In fairness, he called you a pseudo-intellectual for liking MST3K before you told him he had no intelligence or humor.
I am curious to find out what he expected to see on Sci-Fi. I’m hard pressed to think up what sf television Sci-Fi could find that he doesn’t already hate. And what the hell is Earth2?
Earth2 was a Spielberg idea that only lasted one season. It was about some pioneers who were sent to populate a new planet, but the team we followed was dropped off in the wrong spot, and had to travel to the rendevous point that was thousands of miles distant.
I liked it, it had great characters and some funky ideas. The good stories were great! The bad stories, however, were stupid. i.e. not badly acted, just really dumb ideas. I think that may have been its downfall, or maybe it was just too expensive to make.
I expected better from the heavy way they advertised the Sci-fi station. I hated Babylon-5, probably because no matter how often you redo the plot, it’s always the same; bickering political agendas, nefarious back stabbing and limited special effects. I liked Deep Space 9 at first until it turned into the same thing. Then the main guy shaves his head as some sort of racial statement, picks on Captain Picard for ‘allowing’ himself to be captured by the Borg and turned into one and the scriptwriters had Picard act ashamed and craven because of it. Then the guy keeps going off on quasi-philosophical tangents and hanging around in African garb, like every Black person just automatically has to be from Africa. The program sucked after a few episodes and kept on sucking. They even skimped on Odo’s abilities probably because the special effects cost money.
Like Star Trek, it was always the elite command crew who had the adventures, something not likely in real life. Battleship Commanders don’t go flitting around having adventures, because they have lower officers to do that.
I expected things like Alien 1, 2, and 3. The 2001 trilogy, Lost In Space, Robinson Cruso on Mars, the Thing, Ice Pirates, any of the several Mars stories, Moon Trap, Virus, Silent Running, Logan’s Run (the movie, not the sick, sad series) and things like that. Stories that make you think, no rehash a future version of boring real life indicating that even after maybe 500 years we’re still too stupid to basically change. Even some of those radical, weird and provocative Sci-fi cartoons that MTV used to be famous for, until they pussied out and packed in rotten rap at late nights.
Star Trek is so old that it is comical! MST sucked big time. Amusing at first, it often occluded the few good Sci-fi oldies they had with witticisms and annoying chatter and the it grew old to the point that the movies were ancient!
Quantum leap sucks, bytes and isn’t very good because it is predictable as heck! You know how it is going to turn out. The same as Seven Days on another station. That sucks and the main character is a pain in the ass. X-files was magnificent, until they let Mulder go, and it’s turned into predictable pabulum and gone down the tubes. Mulder’s humor kept the show crisp and lively, while the flat faced replacement just makes it suck and the plot has gotten weak as heck.
Earth 2 was good, until the long haired semi-lead character started Neanderthal-ing his way through everything and no one tried to stop him. Like when he decided to burn the alien corpse they found frozen in the ice against his superiors wishes because it was causing strange things to happen. Then the Doc is always running around half hysterical and over emotional and the whiner guy is always whining, something any true pioneer grouping would have settled darn quickly and then, when the series starts to get stale, they toss in the old reliable nefarious government plot to stick it to the natives – again. The girl who lived with the aliens and spoke their language from a previous group made me cringe when she ‘chittered’ in their language. The actress should have been humiliated by having to do that. They could have done so much more with just alien native plant life and animals, sort of like that plant with the spoors that took bodies over to reproduce, but it being able to change the seasons was a laughable and weak plot shift!
I expected much better than what it is showing. Lexx had potential, until they steered it to Earth and now it sucks, and, for me, Farscape sucked from the beginning. There are tons of Sci-fi movies going right to video that they could get the rights to cheaply and show and then, the biggest betrayal of all, around 3 in the morning, they go to infomercials!
And I paid extra to get that damn channel! Boy, did I waste my cash.
You people have limited taste!
…Are we even talking about the same shows here? Shaving his head was a racial statement? African garb? DS9 was my favorite Star Trek franchise, the only one I ever made a point to watch. I didn’t see any of this. (yeah, I saw him shave his head. How is that racial?)
As for B5, I liked the political aspects. Made the universe seem more real than in Star Trek, gave more weight to the actions of the characters. That’s just personal taste, though. However, they did not skimp on the f/x, which were quite good for TV.
No argument.
