There's a list of strange things Fox did with Firefly. They demanded a new pilot episode to be written in less time than it takes to write one, put them in the wrong order, scheduled them for the weeks during which they knew they'd have a huge stream of baseball playoff games coming up to pre-empt anything else, put it in a time slot which they knew was the death of every other Fox show they'd put in that time slot, skipped it around in the schedule, used bizarre advertizements (when it was advertized at all) that seemed to try to make it look bad, omitted it from press events they held to promote other new Fox shows, and gave reluctant, brief, avoidant answers when asked about it. (And I think I'm forgetting one or two things.) I don't think the whole company was out to destroy it, but I do think it appeared to have become undermined by some kind of conflicts within the company's upper management.