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Farscape Fans Reinventing Television
JoeCotellese writes "With the recent cancellation of Farscape, this Salon story discusses the creative ways fans are trying to save the show.
Specifically it talks about how grassroots organization through the internet has helped them to the point where they are discussing fan funded production of the show."
that doesn't like farscape?
The Twiligh Zone(old), Sliders, The Outer Limits(new), and better shows fell from the waves. Why is everyone so concerned with farscape?
In all fairness I haven't seen more than five episodes of the show, but I have never been attached to it. Why are so many people obsessed with it?
This is a serious question, not a flame.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Salon fans reinventing hand-outs as a business model. It worked so well for Linux companies, after all.
Could be an interesting way of doing things however I can't see it really working as shows need a guaranteed, regular income stream.
I would personally love Farscape to be continued, especially having seen the cliff-hanger of a final episode last Monday on BBC 2..........
I wonder if you could do things like give people who donate over $xxx amount a walk-on part or something? Guided tours of the sets (yeah I know they need to be rebuilt)? Signed anythings. I guess you could try a fund raising event like the US PBS shows do - or the lartge charity fundraisers we have in the UK. Would work if we found some big starts who would support the thing for free......
Hmm
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
So, anyways, let me ask some questions. Is the big deal that Sci-Fi bitched out on the final season that it promised or that the fans just want the show to go on forever? Or just the fact that the series ended with a cliffhanger and you need resolution? Moreover, what makes the Farscape fans so persistent and loud about what they want? And will scraping together enough money for an episode (which I thought was a plan at one time) really do anything?
Kind of sucks that one can't read the whole article.
Can we moderate a user down if they give a really crappy link?
The Farscape producers were under the assumption they were going into a fifth season. After all, SciFi bought it for a fourth and fifth season. Thus, they left season four on a huge cliff-hanger and were going to wrap it all up in season five, much like Babylon 5. However, the end result is a cliff-hanger that may never be resolved.
So, to answer your question, the fans want a fifth season, they want resolution of the series and they want more Farscape.
Save Farscape was created for the explicit effort of saving Farscape. I sure hope it is saved, since it's probably one of the best sci-fi shows in existence. Pretty much all I watch for TV shows are Junkyard Wars, Farscape and Enterprise.
TV is an odd bird, and more so in the last 15 years as cable networks have exploded onto the scene.
:-/
Listening to people like JMS (who you mentioned, but did you know he's written an excellent screenwriter's guide for TV and movies that goes into a lot of the politics and how to deal with them?), Joss Whedon, Aaron Sorkin and others who have managed to sneak quality television in, I'm convinced that there's a formula for getting good television on the air.
Woefully for us, you're right: it has nothing to do with the fans per se, and once it stops going our way, we have little hope of changing it. It has to do with good writers (writers in TV are like directors in movies, they have a lot of power if they use it right) who have the organization skills and drive to produce (in name or function) their own shows, and a massive focus on good timing. You really have to pick a network thats brand new or established but on the ropes (even if just in one particular time-slot) or re-inventing themselves (e.g. Showtime and Sci-Fi in recent years).
Crusade was a great counter-example to this. Straczynski ran into an established network (TNT) that didn't have any major problems to solve. That meant that internally, there were too many little drones running around trying to find ways to be useful and justify their jobs. The way he describes it, the folks in Hollywood were practically fans of his (some actually were) and they let him do his thing, but he was constantly assaulted by the folks back at the home office in Atlanta who wanted to expand the demographic of the show, and make it match their existing audience (WWF fans as you point out).
No fan can tell those execs in Atlanta to piss off, because they're convinced that there's more gold inside the goose than the few paltry eggs it lays each season. They want to cut it open, re-structure it and sell it out for condos! That's the mentality you're dealing with, and it's only broken when there's change... you have to seek out that change. To many, JMS seemed pig-headed around Crusade, and I felt that way at first, but I realized after a while that I'd rather have the show go away than have 7 seasons of B5 meets VIP
They are talking about doing season 5 as an anime series. Which, if done correctly, could be really great.
I loved farscape because it tried to stay away from the star trek cliche, and pretty much succeeded. Also because it was actually very well written, acted, and full of really great one liners that really threw you for a loop.
Watch the last episodes of season 4, and you'll probably see the best sci-fi tv in a lonnnng time.
I do understand how some don't like it, as it is very serial. But on the flip side, I know quite a few people who watched the between-season intro episode where they tried to introduce new people to the series, and absolutely were hooked. I mean, even my sister and her husband, who are not sci-fi nerds started watching it.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
I have little sympathy for fans of cancelled TV shows. The typical response I hear from Farscape fans is to say that everyone else's show is "written to the 13 year old level". Ironically the writer of that remark illustrates his comment by attacking of all shows CSI as "95% star-trek style technobabble around a loose and predicable crime scene". Maybe if fans would show a little more respect for the tastes of others I would have more sympathy. But to be honest, if their attitude is that everyone else is inferior for not watching their show, then I am happy that their show is cancelled.
Why can't Farscape or other SF fans find a way to praise their own show without questioning the intelligence of fans of other shows?
I don't know why people have to feel that the only way to advocate their tastes is to tear down the choices of others. Do these people go around saying that everyone else's cuisine sucks because they really like one of their own particular dishes? Maybe the shows would have more fans if their advocates weren't always acting like a bunch of juveniles.
