Since this week marks the dvd release of Firefly, I thought I'd take a moment to rant about a relatively recent phenomenon. We all jumped for joy when, beginning with the X Files, and going from there, they started releasing our favorite television classics on dvd. But it seems that now we have an even more interesting trend taking place: The short runs of many canceled tv shows finding a new life in the dvd venue.

To name a few, off the top of my head:

• Firefly, coming out this week. (I personally am keeping my distance from the Temptation Zone right now, as the one evil I fear more than temporary entertainment deprivation is debt. But if and when the money situation gets better again, this will be high on my list of items to check out.)

  Fox's incompetence with this series is legendary. It's so bad, a casual bystander might wonder if they had some sort of strange vendetta against it. First, they skipped showing the pilot, so most people never got to see the exposition and proper introduction of characters. Then, the episodes they did show were aired out of order, making the threads of the ongoing story line nearly incomprehensible to follow. As a last stab, the show was canceled before the last 3 episodes of the first half-season which had been filmed could air. Under that kind of treatment, it's hard to imagine any show garnering an audience.

  Still, thanks largely to the fact that the show had Joss Whedon's name and vision behind it, it developed a cult following. If the Internet buzz is any indication, this one is going to be a big seller.

• B5: Crusade. Word is out that after the huge success of Babylon 5 dvd sales, its short-lived successor, Crusade, will be hitting the shelves sometime next year. This article, which Yanthor linked to from his website last night, goes a long way to describing the TNT network's gross mishandling of that operation. But despite their mangling of JMS's vision, many people are still clamoring for the dvd release.

• The utterly hilarious Family Guy did so well in dvd sales that Fox apparently wants to try to revive it. This prompts an obvious question. Since the show was obviously so popular, why the bleep did they cancel it in the first place? Bad ratings, perhaps?

  Here's a clue: After season 1, I wasn't watching it either. Why? Because the timeslot shifted around so often, one could more easily predict the appearance of the sasquatch based on the current phase of the moon than figure out when the next Family Guy episode would air.

• Futurama. It's canceled, it's not canceled, then it's canceled again. I honestly don't know what's going on with this one anymore. Another animated great falls victim to Fox's convoluted timeslot scheduling algorithem.

• And of course, the one we all love: Farscape. The Scifi network decided it was more affordable to produce stuff everybody hated (con artists pretending to channel the souls of dead people?) than spend money on its most popular and beloved-by-viewers series. Word is that it might now get a tv miniseries or something to wrap up the storyline that was left dangling. Yet Farscape still commands a premium price for the dvds, and as far as I know, they're making money off of them. (But why, oh why not do complete season box sets instead of dozens of little piecemeal bits?)

• The grand daddy of them all, Star Trek. You know, the one with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Doctor McCoy, which began the franchise around which conventions would regularly be held around the country for years to come. After 3 seasons, and repeated letter writing campaigns to keep it afloat, NBC pulled the plug, thinking they had a loser. History has been the judge of their lack of foresight.

What can we conclude from all this? At the very least, the fact that such popular items were ever canceled in the first place demonstrates that tv networks and studios often grossly misjudge viewer demand. The ones calling the shots are out of touch with their audiences. In some cases, it's easy to conclude that they might even harbor an active contempt core audience members.

How might such inefficiencies be corrected in the future? Well, aside from such mundane practices as having program directors listen to what the people who watch their stations want to see, it would appear that a pay-per-view model, in which viewers themselves directly fund shows might make more sense. Of course, this has the problem of getting people interested in the first place. Audiences generally aren't going to want to pay something unless they're already convinced it's good, and many aren't going to become convinced it's good until they've seen it.

Then again, if direct viewer support is to become the way of the future, we might eventually start seeing direct-to-dvd series releases, bypassing the pesky networks and fickle stations completely. This could become especially successful in cases where shows have established names behind them. If Joss Whedon, JMS, or Chris Carter managed to put together a series which could be directly and immediately sold to audiences as a first step, rather than an afterthought, no one would have to worry about network censors, odd timeslots, or lack of advertisers. Would you buy? I think I would.

Meanwhile, the broadcast tv medium can continue on its merry way into oblivion, shoveling more dirt onto its own grave with each new increasingly invasive spinning logo in the cornor, each "reality tv" retread, and an ongoing tidal wave of third rate sitcoms to fill the gaps.

What's new in your world today?