because everyone liked it too much.
 * Word of God says that WB wanted to wait until the end of the season to consider renewal. Joss Whedon demanded an answer at mid-season and Jamie Kellner cancelled it.
 * Worse, Word of God was that this had happened for the last several seasons of the show. Joss finally snapped, since the show was, as established, quite popular. For some reason the network dropped the ball on what probably would've been the best season yet, for fear of Joss actually gaining enough leverage to know if those scripts he'd been writing for next season were a waste of time or not.
 * Nowhere Man was one of UPN's highest-rated and critically-acclaimed shows, but it was canceled after one season only to be replaced by Homeboys in Outer Space, which barely lasted any longer.
 * Max Headroom, anyone? Give it promotion no series could live up to (come on, a Newsweek cover?) and then drop it opposite the wildly successful Miami Vice.
 * This is somewhat different, though, as the reason it was screwed was not due to incompetence or office politics so much as the content of the show, which pretty much did everything it could to spit in the face of the execs and their way of life. The fact it was ever greenlit at all in the first place is nothing short of a miracle.
 * Miami Vice itself was screwed by putting it on opposite Dallas, then moving to Sunday night.
 * And then there's American Gothic. The show premiered at 10:00 PM on Fridays, a fairly-good time slot. There was plenty of press, promotions, a lot of hype. The show aired, got rave reviews from critics and fans alike...and then, for no apparent reason, scheduling issues began cropping up. Whether the executives in charge at CBS changed and wished to do away with the success of their predecessors (though CBS was transitioning from the disastrous cheapskate Tisch era of the network to Westinghouse ownership; the final-year Tisch era had left a Fox-lite schedule with post-NFL transition disasters such as an Andrew Dice Clay sitcom where he plays a family man, Bless This House, and Central Park West with the new owners), didn't understand how good a thing they had, or didn't understand the show at all, all sorts of problems began plaguing the show. It would be preempted; there would be no episode shown, something else randomly stuck on in its place with no explanation; there would be gaps of several weeks between new episodes, sometimes filled by reruns but usually not; episodes were shown out of order, or never aired at all. Then, without warning, the show was completely yanked from the line-up and vanished for many months. Granted, the show was unusual, not for everyone, and very different from most of CBS' usual fare, but with so many praising it for its daring and disturbing nature, you'd think they'd have gotten a clue. It was certainly Too Good to Last. Luckily the creators knew long enough ahead of time that the plug was being pulled, and managed to wrap up the main plot points. But even these final episodes were withheld for a long time, then suddenly plunked on TV one right after another as a three-hour movie "event".
 * Robot Wars suffered this at the hands of The BBC around the time of Season 5 (which had already aired on BBC Choice but not on BBC2). The BBC were trying to use it to get people to get satellite or cable to get their extra channels. The result was that they aired Robot Wars Extreme twice and by the time Season 5 did air...Season 6 had already been filmed (and started immediately after Season 5 ended).
 * After the Channel Hop to Five, Robot Wars was constantly shunted around the schedule on either Saturday or Sunday. This was its last season.
 * Life Is Wild premiered in a Sunday-night timeslot, and was sure to be canceled after the first season. And then it did, as well as Hidden Palms.
 * Both of them were victims of The CW deciding to throw out the WB's plan to expand their horizons and go into more expensive programming (UPN was infamous for spending as little on their shows as possible). As Life is Wild was shot in South Africa on location it was screwed from the moment UPN and WB executives walked out together on January 24, 2005.
 * The CW rented out the Sunday-night slots for the 2008-09 season to Media Rights Capital. The shows -- 4Real, In Harm's Way, Easy Money, and Valentine -- scored such terrible ratings that The CW repossessed the timeslot and put in reruns of The Drew Carey Show and Jericho, plus movies. The ratings immediately jumped back to pre rent-a-block levels (although still test-pattern low), and after the season The CW gave up completely on Sundays and gave the time back to their stations.
 * Valentine was critically-acclaimed, but despite liking the premise nobody tuned in. Why? No advertisement whatsoever.
 * The CW started screwing over a LOT of shows, particularly their half-hour comedies. Everybody Hates Chris, as well as The Game got cancelled. Another show, Aliens In America, despite receiving good reviews and having decent ratings, got the worst treatment by not only being moved to the Sunday slot, but the later episodes were never advertised. (needless to say, its ratings were pretty much destroyed. Doesn't help that the Writers Strike caused the last few episodes of its first and only season to never be finished). While Reaper, a Dramedy about a young slacker who must be Satan's bounty hunter, did get the dignity of a second season, it still got screwed over by CW. Like the many other shows they screwed over, Reaper suffered mostly through lack of advertising. Go look at the ratings for each season 2 episode. They PLUMMET, and plummet hard, about halfway through.
 * The last seasons of Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars had so much executive meddling from Dawn Ostroff and the other people at UPN who somehow fell upward into the executive suite of the new network, that the slam-dunk "Girl Power Tuesday"' dream lineup which had been gushed about by critics and fans at the time of the merger ended up failing miserably, with both of them considered universally the worst seasons by the fanbases. This was due to The CW forcing the shows to hire writers that didn't know anything about either show's canon (certainly not helping was The CW not allowing Amy Sherman-Palladino to continue with Gilmore Girls), insulting the intelligence of their fanbase by hyperfocusing on the lead actors of each show when both programs had been built on ensemble casts, forcing Veronica Mars to abandon the season-wide arcs of the past for reviled "crime of the week" episodes, and finally the "Content Wrap" (an annoying advertising concept created by the network putting a brand front and center in a non-subtle way) deal with American Eagle Outfitters which forced the Aerie Girls onto fanbases that considered them vapid, annoying, and completely against the spirit of both series, all in the name of selling overpriced underwear.
 * New Amsterdam was screwed over (by FOX, of course) before it even made it to air! The network decided last-minute to scrap the show, even after they produced eight episodes and started to promote it. The only reason it made it to air was the writers' strike.
 * American Dreams by NBC - the show performed fairly decently in its original Sunday night timeslot, but it wasn't enough. NBC played a wise move and moved the show to Wednesday nights at 10 in direct competition with CBS' Surviver: Palau and ABC's Lost. The show was canceled despite many fan campaigns, but the producers were able to film a brief finally to Wrap It Up, but NBC ultimately decided not to broadcast the finale, leaving many viewers hanging.
 * ABC originally slotted Twin Peaks against Cheers, against which it actually performed admirably...then shifted the show's timeslot repeatedly.
 * Feeling that ABC wasn't promoting it enough, Stephen King spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to buy print ads for Kingdom Hospital. The network then decided to change the timeslot to compete with CSI, meaning all the ads King bought gave the wrong time. King was probably pissed-off at this.
 * ABC's apparent reaction to Commander In Chief winning Emmys for its acting was to kill the show. They put it on hold during the Winter Olympics, then moved it to a different timeslot afterwards without properly announcing this. Ratings suffered, so they canceled it.
 * When Due South first premiered on CBS in 1994, it produced higher-than-expected ratings for the network (and for the CTV network in Canada). Because one of the CBS executives who endorsed the series was fired, the show was canceled. Then, after CBS' Fall lineup became DOA, the show was brought back again. After several months of beating Friends(!), the show was canned once more. This came after a press release praising the show's critical acclaim. It's a good thing the series was then picked up by Canadian and foreign investors.
 * Medium was one of NBC's strongest performers (which isn't saying much), but was constantly put on hiatus and was treated like filler on its Monday lineup. Then CBS picked it up...and wins the Friday Night Death Slot.
 * Reportedly, this is happening to Legend of the Seeker. The rumor going around is that the fans of Terry Goodkind's book series are so furious at the way the books have been adapted for TV, Disney-ABC is afraid to advertise it. However, the ironic twist is that the show has possibly taken the advertising budget, poured it into show quality, done some interesting stunt casting (Charisma Carpenter and Jolene Blalock, for starters), and have caused the ratings to slowly climb in its second season. Of course, the show's trapped in a syndication nightmare, so Season 3 is still in limbo.
