Scant hours after the news that quarterlife would move from NBC to Bravo (and that, scant hours after the news that NBC canceled quarterlife) comes word that Scrubs is being saved–by moving to ABC. It’s still rare for a show to migrate among major networks: JAG went from NBC to CBS, and long before, Taxi picked up extra life by going from ABC to NBC. (More recently, Buffy made a mini-network move, from The WB to UPN, as did Roswell.)
But clearly in today’s media world, what used to be mainly a pipe dream for diehard fans is an increasingly likely reality. There’s been talk too of Friday Night Lights moving to The CW or an NBC cable sib, and NBC sent Law and Order: Criminal Intent to USA before borrowing it back for the strike. (See a pattern here? Suggest a new slogan: “NBC–developing hits for other networks since 2007!”) Arrested Development reportedly came this close to being saved by Showtime. In the zillion-channel world, if you can make a show cheap enough, there seems to be a home for everything, somewhere.
It’s almost torturous to imagine the number of great shows that might still be alive had they been made just a few years later. So let’s torture ourselves, shall we? What TV series (current or past) would you save by moving it to what network?
The only rule: you need to keep it financially realistic. Nobody’s making TV shows for charity, so, for instance, it’s hard to see Jericho going to ABC if it bombs again on CBS, but I’d entertain the argument for sending it to Sci-Fi if you can say the numbers would work.