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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."
Fight for what you enjoy, regardless
#!
So ... what's replacing Sci-Fi? (Please, please, please, not reality TV, please, please...)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There is an awkward silence when the subject of the final episode is broached. "I don't know where to begin with that one," she finally stammers. "The final episode is ... appalling."
...you just try and organise a "please don't axe our favorite show" protest before it has been axed. It just wont happen.
Too bad as it would probably work better.
Executive types hate reversing decisions, somehow thinking it implies they don't know what they are doing, but deciding not to can a series...thats just another choice that can be made without loosing face.
The Borg assimilated my race & all I got was this lousy T-shirt
The problem with Enterprise is, the studio knew that there was this already existing rabid fanbase for all things Trek, so they figured that they could put any old crap on TV, put the Trek name on it, and they would have a built-in fanbase. Sadly, all of these protests have proven them right.
Unfortunately for them, this time the fanbase isn't big enough to sustain a series, even on the low ratings friendly UPN. The article also states how they hope to be picked up by the Sci Fi channel, which requires even lower ratings of its fare.
The problem is, Enterprise really isn't a very good show. It needs to be cancelled. Maybe it will mean the death of the Trek franchise, but I seriously doubt it. More likely, it will result in someone down the road coming up with another Trek series and actually putting some effort into writing a quality show.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
The article towards the end mentions that some of the more successful fan movements have been largely the result of female fans. (e.g. Farscape) I wonder to what extent this is true of Enterprise? Anybody have some numbers? The impression I get from the marketing of Jolene Blalock is that women have not been marketed to..
... People love particular episodes, or particular dialog or plotlines or characters. So what's going to happen if the fans get another episode of Enterprise, and it's a "bad" episode? How will you feel if you paid to get more episodes, and that actor or actress you hoped would get some really good character development gets a lot of wooden lines and writing that seems to go totally against the character as already envisioned? What if you were hoping to see more Ferengi, and Paramount turns out three episodes with nary a Feringi in sight?
Right now, the fanbase is making a promise it can't keep - "Here's money! Give us Trek, and none of these thousands of investors will nit-pick about where that money went afterwards!".
Professionals in Hollywood know that, if you add more and more investors in a project, there will inevitably be more who complain later. With tens of thousands involved, this adds greatly to the uncertainty of the project. Anyone acting in it, or writng the scripts or even just doing the special effects becomes worried that they will get extra helpings of blame if it doesn't work out. At this point, the fanbase is asking a lot of people to take exceptional risks with their careers for little or no upside. Maybe Rick Berman deserves that, but do all the others involved? Again, maybe a few of the executives have already taken a negative impact on their future in Hollywood, and should, in 'fairness' have to seize on a chance to prove they could do better, even if the odds are against them, but Hollywood doesn't seem to be saying "You'll never work in this town again." to those execs, and it has a nasty tendency to say that to other people. Those other people are probably responsible for the parts of Enterprise somebody actually loves.
Who is John Cabal?
It's somewhat dismaying to read one of the comments from Jolene Blalock in the article, apparently regarding the final episode of Enterprise...
Without any hint of humour whatsoever I can say - What do you expect? The other episodes were appalling too.
I'm far more concerned about the following attempt to defibrillate the trek movies:
The idea being, one can fairly safely deduce, to re-purpose expensive existing props and sets while hiring an all-new cast of unknowns, rather than pay the inflated fees routinely demanded by established series actors.
Am I alone in thinking that this sounds like it could be really really shit and completely kill off trek for a decade?
SciFi is supposed to be about the future - to look forward. Prequels while still supposedly about our future are still the plain old past in respect to the Trek (and the viewers') timeline and will instantly loose something because of it. It's like hobbling yourself and admitting that you have no vision to share right from the outset. Once you loose your audience's trust, trust that you know where you're going (B5) and that both the journey and the destination will be of interest, you simply loose the audience. Trek writers have often slipped up on this one. The wretched Holodeck had all the interest and drama of a dream sequence and, while I personally always enjoy time travel stories, I can understand that if your brain files time travel and 'Holodeck' together that you would want to gnaw one of your own legs off* listening to them all the time.
1) Lazy plot devices bore audiences to death.
2) No surprises, no vision of the future, no trust.
3) No Audience.
*(Really happened to the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council)
Umm... exactly what "adverts" do you think are footing the bill for HBO shows?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
So the "average beer swilling idiot" is well-adjusted enough to either move on to a new show, go tune up his Camaro, or have a social life, whereas "us" geeks foam at the mouth over what is, after all, just a TV show.
Which one is the idiot again?
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.
Remember when Futurama changed timeslot every week for a few months, then settled in a spot where it was pre-empted by football overtime week after week after week?
Remeber how Fox claimed they aired Firefly on fridays at 8, but would instead put baseball on? And when they did air firefly, it was at 12:03am, or 12:17am, with the episodes out of order?
We have a conundrum here: Is it superhuman incompetance +1, or is it a deliberate act by an exec to kill another exec's project? Hard to tell really, but one thing is for sure: If these shows got bad rating, it wasn't the shows themselves that caused it.
And ratings... how many organisations determine ratings? One? And the ONLY thing that matters is ratings? Then... that company can make or break a show, on any network, by fudging it's numbers... That seem right to you?
You can't take the sky from me...
Hardcore fans suffered through two (mostly) wretched seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation before it started to get consistently good. Then they came on board in sufficient numbers to make the series a huge success.
They didn't do the same for Enterprise, even though its first two seasons were arguably no worse than TNG's, and its current season is excellent. Why?
Could be the more fragmented viewership today, could be Star Trek fatigue after a total of 21 TNG, DSN, and VOY seasons, could be that Enterprise's 3rd season was an improvement, but not enough of an improvement to bring the viewers back. I'd say it all plays a role.
As the article rightly points out, fans of the old Battlestar Galactica were vehement about preserving the old show's crappiness. The new Battlestar is a tight, exciting show with some good writing and acting. I would always prefer a good original show (Arrested Development, for instance) over the economically safer alternative of remaking/rebranding/recycling old actors and material, but BSG has done a very fine job retooling a rotten series and the "military space opera" in general. Just compare it to Andromeda or Stargate Atlantis.
Complacency on the part of fans of anything will always encourage crap. Look at the Laws and Orders. Look at all the lame repetition on TV: crass, untrustworthy 60 Minutes clones, weak home improvement shows, boring (ugly!) chopper/hotrod shows, depressing "reality" shows, uninformative WWII documentaries, numbing "real sex" shows on HBO, and all the dull anime on Adult Swim.
"Fight for what you enjoy, regardless" encourages this crap.
You have to take the risk of being disappointed by something new until you can discover something better. Accepting the same thing you enjoyed last week runs exactly counter to the principle of "infinite diversity in infinite combination".
Now, I know that sci-fi fans are nervous whenever a show gets cancelled. You can never be sure when the next good one's going to come up. However, as a fan myself, I can guarantee I've got better things to do on a given weekday night than waste another hour on Enterprise.
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
Actually, I've heard that prosecutors are complaining now that forensics shows like the CSIs and related are making their job harder. It seems that juries want to see DNA and fingerprints now where they used to settle for marginal witnesses and circumstance.
There's a lot of printed sci-fi crud out there too that panders to the lowest common demoninator. They're two different mediums with different strengths and quality matters in both.
If you want to cherry pick Philip K Dick as being representative of sci-fi books, you have to let me cherry pick Firefly as representative of sci-fi television. And frankly, I'll take Firefly anytime.