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Key points
- Fans protest cancellation of favorite shows with letter-writing campaigns, billboards, or even hunger strikes.
- Fandom provides community, so the loss of a favorite show can feel like a threat to a sense of belongingness.
- Fans develop strong emotional bonds with fictional characters, so the loss may also be a threat to identity.
- Protesting cancellations seen as unjust is a form of collective action that can have mental health benefits.
For fans, there is perhaps nothing more painful than losing your fandom. When faced with the loss of a favorite show or character, fans have a long history of protesting—and there are good reasons why.
Fan Protest, Then and Now
In 1893, author Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his wildly popular Sherlock Holmes character, resulting in a widespread protest, with fans wearing black armbands to show their fury. Conan Doyle’s mother even joined the protest; the author relented a few years later and Holmes was resurrected. In other words, fans prevailed.
While fans protest when their favorite band breaks up or their favorite football team loses, perhaps the most common source of fan outcry is when a beloved TV series is cancelled. Television offers longevity that allows viewers to get deeply invested, resulting in a strong emotional connection.
Fans famously lashed out in the late 1960s when the original "Star Trek" series was in danger of cancellation, with protests on college campuses and coordinated letter-writing campaigns. While the original show didn’t last a lot longer, the Star Trek universe has continued for over five decades.
The phenomenon continues today. In 2019, a particularly devoted fan went on a hunger strike for eight days to protest the cancellation of her favorite show. Earlier this month, the genre series "Our Flag Means Death" was cancelled, and fans metaphorically “took to the streets” just like the Sherlock fans with their black armbands. The modern equivalent (thanks to the internet) allows a high degree of coordination, with fans buying billboards in Times Square, flying planes with banners of “Save Our Flag Means Death,” Change.org petitions, and social media mobilizing with the hashtag #AdoptOurCrew, a reference to the pirate theme of the show.
What explains the intensity of emotion that people feel when something they are passionate about is taken away from them, even if it’s “just” a favorite TV show?
The Value of Community
Fandom is a community, and the sense of belonging that individuals gain from a close-knit group that forms around a show is powerful. Researcher Cornell Sandvoss believes that for some fans, the communal nature of fandom is precisely what is valued about being a fan.
While fandoms can and do persist after the source material has concluded, they are most active when the story is currently unfolding. An ongoing series can inspire lots of creativity—fanfiction, TikToks, and YouTube videos, as well as mainstream media coverage. All that content encourages a high degree of interaction between fans, deepening the bonds between them and providing an antidote for our current epidemic of loneliness.
Dr. Tanya Cook, a researcher who is also a fan of "Our Flag Means Death," describes the way that the show’s themes helped develop a strong fan community, telling me, “Like many of our beloved genre shows, OFMD portrayed the concept of found family—a vitally important survival strategy for folx of marginalized backgrounds who may have been disowned by their family of origin. The crew come to think of themselves as a family bound to one another by choice rather than by biological or legal kinship. The OFMD fandom has paralleled this notion of found family (or community) in real life.”
Individual Impact: Representation and Identity Development
According to Sandvoss, other fans are most passionate about the bond they feel with a character. Beloved fictional characters are often complicated and imperfect, making mistakes and exhibiting a dark side—just like most of us. When those same characters have the courage to keep fighting through challenges despite those imperfections, fans feel empowered to do the same. When fans see themselves represented in media and develop a strong attachment to a character, the loss of that object of affection may be felt as a threat to their sense of self-identity.
"Our Flag Means Death," notes Cook, “was incredibly important to fans because it did a great job of diverse representation, especially with respect to age, gender identity, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, and disability status." Hansi Oppenheimer, a filmmaker and fan, valued the show for its encouragement of identity exploration, telling me that “The show was/is important to me because all of the characters are trying to find themselves and a family that will love them as they are.”
Parasocial Relationships and Parasocial Breakups
The emotional attachment that fans feel for their favorite fictional characters is a form of parasocial relationship, with the fan knowing everything they possibly can about the character, who of course does not know them. Psychologists Horton and Wohl, in their research in the 1950s that coined that term, believed that television is the medium most conducive to parasocial relationships because of the familiarity that comes with repeatedly inviting fictional characters into our lives. The more viewers watch, the deeper the sense of intimacy—and the greater the feeling of loss when that connection is broken.
The way a favorite show ends makes a difference when fans have intense emotional ties with its characters—if they are caught off guard and did not see the end coming, they may feel betrayed and hurt. Shows that end this way have been called “parasocial breakups” and compared to romantic relationships that have less than optimal endings. Just as humans struggle to process any loss that is sudden and unanticipated, a show ending unexpectedly is difficult.
Researcher Dr. Kaela Joseph explained to me that the cancellation of "Our Flag Means Death" was especially hard-hitting for its many queer fans, noting “It feels devastating and also so expected that a major studio would have a critically acclaimed, award-nominated show, with a creative and dedicated fan-base, that showcases queer joy at a time of such societal backlash towards queer people, and the choice they made was to cancel it.”
The Benefits of Protest
Protests happen when people feel frustrated, helpless, and afraid—or, in the case of "Our Flag Means Death" and many other shows, of losing something that is personally and collectively important. While violent protest has negative psychological impacts, some studies have shown that peaceful organized protest can have a positive impact on mental health, increasing the sense of solidarity and reducing depression.
Collective action may provide catharsis when individuals come together to express their grievances, and social ties within the group may be strengthened through greater cohesion. Protesting something that is of personal importance is viewed as an ethical act—it feels better to speak up about the loss instead of remaining silent about what is perceived as an injustice.
Save Our Show campaigns do not always succeed, but viewers are not powerless. When a favorite show ends, fans can keep the emotional connection with their favorite characters alive through what they do have power over—maintaining connections with each other and creating extensions of the fictional world through fanworks and fanfiction. In that sense, our favorites can always live on.
References
Cohen, J. (2003). Parasocial breakups: Measuring individual differences in responses to the dissolution of parasocial relationships. Mass Communication and Society, 6, 191-202.
Horton, D. & Wohl, R.R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19, 215-219.
Ni, M.Y., Kim, Y., McDowell, I., Wong, S., Qiu, H., Wong, I., Galea, S. & Leung, G.M. (2020). Mental health during and after protests, riots and revolutions: A systematic review. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 54 (3), 232-243.
Williams, R. (2015) Post Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self Narratives. London: Bloomsbury.
Sandvoss, C. (2005) Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity.