 * ALF. As Season 4 came to an end, NBC was not guaranteeing another season, but they did promise at least one extra final episode to resolve the cliffhanger the season ended on. They ended up giving the show nothing in the end, and the series ended with.
 * There was a follow-up TV movie a few years later called Project: ALF. It featured Alf, still a prisoner but generally alright and still his old irreverent self, but the rest of the cast was written out with a one-line Put on a Bus. Also, it didn't even air on NBC, but on ABC.
 * There was also that talk show on TV Land, but... er, let's not speak of that.
 * Disney originally was pretty nice to the Power Rangers franchise, going so far as to show episodes on three different channels. Ratings declined eventually (which many blame on the Dork Age of Bruce Kalish), and the last season, Power Rangers RPM was delegated to a Saturday-morning spot among tween sitcoms, where it was constantly preempted in the West Coast because of football and golf, with many stations airing it during ungodly hours, or refusing to at all because it cut into the ability to fulfill their Edutainment Show requirements. It's been stated by RPM's first showrunner that Disney is embarrassed to show the series, not to mention produce it.
 * Even more, after Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, Disney tried to take control of the Super Sentai portion of the series to tone down the violence. Toei wasn't thrilled.
 * On the note of Disney, So Random started off pretty decently, but eventually it was moved to 7:30 PM, and during the summer, it had been consistently getting less than 3 million viewers per episode. It might be that people aren't as pleased with Demi leaving the channel, but still.
 * Though since the fall, it seems to be making its way back up rather quickly.
 * Prankstars, a Disney Channel Punkd clone, was killed halfway into its run when host Mitchell Musso was caught drunk driving and was blacklisted from the company and written out of Pair of Kings. It still aired in the United Kingdom for a few months to low viewership without any promotion whatsoever.
 * Any (UK, at least) programme on the subject of video games, ever. Apart from Games Master.
 * The Canadian station CBC has a reputation for nurturing critical and commercial hit series - then treating them like absolutely dirt for no discernible reason. Many series produced and aired by CBC over the years have enjoyed massive critical acclaim (some of which have gone on to be classics in the genre), a meaty percentage of the Canadian viewing audience and tons of overseas sales. Then, whatever the reason, the shows are abruptly yanked off the air with no fanfare whatsoever. Alternately, they're starved of air time, given just 13 shows one season, 9 the next, a TV movie the next, and then drop dead of malnutrition. It's been speculated by many fans and media outlets that this happens because the network has a middle-school corporate culture, and a powerful political movement that wants to eliminate public broadcasting. Notable examples include:
 * Beachcombers was yanked after its 19th season. It had met with some fan criticism for more suspenseful and action-oriented stories, but it was still very popular. So naturally, when your network's funding is cut back, you use it as an excuse to cut the popular show. Even now, years later, they're dragging their heels on releasing the series on DVD, and any reruns on other networks are of the last few seasons only.
 * This Is Wonderland: A show that garnered a whopping twelve Gemini Awards during its run, the series launched to a massive wave of critical acclaim. After the third season finished, the network yanked it off the air with no explanation.
 * Despite having been written by a lauded Canadian author (Douglas Coupland, who remained involved during production), jPod was treated incredibly poorly by the network, despite the fact that it was exactly the sort of relevant, thoroughly-Canadian drama they promote. It was moved to the Friday Night Death Slot, and the twelfth episode was never aired — in its place, the CBC ran a half-hour of men's figure skating and a re-run of Royal Canadian Air Farce (which was also cancelled just a couple seasons later for no explanation). jPod just happened to be the only CBC show targeted at a younger demographic.
 * For most of its seven-season run, Da Vincis Inquest was the most-watched show on Canadian television. The second the show's ratings started to drop (when it relaunched as Da Vinci's City Hall, the show was yanked from the schedule. Better yet, a TV movie wrapping up all the plot threads from the series, The Quality of Life, was kept on hold for four years due to Executive Meddling, and finally dumped on a Friday night with no promotion.
 * For some reason, ABC decided to screw Samantha Who?, which was undoubtedly one of their most successful shows with high ratings and an award-winning cast. The deathblow? The network decided to move the show from its popular Monday timeslot (right after Dancing With the Stars) to a Thursday timeslot right after In The Motherhood, a complete flop that turned off most viewers.
 * Ugly Betty was screwed over by ABC. Its first three seasons aired consistently on Thursday nights at 8:00pm. However a slight drop in ratings resulted in the show being shunned to the Friday Night Death Slot at 9:00pm in favor of "Flash Forward" taking its place (which ended up being canceled). ABC was clearly trying to end Ugly Betty. Betty's ratings were cut in half after the night and time switch, and its fans spoke out. Betty was then moved mid-Season 4 to Wednesday nights at 10:00pm with other comedy shows. Even though Betty's ratings improved, it was too late. The show officially ended at the end of Season 4, not finishing its original ordered run. The show did get a story sendoff, but it was rushed, and many plot points were never explained.
 * When Kings first premiered, NBC had put it in the 8:00 PM Sunday timeslot. However, despite the show's unique concept, strong cast, and high production quality, NBC decided to relegate the fledgling series to Saturday nights after airing just four episodes, where steadily declining ratings eventually killed it.
 * Nickelodeon has several examples of screwing shows:
 * Teen Nick (and its predecessor, The N) is quickly shaping up to be the teenager's equivalent to Fox when it comes to screwing shows over. If you're a show that airs on The N in the US and your name is not Degrassi, you will get screwed. Examples range from the canceled South of Nowhere and O'Grady to the not-canceled-but-completely-forgotten-about-until-the-network-suddenly-decided-to-drop-the-next-season-in-a-frenzy-of-new-episodes-about-eighteen-months-too-late Beyond the Break. The majority of the network's non-Degrassi schedule? Reruns of shows that originally aired on other networks, only about half of which came from Nickelodeon (like Drake and Josh, Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, and Zoey 101, along with the occasional iCarly or Big Time Rush).
 * And even Degrassi doesn't get off all that easy. The N's broadcasts were heavily bowdlerised, the most notorious example being when they refused to air a two-part episode about abortion out of fear of the Moral Guardians. It Got Worse once the show became really popular in America, which meant that The N was now forced into a position of pushing for creative changes on the Canadian writers.
 * True Jackson VP is rarely shown on the network (but mostly shown on Teen Nick). Whenever a new episode is scheduled to air, no "new episode" promo is shown until THE DAY OF the airing and whenever a rerun airing of the show is scheduled to air.
 * The Troop is also treated pretty badly by the network, resulting in both shows being called the Red Headed Stepchildren of the network.
 * Nickelodeon was a bit more kind to The Troop in the second season, giving it a plush Saturday-afternoon timeslot, right after Power Rangers Samurai. However, they decided to screw it even there by pre-empting the new episodes with SpongeBob SquarePants reruns! However, it was because the show was moved to a prime-time timeslot on Saturday nights!
 * Anything produced by their international networks (especially their Australian and British operations) seems to air out of bare contractual obligation of a promise to air on the American network, though the international producers have no say on promotion or timeslots at all it seems. Witness the rebranding of the Australian series Lightning Point on Teen Nick to the generically confusing Alien Surf Girls.
 * For the network as a whole, it's incredible decline in ratings in 2011 can be mostly due to it's odd treatment of it's shows not named Spongebob Squarepants, Victorious, or iCarly. However, even iCarly has gotten some bad treatment lately. From advertising two separate episodes as the 'season premiere' (The Other Wiki hasn't even established when most seasons started, forcing Wild Mass Guessing as to where each 'season' begins since the network won't tell them), advertising the series to run back to back, only to stop that after 4 episodes, airing episodes with no advertising, and weird timeslots like the 28th of December for the second blooper episode and New Year's Eve for "iPsycho 2", it's ratings have been hammered with several episodes dropping into the bottom 5 rated ever, and the series as a whole dropping the average ratings of the rest of the show by over a million viewers.