Christ, man, they have to run a network. Almost everything you listed there are movies, many of them way out of the budget for a small cable channel like Sci-Fi to put into heavy rotation. What do you mean by “any of the several Mars stories”? You mean just anything set on Mars? Also, Virus? VIRUS? That is the single worst movie I ever saw in the theater. I regret to this day not walking out on that. Didja notice how when they’re on the outside of the ship, it’s tossing in a high storm, but when they’re inside everything is completely steady? How about that unbelievable stupid ejection seat at the end? The whole movie was simply gross and pointless. And disappointing, considering the very cool comic it was based on was.
**
I’m with you on Star Trek, but you are so pathetically off base with MST3k. For starters, they never had any good sci-fi oldies. I try not to attack people for having different opinions than mine, but lord it’s hard not to look down on someone who doesn’t like Mystery Science Theatre. It’s just too fucking brillant.
**
Well, in this context, “bites” makes much more sense. I’m not a huge fan of Quantum Leap, but singling out this one show, out of all the shows on television, sf and otherwise, as being “predictable” seems a tad unfair. Television tends to be a formulaic media.
Never really watched Seven Days, and only watched enough X-Files to keep up with the popular culture. I liked it when it did non-global-alien-conspiracy story lines, and really enjoyed it when it didn’t take itself too seriously (the Frankenstein episode, which concludes with Scully and Mulder taking the monster out clubbing and on to the Jenny Jones show).
**
'kay.
**
So, you liked Lexx, but hated Farscape. Dude, that’s just weird.
Do you like any sf television shows? If not, why did you expect better from a Sci-Fi television channel?
Anyway, you seem to be drastically underestimating how much money a channel as small as Sci-Fi really has for programming, and how much air time they need to fill.
**
Um, I think you want to accuse us of having poor taste, because we like so many shows you despise. You have limited taste, because you don’t seem to like, well, much of anything, really. Can you give us some more examples of good sf, and (very important!) reasons why you like them? Other wise, this basically boils down to: “That sucks,” “Does not!” “Does too!” &c.
Sheesh, The Sci-Fi channel is one of only four channels I bother to watch besides Discovery, CNN, Turner Movie Classics and NY1.
I have to admit that they could play some more sci-fi movies, especially the classics, rather than most of the horror/thrillers they throw on there. I can’t see how horror = sci-fi, but maybe they just figure it’s all the same crowd of people watching the same stuff.
Farscape and The Chronicle have become my favorite sci-fi shows, and Now and Again was starting to, until, it dissapeared? What happened to Now and Again? They showed it for one week, and then replaced it with Outer Limits. I like Outer Limits, but Now and Again had something going there that I thought could definitely grow on me more with a full season behind it.
Turner Movie Classics has lots of the classic sci-fi stuff on when they’re not showing The Godfather I,II, III and all the revisited and revised and editors cut editions as well.
Why don’t you just buy the movies you mentioned (…and sci-fi has played most of those you mentioned as far as I know because I’ve watched them) and not pay for cable at all?
Now and Again wasn’t a sci-fi original, but something they picked up after a network canceled it. Might not have been more than a week’s worth of episodes.
I second what gobear said–if you don’t like what’s on TV, try reading a book. There is damn little on any channel that’s as satisfying as a good book. (And one of those few programs would be *Babylon5,*in my humble opinion.)
Hear HEAR!!! I need a Mike Nelson fix…
Okay, somebody hold his arms, I’ll get the cat o’ nine tails!
:mad:
Oh, yay, someone else who prefers the humourous and non-canon-building episodes. X-Files was at its best when it was goofy fun - or at least sticking with its original premise of investigating the unexplained/unexplainable - avoiding the old predictable (yes, predictable - X-Files canon episodes were probably the most predictable things ever put on TV) conspiracy plot.
(BTW, Lexx is fun, but it never had ‘potential’ - it’s never been anything but a bit of bad-but-fun soft-core porn in space, never tried to be anything else, never will be anything else.)
Okay. Perhaps I’m a radical pseudo-intellectual for laughing my ass off at MST3K.
So maybe DS9 wasn’t the greatest exploration of the Star Trek universe that ever was.
But to diss B5? One of the very few SF shows with a coherent plotline that had some complexity to it? Actual characterization? Effects that, at the time, rivalled state-of-the-art but were done on the rushed schedule of a weekly TV series?
Perhaps you also think Sam Moscowitz wrote far better SF than Heinlein or Asimov ever dreamed of.
Uh… right.
Philistine.
