Originally Posted By: Dignan
From what I can tell, all the networks are nearly identical in their behavior: a show lives or dies based on how many viewers it gets in the first 3-5 episodes. It doesn't matter one ounce to them how passionate the fans are about a show, as long as there's a lot of them.

Passionate fans don't bring in the advertisement revenue, the number of fans does. Since networks aren't on the payment plan of something like the HBOs or Showtimes of the world, they need a certain number of fans so they can justify ad slot prices, which in turn pays for the show. I'm not sure many of the networks are in the business to lose money.

I'm definitely not happy about some of the choices (like Firefly, but I didn't see it until a while after it was canceled), I can see the reasoning behind it though.