4. Family Guy
Family Guy is perhaps the most famous instance of this topic. The show has been cancelled. Twice. After the 2nd season Fox decided to unhook life support, but granted the show a 3rd season before cancelling outright following said 3rd season. Much like Futurama has done recently, massive DVD sales and huge ratings on Adult Swim for reruns showed Fox the error of their ways and the show was brought back for a
4th season in 2005. Since then, Family Guy has become the faithful companion show to the Simpsons on Fox's Sunday night Animation Domination lineup. So successful was the revival of Family Guy that Seth MacFarlane (creator and voice actor) parlayed it into two other companion shows: American Dad, and Family Guy spinoff the Cleveland Show. In other words, rather merely being a shambling zombie raised to life, Family Guy has been miraculously brought back to full fledged life, and shows no signs of slowing down. Fox has hitched its wagon to Family Guy, and is pretending they were behind it all along.