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Still Hope for Farscape
An anonymous reader wrote in to say that the "Save Farscape" campaign thinks there is still hope. If the next 11 episodes (starting Friday, January 10 on
the SciFi Channel) pull the right numbers ). According to this interview with David Kemper:"If we were to do 2s, straight across the boards for these eleven eps, I would be expecting to have phone conversations with people immediately..." Of course that is pretty unlikely- but my household won't miss an episode. To bad the cats don't count in the nielsons ;)
"kill your television" and live life to its fullest
Everyone still call/write si-fi after each episode and ask for more...
Be sure to mention content in each weeks show so they KNOW you are really watching..
We have a chance here, lets not blow it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Man Gets 70mpg in Homemade Car-Made from a Mainframe Computer
It would be interesting to see what happened if you could suddenly get viewing data from all those TiVos, digital cable boxes, and satellites out there. It might be like when album sales became directly tied to the sales register instead of clerk reporting. It was discovered that country music accounted for far more sales than was credited.
If the SciFi Channel is planning to nix Farscape, we can at least demonstrate some interest by browsing their site. :)
Did anyone catch their "original movie" Dragon Fighter last weekend? What a cookie-cutter of a plot, predictable and silly. I swear these folks wouldn't know science fiction if Harlan Ellison tattooed it across their butts. Farscape may not have been high art (what on the tube is?), but they did manage to pull off an original episode once in a while.
Futurama.
Personally I don't care what ad companies target a show -- I fast forward through the crap unless it catches my interest anyhow.
Here's a hint for the advertisers: make it amusing. I'll actually watch an amusing ad, even if I have no interest in the product. IBM, Blockbuster, and a few others seem to have grasped that; corps like GM, Chrysler, Ford, etc. are still under the misguided belief that their ads have anything to do with which vehicle I end up buying.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I don't know how keen I am on having every ad agency in the country know my viewing habits, but you are right.
I don't know how much I care about that. In my opinion, if they are going to broadcast an ad anyway, they might as well use something that appeals me as well as something applicable to my life situation (hint: more beer commercials, less tampon commercials).
I have yet to hear a compelling argument why targeted advertising is so bad, but if anyone out there wants to give it a shot, I'm all ears...
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Far superior program.
Television pisses me off because more likely than not you're already paying for the video feed with an overpriced cable or satalite bill, yet they feel the need to tack on extra means of income by trying to force you to watch commercials that most likely you don't give a shit about.
Those are separate. The money you pay to get the signal goes to support the distribution network. The bulk of the advertising revenue goes to support the production of the shows.
Of course, a profit margin exists in both revenue streams, but, hey, the bills have to get paid.
If you are really that bothered by commercials, you have other options. You can buy all of the material you watch (DVDs, etc.); you might be able to find someone to sell you commercial-free material (you can definitely get commercial-free music); you can opt out and not watch; or you can flip channels/stations (essentially freeloading, although as in many circumstances, freeloading requires a lot more effort than paying). Really, there's no reason to get pissed off here, no one's forcing you to do anything. Decide what you want, decide what you're willing to pay, and figure out what falls in the intersection of those sets. If A /intersect B = {}, so be it. Try going outside.
In my case, I don't care about commercials all that much, but I can't get free TV (not legally, anyway; my brother-in-law is an AT&T broadband installer, and would hook me up for free, but I'm not into that) and it's just not worth paying for, so we don't watch TV.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Firefly was doomed from the start.
It aired Friday nights during that awkward summer/fall transition when everyone's either on vacation, or getting re-integrated into school life (eg. parties.)
Fox didn't air the pilot movie which explained who everyone was and what was going on, but instead aired that horrendous episode about the train robbery, which was easily the *worst* episode of the season. I'd heard the pilot movie was supposed to have aired back in December around Christmas (which would have been another brilliant move by Fox...)
Oh yeah, and don't forget about the baseball playoffs, which knocked out a few episodes, depending on where you happen to live.
Officially, Fox says the show is on hiatus until they find a new timeslot for it, but I don't think anyone here would be surprised if Firefly never came back.
> I still have hope that television can recover from its great creeping miasma, but that hope is waning fast.
I think the broadcast networks are dead and just don't know it yet. (Or maybe they do know it.) Cable has killed them. You're starting to see informercials during prime time, for Christ's sake. And more and more of the remaining programming is the cheap-to-produce "reality" shite, sitcoms, talk shows, "entertainment" programs that are thinly disguised ads for the music and movie industries, etc., with an ever increasing erotic content to entice casual channel flippers to linger for a while.
In 10 years any of the broadcast networks that still exist will be unrecognizable as what you thought "television" meant when you were a kid.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is completely false. While Nielsen households are not a completely random sample of the viewing audience, they are accurate enough to represent the viewership audience per show within an acceptable margin of error. Random sampling/surveys are a scientifically sound method of obtaining an overview of the whole.
If the Nielsen ratings weren't accurate, stations, broadcasters, advertisers, etc would be screaming for a more accurate viewership measuring system. The accuracy of the Nielsen ratings is essential to the surviability of the NielsenMedia company. If the people that studied these ratings (advertisers, execs) didn't feel they were accurate, they would be looking for a new parter to monitor ratings.
If the next 11 episodes pull the right numbers sounds an awful lot like Jimmy Swaggart's If my ministry doesn't collect 8 Million dollars... of a few years back.
Are TV execs so soul-less as to decide a show's viability by the number of eyeballs they deliver to advertizers, without so much as a moment's consideration for the inherent quality of the show itself? Oh whom am I kidding? Of course. The bastards!
How many avid fans of Shakespeare are there? Of opera and theater in general? Of reading classic books? Even of reading pulp instead of watching soap operas?
It's clear that "Good Taste" is the trait of the minority. Yet, it is utterly shameful that we live in an age where economies of scale and advertizing dollars are the sole drivers of the success of entertainment.
Why must good entertainment be relegated to the relatively well off, and sustained by charitable contributions of the wealthy, while the tripe is sold by the bucket, paid for by people looking to take as much money as possible from anyone gullible enough to not change the channel or walk away every 8 minutes?
Bah! Ok, I'm done. Who's next on the soap-box?
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What you do today will cost you a day of your life
A very similar thing happened with The Chronicle. Though the show had not been on for as long as Farscape, it developed quite good ratings for SciFi. In weeks where new episodes aired, it was (with a couple of exceptions) the top show on the network. Then it was moved around, stuck on hiatus, brought back in fits and spurts, and finally strangled after a single season. The constant changes to the schedule and the lack of support for any program has effectively destroyed SciFi's ratings. When it started, The Chronicle pulled in over 2 ratings. Ratings in that range were a given for new episodes of Farscape just a year or two back. But as fans have learned that they can't trust SciFi, they've stopped watching. Why get invested in a series when a single season of episodes will be spread over a year or halted without warning? Science Fiction fans are more loyal than any other viewers on television, yet the SciFi Channel has managed to send them running in droves. SciFi is an perfect example of management to the point of destruction.