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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
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.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.
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