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UPFRONTS 2013: TV Spinoffs’ Almost Perfect Year 
America’s Most Wanted, the longest-running program in the history of Fox, will no longer air as a regular series. Fox has canceled the show after 23 years. AMW will keep presence on the network next season via four quarterly two-hour specials. During a conference call this morning, Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly said that “economically, it didn’t make sense” to continue the show, which had not made money for a while. Additionally, “for business reasons we want to have a place for repeats,” he said. Fox has been the only network to run a schedule of all-original series, with the other Big 3 nets airing encores on Saturday. AMW is produced by Fox TV Stations, and Reilly said the show’s host and producer John Walsh is in talks with other divisions of News Corp about ways to continue it elsewhere. So far, AMW has led to the capture of 1,151 fugitives.
TV Editor Nellie Andreeva - tip her here.
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How can this show be expensive at all to produce?
True, but it probably gets next to nothing in ad revenue. Saturday night, old skewing. I can probably afford a 30 second commercial! It also doesn’t have much international and/or syndication value. And in this DVR world, probably no product placement value. “The murder victim was drinking an ice cold Coca-Cola as he was shot.”
First they sould of put it on earlier in the evening and second they put that crap the family guy on in place of it. I won’t be watching that channel anymore.
My husband and i totally agree on bringing back AMW back something so. I hate family guy and American Dad come on Really……….
Fox channel should bring back AMERICA MOST WANTED by popular demand. Yeah the economy is bad but we America depend on John Walsh and AMW to keep us update on bad criminals in this conutry and around the world.
This blows my mind that Fox cancelled America’s Most Wanted for a stupid show that has no meaning. I refuse to watch Fox because of this. We need America’s Most Wanted back on the air and on Fox by popular demand. We as the public feel safer knowing that Law-enforcement has another tool to assist in tracking down worthless criminals, and that the public can assist. John Walsh has worked tirelessly to bring justice to those who deserve it. He turned a horribvle personal tradgey into a positive for missing children.
John Walsh is a great man. He’ll resurface somewhere. Hey maybe PBS will pick it up-the great champion of the downtrodden. Just kidding.
Didn’t they try to pull this a couple of years ago, only to reverse the decision a short time later? They realized how important the show was, focused on the fact of how many people had been caught (1,000+), and picked it up again. Is this a new network president?
15-16 years ago.
“A couple of years” ago? Try fifteen! The year was 1996. The economics of television were also somewhat different then compared to now. AMW had more viewers and cost less to produce back in 1996. Now it has far fewer viewers and a higher license fee, thus is more expensive to produce. I do wish they had canceled Cops instead and kept AMW, which is a more important show. But at least they will air specials. That’s more than virtually all other canceled shows get. And if the show is so important, another network will pick it up. If it isn’t, no one will.
Perhaps Fox is punishing John Walsh & AMW, for
letting President Obama appear last year?
This would not be surprising.
Why would any network “punish” a show for having the sitting president on? If anything, that’s a bit of a coup that should’ve been seen as an attempt to nab some good ratings.
You can’t be that stupid…
The only reason it doesn’t surprise you is becuase you are EXTREMELY ignorant of life. The Fox network and Fox News are two COMPLETELY differnet entities. And the Fox Network has long been known for having some of hte most LIBERAL shows on TV, since in their early days, they took a lot of chances.
Take your pathetic btching elsewhere.
If Fox punished “America’s Most Wanted” for having President Obama
on air for a few seconds as a re-enforcement to crime, then as the public, we shall call for a boycott against Fox! How can you play politics when peoples lives are at stake?
I’m not sure how/why this would be an economic challenge to turn a profit when FOX has other low rated reality shows like ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ and ‘Master Chef’ that require much more production efforts and contestant support and get very low ratings.
I can see how after 23 years and syndicated repeats AMW would seem redundant but you’d think they’d want to cut salaries/costs instead outright cancelling.
John Walsh made over $100 MILLION off this show in 2008 alone. Think about that for a second. This man is asking a publicly owned network, that is LEGALLY REQUIRED to maximize shareholder value to keep a money losing show on the air….while he sits back and counts down the days until he reaches billionaire status.
Ifthis guy was so interested in just catching bad guys, he would work for free now that he has enough money to guarantee that his great-great-great-great grandchildren never have to work a day in their lives.
As opposed to news programs like 48 Hours and Dateline, which are inexpensive to produce due to their documentary/news interview style, AMW relies heavily on re-enactments. Although a non-union show, the cost to produce those segments within the show, plus augmenting production costs over 23 years would make the program, that has no value in the syndication market (versus a show like Cops), cost prohibitive after nearly a quarter century of production.
AMW still has a necessary place in television. But it originated before the proliferation of news channels that offer the opportunity to cover similar subject matter on a 24/7 schedule, versus AMW which is weekly. The grating Nancy Grace is an example of the ability to focus on crime related news daily. If they were to retool the show and get rid of the re-enactments, make it either more like a newsmagazine or a live news show, it could remain as relevant and useful in a news format on a channel like Fox News (the obvious first stop after being a FOX staple) or any of the other news channels indefinitely.
Actually, the reenactments are covered under AFTRA so, the increase in costs for the show’s budget would also be attributed to the high production budget. But I agree about losing the reenactments. I have always found them to be rather cheesy.
This show should not be cancelled. I hope Walsh succeeds in finding another venue for it.
