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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."
Ratings are the only things that matter. An OTA show has only one mission: to get people to watch commercials. If not enough people see the commercials, the show isn't doing its job, and it goes off the air. So if you want the show to stay on the air, the only real solution is to get more people to watch it.
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TURN OFF YOUR TV!
The best sci-fi is in BOOKS not TELEVISION.
As long as corporate conglomerates control the airwaves, you won't get anything other lowest common demoninator "Popular Reality Show" crap.
Pick up a book, read some Philip K Dick, do something, just stop wasting your grey matter on tv shows!
Q: what's replacing Sci-Fi?
A: reality TV
Dude, it's only a $64,000 question if you don't give the answer right away like that. And yes, reality TV is the replacement. Why? Because 90% of the people who watch 90% of the TV in this country honestly enjoy that crap. The people who don't watch reality TV often have better things to do, like live their own damn lives instead of living vicariously through complete idiots who think survival has the first thing to do with voting someone off the island.
If you want to have a "reality TV" show called "Survivor," you had better have all the contestants but one die, and you'd better not help them out at all. Just videotape what happens when you drop 16 people off with no supplies but the shirts on their backs and whatever they had in their pockets at an undisclosed location with no civilization for at least 100 miles in any direction. I suggest Siberia. (And yes, this is a show I'd gladly compete on as well as watch.)
But none of the TV addicts would watch that, because it doesn't involve sex, immunity challenges, or deciding who "survives" based on popularity.
I thought sci-fi and reality were mutually exclusive. Then again, reality TV has as much to do with reality as does sci-fi, so ... *shudder*.
Its because scifi fans are geeks and control the internet so they can organize much more easily than fans of other kind of shows...
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
>Yeah at least they are fighting for something they
>love...
Anyone else find it pathetic that, 50 years ago, when folks were "fighting for something they love" it was their country, home and family?
We can face the future better then most people. We can't stand the current shit on TV (DIY super celebrity magic flog it special!) and we want something which at least has something intresting in it.
The average beer swilling idiot would complain if you canceled whatever his favourite show was, it's just us geeks have a forum (the internet) and we can rally in huge numbers against things we hate.
I like muppets.
Look, the execs see it this way:
"$36 million?! Shit, we can produce an two seasons of 'Friends' or four YEARS worth of 'Fear Factor' for that!"
Even if you get the audience, it's not going to matter much to networks like 'UPN' who will undoubtedly replace 'Enterprise' with something stupid, cheesy and, more importantly - cheap.
As I've said before, I think the only way to ensure new, quality, Sci-Fi will be if we all want to pay for it, ala HBO - Sci-fi.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
BRING IT BACK, damn you! I want to hear about how Fry and Leela fall in love! I want to see Amy and Kif raise a family of tadpoles! I want to witness Zoidberg's later career as a famous radio psychiatrist! I -- I want to hear how it ends!
HOW COULD YOU CANCEL IT, YOU BASTARDS? How _could_ you? I mean, how was any one individual physically able to say the words 'Let's axe Futurama' without their tongue turning black and their eyes bursting into flame and their skin blistering and peeling and bursting and their vile TV-exec brain crawling away across the floor? I don't understand how it's physically possible.
This, THIS is the proof that evil is built into mankind. This is the physical manifestation of original sin. This is the archetypal ur-mistake of which all other mistakes are just shadows, the womb of chaos from which springs a monstrous child, the black goat of the woods with a thousand young... *mumble mumble*
But! the people who watch Futurama aren't the kind of people who have nothing better to do than work with ratings agencies.
So, it has to go.
Why must everything beautiful be so brief?
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Good sci-fi requires that one think ahead and imagine the future. The problem is our society now is so obsessed with present-day instant gratification that the concept of imagining a different world tomorrow is almost alien (no pun intended).
How many people look up at the stars anymore? How many people can even see the stars from big city lights? I think one reason why we have crappy sci-fi now is that it's not really science fiction; it's formulaic plot lines designed to distract someone in between ads for shampoo, pickup trucks, and diet pills.
You want to see good science fiction? Turn off your stupid tv and go out and look at the night sky away from the city; your imagination will be more entertaining than a thousand mediocre tv shows.
And yes, reality TV is the replacement. Why? Because 90% of the people who watch 90% of the TV in this country honestly enjoy that crap.
I'd say we will see more and more reality shows because they are stupendously cheaper to produce than anything else. Minimal sets, no actors, no script writing, etc. Compare that to sci-fi. Special effects and complex sets are a must, decent acting, and sudo science that is close enough that it allows us to suspend disbelief - all costly if done right, and crap if any of those bits are missing. Episodic TV will get worse but movies will try to get all three right since the reality thing does not work at the ticket counter.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
We are out numbered by people who want to watch stupid reality TV shows. And the networks know this, so cancel our shows and put on more reality TV, bam, better ratings.
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Not quite. Crime shows. Just about every evening show is a crime drama or crime fiction.
