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Farscape is Back
cioxx writes "FilmForce has substantiated rumors of Farscape, widely popular TV miniseries, returning as a standalone project with no new episode commitment attached, independent of Sci-Fi Channel." Previously, some rumors had been flying around that the original series would be finished off in this way, but many Farscape fans are just happy to see more of the show on the way.
Frell yeah!
Earlier this week, Dark Horizons reported that he had learned the production office is open, but that he was unable to learn anything else. SOMETHING is going on but that article simply seems to be plagiarizing the Dark Horizons article.
There was a Henson press conference set for Thursday according to savefarscape.com but it was cancelled which leads me to beleive that perhaps whatever deal they had fell through.
There is a fan convention going on this weekend, so if there is an anouncement look for it soon.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Not particularly directed at Farscape, perhaps, but I see a lot of criticism about various sci-fi shows for a lack of originality, in that a lot of basic tech and plot concepts seem mirrored across many different series.
I think creating an original premise for sci-fi is now extremely hard, all the main aspects of possible futures being represented in one show or another. I know I can't think of anything new to base a story on.
Can anyone point to some recent sci-fi that is truly original? Thanks.
Excellent! Now they just need to bring back the Invisible Man and I will be happy.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
Babylon 5 at least got to tell its whole story (or at the least the story that J. Michael wanted to tell.)
Farscape was not allowed to do this and it makes me a happy scaper that they might actually be allowed to wrap up the main story arc.
Support bacteria! It's the only culture most people seem to get.
I was a fan of Farscape, and was saddened to see it cancelled. That the series ended with a cliffhanger was a frustrating disappointment. At least now they will be able to tidy things up a bit. I have no hope that Farscape will be revived as a series, but at least this miniseries will give it a fair ending.
Bab 5 was cool, really cool, but I wouldn't go so far as saying I mourned it because they did manage to actually complete their 5 year story arch.
Crucade on the other hand didn't really get a chance to go anywhere, other then some hints that the shadow virus that infected earth might be nano based.
Farscape on the other hand didn't complete their 5 year story arch... we were left at a cliff-hanger awaiting a next season doomed to never come. I caught the BBC download of it, and they basicly said something to the effect of "yea that's it, it's a cliff hanger but no more episodes".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
It's inaccurate to call Farscape a miniseries. It was a regular tv show, running 4 seasons with 22 episodes in each. Perhaps the author was confused after reading the article (although that would seem to imply he read the article, which on /., seems unlikely...), that mentions that the new project will be a miniseries.
"Recta non toleranda futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"
If it was widely popular, why does it have to be resurrected?
;).
Because its cancellation was all about money and ownership of the show, not its popularity. (Kinda like the original Battlestar Galatica).
SciFi Channel (owned by USA networks) did not own the rights to the show as it was made by the Jim Henson company (who is owned by a German conglomerate whose name escapes me now). When the USA network changed leadership, they wanted shows that they made and produced to be shown so that all the monies from said show would go to them. Since this was not the case with Henson-owned Farscape, and the fact that the show was not cheap to make, USA (and SciFi) opted out of the 5th season. So now, all you get is USA network made crap programming on the SciFi channel as if the entire USA Network itself wasn't bad enough
Support bacteria! It's the only culture most people seem to get.
- Stephen Baxter's Ring, Manifold:Time, Anti-Ice
- Greg Egan's Quarantine, Diaspora, Distress, and Permutation City
- Ian MacDonald's Terminal Cafe and Evolution's Shore
- Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space
- Rudy Rucker's Software and sequels, which are the weirdest fiction I've encountered since Phillip K Dick
- S.M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time
- Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South, Agent of Byzantium, and World War series
- Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
- Robert Charles Wilson's Chronoliths and Bios
- David Zindell's Neverness
For short stories, the Year's Best SF series edited by David Hartwell is quite good. Stephen Baxter and especially Greg Egan have amazing short story collections fo their own. If you know a good used bookstore, I'd also highly recommend John Varley's short story collections (most published under several titles). He's not a bad novelist, but he's incredible in short fiction.Actually, the Henson family owns the Jim Henson company. It was sold to EM.TV of Germany for $680 million in 2000. The Henson's bought it back for $89 million this year. Not bad.
There has been wild hopes that Farscape would come back in some incarnation now that the Henson family owns the rights. We'll have to see if these hopes become reality. The theme of the campaign to bring the show back has been "Beyond Hope."
I think you're confusing good and popular. Friends and reality shows are popular. Good shows seem to be canceled on a fairly regular basis.
Everything will be taken away from you.
hell.. i have no sympathy for you.
you know, if you played nethack most of your stories in it end that way.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
One of the reasons for the decline of the channel IMO.
I know! Farscape fans bitching about Farscapes cancelation in a story about farscapes cancelation! What hubris!
Everything will be taken away from you.
I didn't miss one.
Then they moved it to mondays during the day??! How the hell am I supposed to have a job and watch Farscape.
So I quit my job.
It was worth it.
The first season or two were pretty interesting. Live actors and puppets working on the same stage in a dramatic setting was kinda cool. And the use of puppets allowed some variation from the common TV sci-fi convention of all aliens as humanoid knock-offs.
The show began to get tied up in multi-episode arcs (trying to outshine the Babylon 5, I suppose) and ordinary notions of story structure got lost. Attempts to wring "surprise" out of regular characters overwhelmed the growth and development that had been an enjoyable aspect of the principals up to then.
