Lost in Space : Why was it cancelled ?

[Maurice]

Robotpo said:
Well, this is directly from the production crew of the show, and the format change is pretty obvious as well. So apparently, they did.

Source?

The Batman influence is clear, but I don't actually see the show getting more serious because of Star Trek. Rumor has it that the stars were griping that they didn't have anything to do by the second season, so the 3rd season format change could have been related to that. And/or maybe someone thought going from planet to planet would be a good idea after seeing Star Trek, but it could also be that the producers decided moving the ship around allowed for more stories.

People watch more than one episode of a genre of show all the time. Most people don't watch one sitcom, nor did they necessarily watch one western...otherwise there wouldn't have been 50 of them on the air at the same time.

 

[Robotpo]

^^ I believe it was mentioned by a producer, (William Faffala?), as well as one of the editors in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Space-Mark-Co...4660&sr=1-3

I had a period briefly as a kid were I thought LOS was hilarious and accumulated lots of useless info about the show.

 

[Darth_Pinche]

Are you kidding? It got cancelled because it sucked! That's why no one was watching. C'mon, it was like F-troop or Gilligan's Island but set in space.

 

[Gojirob]

I wonder if the show would have ever come up with space-type 'friends' for Will and Penny. The Robinsons were married, and Judy and Don seemed an item (and became more of one in Mumy's LIS Comic series), but the two younger kids seemed to be stuck with few or no options. No jokes, please. The Robot was not fully functional and Doctor Smith could not be trusted to peel potatoes.

 

[David cgc]

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Mumy's comic series came up with a, shall we say, unsavory solution to Will and Penny's social isolation.

 

[Jax]

Darth_Pinche said:
Are you kidding? It got cancelled because it sucked! That's why no one was watching. C'mon, it was like F-troop or Gilligan's Island but set in space.

Apprantly you can't read...

LIS finished season one with a rating of 32nd, second season in 35th place, and the third and final season rating 33rd.

Back then the ratings were good and considered more than enough to warrant a 4th season.

 

[Vendikarr]

NX_01 Mark said:

Darth_Pinche said:
Are you kidding? It got cancelled because it sucked! That's why no one was watching. C'mon, it was like F-troop or Gilligan's Island but set in space.

Apprantly you can't read...

LIS finished season one with a rating of 32nd, second season in 35th place, and the third and final season rating 33rd.

Back then the ratings were good and considered more than enough to warrant a 4th season.

True, top fourty shows were always renewed unless they were too expensive, or couldn't hold the audience of their lead audience.

There was a series called "Friends and Lovers", that starred Paul Sands. I believe it's ratings put it around number twenty on the list. The problem is is followed "All in the Family", which was number one. For the loss of audience alone, it was cancelled.

 

[Christopher]

David cgc said:
I seem to remember reading somewhere that Mumy's comic series came up with a, shall we say, unsavory solution to Will and Penny's social isolation.

I don't recall anything like that, and I just recently re-read the whole thing (since there's now a trade paperback completing the second year's 12-part saga that was abandoned halfway through the first time around). The closest they got to "unsavory" where the younger kids were concerned was Penny flirting with Major West, for want of another eligible male. But that soon got resolved, and Penny had at least one "romance of the month" with a guest alien, but it didn't turn out well. As for Will, he was mostly just wondering if he'd ever meet an eligible female he wasn't related to.

It's also a bit misleading to call it Mumy's series. In the first year of the series, he was a regular consultant, but only wrote four issues and both annuals (the second one in collaboration with Peter David). It was in the second year -- or half-year, as it turned out -- that he became the sole writer on the title.

 

[Kryton]

Christopher said:
It was cancelled for the same reason virtually any TV series is cancelled: because its ratings fell too low to justify making it anymore.

Thank you for saying "virtually", because "Gilligan's Island" (a big ratings success) was canceled ONLY because a TV Exec's wife chose Gunsmoke over it.

 

[Gary Mitchell]

^ smart wife.

 

[DWF]

Kryton said:

Christopher said:
It was cancelled for the same reason virtually any TV series is cancelled: because its ratings fell too low to justify making it anymore.

Thank you for saying "virtually", because "Gilligan's Island" (a big ratings success) was canceled ONLY because a TV Exec's wife chose Gunsmoke over it.

Well Gilligan's Island was moved to make way for Gunsmoke but the moved is what killed the show after their ratings fell.

