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| posts about #sciencefictiontelevision more → |
What's Wrong With Science Fiction TV? |
Is Fox Shunning SF For Fall? |
Science Fiction Channels Appearing Globally |
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io9 
04/30/09
Basically, it goes back to the old axiom that good science fiction must be, first and foremost, good fiction. A lot of television's SF shows simply haven't been very good over the years, so much so that people aren't willing to give a blatantly SF show a chance. How often, for example, were people aghast when publications like Time declared that Battlestar Galactica was the best show on television?
Terminator and Dollhouse may be very good shows -- I generally like them, even if I'm not terribly enthusiastic about either -- but the SF elements are going to turn a lot of non-SF fans off. And, honestly, I wasn't especially interested in Dollhouse before it came on because the premise didn't interest me. Just because something is nominally SF doesn't mean that every SF fan is going to be interested in it.
When you get right down to it, SF is difficult and it always has been because it requires its audience to think about things in ways that most people aren't comfortable doing.
That gets us back to Lost, which drew viewers in with pretty much everything except its SF elements. It made people care about the characters (people who like the show; I'm really not interested in hearing any of you snark-meisters going on about how much Lost sux) and the situation they were in. It didn't force people to have to wrap their heads around a lot of new concepts and alien environments. Heroes first season was as successful as it was, I think, as much because it was a Lost clone as anything; it lost audience big time, essentially, by sucking.
My .02 credits.
04/30/09
04/30/09
poor plotlines
cheezy acting
bad directing
And, BTW and much to my surprise, I LOVED Sunshine. (Of course, some of that may have to do with the presence of Chris Evans.)
04/30/09
04/30/09
BSG suffered a similar fate where they'd have a couple of episodes in the season with big explosions and space ship fights, while the rest of the episodes involved a lot of talking and... boxing.
And all other issues with it aside, Heroes tends to be the show where the characters refuse to use their powers or they only do it off screen. Wasn't Ando's power to supercharge other characters? He's used that a whole... oh yeah, one time.
04/30/09
04/30/09
Also, when making a movie, you're only producing 1.5 - 2.5 hours of product. That means you have months to years to get one script ready to shoot. A TV show needs up to 24 hours per season and a script sometimes needs to be written in days. Maintaining quality against that kind of schedule is nearly impossible, that's why so many episodes of so many shows are so uneven.
05/01/09
You're on the right track, but that's still not it. The real problem is that you can't treat a sci-fi series like a sci-fi series. You need to treat it almost like any other scripted series, but with a few key exceptions:
Give it a budget big enough to match the scope of the show. Sci-fi shows often require sets and props that just don't exist in real life, and fancy SFX on top of all that. This stuff costs money, and if you give a sci-fi show a budget that compares to your average procedural, there's less left for the rest of the show after you carve out a chunk for SFX. Red Dwarf is a perfect example of a sci-fi show that works really well on a modest budget.
Support the show, and really mean it. The correllary to this is don't put the show on Fox, or let anyone stick it with a Friday timeslot. Or one that'll get bumped regularly by sports. But seriously, "support" can't simply be in the form of saying "after show X" at the end of a five-minute commercial for next week's ep of a different show. Futurama was a great show, but Fox stopped supporting it the moment the series premiere started, and shafted it by putting it in the post-game slot during football season (which, not-so-coincidentally, happens to overlap most of the TV season).
04/30/09
04/30/09
It needed to be something that would traumatise every American into comprehending that to survive as a cultural minority in that kind of future, they had to stand for something better than every man for himself. Otherwise they would die alone and hungry.
04/30/09
The wild west theme of the show may have hurt in drawing new viewers, but for the most part, people who are negative about the show's "cowboys in space" aura eventually like the show when they actually view it (the Firefly DVDs have done well, for example). I "converted" many friends who were initially put off by the wild west trappings.
04/30/09
04/30/09
04/30/09
Smart people don't watch as much tv as other people.
We're screwed.
04/30/09
01/21/09
01/21/09
01/21/09