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Can cough syrup do for jPod what 20 tons of peanuts did for Jericho?

The success of Jericho fans in wrestling another season of the doomsday show out of CBS by teaming up with an online nut distributor and peppering the reluctant broadcaster has every other fan of a cancelled TV show looking for the right gimmick. Fans of jPod, however, have ruled out expressing their ire at the CBC by shipping cough syrup to the public broadcaster (in reference to a character on the show who abuses cough syrup). Their smarter suggestions for saving the cancelled show based on the Douglas Coupland novel include good old-fashioned letters and messages to the computer manufacturer Dell, telling it how great its product looked on jPod.

Still, they are unlikely to change the CBC's mind: Despite the Jericho experience, fan campaigns rarely work.

With the advent of e-mail and now the rise of Facebook and online petitions, they have become deceptively easy to wage, lulling fans into false confidence about their numbers.

"Back in the days of Star Trek, people had to write letters. There were flyers, they went to conventions, they had phone trees," said Denis McGrath, a Canadian screenwriter who blogs about television. "Nowadays, it's easier, but it is also more myopic.... They are only talking to people who have drunk the Kool-Aid."

He advises outraged fans to reach out beyond their narrow online constituency and to write polite letters explaining why they liked the show, trying to highlight their demographic desirability as viewers. Better yet, they should write advertisers telling them they saw the ads and even tried the products. Angry letters insulting network programmers, deconstructing the ratings and criticizing replacement shows are less effective, and mountains of stuff only get the mailroom mad at you, he believes.

"I worked on a vampire show," he said, referring to Blood Ties, a Canadian series now in limbo with its American broadcaster after two seasons, "and all I could think was somebody is going to start sending blood through the mail and that will be the end of it."

Star Trek is the classic example of a show saved by fan outrage over its cancellation. In 1968, NBC reversed itself and ordered a third season after the network found itself swamped with letters. Still, the original Star Trek only got one more season and, so far, Jericho, which is set in Kansas after a nuclear holocaust, has only got that too. Despite all the peanuts that arrived in 2007 (in reference to a defiant character who says "Nuts"), CBS cancelled the show for a second time this spring, and is now considering various other options. The New York Times reported last week that the network is in talks with the U.S. cable provider Comcast to order a third season of the show that would be partly funded by Comcast in exchange for first rights to air it.

This is the kind of deal NBC recently made to save Friday Night Lights, a drama about a high-school football team, which will now air first on the U.S. satellite provider DirecTV. Yes, fans did ship a lot of mini footballs to NBC, but in an industry where mass viewership is used to underwrite big production budgets, these side arrangements are in their infancy. Some observers suspect the shows will be all over the Internet before the networks get their chance to air them.

While the CBC has always received mail and petitions about its programming decisions, jPod has the distinction of being the first Canadian show whose cancellation has been subjected to a full-blown Internet campaign. The savejpod.ca website has recorded more than 30,000 hits, a healthy figure but still only a 10th of the number of viewers watching the show when its ratings were deemed too low. Meanwhile, about 1,900 fans of Intelligence, the critically praised CBC crime drama cancelled after two seasons, have signed an online petition to save that show, but nobody seems to be to bothered by the cancellation of the hockey soap MVP. This doesn't reflect the shows' respective popularity - the second two were only slightly less popular than jPod with ratings in the high 200,000s - so much as it says something about the net smarts of the kind of people who were watching jPod.

"It's a fan base that is not just a TV fan base; it's a Coupland fan base," said Kirstine Layfield, CBC-TV's executive director of network programming, noting that she has received lots of mail pointing out the show is particularly popular with online viewers who may not be showing up in the ratings.

However, she adds: "There still isn't the business case there. Right now the Internet is not a medium that pays for the kind of production values people expect on TV. ... Until the reality catches up with what people watch on line, you can't justify it."

This season, CBC Television behaved more like a commercial network than ever, putting numerous new shows on the schedule but also rapidly cancelling those that weren't getting the ratings. In part because the U.S. writers' strike left the commercial broadcasters with little new American programming this winter, the public broadcaster has enjoyed strong ratings in recent months, and now occasionally challenges Global for the No. 2 spot in Canadian audience share after CTV. Layfield justifies the cancellations, saying other Canadian productions deserve their shot at reaching mass audiences.

"We want to create an environment of success for Canadian producers. A time-slot with a middle-ranking show is an opportunity being lost," she said. She points to Sophie, the sitcom which the CBC has renewed as an example: Producer Jocelyn Deschênes had failed to get strong ratings with Rumours, a previous sitcom which, like Sophie, was adapted from a Quebec version but which was rapidly cancelled in 2006.

"Here's a Quebec producer who now has a hit in English Canada instead of a miss. If we hadn't cancelled Rumours, he [Deschênes] wouldn't have had Sophie," she said.

Layfield says many factors, including whether a show is fulfilling particular public programming goals such as reaching an underserved group, influence the decision to renew or cancel. Still, the CBC's own figures suggest 500,000 is the current magic number. Sophie drew an average audience of 530,000 this season, while two other returning shows, The Border and The Tudors, drew 628,000 and 673,000 respectively.

"I think it's great that fans do campaigns, it shows they have a passion for a show. It's fun, it's inventive," Layfield said, adding she responds to any thoughtful e-mail she gets. "The cough syrup hasn't arrived yet."