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I'd have to disagree with you.
Screeners are a courtesy, and make reviewers' jobs easier, sure, but they're hardly essential to doing your job as a critic. Your argument that you review screeners for the consumers' sake is disingenuous. There is nothing that says that a consumer needs to go see a movie on opening night, and not wait for reviews to come in from critics who have gone to see the movie after it's opened. As a matter of fact, some studios place an embargo on their screeners and other preview material, which basically results in the review piece coming out after a release anyway, regardless of whether there was an advance screener or not.
In the case of TV shows, which do air at a specific time, and the value that you're assigning to a review-a warning or an endorsement to consumers-does come into play, the case is slightly different. If it's a pilot, or a new show, then yes, I'd say send out a complete screener, so that the reviewer can get a good sense of what the show is about (relatively speaking-personally, I'm a firm believer in not making a judgement call on a new TV show until at least a few episodes into its first season, but I digress).
However, if a show is proven, has been around for a while, and has already run the gauntlet of critical assessment, like BSG most certainly has, there's really no need for sending out screeners-the show already has a certain reputation and standing; let everyone find out about individual plot points at the same time, and preserve the element of surprise for everyone. That SciFi has still sent out screeners is purely as a courtesy to the media, so that a prospective reviewer doesn't have to be working, as you say, on a Friday night at 10PM EST. That they chose to not include a major plot spoiler, regardless of the reason, is immaterial-you can write the bulk of your review, watch the last five minutes of the show in realtime, or whatever, and wrap it up. SciFi has still given you a leg up.
Once more, your argument that the existence of screeners is primarily as a service to the consumer is disingenuous. You of all people should know that almost nothing that large corporations do is to the service of the consumer.
Of course SciFi can't trust the recipients of screeners (or rather, can't trust keeping a secret when sending out screeners-these discs go through many hands before they end up in reviewers' possession), that's been proven time and time again. While I may personally be an advocate for piracy, and personally BitTorrent lots of these shows, I can't say I blame SciFi the corporation for protecting their Nielsen numbers from being diluted by piracy. I may not agree with the underlying rationale, but I understand the motivation.
The publishing industry works in the same way. Sometimes a publisher will send out advance reading copies (ARCs), as a courtesy to reviewers, and sometimes they won't. Granted, since books aren't as time-dependent a media as TV or movies (and they also require a much larger time investment from their audience), the risk of spoilage isn't as large. Additionally, when publishers don't send out ARCs, they do sometimes supply the media with excerpts, which are, by definition, incomplete forms of the work in question. No one complains, and no one expects to make up their minds about a whole book just from an excerpt. An excerpt may entice a prospective reader to pick the book up, though, in which case, mission accomplished-a sale has been made.
As for your comment that "Without critics, the only way you'd hear about new shows would be through marketers", as a long-time SF fan, you should know better than to make that kind of assertion. SF fandom has been around for a long time, has mostly been underground, and has mostly relied on word-of-mouth (which any career marketer will tell you is the best form of buzz anyway) and a very, very dedicated and engaged fandom to promote works of interest. Marketing to SF/F consumers at the level we're seeing now is a relatively new phenomenon, stemming from the recent mainstreaming of all things SF. The very existence of io9, as a node in the Gawker network, is a testament to that. As a matter of fact, SF fandom (and geekdom in general) has survived despite being historically looked down upon by the mainstream, who are the traditional target of marketers (this is changing with the internet, but again, I digress).
Sounds like you got considerably more than just an excerpt in the screener for BSG. For a show in its fourth and final season, you should consider yourself lucky to have gotten a preview at all. To say otherwise makes you sound like a member of a spoiled elite with an aggrandized sense of entitlement, which surprises me, since I've never gotten that from your writing before. I generally greatly respect your writing and your opinion, and am sadly disappointed in this post.
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@Pablo Defendini: Pablo, I appreciate your thoughtful response. Let me respond to one of your main points, which is that screeners are not a service to consumers. I disagree.
Speaking historically, you absolutely correct that SF had a whole network of fan reviewers who would help get the word out about shows or books or movies to other fans. I think that is still true with a lot of SF and non-mainstream culture in general.
However, it is disingenuous to claim that we still exist in a world where fans can pass something around at a con or in a fanzine and that's enough. Back in the fanzine days, fan reviewers often did get the equivalent of screeners or review copies because they were in a friend network where stories got passed around. They weren't dealing with large Hollywood corporations. They weren't, as you point out, consumers in a relationship with large corporate producers. They were fans in relationships with other fans - quite often, they were creators dealing with other creators. There was no giant corporate infrastructure separating book creators from book buyers, as there is today between TV consumers and TV production houses.
While not all reviewers might view themselves as consumer advocates, I do see myself this way. I know that I am very lucky to spend my days reading books and watching movies for a living, and as a result I consider it an ethical duty to let consumers and fans know when I've discovered a story that's worth their hard-earned money and precious free time. I feel consumers are entitled to know when studios are trying to sell them crap, just as they are entitled to know when a small press with no publicity department has created something beautiful and worth tracking down.
