Fans of television series that are threatened with extinction are using sophisticated measures to save their favourite characters from the networks’ axe.

When word leaked last week that HBO was threatening to cancel Deadwood, a critically acclaimed wild west drama that has been shown in Britain, viewers set up a “Save Deadwood” website just hours after hearing that actors’ contracts were not being renewed.

Within a day the website had attracted more than £1,600 in donations towards the cost of a full-page advertisement to run this week in Daily Variety, the bible of the entertainment industry. Viewers bombarded HBO executives with e-mails.

A week earlier a group of Los Angeles fans of a threatened high school series called Veronica Mars, starring Kristen Bell, collected £2,100 to hire a plane and tow a protest banner over the house of Dawn Ostroff, the network president who was considering dropping the show. The banner read “Don’t be a dope: renew Veronica Mars”.

Other fans who begged, threatened and even tried to bribe network executives were rewarded last week with a last-minute reprieve. The antics of a teenage amateur detective called Mars, who lives in a town called Neptune, will survive for at least another season.

Even an outwardly innocuous decision to move one of America’s most popular shows from Sunday to Thursday nights provoked a viewer backlash. The decision by ABC to move Grey’s Anatomy, a popular hospital series set in Seattle, has created a dilemma for any viewer who does not own a video recorder — it will now be broadcast at the same time as CSI, the CBS hit.

“I’m home on Sundays and not Thursdays,” said one of more than 1,000 viewers on a Grey’s Anatomy blog.

Obsessive fans who campaign for their programmes are scarcely a novelty — in the early 1980s a Michigan housewife named Dorothy Swanson launched a letter-writing campaign that saved the female cop show Cagney & Lacey from early oblivion. Fans of Star Trek also mobilised themselves to get the original series extended.

There are countless examples of shows that failed to be saved and several industry executives have dismissed fan campaigns as irrelevant to hard-nosed network decisions about costs, ratings and advertising revenues.

Swanson complained last year that every cancelled show, however bad, was getting its own campaign. In one case, the hundreds of e-mails that arrived at Sony studios on behalf of a series called Werewolf were found to have been sent by four people, one of them the star of the series.

Yet executives acknowledge that the rapid spread of fan websites, mobile phones, text and instant messaging, have altered the balance of power between the networks and their viewers.

Campaigners are becoming adept at capturing media attention with stunts such as the Veronica Mars fly-past.

Ostroff assured The Wall Street Journal that fans were not being overlooked.

“I certainly am going to think about this passion when it comes down to the wire,” she said.

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