Darrin Drader
Explorer
Something has been bothering me lately about science fiction on TV. It seems that the '90s were a great time for scifi on TV with the successful run of Babylon 5 (though it almost ended in ruin at the end of each season), the three Star Trek Series', Earth: Final Conflict (not a show I watched, but it still survived a few years), and the numerous others.
Recently scifi TV hasn't been doing nearly so well. Farscape was cancelled before its proposed 5 year run. Other failed series' include Firefly, Crusade, and even the direction Enterprise is headed makes it look like the whole Trek franchise is going the way of the dodo within a year. The most recent successes have been the miniseries. Scifi had huge hits on their hands with Dune, Children of Dune, and Battlestar Galactica. In fact, those are the top 3 rated events in the history of the channel.
Another real problem with scifi on TV, I feel, is that people are getting a little bored with the whole thing. I'm not saying that there's something wrong with the genre, but Star Trek has established a trend of recycling plot lines over and over. Other shows tend to have a few huge episodes per season that end up defiing the entire show, but their impact is lost among a great deal of less memorable episdoes. Frankly, I would have watched Voyager if I would have known which 2 or 3 episodes a year were actually worth wathing.
So I'm wondering if what we would really rather have are 6 to 8 hour miniseries rather than entire 22 episode seasons of certain shows.
Take Battlestar Galactica. Despite the incredible ratings, the Scifi channel has yet to greenlight a series, mainly because of budgetary concerns coupled with the fact that they can't predict what the ratings will be. It may not get picked up at all. Traditionally a network will air a pilot that they are interested in developing into a series, and then if the ratings are high enough, the series is approved and then all the fans of the show hope that the ratings continue to do well. Lately this model hasn't been working for science fiction.
What if they instead produced another miniseries 8 hours long? You can cover a lot of ground in 8 hours, and it would end up costing the network less than half the amount of a standard season. Rather than getting a season full of mediocre episodes, you get one or two large stories of epic scope that would be far more memorable. What's more is that since the entire series would be very tightly focused, you wouldn't get people not tuning in because they missed an episode. The channel would want to re-show the miniseries as often as possible so that people could either re-watch or get drawn into it and it wouldn't require a great deal of dedication on the part of the viewers. Assuming that the ratings remain good, follow this up with yet another miniseries the following year. In essence, instead of the traditional TV show, what you really end up with is something much closer to a series of novels that slowly unfold at about the same rate most novels are released. Hercules actually went from a pilot movie to a full blown series in exactly this way, except that they did movies rather than mini-series'.
So, what do you, the fans of science fiction, think of this idea? Would you like to see this become the future or scifi TV, or would you rather cling to the one or two series that actually manage to survive from one year to the next?
Recently scifi TV hasn't been doing nearly so well. Farscape was cancelled before its proposed 5 year run. Other failed series' include Firefly, Crusade, and even the direction Enterprise is headed makes it look like the whole Trek franchise is going the way of the dodo within a year. The most recent successes have been the miniseries. Scifi had huge hits on their hands with Dune, Children of Dune, and Battlestar Galactica. In fact, those are the top 3 rated events in the history of the channel.
Another real problem with scifi on TV, I feel, is that people are getting a little bored with the whole thing. I'm not saying that there's something wrong with the genre, but Star Trek has established a trend of recycling plot lines over and over. Other shows tend to have a few huge episodes per season that end up defiing the entire show, but their impact is lost among a great deal of less memorable episdoes. Frankly, I would have watched Voyager if I would have known which 2 or 3 episodes a year were actually worth wathing.
So I'm wondering if what we would really rather have are 6 to 8 hour miniseries rather than entire 22 episode seasons of certain shows.
Take Battlestar Galactica. Despite the incredible ratings, the Scifi channel has yet to greenlight a series, mainly because of budgetary concerns coupled with the fact that they can't predict what the ratings will be. It may not get picked up at all. Traditionally a network will air a pilot that they are interested in developing into a series, and then if the ratings are high enough, the series is approved and then all the fans of the show hope that the ratings continue to do well. Lately this model hasn't been working for science fiction.
What if they instead produced another miniseries 8 hours long? You can cover a lot of ground in 8 hours, and it would end up costing the network less than half the amount of a standard season. Rather than getting a season full of mediocre episodes, you get one or two large stories of epic scope that would be far more memorable. What's more is that since the entire series would be very tightly focused, you wouldn't get people not tuning in because they missed an episode. The channel would want to re-show the miniseries as often as possible so that people could either re-watch or get drawn into it and it wouldn't require a great deal of dedication on the part of the viewers. Assuming that the ratings remain good, follow this up with yet another miniseries the following year. In essence, instead of the traditional TV show, what you really end up with is something much closer to a series of novels that slowly unfold at about the same rate most novels are released. Hercules actually went from a pilot movie to a full blown series in exactly this way, except that they did movies rather than mini-series'.
So, what do you, the fans of science fiction, think of this idea? Would you like to see this become the future or scifi TV, or would you rather cling to the one or two series that actually manage to survive from one year to the next?
every time I watch some hacky basic cable/syndicated show with fake-looking sets, lame-o CGI (I couldn't get past the fx on B5, call me a heathen if you will), cardboard characters, mediocre acting, and plotlines that were old when Shatner and Nimoy were reading the dialogue. The only sci-fi show (note: I don't lump Buffy or Angel in with the sci-fi group) that sounded remotely interesting was Firefly, but the day you catch me watching TV on a Friday I better be in traction or something.
... but wasn't that a vampire novel that didn't actually mention "vampire" (for much the same reason, from memory - to see if he could do it)?