 * Nickelodeon seems to be screwing iCarly over even more as of recent. This is further justified by the fact that the upcoming "iPear Store" episode didn't get a promo at all on the last Saturday night block prior, the most they got was a Big Time Rush promo that said that was airing "right after an all new iCarly". Needless to say, fans did not take that well.
 * Not to mention Taina, for those unaware or it. It was about, Taina, a teenaged Puerto-Rican girl who aspires to be a singer and actress. Other cast members included a black guy friend that is sometimes the voice of reason, a guy that sometimes plays guitar for Taina's performances, and another aspiring actress who acts mostly as a rival but sometimes a friend to the main character. And if none of that sounds familiar, Taina is enrolled in Manhattan Performing Arts School. It also received similar ratings to Victorious and was moved to Saturday nights for the second season (which aired from January to May of 2002) where ratings doubled. Aside from being a popular show, it was cancelled that summer. Number One reason. Nick thought it only appealed to girls. At the time, Nickelodeon's target audience were mostly males. Turns outs guys did like the show too.
 * And to make matters worse, look at the current Saturday lineup. iCarly, Victorious, and How to Rock. All of which have more female main characters than males. Seems although Nick's target demographic is teenage girls, they learned which types of shows and cast attract male viewers as well as female viewers. Especially since their only show with a mostly male main cast is Big Time Rush and aimed at girls, and currently new episodes filter in and out whenever the band can do an episode during tour off time, and the only pure male show, Bucket and Skinner gets the Invisible Advertising treatment.
 * FOX's Titus was simply shot down, no questions asked, mid-season, because of the show's twisted humor (culminating in a two-part episode about Titus and his friends being accused of hijacking a plane and a Missing Episode where wild teen Amy confronts the male babysitter who sexually molested her as a kid). Its replacement? The Pitts, one of the biggest failures FOX has ever forced on, running five episodes before the timeslot was canned and forgotten (save for a quick, cheap mention on Family Guy).
 * Another contribution to the Titus cancellation came when creator Christopher Titus got called in to meet one of the head honchos at FOX. Turned out that the exec wanted to break up Erin and Titus as they had done with Dharma and Greg. Titus naturally objected as the show was based on real life, and Erin and Titus had never broken up in real life. Seems Titus' objection was a little too rough for the execs, as the next week all the promos completely stopped and the show ended up canceled not long after that. Ironically, Titus did break up with Erin Carden in 2006 (according to the comedy special Love is Evol) and now Titus is looking to create a Spiritual Successor to his first sitcom, which shows Titus as a divorcé dating a 29-year-old model with a Badass Family).
 * Dead Like Me's executives meddling caused the writer and team to split after three episodes.
 * The Practice was having great success for six seasons. Then ABC decided to move it from Sunday nights to Monday. ABC wanted the Sunday night position for the new show The Lyons Den. 'Lyons Den' was cancelled in less than one year. 'The Practice' suffered a huge drop in ratings during that year. At the end of the seventh year, ABC refused to renew the show unless its budget was severely cut, citing "poor ratings". As a result, six of the main cast members were fired. Ironically, the show was put back on Sunday nights for its final season, and to show that David E. Kelley can make lemons into lemonade, he introduced a new character, Alan Shore, played by James Spader. The final season mostly dealt with Shore being wooed by a rival law firm, led by Denny Crane, portrayed by special guest star William Shatner. Spader and Shatner both won Emmys later that year for their performances, and both characters and actors were spun off onto a new show, Boston Legal, which lasted for several years.
 * Joss Whedon has recently joked that Dollhouse's (aired in the infamous Friday Night Death Slot) unexpected renewal was the network screwing him around, saying that they told him, "whoops, we forgot to cancel your show, you're going have to make more episodes".
 * A very slight, yet still loomingly-large version: Married With Children suffered from this, in regards to the Series Finale. Not only did FOX waffle on whether or not they'd renew the series, they didn't even tell the actors before announcing the cancellation. Christina Applegate expressed the surprise she got when they heard about it on the radio first, while Ed O'Neill was told about it by two fans he met in the parking lot at a bed-and-breakfast. O'Neill replied that he was glad he heard it from them first.
 * The BBC agreed to co-fund Rome with HBO to the tune of $15 Million per season (which is a lot of money to a British broadcaster), but treated it like an embarrassment when it came time to air the show. They decided to play up the sex scenes in the promos and re-edited the first three episodes into two, losing an hour of character and story development in favor of the sex scenes and blood, to the utter fury of the director Michael Apted. The British audience was not impressed and immediately tuned out, resulting in poor ratings. The BBC, apparently unrepentant about their mistake, then pulled out of funding for Season 3 and put Season 2 on the smaller BBC-2 at about 11:00 PM on Friday nights. (Actually, Rome was always only on BBC2 - few imports/co-productions air on the main channel nowadays, with Damages being the only recent exception.)
 * The BBC's withdrawal concerned the higher-ups at HBO, who consulted the accountants. The accountants informed them that they could not afford the show without the BBC's 15% budget contribution, and the show had only gotten good American ratings for Season 1 due to a strong lead-in from The Sopranos, which would not be airing ahead of Season 2. HBO decided to pull the plug before Season 2 was written, giving the producers plenty of warning (but only 10 episodes) to resolve the 24-odd further episodes of plot they had planned. Of course, when Season 2 aired, it maintained its audience and HBO could have afforded to have kept it on the air even without the BBC, but it was way too late by that point as the cast had scattered to other projects.
 * Incidentally, the BBC claimed the initial editing was done because British audiences were aware of the historical background, unlike their American counterparts; director/executive producer Michael Apted claimed it was done in the name of ratings. Who was right? Well, the BBC screened all four seasons of the famously low on historical accuracy and high on sex appeal The Tudors, which unlike Rome is set in Britain...
 * Gilligans Island, despite having decent ratings, was cancelled because one CBS executive hated the premise and wanted to give its timeslot to Gunsmoke, which was the show that originally was going to be cancelled. Luckily for James Arness, the exec's wife was a fan of the western show.
 * This came back to bite the network on the ass. Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of the show, was so angry at the network that he vowed not to work for it again. The next show he created ran on ABC, which you may be familiar with.
 * Arguably, both sides got something out of this. Gunsmoke ran for 20 seasons, more than twice the running time of Gilligan/BB combined. However, The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island became two of the most syndicated shows of all time. Alongside spin-offs, reunion movies, and the nineties films of The Brady Bunch that were a good-natured parody and deconstruction of the series, in the long run Gilligan/BB have been much more successful.
 * The Partridge Family was a modest ratings success its first 3 years, debuting at #26 and breaking the top 20 in seasons 2 and 3. Then ABC moved it to Saturday nights, opposite All in The Family (in the middle of 5 consecutive seasons at #1). Ratings tanked, and the show was canned.
 * Southland was plowed over to make room for Jay Leno's daily 10:00 PM show, and didn't come back when the Leno show failed.
 * Although it was picked up by TNT.
 * The Australian run of Veronica Mars -- late at night on Fridays, stopping mid-season for months at a time because of Big Brother.
 * Heck, even the American run of Veronica got screwed. Networks claim they gave it the best spot possible -- against House, a show that pretty much commanded Veronica's demographic, as these guys will tell you.
 * For its first 11 years, Murder, She Wrote dominated its timeslot of Sundays at 8:00 PM, always finishing in the Top 20 (and often in the Top 10) each year. Then, for Season 12, CBS abruptly moved it to Thursdays at 8:00...against NBC's Friends, which was already the #1 show in America. Of course the ratings for Murder tanked, and of course the show was cancelled at the end of the season. The result was so predictable and blatantly obvious that the only rational explanation for the move is that somebody at CBS wanted to create an excuse to kill Murder. There really could be no other reason.