Humanoid knock-off aliens began showing up in droves, reducing the novelty level. A lot of time spent on earth allowed homo sapiens to be viewed as the "aliens." This got carried to an extreme not needed for long-time sci-fi fans. (Quibble alert: Characters who lived in the midwest of north america but tended to speak with Australian accents was somewhat disconcerting to a native north american. End of quibble)
The plots went out of control. Elements would be introduced that had no background, tensions would arise that were not resolved. The show's writers and producers promised in the trades and fan publications that upcoming episodes would knock everyone's socks off -- but what hit the screen was just more of the increasingly muddled mess that had now become Farscape.
The last scenes shown didn't really strike me as a cliffhanger ending, but just another weak set up for following episodes that wouldn't make sense or break through to new visions.
Let it go.
Unfortunately, that's not going to give you the ability to appreciate the show. The first season, the entire cast was getting their legs and learning to work together. Ergo, the show was craptacular. The big draw of the show after season 2 was that the quirky humor started to gel, and the actors really got more into their roles. We actually started to care about them. Really, the first three eps are not the best way to get into Farscape. You'd be better downloading the "Best of" season n material.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
There's seems to be a lot of unanswered questions about if this is actually going to happen or not and Henson & Co. aren't talking...
Truthfully I loved Farscape but I could also see where the show had serious problems. The major one being that the story arcs were so long and the stories so complicated (often based on things that happened in previous episodes / seasons) that it just couldn't attract new viewers.. I know that for a fact since I tried to get a lot of my friends to watch it and they always had a 1000 questions about why things were happening and why the characters were acting the way that they were which pretty much required giving them a two hour synopsis of every significant event from the last two or three seasons. So far everyone who I've loaned my season one and two DVD's to have really loved it once they managed to watch them all.
The second problem is that the fourth season (for the most part) just plain sucked.. there were very few good episodes from the first part of the season but it really didn't get good until the last six episodes (I think the writers realized that they needed to pull it together).. I loved the last couple with Criton running around with the fusion bomb that had "Hi There!" (a reference to Dr. Strangelove) written on it strapped to him.. that made the rest of the bad episodes somewhat worth while.
As I'm sure you're reading from other posts, Farscape was a show that didn't start out great, but developed into a great show over time (kind of the opposite of how most shows act.)
-B
Yeah! I HATE it when people other than me get something that they want!
You're not a very nice person.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Mourning Star Trek is like Mourning Dracula. It's not alive, but it's not dead. Voyager and Enterprise are/were terrible.
It's undead. It would be nice for Paramount to cut off it's head, cut out the heart, and finally burn it. The real Star Trek died with Gene Roddenberry. The animated corpse still adorns telivision.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Don't forget the football game.
From JMS:
We heard what we initially thought were disappointing figures, that we'd done a 1.7 when SFC was hoping for a 2.6 or better. It kind of
puzzled everybody because the B5 audience is generally pretty reliable.
It became even *more* puzzling when the more detailed figures came in, showing that by quarter-hours, the show *gained viewers* and did not lose them. Meaning folks who came on the show by accident, stayed to watch. It should have been much higher than it was.
Then the final market-by-marked figures came in from the studio, and we had our mystery resolved.
The east coast ratings got hammered by the football game, which was the highest rated such game in something like 5 years. The B5 male
demos are pretty much the same as for sports, and we lost heavily to football. So there we did not do well.
By contrast, on the west coast, where the show aired *after* the game had finished, we not only met but *exceeded* SFC's expectations, getting a 3.2 or 3.6 in many markets, which is actually pretty unheard of for a basic cable network.
The problem is that the average, 1.7, is still what's used for advertising. So we have to see if SFC will look past the show getting hammered by a big football event on the East Coast to look at the West Coast figures and see that there is, indeed, a market.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Actually no it didn't. It was meant to have a 5 year run (and yes I know it did) but prior to the 4th seasons end the show was to be cancelled so J.Michael had to rewrite to end the series at the end of the 4th season. When he was told that it would have a 5th he had to hack together the tacked on 5th season.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Episode 15 Season 1, Grail
Full Quote:
"No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here. Boom, sooner or later. BOOM!" --Ivanova
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
- a lot better than Grunts in Space, er, I mean Stargate
Nice characterization. I started watching Farscape because I was running out of Star Trek disks to get from Netflix. I've looked at a few other things too, including Stargate. I gave Stargate 2 disks worth of chances, and it was nothing but GI Joe lobbing grenades from a wormhole instead of foxhole. Boring as hell - a gunslinger movie with lights instead of gunsmoke.I have to agree that Farscape's earlier episodes weren't stellar. Luckily, they were just good enough to keep getting the disks. But then, from season two on, the show became amazing, like "bring tears to my eyes" amazingly good.
I feel a lot more emotion for the Farscape characters than I do for Star Trek characters - and I'm a die hard ST fan. But the truth is, the Farscape characters are far more "human" and it is very easy to get wrapped up in the story - I've found myself actually mad at a character for being a jerk, and happy or sad for a character depending on what is going on. And none of the characters are always good, always bad, always selfish, always generous - hell, even the evil nemesis is humanized to the point that, in a lot ways, I find him very likeable. Scorpius is humanized far more than the Borg ever was. This makes things much more complex and interesting.
Anyway, Farscape was not just about lights and gun battles - it was about the characters becoming real enough so that you cared what happened to them and worried for them. As far as I could tell, Stargate never got there. Neither did Andromeda for that matter (I've given that about 5 disks of chances - frelling dren).
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good