Meta: Cancelled!?! Gasp! Or how to keep the love alive once the series goes off-the-air

[catwalksalone]

MJ Panel mod: RoaringMice

Discussion space - the floor is yours...

Potential points to consider (not exhaustive, just to get you going):

Your show is cancelled. Do you cling or move on?

If you stay, what can you do to keep people's interest in the show alive? Run challenges? Hold viewing parties? RPG?

How do you bring new people into a fandom that's got nothing new to offer in terms of canon? How do you keep them there?

Do your own feelings towards the show change over time given increasing distance from the heady days of when you got a new episode every week to when the new shinies start to look increasingly attractive? What can you do about that? Do you want to do anything about it?

Comments

As God Is My Witness, I'll Never Be Jossed Again

[executrix.livejournal.com]

My first fandom was Blakes7, which I watched on VHS about 20 years after the series ended. I think it helps that there were still people who'd been in the fandom since original broadcast; that there is plenty of canon (52 episodes) and the fandom hates the way the canon turned out so much that we're still wibbling (and writing fix-it fics about it) so many years later.

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

I actually prefer closed canon (in both books and TV shows) because then either the canon's turned out the way you wanted or it hasn't, but at least you know the worst. There's no horrible suspense (I'm a wimp about suspense, both narrative suspense and meta-suspense about the narrative) and worrying about whether it might get cancelled with no time to wrap up loose ends like Firefly or, worse, keep going and going but jump the shark so that watching is painful but you feel guilty about stopping. Er, not that I went to all three Star Wars prequels out of that exact feeling of guilt or anything.

It helps if there were some satisfying plot arcs and a sense of closure, I think - it makes watching the DVDs more of a short, sweet pleasure than a sharp letdown. You can pretend it was always intended to be a small canon, rather than one cruelly cut off in its prime. Also, short canons are much easier for the lazy to research.