Slashdot Mirror
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
#!
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.
[ home ]
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
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!
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..
Sci-fi fans? Surely these are manziers or bros that are being mailed in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
12345
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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
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
There's anime. Where do you think the fan base for all these shows went.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
... 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)
1) Geeks buy hi-tech TV gear that skips ads
2) TV shows popular with geeks loose money
3) Shows get cancelled
The alternative, of course is in-show advertising:
ALIEN AMBASSADOR: We demand tribute from your puny species!
EARTH AMBASSADOR: Our delegation comes bearing Crucial Ballistix RAM. Truly, the latency is low, and the tracer LEDs magestic.
-- later --
COMMANDER: Fire at will!
* FIGHTER 1: Fires missile
* HUGE MISSILE: Hits FIGHTER 2 and explodes
COMMANDER: You fool! You hit the window!
PILOT 1: Damn that 3M Security Glass!
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
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?
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
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...
Forget Star Trek - it has been over exposed!!
Instead of paying $36 million for one more season, those fans should use that money and buy all of the Stargate SG-1 seasons on DVD, watch tem, and then follow the current series on TV.
It is much cheaper - the plot line is MUCH more interesting, and the special effects are better as well.
In fact, the Stargate series now has all sorts of sweet ships, so they won't have to give up on the idea of flying around in space - they'd only have to give up on the concept of anti-matter and start believing in crystals and naquada!!!
Sci-Fi has advanced beyond Star Trek with series such as Stargate and BSG - it's time for everyone to move on!!!!
This isn't you're father's Sci-Fi!!!
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
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.
And it didn't work then either.
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.
No, I didn't. Not very interested in mob thugs.
Now explain what product placements are paying for "Deadwood."
Face it, there's proof that the subscription model, especially with DVD sales factored in, can support quality productions.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
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.
It seems like at the end of this season a lot of things are going to get rapped up. **Spoiler Alert from here on**
Richard Dean Anderson will be gone next season, personal reasons, the whole Jaffa rebellion and war against the gauold apparently are going to be pretty well wrapped up along with the replicators, and if that's the case, its almost like asking what's left to do? They apparently are going to be going off into a new tanget with more about the acients, but they have Altantis to do that...
Still there is a couple good highlights, Ben Browder (Farscape) is joining the cast to replace the O'Neil smart-ass casting (good choice in my humble opinion). Also Amanda Tapping will be missing the first part of the season due to having a baby so they are bringing in Claudia Black (Farscape) for a 5 episode story arc. So for their first part of Season 9. Wise move of Sci-Fi parts. Number of Farscape fans also probably watch SG-1 now, if not it might bring a few over to the show.
Also the whole being lost in space thing gets resolved too by the end of season 1 of Atlantis. So it hopefully Atlantis won't get the stalness of say Voyager.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.