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If 'Doctor Who' Had Been an American Show

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TedStriker2/16/2014 9:04:30 pm PST

re: #1 sauceruney

It would’ve been canceled while the second season was in pre-production, and its fan base devastated for decades.

Yeah, Firefly syndrome; Fox just couldn’t give even a full season to see if the series would get its legs. However, there’s another example.

Star Trek has become a pop sci-fi institution over the past 45+ years, but it wasn’t always that way. Seeing as TOS was contemporary with the first years of Doctor Who, a lot of people forget that NBC decided to can TOS after three seasons due to low ratings (the network wanted to kill it during the second season, but, even then, Trekkies lobbied the save the show for one more season).

It wasn’t until the mid-70s, when Paramount wanted to start its own network to compete with ABC, NBC, and CBS, that Star Trek was reborn, first as the flagship series for the proposed network, then, once the Paramount Network plans fell through, reworked as a feature film.

The rest is history.