 * At that point, even Angela Lansbury had been considering it. She had just turned 70, and the demands of a series were beginning to wear on her. The last few seasons had several episodes which were Poorly Disguised Pilots, where Jessica Fletcher was telling the story as a Frame Narrative. Had it not been cancelled when it was, it would have been soon after.
 * Programme creator Phil Redmond felt that this was the very reason that his Soap Opera Brookside was cancelled by Channel 4 in 1993.
 * The Screen Savers, among most other Tech TV shows. When G4 "merged" with Tech TV, it was a merger in name only. In everything else, it was a thinly veiled example of a textbook hostile takeover. The G4 execs fired most of the existing Tech TV talent (the shining example being Leo LaPorte), moved some shows around, canceled other shows, and eventually turned The Screen Savers into Attack of the Show. The only show still surviving from Tech TV is X-Play, and with the departure of Adam Sessler on acrimonious terms in April 2012, its days are numbered. As if to add insult to injury, the "G4TechTV" name of the merged channels was then changed to G4. This is how you kill a competing channel and become loathed by those who might have been your audience.
 * Doesn't help that G4 was owned by Comcast and Comcast decided to drop Tech TV, possibly to lower its price before the merger.
 * The Goodies were shafted by a BBC executive who never liked them. They were denied funding and retreated to ITV, who cancelled them after a season or two.
 * In 2000, Nippon TV joined the list of people screwing All Japan Pro Wrestling. They canceled the weekly TV show, which they had aired for nearly 30 years and signed a deal with former AJPW president Mitsuharu Misawa, now head of Pro Wrestling Noah. However, Nippon kept their 15% share of the company and made it so they could not get a TV deal with another network, taking the once-large company off the air. Keep in mind that this was about a week after Misawa announced he was leaving the company and taking almost all of its employees to NOAH, and at the time Baba only had three people under contract (two wrestlers and a referee) with free agents and independent wrestlers rounding out the rest of their cards.
 * Nippon TV actually backed the separate promotion a year before it happened (and it only happened in 2000 as opposed to 1999 out of respect for AJPW owner Giant Baba, who died that year). This is not appreciably different from Baba's split with the earlier Japan Wrestling Alliance in 1972, which was also coordinated with Nippon TV (leading to their stake in the company).
 * Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles opened with strong numbers, only to be interrupted by the writers' strike which sidelined its planned lead-in to Twenty Four. Instead of trying to gain viewers in Season 2, FOX shoehorned it into a lead-in spot for Prison Break (which had seen a dramatic crash in viewership and popularity). The show was then put on a three-month hiatus and upon its return, rather than being scheduled as the lead-in to the returning 24, FOX moved it to the Friday Night Death Slot and needless to say it was over from there.
 * Noah's Arc (essentially Queer as Folk with Blacks and Latinos) was canceled by Logo after its second season, despite being the highest-rated and most critically-acclaimed show on the channel and bringing some much-needed representation to gay media. Network execs were shocked by the outcry from fans, and said they'd bring it back if The Movie was a success. It was, but Logo didn't keep their word.
 * Tales of the Gold Monkey. Cast and crew members cited a lot of hostility by ABC at A) the tone of the show (the network wanted Lighter and Softer), B) the high budget, and C) "culture clash", as the South Seas Retro setting of the show didn't mesh with ABC's at-the-time "modern urban" sensibilities. It experienced Executive Meddling in scripting from the start and was canceled after a single season even with growing ratings and the rival networks certain it would be ABC's flagship.
 * Lexx managed an aversion; fan support kept it around for Season 4 when news of cancellation got out. It may have helped that the creators intended Season 4 to be the last anyway.
 * The CBS Prime Time Soap 2000 Malibu Road was cancelled after just six episodes...but not over ratings, which were quite fine -- it was because Aaron Spelling didn't want it competing against another of his shows.
 * Important Things with Demetri Martin got this treatment in the middle of its second season. They took a hiatus and got moved to a 3:00 AM death slot for seemingly no reason at all along with The Sarah Silverman Program. It does re-run, but only at 7:00 AM.
 * Unfortunately this is pretty much par for the course with Comedy Central, hence why it gets a Once Per Episode lampshading (and occasional lament) on the very much Adored by the Network Tosh.0 which will go to commercial by replacing its own name with that of a show the network previous screwed.


 * Farscape was renewed for a fourth and fifth season by the Sci-Fi Channel, and the show's writers plotted out the fourth season under the assumption that story threads, including the season cliffhanger, would be resolved in a fifth, final season. Four days before production ended on the final episode shot of the season (and several weeks after the actual finale had been filmed, owing to episodes being shot out of order), Sci-Fi abruptly cancelled the series. The writers were given a rare opportunity to wrap up the arc in the Peacekeeper Wars miniseries (produced independently and, ironically, broadcast by Sci-Fi) but it was still a case of having to take a full seasons' worth of story threads and condense them down into a four-hour miniseries.
 * In Australia (where it was made) Channel 9 Screwed with it even further. During airing of seasons 2-3 episodes were moved (Out of Order) to the 5:30pm and 11:30pm time slots and due to 'censorship' of the earlier timeslot edited/deleted over 20 mins on each episode and deleted anything that sounded like a swear word.
 * 10 Things I Hate About You had solid ratings and good advertising for the first half of season one. (It is ABC Family's habit to split the seasons in half. In this case, the first half was in the fall and the second half was in the spring.) Disaster struck with the second half. This time, there was scarcely any advertising. The half-hour show wasn't paired with anything else and merely showed the same new episode instantly afterwards. The instant followup was also the only rerun that was on at a reasonable time of day. Now in this day and age, if one misses a show, one can catch it online right? Not so fast. The website made people pay a 99 cent fee if they wanted to watch the episode online before Friday(when it would become free), a tactic they haven't used on any other show before or afterwards. The worst blow however, was moving the show from Tuesday night to Monday night, pitting a show still finding an audience against ratings juggernaut Dancing With the Stars. The show still did fairly well considering the circumstances, but dipped below an average of one million viewers, which prompted a swift cancellation.
 * Breakthrough with Tony Robbins, which aired in the summer 2010 was screwed by NBC because it was the last program approved (for midseason) by programming non-wunderkind Ben Silverman before the merciful end of his tenure as president of the network. As anyone in the entirety of both NBC Universal and the universe but Ben and Tony knew nobody was going to watch what was pretty much a one-hour Infomercial in primetime, the program got a cheap budget, the infamously lousy Tuesday at 8pm timeslot, and was absolutely not promoted at all beyond the required synopsis and a Today fourth hour interview with Robbins (you get into Hota & Kathie Lee & Wine territory for a promo interview and you know your show is the network's shame of the moment). It also wasn't broadcast in HD, a Kiss of Death for a program in 2010 unless you're on public access. It died a swift and merciful death after two weeks to be shoved off to shame on NBC.com, with the episodes finally (barely) seeing the light of day on the ever-cursed Oprah Winfrey Network.
 * My Name Is Earl in Germany got the worst treatment in existence. The first run of season one was at 11PM at Fridays. The show got cancelled after 6 weeks due to low ratings. Two years later they brought it back at the smart timeslot of 1AM in the night of Friday to Saturday. Surprisingly, it worked, and the show has better ratings than the ten viewers before. They aired 2 and a half seasons at this timeslot and occasionally had a rerun at saturday afternoon, which seems to have drowned because of the more popular rival channel having Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother at that time. They now announced to show the remaining episodes, now in Saturday/Sunday nights at 3AM. I have no idea how a show could generate viewers at these slots, or do they accept Tivo now?
 * The show also got screwed in the US when NBC chose not to renew it for a fifth season in favor of the failed Jay Leno Show experiment. TBS was offered a chance to pick it up but turned it down and creator Greg Garcia chose to do Raising Hope instead.