Law & Order CI, Law&Order SVU, Law&Order Trial By Jury, NCIS, 24, Numbers(oops, I mean, "Numb3rs"), Blind Justice, Cold Case, NYPD Blue, Boston Legal, The Firm, Crossing Jordan, Medical Investigation, Third Watch, Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, JAG, Six Feet Under, Monk...the list goes on and on, and those are just the ones I could think of quickly or look up off the three major networks' websites. They have three angles- "beat" shows like NYPD Blue or Third Watch which focus on cops/detectives...legal shows like The Firm, Boston Legal...and scif-fi-forensics.
Many of which condition the public into accepting trampling of their rights by real law enforcement...show DNA tests in seconds and cases solved in hours...all which make the public think that law enforcement is on a roll throwing an endless stream of serial killers and terrorists into jail, or outrage the public when their "rights" let the bad guy get off or a judge won't sign that search warrant our dashing detective needs to find who's been kidnapping little girls with lolipops.
Please help metamoderate.
I mean, sure, there's a lot of crap out there, but both BSG and Firefly have been excellent in recent times.
Yes, there's great written SF that's far better than almost any TV SF, but it _is_ possible to produce good TV SF.
My Journal
Better then someone elses country who doesnt want your ass there in the first place.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It sucked, period. Real fans of Star Trek wouldn't be fighting to keep that piece of crap on. The Star Trek empire needs to take a break and stew in creative juices for a while.
GO OUTSIDE!
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
If a series ends naturally, there is grumbling, but marching in the streets doesn't make sense. Enterprise and other shows that were pulled in mid-run make you feel cheated, and in fact, that is just what has happened. This is one of the reasons why television sucks big time compared to books: Imagine "Lord of the Rings" without the third book, and you get an idea of why people get pissed about these aborted seasons.
Fans make or break the shows -- an old adage anyone in show biz will tell ya. This article actually serves as an excellent PR piece for actress Jolene Blalock, who dares to defy Hollywood tradition by telling the truth about her own show.
On her fan site, there are quite a few photos of her without the sci-fi makeup. Here is the link: http://www.hostconnect.org/~jolene/htm/index.html
Sun and Fun
It's not a question of "Can Sci-Fi fans cope?" Sure, we can cope. We just have to put up with far more crap than any other kind of niche market. If there's a decent Sci-Fi show on the air at any given time, chances are it A) Isn't advertised, B) Isn't in a consistent timeslot, and C) Frequently gets preempted for other things (like sports - See Firefly, or actually, any Fox-based SF show for a good example).
This is largely due to the fact that TV executives don't like science fiction in the first place. Even the Sci-Fi channel has recently been frighteningly short on actual Sci-Fi, and pretty heavy on Monster-of-the-Week and Fantasy.
It's also a matter of the networks keeping their word. Farscape fans were particularly upset at the cancellation of Farscape because the fifth season was meant to be the final season. This was pretty clearly stated by Rockne & Co fairly early on, and cancelling at the end of the fourth season was a clearly antagonistic move. Firefly fans got ticked because the show was never given a fair chance at all (Ask Rupert Murdock why) despite excellent writing, effects, and direction.
Perhaps the best example of this problem was the Fox series Sliders, starring John Rhys-Davies as Professor Maximilian Arturo. The show was very clever and well thought out, right up until the third season, when each episode became a copycat of a recent movie. The writers were under pressure from the executives to tone down the science of the show, and amp up the "x-tremeness." So, midway through the third season, Rhys-Davies, disgusted with the direction the show was taking, wrote himself out, killing his character. Of course, the whole time, the show was struggling against poor budgets, floating timeslot syndrome, lack of public awareness, and constant preempting, and finally was canned a few episodes after Rhys-Davies departure. Then there was the SciFi channel's resurrection of the show, which is best left unmentioned.
The problem isn't that SF fans are obsessive. The problem is that the TV executives don't care about SF, don't understand or like SF, and generally aren't willing to put forth any effort to help SF.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
What's replacing it is more subdued sci-fi elements. It was once acceptable to base an entire show around "HEY LOOK SPACESHIPS"; that's no longer true. The standard trappings of sci-fi are no longer sufficient to drive a show, they must become the foundation upon which traditionally dramatic situations are constructed. In a typical TOS or even TNG episode, the plot usually revolves around a brand-new alien race with some unique but secret quirk that the heroes must discover to solve the crisis. And now look at BSG- there are some episodes where you never see a spaceship outside of momentary establishing shots after the commercial breaks and in the background of the hangar bay set. It may as well be a military drama set on Earth, which is a large part of its appeal.
Because all too often fans act like religious fanatics over mediocre drivel, which makes it easier for execs to dismiss the outcry when a truly great show like Firefly gets canceled.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
And surely the mainstream market is going to be put off by sci-fi anyway if they don't like trek.