The fans don't have to necessarily fund a full season. It would require more writing but it's likely the cliffhangers could be resolved more quickly then was planned, perhaps in three or four episodes made with extreme attention to cost-savings. This might be an attainable goal, esp. if all the fans go out and buy three or four copies of the DVD releases; it might look profitable to make a final DVD or two just for that. ;-)
I would never expect them to fund a full season but they might be able to get enough. It might seem a bit hurried to the fans but surely they'd understand. I don't watch Farscape so I don't know, but if the cliffhanger was intense enough, the speedy pace might even fit into the story.
Perhaps the story mentioned this. I don't know, because I can't view Salon stories. I can't see the ad I'm supposed to watch to get the day pass, nor do I really care, so please no RTFA comments; I would if I could.
Figure $1-2M per episode for typical TV. Yes, that's Million.
... but not fandom at large.
But a LOT of that is waste.
Realworld Example: back when an ordinary one-hour drama (average cast, not big names; no SFX, no remote locations) cost around $500,000 to make, Robert Blake managed to produce Hell Town on $80,000 per episode, without shaving the crew/extras budget either (in fact, it was a great show to work, so long as you stayed out of Blake's way).
How'd it manage this? Because the money came out of Blake's own pocket and every penny was accounted for; it wasn't paid for out of some nebulous studio slush fund that doesn't demand strict accounting. (The deal was if Blake would finally stop pestering NBC 50 times a day, they'd let him do a trial run for his dream show -- provided HE paid for making it.)
And Hell Town wasn't any worse (from a production quality standpoint) than similar dramas with more-typical budgets. The scripts weren't bad as such stuff goes. It died mainly because the premise wasn't very interesting (to anyone but Blake) and even with a good timeslot, didn't draw much audience.
But notice it was *one* guy's vision, budget, and drive that made it possible. I just can't see the fractionalism of fandom accomplishing this. Maybe with a crew like the makers of "Troops" (theforce.net)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I have a very hard time believing that the SciFi channel cancelled Farscape because of the money or the ratings. They continue running the incredibly lame series Stargate SG-1. I liked Richard Dean Anderson as "MacGyver", but he should have stuck with that. If that wasn't bad enough, SciFi has been running ads for "Tremors - the series" - okay, the movie was bad enough. This is the kind of thing that you could easily see on MST3K - poor writing and cheap effects ("special" intentionally omitted.)
Farscape requires a bit more intelligent viewer to follow and understand the storyline and the depth of the character development. So yeah, it would be harder to get ratings than with a waste like "Friends."
As I understand it, the first three seasons of Farscape were designed to be able to be wrapped up in case SciFi cancelled the series. The producers left season four in a cliffhanger, which indicates how much of a surprise it was when the SciFi execs pulled the plug. Its really too bad. There is so little quality television programming anymore that I've taken to keeping FoxNews on most of the time.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
Grow up people, shows such as Farscape cost MILLIONS of dollars to produce. There is now way in heck fans would EVER be able to afford it!
I wonder if they could put Farscape on Pay Per View. That would be an interesting experiment.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
I'm a fan of the show and I've been watching the "save farscape" effort through a friend and coworker for whom the show had a lot of meaning. She has participated in some "guerilla marketing" activities to help save the show, and kept me informed of general trends.
.emacs files, and those people are actually a significant minority, not the majority. Most people never notice, didn't read the announcement we sent out, and don't care. So it is with cancelling TV shows. The ones who bitch are the ones who really were the target audience with respect to the writing. Everyone else either doesn't care or won't notice. The one's who complain just had their .emacs file broken.
I have a few musings that came to mind as I read the responses to this article.
First - on cancelling shows in general. No matter what, some people will gripe. While this expression of dissatisfaction should not be taken lightly, it should also not be taken too seriously unless it passes a certain threshold. My reasoning for this is based on dynamics I encounter at my job, where I manage the open source tools used by a world-wide corporation. Whenever we change the default version of emacs or xemacs for people, someone bitches. Without fail - they bitch. I've learned the people who bitch are the people who have heavily customized
Second - Farscape as a show has some real value going for it. For me it was the show I picked up after Babylon 5. It is my sci-fi fix. Farscape is serial in that it has a major story arc. It's sometimes episodic - isolated episodes stand on their own. Very Bab 5-ish.
Third - The show is funny (usually). The show plays with innuendo and sarcasm. Often I'm guffawing with laughter at the antics of the characters.
Fourth - It has drama. Good drama, though since blowing up the Scorpi's ship it hasn't been quite as good.
Fifth - The show takes left-turns. Real left-turns. Some of the episodes from time to time are surreal and left-of-center in terms of how they were produced or directed or both. Scratch-and-Sniff and "John Quixote" are two that stand out in my head.
It has some down-sides two.
One - The John/Aaron thing is geting old.
Two - Sometimes the characters are acting out of character to facilitate the plot. John especially is overwritten as a stubborn punk-ass human who needs to be taken down a notch or two.
Three - The arc has lost its momentum as of late
.
Four - I dunno... There's probably a four but I'm too tired now...
Cheerio.
You know, there's a difference between anti-semitic, and anti-sionist.
And the original poster didn't even express any of those, anti-sionist tendencies that is. He merely stated a concern with the policies of the state of Israel.
Quite a few of us share his concerns, without being either anti-semitic, or even anti-sionist per se.
Stefan Axelsson