 * Garcia was aware that the show's ratings had declined in the fourth season. He asked the network if they were going to renew or cancel the series. He said he could make the final episode of the fourth season a series finale that wrapped up various plotlines or a cliffhanger that would hopefully draw viewers for the fifth season premiere. NBC told him the series would be renewed and he should make the cliffhanger. Garcia did and then NBC cancelled the series.
 * In the United States, FOX Family Channel (now ABC Family) only aired the first two seasons of The Adventures of Shirley Holmes on Saturdays and Sundays before it stopped airing the show. To add insult to injury, the episodes were usually aired out of order. The third and fourth seasons never saw the light of day in the US.
 * Shall no one mourn the loss of Kyle XY?. After 3 successful seasons (which most people agreed that it really didn't degrade in quality at any point) it appeared that mainly after the slow decline of Heroes and Smallville viewers ABC Family decided that Superhuman Realism based shows weren't really their bag anymore. So Kyle was suddenly canceled and "several" new dramatic based shows mainly The Secret Life of the American Teenager along with several press statements that ABC Family would be focusing on more realistic shows in the future.
 * ABC Family also said Kyle XY was axed due to low ratings. It is true that ratings dropped after Secret Life premiered, but Kyle was still pulling in an average of 1.5 million. That's pretty good for ABC Family, but since it wasn't Secret Life's average of 3 million, it was "low ratings" and worthy of cancellation.
 * Another show that was cancelled due to ABC Family's new "more realistic" outlook was The Middleman. Alas.
 * Contractual obligation with the network's original founder Pat Robertson is the only thing keeping The 700 Club on ABC Family. In the meantime, the network is doing everything it can to discourage people from watching it, airing it at 11 pm and putting disclaimers before it that its views do not reflect that of the network. Some would call this entirely Justified due to Robertson's laundry list of controversial statements, especially since 9/11, making this a rare case of Screwed By The Creator.
 * E!'s The Daily 10 was announced for cancellation coincidentally, about a week after guest host "Psycho" Mike Catherwood made an extremely crude and lame "prison rape" joke about Adam Lambert, who is openly gay. Naturally, regular hosts Catt Sadler and Sal Masakela are screwed out of a job because of what Catherwood did.
 * In an example of an entire network screwing its own self, UPN, a broadcast channel created by Paramount Studios that was supposed to become the new FOX Network. Unfortunately, that never happened, and the only reason the network stayed alive at all for just a little over 10 years (even after airing shows that were either universally panned or just hardly watched at all) was simply Star Trek. Basically Star Trek Voyager was (and for most critics of the channel still is) UPN's flagship series, and the strong Trek fanbase and viewership was truly the sole thing keeping the small network's head above water (but just barely). After Voyager's end season many wondered if UPN would survive. Fortunately a strong vocal campaign to create a new Trek series was heard and Enterprise was created. Unfortunately, many believe that even Enterprise was screwed over in its own way by the network leading it to become the 2nd shortest running Trek series (next to The Original Series itself). Simply by sheer irony, by screwing over Star Trek they essentially screwed themselves into network cancellation, and finally merging with its main competitor the WB.
 * To expand on Enterprise being screwed over, an ongoing issue with the series was the fact UPN apparently had little control over what its affiliates actually aired. As a result, the series was chronically preempted in major markets in favor of local sports coverage, with Enterprise (and other UPN shows) being rescheduled to local-specific timeslots that were not counted by Nielsen ratings. UPN itself also aired a rebroadcast of Enterprise on the weekend, and this too was not counted in the Nielsens despite anecdotal evidence indicating many viewers were choosing to watch the weekend broadcast instead of the Nielsen-counted timeslot (the evidence for this is provided by series co-star Connor Trineer who, shortly before the series was cancelled, took to the pages of Starlog magazine to plead with viewers not to watch the weekend showing but instead watch the showing that counted). The fact UPN failed to achieve nationwide coverage was also blamed for the show's lower-than-expected ratings (in some markets it aired on local versions of the Home Shopping Channel!). To be fair to UPN, however, Enterprise wasn't all that popular with the Star Trek fanbase, so it's possible UPN adjusted its efforts accordingly.
 * The Growing Pains spin-off Just the Ten of Us was screwed by its network ABC because of politics. Although Just the Ten of Us did well in the ratings on Friday nights (and frequently won its 9:30 p.m. timeslot), ABC wanted all shows in the TGIF block to be produced by Miller-Boyett Productions (as was the case with Full House, Family Matters and Perfect Strangers). Ultimately, after finding no other suitable timeslot for Just the Ten of Us in time for the 1990-91 season, the series was canceled outright and replaced by a short-lived series called Going Places (which lasted only one season).
 * Caprica. Very much so. For a breakdown of how it was Screwed By The Network, see here.
 * One of the factors of Caprica's cancellation was Syfy's decision to re-promote Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome from a webseries back into a backdoor pilot movie, and choosing to favor it alone over having two Battlestar spin-offs airing simultaneously. That was back in 2010. It has since been demoted back to a webseries, and Syfy remains noncommittal over whether or not it will even air the damn thing now, especially in light of the upreicidented amount of press coverage and fan interest generated by the leaked trailer for the premier episode, which Syfy has been sitting on for nearly two years now. Why does Syfy hate this Peabody Award-winning franchise? It's like they're determined to look as terrible as possible on the matter.
 * And now Universal is planning another reboot, as a film directed by Bryan Singer. I guess Universal just wanted space battles and lots of CGI.
 * Channel 4's 2004 comedy series Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, a spoof "rediscovered" forgotten low-budget British horror-fantasy show from the '80s, failed to find many viewers and subsequently only had a single series. This was largely blamed on Channel 4's mysteriously failing to do much in the way of promotion for the show, despite signing-up the Perrier award-winning character of the title (played by comedian Matthew Holness). Despite only attracting a small audience on its initial broadcast, word of mouth and DVD sales brought a strong cult following. Even more absurdly, Channel 4 responded not by commissioning a second series but by instead commissioning a spoof chat show (Man to Man with Dean Learner) featuring many of the same actors playing the same characters. Not only did this also flop but it attracted nothing like the cult following or appreciation of the "parent" series. Why Channel 4 didn't just recommission Darkplace remains a mystery.
 * Norm MacDonald was fired from the "Weekend Update" segment of Saturday Night Live in 1997 at the insistence of NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer, who claimed that Mac Donald was "not funny," despite his popularity: Norm's appearances in sketches and on "Weekend Update" were frequently greeted with extended applause breaks, to the extent that he once had to quiet down the Studio Audience during a mid-monologue sketch involving host Sarah Michelle Gellar by saying, "Alright, I've gotta do this skit now." He later got his revenge by being asked to host SNL a couple of years later, during which he poked fun at his firing, and said that while he still wasn't funny, it was okay because the show had gotten "really bad," thereby making him look much funnier by comparison.
 * Robin Hood had arguably already killed itself with the, but The BBC didn't help matters at all with its 'promotion' of the third series, which essentially amounted to one trailer for the series (and a few other episode-specific ones), and Jonas Armstrong and Joanne Froggatt guesting on The Paul O'Grady Show. This They Just Didn't Care attitude culminated in the final episode being shunted to BBC Two in favour of tennis just hours before it went out (not that it mattered much, since the series had been released on DVD prematurely). Irrespective of fandom's reaction to series 3, it's hard to deny that it got a raw deal from the network.
 * Central Park West is an interesting case. The show was originally a way for CBS to bounce back after their disastrous 1994-1995 season. The network threw their entire marketing clout behind the show, which was touted as the hottest and sexiest drama to ever air on a network, and bolstered it with a massive advertising campaign - huge banners on buildings, bus advertisements, commercials, you name it. For a reason only known to the executives, CPW's first two episodes were scheduled against anniversary episodes of the two biggest primetime soap operas airing at that time (Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place). It also had to deal with the big affiliate shuffle in the wake of the FOX/NFL deal, where the new CBS stations just wanted to make sure viewers knew where they were on the dial first before getting into things such as network promotion. The show was trounced in the ratings, which would have led to its cancellation had CBS not already invested so much money into the program (roughly $13-15 million for the first season alone). The show was continually pre-empted, aired on different days (which led to its being trounced by Party of Five) and then taken off the network while the show was retooled. When it came back, half the cast was gone and the series' theme was changed to a Dynasty-esque clone. However, it didn't last even a handful of episodes before CBS pulled the plug for good.