Well, the reason Rick Berman has been running Star Trek for 15 years is that he did have a formula for getting the "mainstream market" to watch the program -- something Next Generation was very successful with. There's not enough "sci-fi fans" or "trekkies" to keep this stuff on the air so you have to have cross-over appeal.
The eventual result was Voyager, where boring people in uniforms sat around and talked about their boring personal problems for the entire boring show with some boring bumpheaded aliens in the background. This idea had totally played itself out.
The problem is that by 2001 "Star Trek Fan" basically meant "Voyager Fan" -- everyone else had tuned out. So when "Enterprise" came out, they didn't go back and rethink the concept from the bottom up, they just produced rehashed Voyager episodes with a different cast. The Berman/TNG concept had totally played itself out.
Of course, there's lots of good "Sci-Fi" and "Trek" concepts out there. But nobody has any idea how to get the mainstream audience large enough to sustain the production budget.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
"Incompetance"? Live action sports gets much higher rating and a more desirable demographic than the average slop of network programming. Do you expect them to show Baseball Playoff Games at 12AM because of "B" show like Firefly?
Yes, incompetance.
Either air the show at the time advertised, or don't advertise it for that timeslot when you know that you have baseball playoffs that day.
And I'm not kidding, they had ads for "firefly, friday at 8" DURING baseball. It's either gross incompetance, or deliberatly machiavellian.
You can't take the sky from me...
Yeah, that's something that seems to infect American TV like a cancer. People want to see the same boring programmes over and over again. They'd rather have 600 shitty new episodes of a programme that ran out of ideas years ago, than watch something new. Just look at Friends, 700 episodes, 4 jokes. Or watch the Simpsons script-writers continually scrape the bottom of the barrel: "Oh god, we're like, the longest running cartoon ever, we rule", yeah except if you only count the decent episodes it only ran for a few years.
People say things like 'How can we possible exist without friends/simpsons/star trek on TV?' Dunno, perhaps you could watch the old, better repeats, or get the DVDs, or watch something new. Just because you once enjoyed a programme doesn't mean you need new episodes on every week. Wouldn't you rather have good memories of a great programme than a current reminder of what a once-great programme has sank to?
Personally I think Star Trek has run out of ideas. It'd be a better idea to raise money for a new, better programme.
I find it pretty pathetic that people would put so much effort into fighting for something so trivial. It's a TV SHOW!
While I agree that there are definitely more valuable things to fight for, it should be noted that the airwaves over which the networks broadcast are public property. In other words, it belongs to you and me and the rest of the American people.
Thus, I would argue that since the networks broadcast at the pleasure of the people, there should be a certain obligation on the part of the networks to provide a wide range of programming with an eye toward providing at least one or two shows in their lineups that attempt to appeal to any given significant demographic. The efforts of fans of these shows to make their opinions heard are, in reality, an attempt to make the suits in charge of programming realize that the sci-fi-watching demographic is not as insignificant as the Nielsen system (which tends to skew viewership data in favor of pure lowest common denominator garbage) would otherwise imply.
Now, while I feel that Enterprise was nothing more than a stale re-hash of Star Trek's previous incarnations, I have personally, over the past few years, had the displeasure of seeing most of my favorite shows cancelled to be replaced by "reality"-based crap along the lines of "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire Midget with Ass Herpes." There has been no real attempt on the part of the networks to appeal to my interests. What us sci-fi fans are fighting for is nothing less than the right to be able to see the kind of TV that we enjoy on the publicly-owned airwaves. And, however trivial that may seem to some, the fact is that network television has gradually become more homogenized, with a rash of brain-dead "me-too" reality shows and nighttime soaps (which draw better ratings from the retards who set the ratings). How is this in the public's interest?
When we fight for these shows, we realize that we'll probably not be successful (I realized that when I participated in the attempts to save Firefly), but it is a matter of principle, and I believe it is non-trivial. It may turn out that the lousy ratings are actually the result of the show having no fan base whatsoever, but nobody will ever know one way or the other if nobody tries (it's like voting for third parties in elections). If everyone who likes a show (regardless of genre) makes their voices heard when it gets cancelled (hopefully in a respectful fashion--this can't be stressed enough), we might be able to get the network execs to realize that they should not be marginalizing "niche" shows, that a wider variety of programming is a good thing, and that maybe--just maybe--some research should be done to investigate how the Nielsen system could be modified to more accurately reflect the actual viewing habits of the American public. This would unarguably be a very good thing...
What would you rather tell your grandkids? I fought hard and got Spaceshit3000 extended for another 3 seasons.
or...
I joined the fight and helped to bring about the end of software patents (just an example).
Like I said before, you're right on this count, but by no means is activism with regards to your favorite television show exclusive to other, more important forms of citizen/consumer activism. Simply making your voice heard about any given topic is hardly a full-time job. Obviously, if the only thing Bob the Couch Potato has ever gotten "up in arms" about is a TV show, then shame on him, but I think that art and entertainment are definitely valuable and worth fighting for, too...
Anyhow, that's my two cents...