Well, word of mouth and advertising can always increase audience from an initial small viewerbase. The classic example is Cheers, which finished dead last in the ratings in its first year and then went on to be a monster hit. It's the would-be success story the fan of every single cancelled series claims his show would have been with a little time and lovin'.
The nuBSG miniseries is another unusual example the ratings for part 2 of the mini were higher than part one, that's nearly unheard of.
Maybe I was hasty about the second part of my statement though some shows seem to have a base that stays steady through its run.
The point being, ratings going up is the exception, rather than the rule. The tactic for V could work ... but it's definitely a long shot. It'd have to be incredibly good for this to even work.
Wasn't Jericho a bit hit for CBS, but after the extra long hiatus it sank like a rock? One exception to the rule seems to be Burn Notice, but things are probably different for cable.
Burn Notice is ten times better than any show on non-cable network. However if BN was on any non-cable network it would get 5 times the audience it gets on cable. Similar thing happened with Dexter I believe.
The only footage I've seen is the 2'00" preview of the Anna interview with Scott Wolf. Must check them out.
Didn't the Zedti actually kill several humans when they first arrived on Earth? In the process of assuming their human disguises? This would seem to put the lie to the theory that they could ever genuinely be our friends.
Exactly. The Zedti really thought of us as, pretty much, disposable. They'd help us if it'd thwart the Visitors. But if it would be more effective to exterminate us, they'd have no qualms about doing so. Essentially, the way I saw it, it was never about humanity so much as it was about their own objectives. They simply didn't care for the human race -- beyond the fact that saving us would be a blow to the Visitors and might aid their own ends. I'm not sure they were as imperialistic as the Visitors, so whether or not the Zedti would choose to subjugate us seems irrelevant, to them at least.
There's a difference between putting an established show on summer hiatus, for example, and showing a couple of episodes for a new show and then taking it off the air for 3-4 months before it even has an audience. Hopefully they'll be smart and re-air the first episodes before the new ones get picked up, and they'll air them in the same damned time slot. If they don't re-broadcast, or they air the "original" episodes in a completely different time slot than the remaining episodes they'll shoot themselves in the foot.
I, too, purchased the book and, frankly, it's one of the absolute worst tomes I ever read (yes, I forced myself to read the entire thing). If I ever have to free up space on a bookshelf in my home, you can be guaranteed that Johnson's abomination will be the first to go. Gatekeeper
Here's a recent example of senseless scheduling -- The Unit. In their final season, they'd go to winter reruns, but one new episode would appear out of nowhere without any advertising, then there would be more reruns. It was as if CBS was trying to kill it.
first 8 minutes of the pilot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf32_KRCfbY&feature=player_embedded from TV Squad Nice how the jet CG is done. Not the slow motion Michael Bay long lens style... Looks like an ABC TV movie not an epic JJ Abrahams Fringe pilot...or the Alias pilot.
Cheers was eons ago in TV time. I haven't noticed any shows managing to buck the trends lately - too many cable stations chasing the same eyeballs - the best you can hope for is to premiere big and not suffer too much attrition in the following weeks, while leveling off at a decent level. FlashForward has been able to do this, for instance. Even then, I'm not getting too sanguine about an S2 this early on. They're never the ones I like! I heard tell that one of those cop shows I ignore, some NYPDCSI type thing, actually premiered this season above where they left off last season but that does me no good. The interesting genre shows are the ones whose audience seems to have a brutally short fuse. Frustrate them in the least and you're dead.
Just like my post, but touche. Naturally, even at the time it was a miracluous fluke of a ratings recovery on the most catastrophic level, but 'tis interesting ne'ertheless. Well, if by 'interesting' you mean heavily serialised, then yeah. Any series like that isn't one that will gain viewers over time or have people popping in to casually watch a couple of random episodes because they can't follow it. You're sort of dependent here, I guess, on good reviews, buzz, and people catching up on DVDs/reruns to allow for new viewership.
The Office might qualify as a recent example. It was getting horrible ratings and mixed reviews during it's 6-episode first season. It is a miracle that it came back for more. Now, it is one of the most highly acclaimed and rated comedies today (starting with it's award winning second season).
The Big Bang Theory has shown pretty significant growth. It went from 8.3 million and a bubble show to 10 million average viewers from its first to second season. Now its getting over 13 million(albeit in a better time slot) and the heir apparent to 2.5 men. However, I think its generally easier for episodic shows to show growth than serialized. On the topic of V, on the one hand, I just can't see a big break after 4 episodes being good, but I also think ratings during December are generally so bad that may also have hurt the shows chances. I am personally excited to see the show however(although I have never seen any of the original stuff)
The break has little to do with the Olympics and much to do with the "re-engineering" of the premise to contain less political allegory after it was pointed out that the Visitors' Modus Operandi closely resembled that of a certain real life administration...