 * Eleventh Hour. The US Version had consistently good ratings, but was cancelled by CBS because it essentially didn't get the ratings of its lead-in CSI.
 * The same fate befell Unforgettable on CBS four years later; Top 20 ratings and first for the timeslot, but almost no buzz at all and it didn't do better than what The Good Wife did the previous season.
 * Jonny Zero. While no means a great show, it suffered at the hands of FOX as well. It was aired completely out of order and was stuck in the Friday Night Death Slot.
 * Let's produce a comic-book superhero show to replace that other comic-book superhero show we had. Let's promote the hell out of it for two or three months in advance. Now, let's put it in a timeslot where it's directly competing against this other new show that has pretty much the same audience on that other network we own, because we like that show a whole lot more anyway. Then, when the ratings start to smell worse than day-old roadkill, let's cancel it and only air the final episode on our website! Because hey, we're NBC, and that's how we roll.
 * Friends spin-off Joey got screwed by NBC in its second season when it was moved to the timeslot opposite American Idol (a fate nearly as bad as, if not worse than, the Friday Night Death Slot) and of course its ratings soon declined considerably. Even worse, the show was suddenly cancelled mid-season with no warning, leaving eight episodes unaired in the U.S. The only way to see them (other than downloading them of course) is to import the somewhat pricey season 2 DVD from Canada.
 * Arrested Development was initially saved by FOX, as they kept it around a year longer then they planned to because of its critical acclaim, but they soon screwed it over by changing its timeslot constantly and barely giving it any advertising.
 * The show that replaced it, The War at Home didn't fare much better, while FOX did somewhat unexpectedly renew the show for another season, it soon declined in ratings when it was abruptly moved from Sunday nights to Thursday nights and FOX did little to promote it, because of its low ratings, the show was not renewed.
 * Jack and Bobby wasn't treated very favorably by the The WB It was hardly advertised at all compared to most of the networks other shows, and after winter break, there was NO advance warning of any new episodes airing, so unless you used an episode guide, you'd NEVER know the show was even still on. To be fair it did get a much more significant amount of advertising towards the end of the season, but the damage was already done as the ratings were far too low for it to have a chance of being renewed. Also Jack and Bobby wasn't an exactly an easy show to sell based on marketing, from the ads it looked like a typical WB teen drama, but the commercials didn't even hint at the story of Bobby being president in the future(being told through flashforwards) People looking for a teen drama were caught off guard by the political storyline, and those who didn't mind the politics didn't watch the show because it didn't look too different from every other teen drama on the network. In the end the show's unique premise was its undoing, maybe it would've lasted longer without the future storyline.
 * Hope and Faith was still getting decent ratings in its third season despite being scheduled opposite American Idol but ABC cancelled it anyways so they could make room for an expanded version of Dancing With the Stars
 * The WB was quick to cancel Run Of The House. So quick that the show didn't even to get to finish its first and only season (the last few episodes were only ever aired overseas) it wasn't like the shows ratings were that bad either, after all it had What I Like About You as a lead-in.
 * Twins and Related were also victims of this. Really, WB was almost as infamous as FOX for cancelling shows left and right, and now The CW seems to be following in they're footsteps, given how badly they screwed over Reba, the highest-rated show on The WB.
 * ABC screwed over Jake In Progress after its second season premiere by replacing its timeslot with The Bachelor and cancelling the show a few short months afterwards, leaving eight episodes unaired, ABC cited lackluster ratings in the premiere as its reason, it also screwed over Emily's Reasons Why Not by cancelling it after only one episode for the same reason, while 6 million viewers isn't a whole lot for a premiere, it hardly seems like a good enough reason for cancelling both of those shows, it seems more like ABC just wanted an excuse to cancel the shows so it could fill the timeslots with more of they're Lowest Common Denominator reality shows.
 * The WB screwed over Birds of Prey by trying to turn it into Smallville:
 * WAY too much Helena/Reese, too little Barbara/Dinah.
 * The WB ordered the pilot to be completely reshot just weeks before airtime (The original pilot -- now available as an extra on the DVD release -- was deemed by the network to be "too dark".)
 * Network moved show from Toronto to L.A., thereby putting a serious crimp in its budget.
 * MASSIVE Executive Meddling.
 * End Result: Dead Show, Dead Network.
 * CBS notoriously did this to an ENTIRE GENRE of television programs. Between 1970 and 1972, in what would later be called "The Rural Purge," the network cancelled most of their sitcoms and dramas focusing on country life or country folks living in the city. Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Mayberry RFD, Lassie, and Hee Haw were among the shows that got their pink slips during this period as networks began to move away from rural settings to more modern shows set in suburbia and aimed at a younger demographic, such as The Brady Bunch and All in The Family.
 * Pat Buttram (Mr. Haney on Green Acres) famously said 1971 was "the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it."
 * 1971 was also when CBS canned Ed Sullivan Show.
 * It's true that CBS did cancel a number of shows, some of which were still popular. But in the network's defense, the shows they brought in to replace the cancelled shows included All in The Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mash, The Bob Newhart Show, Maude, Good Times, One Day At a Time, and The Jeffersons.
 * Essentially, this bookends NBC's cancellation of Star Trek- Nielsen's demographic breakdowns of a show's ratings had become more specific between 1968 and 1971, thus if Trek's early demise (good demos but low overall ratings) was the before, the 1971 CBS Rural Purge (of shows with good overall numbers but lousy 18-to-49 ones) was the after.
 * Lie to Me was continuously screwed by FOX despite a devoted fan following and critical acclaim (mainly for Tim Roth's performance). The show was always near cancellation due to Fox not being happy with the ratings (the show won its time slot or finished near the top most of the time) and a few seasons only got 13 episode orders and didn't premiere until the spring. The show was finally canceled in 2011 along with several other shows that had decent followings (such as Human Target).
 * ABC screwed over My Wife and Kids by cancelling it after the creators had already been promised another season, thus ending the series on a cliffhanger as a result (though Word of God's explanation for what would've happened next season lessens the blow somewhat).
 * The Good Guys was a comedy on Fox featuring the uptight but ambitious Detective Jack Baily and the relic of the 80's, Detective Dan Stark. It featured colorful characters, plenty of action, a great sense of humor, a low budget, and rather good reviews. However it was given the Friday Night Death Slot at the end of the summer of 2010 and was cancelled later in the year.
 * Boomtown was an interesting experiment. It featured numerous characters, overlapping storylines, out-of-order timelines, and unusual visual techniques. It could conceivably have caught on as a cult show but unfortunately it didn't find an audience. NBC deserves credit for trying something different and for bringing the low-rated show back for a second season. However, it loses that credit for its attempts to "fix" the series in its second season. It removed all of the elements that made the series interesting and essentially remade it into another typical cop show, which ended up getting cancelled anyway.
 * Moesha was a very tragic example, as the execs at UPN were the ones that demanded the infamous storyline of Frank's infidelity and Dorian being his son, the series creator strongly objected to the storyline and the Retool of the show and was let go. The ratings sharply declined following the introduction of the infidelity plot, and then It Got Worse-UPN cancelled the show on the SAME day that the cliffhanger season finale aired, leaving many loose-ends unresolved (they were supposed to be resolved on the spin-off The Parkers, but that never happened, presumably due to Brandy Norwood getting tired of her character and the show) it's like they had already made up their minds about what they were going to do to the show before the season had ended.
