Hollywood is a brutal industry, and sometimes even the highest-quality shows are subject to unceremonious cancelation.
But even if your favorite niche show (that's definitely the best thing on TV so how come nobody else watches it?) does get nuked, try not to lose hope. If enough people are as passionate about it as you are, band together and combine your powers. Persistence pays off, and if you're loud enough, you just might manage to save your favorite show. After all, there's a lot of precedence for fans saving TV shows.
Family Guy
FOX
Considering Family Guy's long-running status as a cultural icon of adult animation, it might be surprising to discover that Family Guy was actually canceled not once, but twice. After lackluster viewership during its first two seasons, Fox canceled Family Guy in May of 2000, only to revive it once again in July for another 13 episode run. Those episodes didn't draw in viewers either, so Fox canned the show entirely and sold the re-runs to Adult Swim. Naturally, Adult Swim connected Family Guy with a proper audience who went on to buy 2.2 million copies of the first two seasons on DVD. Sales numbers like that caught Fox's interest, so they revived the show again in 2005 and it's been running ever since.
▲Brooklyn Nine-Nine
NBC
Perhaps the only decent thing to ever come out of the concept of "police," Brooklyn Nine-Nine ran for five seasons on Fox before getting the axe. This drove fans into a social media frenzy, probably because they didn't know where else to watch Andy Samberg and Terry Crews at the same time. Fans pleaded with Hulu, but Hulu passed, upping the ante. Luckily, NBC stepped in to rescue the show, where it continues to thrive.
▲Community
Yahoo! Screen
Before Rick & Morty, Dan Harmon's biggest hit was an aptly titled show about community college starring Joel McHale and a young Donald Glover. Community was expected to have six seasons and a movie, so when NBC canceled the show after season five, fans were predictably miffed. That's when Yahoo! Screen, which nobody even knew existed, swooped in to save Community and fund its promised sixth season. The fabled Community movie is yet to come.
▲Sense8
Netflix
Partially produced by the Wachowskis, Sense8 was a creative, albeit muddled sci-fi drama about a group of strangers from across the world with a bizarre psychic connection to one another.
The show amassed a small but highly dedicated fanbase who Netflix didn't consider big enough to warrant continuing the show beyond two seasons. The Sense8 fans were ridiculously dedicated, though, creating petitions, organizing call-in campaigns, and banding behind various hashtags like #RenewSense8. Eventually, Netflix relented, giving the show a final two-hour special to wrap things up before shutting it down for good.
▲Arrested Development
Netflix
Arrested Development is the text book definition of a TV show ahead of its time. Launching on Fox in 2003 alongside family-friendly fare like Malcolm in the Middle and That 70s Show, Arrested Development offered far more complex humor full of running meta-jokes that required sequential viewing. It won a ton of Emmys and garnered a dedicated cult following, but definitely wasn't geared for the average Fox viewer. Fox planned to cancel the show after its second season, but fans bombarded them with letters and fake bananas, convincing them to make a third season before finally ending it in 2006. Then, seven years later, Netflix picked up the show again, ultimately creating two more seasons which unfortunately paled in comparison to the first three.
▲Veronica Mars
Hulu
A teen noir mystery about Kristen Bell being a high schooler and a secret private investigator, Veronica Mars fit perfectly into the classic angsty CW vibe of the mid-2000s. After the show's cancellation in 2007, series creator Rob Thomas wrote a Veronica feature script that Warner Bros. chose not to move forward with. But the idea of a Veronica Mars follow-up movie bubbled in fans' minds for years. So when Kristen Bell launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the movie in 2014, fans raised 5.7 millions dollars to make it happen. Hulu then gave the show another season, because clearly Veronica Mars fans want nothing more than to throw cash at the franchise.
▲Jericho
CBS
A rare mid-2000s CW series featuring people other than teens, Jericho was a post-apocalyptic action-drama about small town Kansas folk surviving after America's nuclear annihilation. Pretty much nobody watched it (too few wet abs, maybe?), so it was canceled after one season. This lead the show's probably five fans to ship over 20 tons of nuts to CBS, scaring them into making a second season. Again, nobody other than those probably eight fans watched, so the show was canceled permanently.
▲Star Trek: The Original Series
NBC
Star Trek: The Original Series, considered by many to be amongst the greatest pieces of science fiction ever created, was rumored to be on NBC's chopping block after its second season. This resulted in a massive fan letter-writing campaign, wholly unprecedented for the 1960s. NBC received anywhere from 116,000 to over a million letters over the course of just a few months, so of course they gave Star Trek: The Original Series a third season.
Mystery Science Theater 3000
Netflix
Mystery Science Theater 3000 or MST3K is an odd-duck as far as television shows go, essentially formatted around making fun of B-movies via a voice-over track. The series aired on Comedy Central for a few years and then The Sci-Fi Channel for a few more, but never found a proper home. Still, it held a special place in fans' hearts, so when series creator Joel Hodgson launched a 2015 Kickstarter campaign to revive the series without the risk of a network ruining the format, they jumped at the chance. The campaign raised 5.76 million, topping the record set by theVeronica Mars campaign, and eventually lead to the show being picked up by Netflix.
▲Lucifer
Netflix
Lucifer is a TV show about hot, bored Satan, so naturally it has a lot of a very specific type of passionate fan. Well, the third season ended on a cliffhanger and Fox canceled it anyways, so you can probably imagine what that fan reaction was like. Hashtags. So many hashtags. Luckily for them, it just so happens that picking up shows based on hashtags is Netflix's jam, so Lucifer was saved and the screaming fans got exactly what they wanted.
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