What about “Cheers?” I’m sure there was a lot of pressure to cancel it, and yet, it became one of the most popular TV shows in history. You have to know what you have and ride it out. A kindergartener can look at the numbers and make a purely numerical decision. The reason these guys get paid the big bucks is for their wisodm. Albert Pujols had a few bad months at the start of the baseball season, but you didn’t see a mad rush of fantasy baseball owners dropping him from their teams.
Like I said, that was a different time, NBC had some serious hit shows on that were making vast quantities of money, they could afford to hang onto a loser for a while until it found an audience. And Cheers was seriously loved by the critics and got lots of awards, there was good reason to believe it was going to find an audience. And finally Tartikoff liked it, when the big man that’s put a lot of big hit on the network likes a show the show gets to stay for a while not matter what the ratings are. That world is gone, NBC doesn’t have any big hits generating fat cash, Journeyman isn’t going to win any awardss, and Tartikoff is dead.
The reason these guys get paid the big bucks is because they get fired all the time. There are very few people in this world with less job security than a network TV exec (big studio film execs would be about it) championing one high priced flop is all it takes. Subsequently they’re very risk averse and tend to pull the plug quickly.