(Twenty Esther Baxter Points to whoever can guess the Fox series title I’m paraphrasing for the tile of this blog post!)

You can just imagine Drive star Nathan Fillion at a cast meeting, cursing and saying “Not again!” With the show’s cancellation after a mere four episodes, I have to wonder, what’s Fox’s deal? Why even bother with high-concept shows like this if they’re not even going to give them time to build an audience? Was it really costing them so much money that they couldn’t even air the last two episodes and then say, “we’re just not gonna film the rest of them.”? I may not be an expert on television as a business, but dammit if Fox doesn’t have a piss-poor record of handling genre shows!

It’s kind of sad given the shows they launched with 20 years ago. You had stuff like Married . . .With Children, 21 Jumpstreet, The Tracy Ullman Show (which ultimately led to The Simpsons), and Werewolf!! The last thing Fox was trying to do was be like the Big Three, and that’s what made them so popular. But with that popularity came greed and the desire to be more like the powerhouse networks that have existed since before there was even television. In their quest to become a “legitimate” network, they got legendary producer Aaron Spelling to slap his name on shows like 90210 and Melrose Place, but at this point, they still had an edge to them. We hadn’t seen anything like the X-Files on television before, and on some level, we haven’t seen anything like it since. But the show eventually became a victim of its own success. In retrospect, The X-Files movie would have made a perfect ending to the series after season five, but would Fox let the show go? Hell no! The damn thing went on for four more seasons of complete and utter nonsense, leading up to a series finale that had even more complete and utter nonsense.

Then there’s Fox Sports. I’ve ALWAYS hated Fox Sports. Why? For one, my local Fox affiliate doesn’t play movies on the weekends anymore. But mostly, it’s because football season always screwed with Fox’s Sunday night schedule, especially when Fox came out with Futurama. I can’t imagine Matt Groening not being pissed at how badly Fox screwed the pooch on this show. Episodes were continually being pre-empted because of games running long, which wouldn’t have been an issue if they had just placed it after The Simpsons. I guess that made too much sense. It’s only with the return of Family Guy that Fox has seen the benefit of pairing two shows with the same creator. The kick in the teeth being that American Dad is utter garbage!! Words cannot express how profoundly retarded and unfunny this show is!

But most disappointing has to be Fox’s treatment of any show stuck with the television graveyard that is Friday night. X-Files had the luck of coming along when Fox still had some balls. They eventually moved the show to Sundays, and the rest is history. But what about shows like Brimstone, M.A.N.T.I.S. (albeit a white-washed version compared to the brilliant, socially-relevant pilot movie), Wonderfalls, and John Doe? What about Firefly?!? This has to be Fox’s biggest Friday blunder of them all! It’s not like they greenlit the show solely based on the concept. Joss Whedon’s name had already started to carry a lot weight with the success of Buffy and Angel, and Fox promoted the mess out of the show based on that fact. But in true Fox fashion, they made every possible decision that would lead to the show’s demise. There’s the aforementioned Friday scheduling, for starters, but also running episodes out of order, thus confusing the few people who managed to tune in. Less promotion and an unannounced rescheduling soon followed, and like that, Firefly was no more.

Not that I don’t love my 24 and House, but more and more, I find myself missing the old Fox. I miss the Fox that just didn’t give a damn what their competitors thought of them. I miss black Thursdays with Martin, Living Single, and New York Undercover! I miss the Fox that was so on the cutting edge, that The WB and UPN were ripping off their shows when those two networks launched!! What happened?!? How many hours do you really need to devote per week to American Idol anyway?!?! Does anyone really want to watch Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? Talk amongst yourselves, I’m gonna go weep in a corner.