I would like to thank John Welsh for all the year’s he has put into catching all these bad people if it wasn’t for him and the police office and the FBI and all the others agentises these bad people would still be on the streets going and killing more and more. I have been watching this show ever sense it started forget about fox channel John you can find a better channel and i will be watching. thank you
Lower the budget and make it straight for synd.
im gonna miss the double crime take
Cops
then America’s Most Wanted.
Fugitives Win! That’s what Fox’s decision means as less will now be caught. Maybe Fox News would pick it up or one of the other TV news Networks? Maybe Current TV would pick it up?
IT is about BUDGET. It costs way too much to produce the show. (And pay Walsh’s enormous salary) Current TV can’t afford to buy their employees sticks of gum, let alone full packs. Most of their shows get ZERO Nielsen ratings (literally since when you round to the nearest tenth, it is 0.0)
I bet Fox would be happy to keep the show on if Walsh would agree to take less money and get other production costs down. And that is what he would have to do anyway to get on a cable network.
America Most Wanted should be picked up by TruTV on cable.
But then people will think it is a fake show like all their other shows.
Just heard that FOX News Channel could air it on Saturdays. Don’t think that would happen though!
I think the ability to run repeats of shows during the week is the real reason they are doing it. It is actually a pretty useful tool for other networks to promote various shows and build audiences. More useful to them than keeping AMW on the air.
Seems to me like if they are really serious about keeping the show on the air, that syndication might be the route to go, even though that has to be a pretty soft market these days, I have to imagine it might have some value. Although the no repeats things is kind of tough to pull off for syndication.
AMW should go online 100%, forget dying old media anyways. Have you see mugshots.com lately? That little site has over 1 million arrest mug shots. It will help capture by far more criminals than AMW has in all its years, in one year.
What in the world are you thinking? This show has been the best way of finding fugitives and sex offenders and the rest of the criminals that are out there. You tried to do this a couple of years ago and many people like myself had a say in it. So get smart and keep Americas Most Wanted on and take off sick minded shows like the Phil Donohue show or Married with Children. You have got to keep AMERICA’S MOST WANTED ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This has been my favorite show ever since it started. Most of these other shows just are crap. This is so important especially now. Take it somewhere else and tell Fox where to go.
Fox should keep AMW as a public service & forget thinkn they need to make money off that show, they have enough crappy shows they make loads of money off. I’m not a Fox show fan, I only watch it for news or Sat morn shows. Since they stopped Lie to Me, I stopped watchn.
AMW has been and continues to be an important tool for law enforcement use. Fox new waay back when that the show was not originally designed to “turn a profit”. It did what it was supposed to do. I hardly ever watched it because it had become so stagnant and stale. Frankly it was boring to watch. While John Walsh did assist in the capture of over 1000 fugitives, every thing was re-enacted and poorly at that. Hopefully Fox can fill this slot with another show similiar to AMW but more updated…
i guess i wont have any need to watch Fox anymore. AMW was and is my favorite show. Criminals are probably happy now!!! I hope another network picks this show up and runs AMW everyday.
My family has no reason now to watch Fox on Saturday nights. We always tuned in to America’s Most Wanted. Fox forgets what is important and what is not important. The meaningless re-runs they air are a waste of time for us. We won’t be watching Fox at all in the future.
Doesn’t AMW fall under the category of Public Service television? Aren’t there rules about the networks needing a certain amount of PS shows on the air?
1,151 captures in 23 years is almost 1 a week.
That’s unbelievable.
I’m sorry, but why do people think that 1,151 fugitives in 23 freaking years is a lot? Instead of putting them on a television show that practically nobody watches – they could start placing photos of fugitives on internet pages, like google, twitter, msn, yahoo, IE, places people actually look, not the measly 5 million viewers AMW manages to pick up. If anyone actually gave a crap about finding these fugitives they wouldn’t be using such a poor media outlet to do so.
Anyone who thinks that AMW is a useful tool for catching fugitives doesn’t know anything about media. The internet could find 1,151 fugitives A DAY.
Becuase peopel don’t go to Twitter or Facebook to see fugitives. Unless you are suggesting that the government should forcefully make Facebook put wanted posters on people’s facebook pages.
Your last sentence about how the internet could find that many in a day shows how ignorant you are. You clearly are a teenager who has no clue about reality.
Actually, the funniest part of your comment is you prove you don’t even understnad the internet, even though you tout it. “put it on google, IE, etc” What does that even mean? How would you put fugitives “on IE” as you suggest? Built it into the browser itself? How would you put it “on Google”? Because you realize you CAN search Google to see fugitives, right?
It really sounds like you are suggesting that private companies like Google and Microsoft should be forced to feature fugitives on their products/pages.
AMW has proven to be effective and interesting, both a matter of my perspective, but one that obviously is shared by a lot of people who care about justice. Like any business, needs good management and there is no reason that a solution couldn’t be found to make it work – maybe time for an overhaul and / or staff adjustment – starting with whomever made the decision to pull it
the criminals will feel a lot safer. As for the money John makes,
who cares,between the crooked politions & clergy everone is a CROOK
What doesn’t make sense? We pay a fortune for Satellite TV. It’s pretty sad to have to put up with all the reruns and shows that are an insult to one’s intelligence. If we’re lucky perhaps there are 10 decent shows with not only a good story line and acting. Our family looked forward to America’s Most Wanted every Sat. We certainly didn’t want to see the horrible things that happen but it opened our eyes as to the kinds of crime there is out there and to definitly be more aware when it came to the kids. When you think of all the good this show has done and the slimeballs that have actually been caught, how can this show not be a service to the public? It’s a public service. By all means let’s make it easier for these nuts to commit more crimes and get away with it. Use your common sense!