I watched ‘Escape From Mars’ last night and found it almost interesting, except that they spent a large portion of the script on mundane things such as interpersonal relationships between the crew, and the real action did not begin until the movie was 3/4 of the way over. ‘Contact,’ with Jody Foster, was about the most boring Sci-fi movie that I ever watched, with 95% of the movie taken up with political stuff and personal battles and the actual Science Fiction goodies arriving at the very end.
I enjoyed the Star Wars movies, though I had a big problem with every alien species dressing up in something like 11th century robes and carrying swords. Some of the ‘Gray Era 80’s’ movies showed promise but the background sucked. Like those Australian movies where everyone lived in huge cities, dressed in rags, lived in dirty looking, semi-abandoned buildings and the environment was always dark, wet and greasy looking and it appeared that half of the population was Japanese or Chinese with Japanese or Chinese influence on almost everything.
I enjoyed ‘Tank Girl’ with Lori Petty, mostly though the inclusion of people half human and half Kangaroo almost ruined it, but her off beat acting carried the movie through.
I liked the second making of Dune a lot more than the original one, though both over did the ornate decorations on the scenery and insisted on having the clunkiest space craft ever designed. Moon Trap started the genre of wild robots using body parts of humans as spare parts, but Chekov from Star Trek as a lead character was not a good idea. Too type cast from Star Trek, but still, the movie was good, entertaining, thought provoking and pretty well interesting, though it never made top billing.
I have pretty high standards for Science Fiction. Heinlein and Asimov
were great in their day and still tick along pretty well, but Larry Niven, in my opinion, has not only joined them, but, in some aspects, gone beyond their visions. Then there is that potential incest thing that started showing up in Heinlein’s later books, like ‘Time Enough For Love’ that also occasionally showed up in some of his earlier stories plus his lead women always came out of the same mold and were predictable, like in ‘The Cat Who Walked Through Walls’.
You don’t seem to have much of a clue what is or isn’t a good example of SF, but I can’t argue with your closing statement! As someone else has pointed out, you’re probably pretty tough to program for, but DAMN - out of all those channels, there should be SOMETHING for you or anyone else to watch no matter what time of day it is…
If you didn’t know what the channel *actually *shows, why didn’t you go to their offical web-site and find out? It has the schedules and show descriptions for everything they air. As for commericals, the ones for HBO, Starz and Showtime ect make them sound like they don’t play boring stuff 1/3rd to 1/2 of the time, so why would the sci-fi commercials be any different?
I have a very simple solution for you.
Call your cable company and have them shift you back down to you $42 a month. If you don’t like what you’re getting on the digital channels, and aren’t finding anything you don’t think is worth watching, then it’s easy to have them switch your cable box back out and go back to regular old cable. Or get rid of it all together. Just because you’ve gotten an upgrade doesn’t mean you can’t downgrade again. (Unless your cable company works differently than any other one I’ve ever dealt with)
Okay…
How can you possibly be so self-centered that you expect any TV station to air only programs which you like?
Despite my almost never watching the Sci-Fi channel as I am a radical pseudo-intellectual (and thus a big MiSTie) so most of their programming is very juvenile to me, get a LIFE! It’s just TELEVISION for chrissakes! (Sorry if I’m a philistine, but I always found Babylon 5 way too over-the-top for my tastes in drama)
Hi, Opal!
If you’re wondering why Sci-Fi has so many crappy shows, it’s because it’s parent company is the Home Shopping Network.
The only program on the Sci-Fi channel I find truly reprehensible is the ‘Crossing Over with John Edwards’ show. The reasons I dislike it should be obvious to anyone who isn’t fooled by Miss Cleo and my reasoning for not wanting it on the sci-fi channel is thus: If it is fictional, it is not stated as being so, if it is non-fiction, why is it on the science FICTION channel?
Yeah, I absolutely dislike the ‘Crossing Over’ farce also, which, in my opinion, should not even be there at all. Cleo is under investigation, so I figure it’s time for Edward’s to be exposed also as a fake.
I don’t expect TV to program just for me but I used to like the 24 hours worth of shows cable had until the invention of both the Infomercial and Digital. Shortly after, cable programming went down the tubes and now, my cable provider cannot even program the menu right, having many errors! I know of neighboring cities with different providers who have struggled years to switch or get rid of them because of poor service but been basically laughed at until lawsuits were brought.
I do know that the government has had to step in and restrict the amount of Infomercials shown in a 24 hour period because TV stations were going to pile them on as cheap, money making programming, ignoring the wants of the subscribers/audience.
