<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>1. Does anyone know if B5 fans had any input on the decision to continue B5 for a fifth season? If yes - how?
2. And, does letter writing ever make a difference?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
1. No. Warner Bros. knew perfectly well that people wanted to watch the show. The problem was that the PTEN "network" was folding, all of its shows
except B5 having already been cancelled. You can't have a network with one show. So it isn't like Warner Bros. decided to cancel the series and the fans talked them out of it. WB spent the better part of a year trying to sell the show to somebody before finally hooking up with TNT.
2. Hardly ever. Letter writing campaigns will sometimes save a show that is "on the bubble" - not doing well enough to be renewed automatically, but not really bombing in the ratings, either. Or if a network needs to cancel one of two or three shows and from a business standpoint, it doesn't much matter which. In that case the show with the most passionate fans might win a reprieve.
But no amount of snail-mail is going to save a show that is in the ratings toilet. Even a niche cable show in today's TV market has to attract several hundred thousand viewers on a regular basis to stay on the air. Network shows have to attract millions. And they way networks determine how many people are watching is by ratings, not by the viewer mail. Let's assume that 1:100 ratio is correct, and 10,000 fans write in to save a show. That means, in theory, that a million people watch the show. But if the ratings say that only 400,000 are watching, guess which number the network goes with?
The letter campaigns for the original
Trek certainly helped, but that was in the days when dinosaurs walked the Earth and there were only three major networks (one of which didn't even reach a surprising number of cities.) The whole industry was different then. Even so,
Star Trek fit the profile for "salvageable" shows until the third season (when it landed in a suicidal timeslot.) It was a show with
marginal ratings, not a certifed flop.
Also the ratings system in those days wasn't good at tracking things like 50 college kids crammed into a common room to watch
Trek, which happened a lot, and which many of the letters pointed out. So the letters (the better part of a million of them, which calls that 1:100 ratio into question, since there probably weren't 100 million households with TVs in 1966, 67 and 68) were enough to tip the balance. But if the ratings had been substantially worse, no amount of letters would have saved the show.
And I seriously doubt that a letter writing campaign in support of a show that isn't even on the
air]/i] yet would do much of anything. Sci-Fi knows that there is a big audience for B5. That's why they bought the reruns, that's why they're airing Crusade, that's why they invested the better part of $4 million (USD) to make a new {b]B5[/b] TV movie. But there are a lot of factors that go into series production decisions, many of which have nothing to do with the quality of the shows or how much "confidence" a network has in a given series.
Putting together a TV schedule is like putting together a meal; you want the whole to work together. Even if you make killer black beans and rice, you probably won't serve them with a main dish of pasta.
So the process of planning a schedule and balancing costs, estimated ratings, ad revenue (which are down), budgets and the rest is hard, and I can't really blame the network for taking its time in these matters.
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
