For Canceled TV Shows, Never Say Never Again

The end of the TV season each May has traditionally been a time for production companies to box up failed shows and ship them out to the vast canceled series graveyard. Lately, however, some of those hearses are being replaced by moving vans.

Several programs on the bubble in terms of coming back next fall could find homes on other networks, reflecting shifting standards of what justifies survival in today’s fragmented television landscape. Moreover, even canceled series--including the unseen episodes left after the ax has fallen--are almost instantly showing up on cable, as studios rush to recoup whatever they can of their squandered production costs.

The fledgling UPN and WB networks, in particular, have been open to considering moderately rated properties from elder networks, a trend that began a few years ago and has shown no signs of abating.

WB has already scored a coup by landing ABC’s “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” for next season--an apparent bull’s-eye with the “Dawson’s Creek” network’s target teen demographic--and has reportedly expressed some interest in “The PJs,” a clay-animated series that debuted to strong ratings but has since languished for months on Fox’s bench.

UPN, meanwhile, is negotiating for a midseason series Fox has yet to broadcast, the clay-animated “Gary & Mike,” which otherwise would have been burned off this summer. The network has also been mentioned as a possible buyer for “The Hughleys” if the series fails to receive a third-season order from ABC, as well as Fox’s animated comedy “Family Guy,” though sources characterized the prospects of those moves actually happening as iffy at best.

UPN President Dean Valentine declined to discuss specific properties but said there is an obvious reason why UPN and WB would contemplate picking up network castaways.

“We’re really looking at a difference of scale,” he said. “Even most of their low-rated shows do a bigger audience than UPN or the WB. That can make it a very attractive proposition.”

Both WB and UPN have gotten mileage in the past out of major-network series, such as “Sister, Sister” and “Clueless,” which were able to survive in those venues with a narrower audience than they reached on ABC. Yet while there is an advantage in acquiring a show another network has spent millions of dollars producing and promoting as opposed to “starting from scratch,” as Valentine put it, various factors influence the decision-making process.

For starters, Valentine stressed that any property must mesh with a network’s programming identity to have a chance to succeed--one reason some of these shows didn’t do well in the first place.

There are also nagging concerns when a show has been canceled, Valentine said, “What do they know that you don’t know? . . . If it’s failed on another network, it’s unlikely to be a huge hit on yours.”

Indeed, history indicates that few programs making the jump from one network to another prosper, with “JAG”--the military drama that premiered on NBC--perhaps the most notable exception, having blossomed into CBS’ highest-rated drama.

Cultivating interest from competing networks has nevertheless become a standard negotiating ploy for producers--a means to pressure an incumbent network to renew a borderline series.

Because so few shows are instant hits, determining whether to extend a show or cut it loose--and risk letting that program become an arrow in a rival’s quiver--has turned into a complicated guessing game and rite of spring. All six broadcast networks will unveil next season’s prime-time lineups the week of May 15.

“Unless you have a bona fide hit, producers always find themselves struggling for renewals,” said Tony Krantz, chief executive of Imagine Television, which produces not only “The PJs” but two other critically acclaimed series sweating out the schedule-setting derby, ABC’s “Sports Night” and the WB’s “Felicity.” “We’re hoping we’ll be successful by virtue of the quality and unfulfilled commercial potential of these shows.”

Even canceled programs, which once would have disappeared from view entirely, are quickly resurfacing thanks to the hunger for low-cost programming among cable channels, which attempt to cash in on whatever following these shows generated during their network runs.

“Harsh Realm,” the science-fiction series Fox dropped last fall after just three telecasts, currently plays on Fox’s FX channel, including a half-dozen episodes that never made it onto Fox. A similar deal has just been announced for “Action,” the acerbic Hollywood comedy Fox yanked earlier this year, which will be shown this summer.

Discussions have also taken place in regard to finding a cable home to carry NBC’s “Freaks and Geeks,” just as “Prey”--a short-lived 1998 ABC series--began running this year on the Sci Fi Channel after an Internet fan group lobbied for the show’s return.

Despite cable’s appetite for reruns, such exposure has seldom led to further production, though there’s hope that will change. TNT, for example, continued the sci-fi program “Babylon Five” after its initial run on broadcast stations, albeit in the form of original movies as opposed to a weekly series.

With so many channels to fill, it seems likely very little will be allowed to go completely to waste in the future--including series prototypes. In fact, there’s a market for such contraband on the Internet, as producer Alan Spencer discovered when a sci-fi spoof he produced in 1994, “Galaxy Beat,” illegally turned up as an auction item on the Web site EBay. “Rare advance screener!” reads the description of the one-time CBS project, which predated “Galaxy Quest” and a similar concept that’s under consideration at Fox.

“You can’t say any more that it’s an unsold pilot,” quipped Spencer, who’s currently developing a series for HBO. “It sold on EBay for $39.”