I also know that the original basic cable had been deliberately adjusted to provide the legal minimum of programming in order to force subscribers over to the oncoming digital technology by cutting down on entertainment shows and shifting them over to digital channels. Sci-fi showed up broadcasting wonderful things and requesting viewers to get their cable provider to carry them and mine did, but on digital stations or channels. Once I got the digital stations, Sci-fi changed and I’m stuck.
I could switch back, but what halfway good programming there is, is on digital stations. I am tired of being manipulated by cable companies and skillfully designed advertisements of shows to be viewed by stations. A prime example is the movie ‘Twister,’ which was good, but the come on advertisement was strung together to make it appear much better than it was, complete with bits taken out of sequence. Like the famous scene with Helen Hunt in one truck, showing the Twister taking her own truck away, and she says ‘where’s my truck’ and in the next view, one sees the truck crash down on the road and she says ‘oh, there it is.’ In the movie, there was much programming between those two sentences, but they were strung together by the advertising company to appear to be more lively or funny than they were. Now, this is legalized lying, which I resent.
I also resent being held ‘prisoner’ by cable companies who decide what I’m going to watch for an exorbitant fee and then by stations who start out with great programming and then drop to showing garbage. This seems to be the normal state of affairs which you all accept, or many people like you, but I’m from a time when cable just started and when they provided excellent and consistent programming and inexpensive fees and HBO was a wondrous thing to behold!
See, I’m from a time where entertainment companies needed your opinion to program their shows, but now, with cable companies, they barely care about such things because what the cable company accepts, you watch and it takes a major amount of complaints before any change will be made because each cable company is a local monopoly, which gives you no choice.
Now, I dislike the show ‘family guy,’ which was aired and then taken off for a season. So, now it is back, with advertising saying how ‘we liked it,’ but few people I know find it worth watching. The show ‘the PJs’ aired, a black animation, and it was funny, only it was taken off of the prime station and shows up on a secondary ‘new’ station months later without any explanation and that crappy Hank Hill animation stays on season after season in prime time. Channel 8, FOX produced Futureama, which is better than Hill, but then in sports season, they pre-empt most of the shows for football games, leaving Hill untouched, when previously, they would have alternated between cutting the two shows to pacify viewers.
See, you guys seem to just put up with all of this stuff, but I recall when what a viewer wanted counted. I recall when stations did not shove good programming on at the begining of a season and then reduce it to junk, and when they showed a full 13 shows of a new item instead of the 6 they do now, then repeating them as they decide if they are going to be kept. Just like the new movie advertisements where you have to struggle to find out what the name of the show is because they changed the advertisements to a few lines of small print, the show’s name squeezed in there when previously the header was the biggest thing in print. No one likes them, but the entertainment industry has decided to use them because they like them.
You guys accept what is served up. You’re used to not having a say in programming. I’m not. Just like I’m used to 24 hour good programming, which ended with the inception of infomercials that no one likes, to my knowledge, but are being kept anyhow. I don’t care if the Sci-fi station has a limited budget, it should not have designed it’s advertisement to make itself look tastier than it is and when I got it, this lying John Edward’s was not being carried by it.
Plus it is worked in with my package, so I cannot drop it without dropping my package. BTW, I’ve seen almost all of the worn out Crypt Keeper shows from when they were on HBO, though I do somewhat like the new Outer Limits. Not to mention that when I got Sci-fi, they did not turn their programming over to infomercials at 3 AM either, but ran all night.
No, I don’t accept it. I just watch what I want to. This has resulted in my not turning on my TV (other than for DVDs) since the inauguration.
You say you don’t want to pay $72 for crappy television. Yet you don’t want to give up the $72 subscription because then you would lose the halfway decent television shows. Well, that just means that those halfway decent television shows must be worth $72/month or you wouldn’t pay for them.
If you want to protest the way you feel the cable companies treat you, then commit the ultimate act of protest: cancel your cable and don’t turn the TV on.
Also, “the wants of the viewer” are still important to cable networks, it is just that they are looking for very narrow groups of viewers. Cable is a medium of niches. MTV is looking for one group of viewers, Lifetime is looking for another, CNBC yet another. A cable network is happy if it can get 500,000 people to watch one of its shows at the same time. A broadcast network show that can’t get 10,000,000 at a time is going to be a failure. The cable networks do care what their customers want (though they may not be able to afford what their customers want); they just don’t care what you want.
***HISSSSS!!! BOOO!!! ***