Eventually.

We don't have "any say" in these things, and the Americans themselves only have one anymore as long as they buy enough products to justify the advertisers spending the money on prime time TV anymore. The internet has already become a huge competitor, not only for the money of advertisers, but also in a lesser measure for the audience's attention. The US content producers also no longer make nearly as much money from foreign sales, because the decrease in advertising revenues, combined with the gaining popularity of watching TV over the net and the less important losses to piracy are such that that buying a US show isn't nearly as interesting anymore (they've reappeared after a big decrease in some markets largely as a result of the producers cutting their prices, but they can only go so far as the way the foreign rights work in the US (the parts that go to the writers, actors and most expensive of all, for the music force them to keep their prices still fairly high).

Then there's Hulu. Several factors are keeping the content producers involved from introducing a new business model to replace or to co-exist with the revenues made there from advertising (and the main factor is disagreements and complications over what the new model should be), but Hulu is drawing away from the traditional broadcast (and from piracy) more and more Americans, further decreasing the ad revenues, and the estimated number of revenues from ads on Hulu last year was around 100 millions, which sounds high but is a far cry from the advertising losses faced in traditional broadcasting.

So basically, the US broadcasters are quite deaf right now to complaints from viewers, petitions and other declarations of love for cancelled shows and look only at ratings, on shorter and shorter terms, and they've lost most of their room to manoeuvre. A show threatens their revenues, they cancel it very fast. They can no longer take much chances or nearly as much risks as they once did. They know if they kept a show on air longer, they stood a chance the ratings gradually might increase. It's just in the current market, and with shows at the current production costs, that's chances they can't afford to take much anymore, or it's not the "lame duck" they risk making losses with, it's the financing of their whole grid they might threaten.

To many, this may be the sign of the beginning of the end. If you look at the situation worlwide, it's much the same phenomenon, but the US (and India) are "the abheration". They're about the only ones who've managed to avoid so far not to invest much into culture (especially popular TV/cinema) and have let it to the private sector almost entirely, and for many decades it's become a huge industry and has thrived, and in the case of the US it's gradually become the most expensive TV produced worlwide (whole series are produced elsewhere at the cost of a single episode of an US show, or less), and has also managed to "invade" the planet by becoming popular nearly everywhere. Nearly everywhere else (where there's real national TV anyway...) both TV/cinema can exist because people want them and thus there's no opposotion and they're heavily subsidized by public money (up to 90% in Canada, for instance). That television porduction is losing advertising revenues as well, but it's not as dramatic as public funds keep coming - and it's thus a much smaller percentage of their financing that is affected). But with the US system, its traditional sources of revenues, those that made the model viable for over 50 years, are decreasing dramatically and very fast, and now they're the broadcasters suffering the most from the transition to the "new platforms" and the most worried about how they'll manage to stay in business, the most worried if they'll find new ways to finance themselves, and also the ones that suffer the most financially from piracy (the other nations, where so much public money is invested in productions, abolish geographic barriers more and more, make their content available more and more widely for free, or introduce very affordable pay-per-view systems that manage to cover some of their losses in advertising. The US TV system is facing a much bigger challenge. With Hulu, that 100 millions are almost a drop in the ocean for US TV. Subscriptions are uncharted territory, and they need far more money from that than anyone else, and are the ones who have to fear the most their prices will have to be too high. Some communication analysts believe in the long run the US' 100% private model for TV (well, except that fringe public broadcasting that's such a weak player it doesn't really count) might never fully recuperate and will remain in a tight spot, have gradually to lower their costs and will have to play even safer than now when it comes to very high budget shows. It's a huge challenge. The model was so succesful and for so long that everyone in the system in the US is paid in a way more than anyone abroad (though it's lucrative careers, in the US it's just far more so, with much stronger unions, far more lucrative rights paid for music and so on - and advertisers that paid far more than anywhere else.), and likely way too much for the "new business models" with lower revenues to afford that. The day may well come were Americans will have to pay, with subscriptions or public money, for ABC, CBS and company the same way they pay for cable channels, or see those networks gradually disappear or become a shadow of their former selves.

And the trend to pull out of the air shows in the middle of seasons, to cancel a lot of shows after a season, or in the middle of 4-5 storyarcs is here to stay. For a long while at least. The networks are all in pretty bad shape at the moment. The most positive aspect for them is that they're still fairly popular, that their popularity extend way beyond the US borders, and that they see the day in sight when they'll be able to cut a lot of the intermediaries between them and the public remaining (that's far more true for the movie studios, though - as this is mostly in the distribution sector these "doomed" intermediaries are) and to which 20 to 40% of their profits go.