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."

Comments

Lame and pointless

[squarooticus]

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.

Here's a clue...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re: Here's a clue...

[gidds]

Just what I was going to say! Maybe the story should have been called 'Can Fans of TV Sci-Fi Face The Future?' (To which the obvious answer is 'Does It Matter?')

I for one am getting fed up with people equating the sort of bad space opera, alien-of-the-week stories, soap opera, and space-bound military action that we see on TV with real, hard-edged, thought-provoking, intelligent ideas-based science fiction of the sort that we see in books and especially in the 'pulp' magazines where it all started and where real talent and real ideas are still being fostered. (Personally, I prefer the short story format, as that tends to concentrate on the ideas and deliver them with real punch.)

Even in Star Trek at its best, I'd only count some of the episodes as real science fiction. (To be fair, while some of those ones were great, some weren't; and some of the non-SF ones were very good.) But none of the 'SF' programmes on (terrestrial UK) TV at the moment interest me at all.

Science fiction isn't necessarily about space, time travel, cosmology, particle physics, parallel universes, alien races, or robots -- though there've been wonderful stories about all of those. And it certainly doesn't need to involve space ships or laser pistols, despite the many films and TV series which seem to think it does. It's about ideas. It's about asking 'What if...?' It looks at the universe and says 'Why not...?' Or even 'Unless...'

To take two film examples, I consider The Truman Show to be better science fiction than Minority Report. The latter certainly looked the part, had all the trappings, and got right up to asking some really interesting and fundamental questions; but then pulled back from them and decided to be a bog-standard action film in the end. Whereas the former dared to take a Big Idea and actually explore the consequences.

So what I'd personally like to see is a science fiction TV show that's not even called science fiction, that the fans of what currently passes under that name won't notice or be interested in. I don't know if the cancellation of Enterprise will make that more likely, but it probably can't hurt...

Can Executives Embrace Sci-Fi?

[Thedalek]

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.