 * Ironically the show that replaced Moesha - One On One - ended up suffering almost the exact same fate (Executive Meddling during the last season, an unresolved cliffhanger) after the UPN/WB merger, the CW cancelled One On One a mere THREE days after the network's debut, the CW execs claimed they intended to renew the show but simply couldn't find a spot for it on their schedule, which sounds like a really lame excuse. It's obvious the CW was more interested in focusing all their attention on the shows carried over from The WB while barely giving the UPN shows the time of day, so the execs more then likely cancelled One On One just so they could free up space for they're new shows.
 * Eureka was screwed over by Syfy. They ordered what was supposed to be a sixth season - the final one - with six episodes. A week later, they then cancelled the show and took back the season six order, leaving the writers scrambling to wrap up the series.
 * Fans of Lois and Clark had no reason to suspect Season 4 would be its last, as 4 and 5 had been confirmed for some time as part of a single contract deal. Then ABC got both new Disney ownership and leadership who wanted the timeslot for a revival of The Wonderful World of Disney, and the contract was reneged on, leaving the cliffhanger unresolved and the hasty removal of "To be continued..." over the last scene.
 * TNT screwed with Memphis Beat by hardly ever promoting the show during its two seasons on the air (despite the fact that the show starred Jason Lee and had none other than George Clooney as executive producer). Instead, TNT put most of its marketing power on Franklin and Bash and its other in-house productions.
 * Tower Prep appears to have fallen prey to this. According to Paul Dini, after Unnatural History's average ratings, Cartoon Network gave up Tower Prep before it had even started. They stopped promoting, gave up on recaps, and switched the time slot to Tuesday.
 * Discovery Channel seriously screwed Dinosaur Revolution. There was originally six episodes but for some reason there were only a mere four. There also was originally no talking heads, no narration but that was changed too, leading many to people to criticize the show for having cartoony slapstick. The worst example is the fact the last two episodes were set to air on September 11th, 2011, the anniversary of 9/11 so it was re-scheduled to September 13th, and aired on the Science Channel.
 * The Fox sitcom The Grubbs was cancelled TWO DAYS before it's premiere(supposedly due to bad reviews) without having even aired a single episode.
 * Fox did the same thing to The Ortegas a year later, NBC had already screwed over the show (after beating out Fox in a major bidding war for it) by pushing it back to midseason, so the creators decided to approach FOX with the show and they were promised a fall premiere date, but in the end FOX gave them nothing as the show was cancelled weeks before it's premiere, and unlike The Grubbs FOX didn't have the excuse of bad reviews to fall back on.
 * The Hank Azaria show Imagine That aired two episodes, and that was it. He got three episodes for Free Agents on NBC in 2011, which was a workplace dramedy mismatched with Whitney Cummings's self-titled three-camera sitcom.
 * While Amazing Stories (or Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories, as the BBC insisted on billing it) was no classic, it still deserved better scheduling than it got from The BBC, with episodes being flung onto the lineup at whim (and even going from BBC1 to BBC2 and back) and turning up anywhere from early in the morning ("Family Dog") to mid-afternoon ("The Mission") to early in the evening ("You Gotta Believe Me") to late at night ("Mirror, Mirror"). If anyone managed to catch the entire run when it was screened terrestrially in Britain (Sci Fi, to their credit, gave it a coherent run), you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
 * Better Off Ted. The critically acclaimed sitcom quickly grew a Firefly-level intense fanbase, and to ABC's credit was given a second season despite low ratings, but the screwing truly began in its second year with the network providing minimal promotion, launching the season in December (exceptionally late for a returning show on the network), airing episodes during the holiday season (even though by 2009 most US viewers had been conditioned to expect new shows to be on mid-season break and so likely did not expect the series to be on at that time), and when the ratings weren't stellar began burning off the episodes two at a time in January, cancelling the series, thus giving the show a 2nd season that ran for less than two months, with the last two episodes not seeing any network airing due to the network's plan of airing them as Filler if the NBA Finals ended early wasn't needed due to that year's series going a full seven games. Although not necessarily ABC's fault, the fact the show's second season has (as of the end of 2011) never been released to DVD is seen as further evidence of the trope.
 * NBC has also managed to screw an actor along with a show. David Tennant left Doctor Who after an acclaimed run to shoot the pilot Rex Is Not Your Lawyer with a guarantee that the show would be picked up. But after the dreaded test screening where audiences didn't exactly understand the concept, they simply canned the show without reshoots and went back on the guarantee. As a result, Tennant was screwed out of not one, but two shows due to focus groups.
 * She Spies had this happen twice. It started out pretty well, with its first four episodes being aired on NBC. After that, the show was dumped into first-run syndication, with some markets airing it at unholy hours in the morning. However, the show was still pretty successful, and it got renewed for a second season. However, they decided to completely Retool the show, taking it from a light-hearted action/adventure/comedy series (like a gender-flipped version of Chuck) to a straight action series (basically, yet another lukewarm rip-off of Charlies Angels). As it turns out, the comedy aspect was one of the show's strengths. It was canned soon after.
 * Not only was Freaks and Geeks given an inconvenient Saturday-evening timeslot, but several episodes were left unaired (until Fox Family picked up the series) simply because the NBC executives didn't like them. For example, the episode "Kim Kelly Is My Friend" was left unaired, because NBC felt it was too violent/scary for what they (wrongly) perceived as a children's show.
 * Family Matters, at the very end of its run, was a victim of this. After declining ratings, the series was silently moved from ABC to CBS for its last season, where ratings became almost non-existent. Adding insult to injury, the final episodes aired during Summer 1998 (when TV viewership was typically down due to between-season reruns) and the Grand Finale received little promotion or recognition from CBS. The fact that it aired just a couple months after the Seinfeld finale probably didn't help matters.
 * It's also an example of an actor/actress getting screwed over by the network. Jaimee Foxworth was inexplicably written off after Season 4, after demanding more money and a larger role for her part. And the rest, they say, is history.
 * One ABC station in northwest Florida aired 3rd Rock from the Sun at 3:30 AM Central every Saturday/Sunday morning, right between two infomercials.
 * One My Network TV station in northwest Florida(its sister station) barely aired it in a good timeslot, but it failed...
 * Game Show and reality shows, in so many ways.
 * Of the five series of Would I Lie to You, it has never once held the same timeslot twice; it has bounced from Saturday at 10PM, Friday at 9PM, Monday at 10:30PM, Friday at 10:35PM, Friday at 9:30PM. And it's been announced that the sixth series will be airing before the watershed, at 8:30PM.
 * While the screwing may not have been deliberate, The Mole fell victim in Season 5 when ABC's marketing department did so little to promote the show that even many die-hard fans were completely unaware that the show had returned for the first third of the season.
 * This is thought to be the cause of Carol Vorderman's 2008 departure from British game Countdown: When the show's budget was going to be cut by 33%, Vorderman was willing to take a 33% salary cut as well. But Channel Four allegedly went up to her and said what boiled down to "We're going to take off a trailing zero from your salary next year. Take it or leave it, you have two days to respond." Note that Vorderman's about as famous in Britain as Vanna White and Bob Barker are in America, as she was on Countdown from its 1982 debut.
 * Duel was bumped to the Friday Night Death Slot for Season 2, against The Price Is Right $1,000,000 Spectacular (itself a death sentence for any game show).
 * Million-Dollar Mind Game, a well-liked quiz imported from Russia and intended for primetime with good...well, everything...was sat on by ABC for some time before being slapped on Sunday afternoons against NFL games (a timeslot usually used for awful time-buy motocross events and infomercials!) with minimal promotion, and instead chose to focus on promoting and giving You Deserve It primetime space. The result? The burn-off got better ratings!
