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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 1304477" data-attributes="member: 177">WizarDru: Whether you want to say it's Joe Six-Pack, or less disciminating sci-fi fans, or what - I expect most fo the folks in this thread are in a minority of viewers.  We have rather high and exacting standards that have to be met before we call a thing "good".  All that's required is that there be a lot of viewers who aren't as picky.  Quite true.  In terms of public relations, Sci Fi has done poorly, no doubt there.  I think, though, that this can be attributed mostly to the pressure you note above.  I find it terribly difficult that Bonnie Hammer, the woman who brought us Farscape in the first place, would have worked the way she did if she had a reasonable alternative.  The only people keeping her from reasonable alternatives would have been the Vivendi folks.  However, here we enter the land of speculation, because we don't know what went on behind those closed doors.Now, let's not take that out of context.  Olmos wasn't saying the show was bad.  He said that the new show was going to be different enough that the old fans weren't going to like it.  And he was probably right.  Because the real rabid fans of any property are just plain intolerant.  Richard Hatch is a fine enough gent, but it's not like he's the end-all, be-all, final word on BG.  Honestly, his involvement in the whole thing struck me as... a bit egotistical.Personally, I was a fan of the old BG.  I didn't get to see all of the new one (screwed up setting my VCR).  But what I saw I liked.  On it's own merits, it was a good show, IMHO.  Probably better potential for character and plot development than the old show ever had.  But, fans are intolerant.  If it doesn't fit their vision of what the show should have been, it won't fly.  Odd, really.  Here, we say we're looking for good writing and originality.  And when someone deviates from an old vision and old stilted writing style, we jump down their throats.  "We" being fans in general, that is.  Seems it happend with DS9 and Firefly, too.  Give the fans something different, and they get all weird in the head.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I've never seen a SciFi ad saying, "Watch us, we are the champion of genre fans!"  I don't think the channel has ever made any claims to being a champion of anything. They provide programming.  They aren't defenders of the fannish cause, and never have been, and never said they were.I'm not saying they should or shouldn't do anything.  I'm saying they already seem to be doing so.  Sometimes playing to a tighter audience is the thing to do.  Sometimes the audience you're trying to play to is too tight, too small. Then, you have to broaden your base, rather than contract it.We aren't in a position to do anything but guess about whether SciFi should broaden or tighten it's target.  We don't have the market research data to know.  I don't think Sci Fi has that data either.  The Neilsen system doesn't give it to them, and hunting it down themselves would be costly.  So, we all guess.  They guess in a way that seems to get them more money than before...</blockquote>

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