 

[David cgc]

Christopher said:

David cgc said:
I seem to remember reading somewhere that Mumy's comic series came up with a, shall we say, unsavory solution to Will and Penny's social isolation.

I don't recall anything like that, and I just recently re-read the whole thing (since there's now a trade paperback completing the second year's 12-part saga that was abandoned halfway through the first time around).

I just checked around, and I can't seem to find anything concrete about what I heard of could've actually been, and none of what I did find is something I would've expected to have heard about. Never mind.

 

[Maurice]

DWF said:
Well Gilligan's Island was moved to make way for Gunsmoke but the moved is what killed the show after their ratings fell.

Gilligan was killed in the same instant Paley told the CBS programming people to put Gunsmoke back on . They had already filled the entire schedule, and to fit Gunsmoke in, they had to lose an hour of programming. One new sitcom they didn't have high hopes for was in the same hour block as Gilligan, and it was an easy choice to kill it...Gilligan died partly because of what it's neighbor was. It didn't get moved and it's rating didn't drop. It just didn't return for the new season.

The whole affair is discussed in the Archive of American Television's multi-part interview with Gillian creator Sherwood Schwartz.

 

[DWF]

DS9Sega said:

DWF said:
Well Gilligan's Island was moved to make way for Gunsmoke but the moved is what killed the show after their ratings fell.

Gilligan was killed in the same instant Paley told the CBS programming people to put Gunsmoke back on . They had already filled the entire schedule, and to fit Gunsmoke in, they had to lose an hour of programming. One new sitcom they didn't have high hopes for was in the same hour block as Gilligan, and it was an easy choice to kill it...Gilligan died partly because of what it's neighbor was. It didn't get moved and it's rating didn't drop. It just didn't return for the new season.

The whole affair is discussed in the Museum of Television's multi-part interview with Gillian creator Sherwood Schwartz.

But even according that paragraph they cave Gunsmoke Gilligan's Island's timee slot.

Under pressure from the network president, William S. Paley, and his wife Babe, as well as many network affiliates and longtime fans of Gunsmoke (which had been airing late on Saturday nights), to reverse its threatened cancellation, CBS rescheduled the western to an earlier time slot on Monday evenings. This had been Gilligan's Island's timeslot in its third season. (The show ran on Saturdays in its debut season, before moving to Thursdays in season two.) Though Gilligan's Island's ratings had slumped from 24.7 (18th) to 22.1 (22nd) out of the top 25 (possibly as the result of two timeslot shifts in two years), the series was still profitable.

There was no real explaination given for the cacellation of Gilligan's Island either their ratings were even higher than Lost In Sapce's ratings.

 

[Maurice]

DWF said:
But even according that paragraph they cave Gunsmoke Gilligan's Island's timee slot.

There was no real explaination given for the cacellation of Gilligan's Island either their ratings were even higher than Lost In Sapce's ratings.

^^^I said they gave Gunsmoke Gilligan's time slot AND that of a new comedy they thus killed without airing.

As I said, the whole affair is discussed in the Archive of American Television's multi-part interview with Gilligan creator Sherwood Schwartz, and he explains it.

Link to the Sherwood Schwartz video.

He discusses the cancellation starting at about 08:20 into the video. Straight from the horse's mouth. Watch it and you'll have confirmation that they killed Gilligan on the spot to make room for renewing Gunsmoke.

 

[CmndrSela318]

Back in the late 1990s there was a movie made based on the show. Kinda like the A-Team movie that recent came out. I think that was around the time all this "let's make a movie version of the old tv show (tv show name here)." trend started.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

Back in the late 1990s there was a movie made based on the show. Kinda like the A-Team movie that recent came out. I think that was around the time all this "let's make a movie version of the old tv show (tv show name here)." trend started.

I think that trend was actually started by "The Fugitive" (1993) and the first "Mission: Impossible" (1996) movie...

 

[Christopher]

^Or by Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

^Or by Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

TMP wasn't really an adaptation like "The Fugitive" or "Mission: Impossible" though. It was a feature film continuation of the pre-existing TV show with the same cast.

 

[Forbin]

No, they ran out of viewers. Irwin Allen never had to worry about running out of stories; he could always have an episode of one of his other shows rewritten. There were occasions where different Allen shows recycled the same plots.

On the other hand I saw in interview with Johnathan Harris about The Great Vegetable Revolution. He said he went to the writer after reading the script and asked what in the WORLD he was doing writing this tripe. The writer (can't recall who) said to Harris "Johnathan, I can't think of another blessed thing to write!"