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Can Sci-Fi Fans Face the Future?
khendron writes "The Toronto Star has an article about sci-fi fans and their ongoing habit of protesting the cancellation of their beloved TV shows. From mailing bras to starting malicious Internet rumours, devoted viewers try all sorts of things to protect what they love. That's not always good news."
This came up a few days ago with the "pay-per-view series" story, and in a thread attached there some of us contemplated something of a plan to actually make a series based on fan interest... like a middleman-less version of broadcast TV.
Along those lines, I made a page outlining the "business plan" and asked for input as to how much you personally would pay per episode of a particular show. I did it kind of late in the game, though, so only about 400 people saw it. I'd like to increase the sample if I could...
The idea related to TFA is this: if you have a block of fans that are fanatical enough to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures, to pull a sinking series out of the abyss... why not actually give them what they want? If you get subscriptions for a season of a show from enough people, you can easily produce a show, and you will make bigger profits than before while still giving the fans what they want. Especially in sci-fi, where the audience is more internet-aware and a lot more passionate, this seems like a great solution for all parties.
Anyway, if you'll at least take the time to vote at the bottom of that page, it would be very interesting to see how Enterprise's target audience actually feels about the idea.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
From the article:
"I mean, we started out with 13 million viewers on the pilot, and we somehow managed to drive 11 million of them away."
There's 11 million other trek fans that feel Enterprise sucked with 2 million that stayed. Sounds to me like an overwhelming majority feel Enterprise was a terrible show and it's obvious the remaining fans are simply fanatic activists. There's nothing wrong with being a die-hard fan, but the ratings pretty much prove how terrible a show it was. I could understand protesting the cancellation of a star trek series that was produced well, but why the worst of the series?
As well, MST has the distinct honor that it's feature film marks the only time in history that such a large group of fans wrote to a movie studio demanding that a movie be made that it actually worked.
Only time? What about Firefly?
Je ne parle pas francais.