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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1300125" data-attributes="member: 5171">There are strengths and weaknesses to each format. The average SF short story can be done as a one-hour short movie, or as the inspiration for a two-hour movie with a larger plot.  The average SF novelette (7500-15000 words) works well as a two-hour movie.  The average SF novel works best as a miniseries, and the average SF series of novels would be best done as a TV series.I'd like to see good series, and I'd like to see good miniseries.  In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to choose.  I don't entirely believe the minis are less expensive than series, because with a series that is set-driven rather than effect-driven, you've got big up-front costs, but you get to use those sets for a longer period of time.  Think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I believe that part of the reason it was able to grow and prosper was that it had decent sets that it used along with relatively few effects (some set props, energy bolts now and then, and a few dust-the-vamp effects per week).  Quantum Leap had an effects-light show -- usually one blue-light per week -- but needed entirely different sets every single time, which made it much more expensive.  I believe that in the last season Sam found himself leaping into prisoners more than once, because it was cheaper to re-use the prison set.Farscape was actually doing well -- it had a lot of "Bad guys come onto Moya" episodes per season, which kept the set costs relatively low, and it used muppets when possible instead of CG-ing when they didn't have to.  The big problem was that Stargate: SG-1 came in and gave Sci-Fi unrealistic ratings expectations (not that SG-1 is a bad show; I like both shows a bunch).  SG-1 had a bigger audience, and I would guess that the show is relatively inexpensive to produce as genre shows go -- you've got whole episodes with no more than a few effects (staff blasts, stargate wormhole), and you've got re-usable sets for most episodes.As a writer, I love writing with constraints -- seeing my limitations and making the most out of 'em.  I've written without the letter "E", I've written a vampire mafia witness protection story without using the words vampire, mafia, or witness protection, and so on.  I see this kind of challenge -- write a good SF series whose concept is cheap enough to produce that it can make studio execs happy even without CSI-like ratings.</blockquote>

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