But Star Trek wasn’t a license to print money at the beginning. When it started it was an expensive show with crappy ratings, 40 years ago nobody knew Star Trek would find it’s audience 5 years after it got canceled. It’s nice to say that a show “should” find rating, but when you’re the guy writing 6 and 7 digit checks every week to keep a show on the air “should” doesn’t cut it, you need a show to have already found it’s audience. And it’s even more true today than it was before, the pie is cut thinner than ever, most of the networks (especially NBC) don’t have the big hit shows making enough money to keep a couple of experiments around. They need every episode of every show to be profitable, they no longer live in a world of letting Cosby make enough money to keep Cheers around and see if it catches.
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.