These days, consumers and fans of science fiction have to wade through oceans of promotional materials and advertisements to find good stories. They need reviewers they can trust, who are ethical and thoughtfully evaluate stories, to help them look beyond the Michael Bay-style hype machines and find the good stuff.
And it's this kind of media-saturated, corporate environment where I think reviewers become consumer advocates. The tools of our trade are nothing more than advance copies of stories (screeners, review copies) and laptops. While it's true that people don't have to go to movies on opening night or watch TV shows when they air, many of us do. And those people, those consumers, deserve to have a legitimate evaluation of the story to read if they want.
I fully understand why the SciFi Channel did what it did with the screener copy, and in fact we spent some time today talking with a very nice and patient rep from the channel who discussed it with us. I do feel like my response was a little harsh, and we apologized for that. I also added an update to my post above, explaining that I now understand that TV screeners are incomplete more often than I had realized.
However, I do think that BSG has been off the air long enough that people really are looking to reviewers to decide if they want to reinvest in the show. Or whether they should invest in buying last season on DVD so they can catch up. The point is, just because a show has been on the air before doesn't mean consumers should automatically be expected to suck it up without any kind of critical evaluation. Consumers deserve better than that - they aren't automatons, and people stop or start watching shows all the time.
Maybe the answer is for critics to agree not to review incomplete episodes. Or maybe SciFi shouldn't have sent out anything more than a single scene from the show, if they were worried about people posting the episode on a file-sharing network. I don't know what the best solution is, honestly. But I think there has to be something better than this.
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@Annalee Newitz: First off, let me say that, having actually seen the episode in question now (what. the.frak.), I can see how some people will totally think that SciFi removed the reveal because they think it's kinda lame and reviewers would balk-that's not necessarily what I think; I still think it's more of a strategy to prevent leaks, and I actually don't know just what to think about the episode itself just yet, I have to process. But I can see how it could be interpreted that way.
Now, on to your comment. You make some interesting points. I still don't necessarily subscribe to your interpretation of reviewer as consumer advocate, but I understand your rationale, and can respect it. Maybe it's just that for me, the term "consumer advocate" is not one to be bandied around so lightly-when I hear that phrase, I think "This car is unsafe at any speeds, don't put your kids in it". "This show blows, don't watch it"? not so much.
I do think you've hit the nail on the head when you say:
"These days, consumers and fans of science fiction have to wade through oceans of promotional materials and advertisements to find good stories. They need reviewers they can trust, who are ethical and thoughtfully evaluate stories, to help them look beyond the Michael Bay-style hype machines and find the good stuff."
I agree completely. There is way too much shit out there, and it's good to have voices that you trust pointing you in the right direction. I don't see that as consumer advocacy, mind you, but that could very well just be semantics on my part-see above. I do see it as a curatorial and, well, critical (no pun intended) role within the media ecosystem. But to say that advance copies of stories are your tools of the trade, and are as essential as your laptop in order for you to fulfill that role is, once again, somewhat self-aggrandizing. If you are evaluating a consumer experience, you shouldn't expect to receive anything better than what the average consumer experiences. If you do receive something in advance, I think that, as I explained in my previous comment, it should be seen as a courtesy from the media producer, who is making your job easier-or not easier, really, but at least more efficient-than it would otherwise be.
In the particular case of BSG, where the show's been around and it has a reputation, but it's been gone for a while, I agree with you: there may be a component of the audience that needs to be convinced to come back to the show. But most of those consumers probably won't be convinced just by a few advance reviews. Former fans that have been burned are harder to bring back into the fold than people who have never been fans, and while an advance review or two may help in some cases, in my experience (having been in advertising for a number of years before working at Tor, and having been through my share of focus groups and read my share of consumer analysis reports), the effective communication strategy for dealing with recalcitrant prodigals is repetition of a simple core message over time, and, once more, word-of-mouth from friends. These, I think, are actually the driving factors in creating renewed curiosity in lapsed fans for the media property in question.
Speaking of word-of-mouth, I think we do still live "in a world where fans can pass something around at a con or in a fanzine and that's enough". Now more than ever we can rely on word-of-mouth like the fandom of old, but through much more efficient media: internet fora, social networks, and the like. We're no longer stuck with one or two reviewers writing for a large newspaper or glossy magazine decreeing that Something Is Good, You Should Go Buy It; we can ask our friends, or we can choose to come to places like io9, which caters specifically to the very niche that we're a part of. Hell, one of the descriptions we bandied about when developing Tor.com was "a really large, year-round con", and I think that applies to you guys as well.
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@Pablo Defendini: I like the idea of Tor.com as a "really large, year-round con," except I don't think I could stand to be that drunk all the time!
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