The Firefly Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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