One of my current favorite TV shows is Brooklyn Nine-Nine, created by Michael Schur (and Dan Goor, but he’s not as well known). Yes, this is the same legend of a man who created The Office (US), Parks & Recreation, and The Good Place—all of them amazing shows. However, the show was (very briefly) cancelled and removed from its position on Fox Television earlier this year. Now, if you’re caught up with The Interwebs™, then you know that the show has now been picked up by NBC and will be going for its sixth season soon. The reason behind NBC’s saving grace move was the public outrage that followed the show’s cancellation, with trending tags on Twitter and Tumblr and everywhere, honestly, leading to the current joy that fills the hearts of everyone who loves the show. However, this is not possible for every show that gets cancelled. Even Sense8 was only able to squeeze a season finale out of Netflix (it’s really good, if you haven’t seen it).
Now Fox is at it again with the cancellations, effectively cutting several shows from the fall run, including New Girl, The Mick, Ghosted, and The X-Files, and here’s the thing: as an avid television watcher/obsessor, I noticed a trend among the shows they were canceling; a lot of them were extremely, and successfully, diverse, both in topic and in cast. New Girl had a specific scene that I loved, in which one of the black protagonists gets a job as a police officer and has to explain to his non-black friend why he is struggling with the position as a black man. Ghosted is the story of two men who end up working for a secret government agency that tracks “unearthly phenomenons” and other things, indulging everyone who still wants to talk about multiverses and tesseracts outside of Marvel. And then there’s The X-Files and just…how dare you cancel The X-Files?
However, there are other factors for these cancellations that the station has pointed out, and must be taken into account when judging the choices made by the parties involved in the cancellation process. First, although some of the shows were iconic and diverse, which I discussed previously, and had interesting subject matter—they are genuinely canceling The X-Files and Last Man on Earth—it is possible that the viewers just didn’t watch them as much. Second, the television channel wasn’t getting as much traffic anyway, especially post-B99 debacle, including the fact that not many people actually sit down in front of a TV screen and turn on channel whatever on Thursdays at 8/7 central. It’s much easier in this day and age to open up your preferred electronic and access whatever you want on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Google Play, Crunchyroll, KissAnime, and many more (possibly illegal) sites. My original theory, which was mostly formed out of pure outrage and confusion, was that the television company was starting to turn towards the direction of Fox News, and that led to some very unnerving trains of thought regarding TV shows about Trump’s greatness (but we won’t get into that now).
Either way, Fox is starting to lose support, but I think that if the same people who convinced some of these shows to go on air in the first place are still in the writer’s room, then maybe the station will be salvaged. And if not, there’s always NBC.