 * The original (1957-64) nighttime version of The Price Is Right flourished Wednesdays at 8:30 PM on NBC, making it the top-rated primetime game show. In 1961, the sponsors wanted to tinker with it so NBC moved the show to Mondays at 8:30. Ratings slid, so a year later the show got moved to 9:30 PM Mondays, opposite The Andy Griffith Show. Price hemorrhaged ratings, so on February 1, 1963 it was moved to Fridays at 9:30. NBC wanted a show that attracted a younger audience than Price sponsors wanted, so they optioned the sitcom Harry's Girls to replace Price that Fall. ABC stepped in and acquired both versions of Price for an amount NBC wasn't willing to match. The move was costly, though, as ABC couldn't afford the nighttime show in color and not every market had an ABC affiliate (48 markets aired Price on their CBS station). Nighttime ended in September 1964, and daytime a year later.
 * NBC head Lin Bolen became the enemy of fans for her insistence on ousting games hosted by middle-aged men on technologically-obsolete sets.
 * When CBS lifted its ban on big-ticket giveaway shows in September 1972 and introduced three games, Concentration fell victim to The New Price Is Right.
 * In 1974, she killed the Bob Stewart game Three On a Match, which had done respectably in a slot that had been trouble before it debuted three years earlier. The replacement, Winning Streak, was a failure.
 * Once TOAM ended, Bolen moved the original Jeopardy! to the 1:30 slot, causing it to lose a good portion of its audience. In exchange for ending Merv Griffin's show a year before the contract stated, the remainder of said contract was given to the culmination of over a year's development and Bolen putting her job on the line — Wheel of Fortune.
 * Every GSN original, ever. The typical formula for an original game here A) introduce it with some fanfare, B) constantly jack its time slot around, C) show a metric buttload of reruns while the show's still making new episodes, D) not announce the new seasons at all, and E) gradually stop making new episodes. Lingo suffered the most in its original five seasons.
 * Russian Roulette was similarly screwed, though it perished due to the network's rebranding which killed all the original programming (including Lingo) at the time.
 * Forever Eden, a rare example of a Reality Show getting screwed, FOX changed its timeslot repeatedly with little advance warning and cancelled the show mid-season before a winner was even announced.
 * FOX screwed over both Greed and It's Your Chance of a Lifetime because the current network president hated game shows. Chance got it the worst because it was barely advertised, and what little advertisement there was only appeared mere days before the show was due to air. Chance was supposed to become a regular weekly series, contestants were being interviewed and everything, and FOX just pulled the plug for no reason whatsoever. Full details here.
 * The Chamber also got screwed by FOX, as it was rushed to air ahead of time to compete with ABC's The Chair and ended up getting labeled a rip-off as a result (it's unknown which show began production first)...and then Fox canned it after only airing half of the six shows taped.
 * CBS screwed over the American Winning Lines by only airing it Saturday nights with seemingly no consistent timeslot, causing the ratings to plummet.
 * CBS also screwed Million Dollar Password by cancelling it simply because it didn't hit their target demographic, despite the fact that it frequently pulled the highest ratings in its timeslot.
 * NBC's 2000 revival of Twenty One was performing quite well, yet it was abruptly canned out of nowhere for no reason, and the finale wasn't even advertised.
 * Many daytime game shows whose network was run by Fred Silverman.
 * The Hard Times of RJ Berger, the best live-action show MTV has had in years, began with a large viewer rating of 2.6 million viewers, but dropped drastically by the second season, causing the show to be cancelled.
 * One of Litton's Weekend Adventure shows, Culture Click (an educational clone of The Soup) got screwed in Atlanta when their ABC station aired it at 4AM Eastern. To be fair though, it was the dud show in the Litton lineup and the first canceled program.
 * Less Than Perfect was royally screwed by ABC during it's final year, first ABC shortened it's season 4 order from 22 episodes to 13 despite solid ratings for the previous season, then the season was delayed until April. Then It Got Worse, only 5 out of 13 episodes were aired, the next two episodes scheduled to air were both pre-empted by NBA games and ABC unceremoniously cancelled the show without giving any explanation whatsoever.
 * Disney Channel is infamous for screwing over their popular shows, thanks to their 65-episode only rule. Shows screwed by the network:
 * Lizzie McGuire, which helped put the Disney Channel back on the map, was cancelled after fulfilling its 65-show order.
 * Even Stevens, also a victim of the 65-episode rule.
 * Kim Possible was first cancelled after fulfilling it's 65-episode order, but was brought back for another season by outraged fans.
 * Phil of the Future, which was cancelled well before the 65-episode mark, much to the confusion and dismay of fans. The reason Disney gave the cast was that since the show was so popular (and making them so much money), they had a choice: produce a third season of the show or use the money to create another show with the potential to be just as popular. They chose the latter and despite many fans to save the show, the show remained cancelled.
 * CBS screwed over The New Adventures of Old Christine in it's last season by cancelling it despite it being their highest rated show on Wednesday nights (it was pulling in 8 million viewers on average).
 * Spooks got this bad during its two runs on cable TV in the United States. It first landed on A&E at a time when the network was in the process of decaying from its original image as a home for British imports into the reality hive it is today. After getting decent midweek slots for series one and two, the network decided to push series three to Saturdays at 10 to make room for reality in that midweek slot. Ratings suffered, but A&E was already locked into a contract for series four. So, they pulled repeats off the schedule during the long hiatus between series, and dumped series four on Fridays at 11, where the ratings dropped so hard, so fast that it was pulled after two weeks.
 * That said, at least the network bothered to burn off the rest of series four (in Saturday afternoon marathon form). The show wouldn't get that chance at BBC America, who restarted the show's run at series one. This time at least, the show would maintain a midweek slot for its entire run. Unfortunately, the third series found it in competition against American Idol, which helped drain away a lot of viewers from the show (as Idol was prone to do to all shows at the time). The fourth series actually premiered against the gigantic Idol finale that year, and the numbers never recovered during the subsequent summer run, which led to BBCA pulling it after the fourth episode, never to return to cable TV in the US.
 * Luckily, PBS would pull a Network to the Rescue by contracting most of its affiliates to carry the show. As of this writing, the first nine series have aired in their entirety, and this troper's PBS station is re-airing the earlier episodes while presumably waiting for series ten to become available in America. That plus the fact that, unlike the cable runs, the episodes are aired in their entirety (the cable runs cut them to fit into hour-long slots with commercials), has made for a far more satisfactory viewing experience.
 * The Finder looked to have it pretty good, Bones creator Hart Hanson is hot stuff on Fox, given Bones is still on the air, it started in the post-Idol Thursday slot, what could go wrong? Fox (surprise surprise) rearranged the ep order, randomly put it on a month hiatus, then with little advertisement shifted it to Fridays so Touch could get the post-Idol slot. The Finder supposedly was canceled for low ratings, but it did better than Touch overall before timeslot shift (comparing with Touch's aired eps). Since Touch is the new golden child with KS in it on Fox, it gets a second season and The Finder, well... ends with everyone needing to be found.
 * CBS in 1979 cancelled Wonder Woman and The Amazing Spider-Man and never went forward on the Doctor Strange and Captain America (comics) pilots not because their ratings were poor because they didn't want to be seen as "The Superhero Network." Only The Incredible Hulk, survived.
 * Headbanger's Ball was a popular show that aired Saturday nights on MTV beginning in 1987. The Ball (as it was nicknamed by its fans) aired for two hours and played hard rock, Heavy Metal, and Hair Metal music videos. The show also featured interviews with musicians as well as "road trip" specials where the cast of the show would accompany bands to various locations around the world. It was one of the most popular shows on MTV and for a while was one of the network's flagship shows. The show even remained popular during the 1990s, when alternative rock and hip-hop became the most popular genres of music. But in January of 1995, Headbanger's Ball was abruptly canceled without warning. The host of the show, Riki Rachtman, was called by the network and informed that he would not need to come into work the following week. Fans of the show were outraged and to this day many of them consider the cancellation of the Ball to be the moment when MTV Jumped the Shark. MTV has never explained their reason for canceling the show. Headbanger's Ball was Uncanceled in 2003, but many believe that the new version of show to be inferior to its predecessor.