The new episode of Farscape will be on at 8:00 (and repeating at 12:00) tonight. Anyone else think that the fan effort is really going to boost the ratings? I bet it will. The question will be whether it will be too little too late, though. Maybe Sci-Fi will just take the extra advertising dollars from the ratings increase and use it to pay for more crap like Tremors: The Series and that charlatan John Edward.
If anyone here has a Nielsen box or knows someone who does, make sure it is tuned in. It would be nice to see a grassroots campaign that so many people worked so hard on actually succeed.
Such campaigns are less effective now than ever before, for several reasons:
TV shows are more expensive to make than they used to be. In the 60s and 70s, a network could more easily afford to keep around a promising show that wasn’t drawing large audience. When CBS chose to give “The Waltons” time to find its audience (it eventually did) back in 1972, it wasn’t blowing nearly as much money as it would by keeping around a ratings turkey today.
Networks are only interested in specific demographic groups. If you fall into one of the desired demographic groups, then thousands of letters from you and people like you can have a powerful effect. But if you’re NOT in such a group, networks don’t care what you think.
To put it crudely, if a new “Friends”-style sitcom is doing badly in the ratings, a few thousand letters from twenty-something, white, affluent females would save it, at least for a little while. But a million letters from senior citizens wouldn’t save “Diagnosis Murder.”
Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, it’s easy, INCREDIBLY Easy, to generate a “groundswell” of support or opposition to almost anything. That’s especially true of causes favored by geeks. It wouldn’t take much effort to generate thousands of letters on behalf of almost ANY television show, even if it has very few fans.
The network execs KNOW how easy it is for Internet rabble-rousers to generate great volumes of mail (both paper and electronic), and so they don’t take such letters very seriously.
My guess is, “Farscape” is history, no matter how many letters you send. UNLESS… you send thousands of letters, purportedly from female yuppies! Letters from sci-fi geeks won’t sway anyone, but the brass will listen if they think female twenty- somethings are watching the show!
I watched the new episode of Farscape last night. I hate to say it, but maybe there’s a good reason it’s being cancelled. This episode looked as if all the writers left, and the show was being written by teenaged fans. Sheesh!
Well, it looks like the naysayers here are probably right. The ratings are in for “Kansas”, and it’s only a 1.34. Barring a Nielsen miracle in the next couple of weeks, it looks like fans can’t save cancelled shows nowadays.
Of course the Pretender was cancelled. Jarod posed as a network exec, shut down production, and sent Ms. Parker a coded message telling her that her mother was actually a waitress at the studio commissary.
1812 - thanks for that very informative article. Nielsen ratings had always been a mystery to me.
For some reason I didnt realize that article you posted was from the linked site, I thought you had written it. I was all set to thank you for making your dad watch B5
Glad you enjoyed the article, Mars Horizon. I loved Babylon 5 as well. It’s too bad none of the B5 spinoffs went very far. Are you a Farscape fan too? I wonder if there will be Farscape spinoffs in the future? I’ve heard rumors about a Farscape anime and movie. Well, for now, at least we can all enjoy the last 10 episodes. (Except for Baldwin, who is obviously not a man of taste. JK )
By the way, Bonnie Hammer, president of Sci-Fi, said in a recent interview that Farscape “had brilliant and sophisticated writing, but it was so narrow that it basically was an invitation to not tune in if you weren’t totally familiar with the show. It was brilliant when you got it, and some of the characterizations were truly amazing, but it took a little too much work.” If anyone watches it tonight (8:00 pm & midnight), reply here and see if you agree or not. Don’t forget to include how much of the show you’ve watched before.
Do you use Kazaa? If so, search for a special called “Farscape Undressed.” It will fill you in on what happened in the first two seasons. That is, unless you mean that you wouldn’t have an extra hour on Friday to watch the new episodes even if you knew the backstory.
That’s the first one I thought of too. Still going after about 33 years. I can remember where I was when I heard the news that it was cancelled. JFK’s assasination, the destruction of the WTC, and the cancellation of Star Trek.
I can’t speak to specifically letter-writing campaigns, but I’ve been, if not on the front lines, then at least somewhere in the middle ranks of the fight to get “Firefly” back.
Although a lot of people have sent letters and postcards to FOX, SciFi, UPN, and other networks, the most notable success yet was recently announced: a full set of DVDs will be released in December, including the 3 un-aired episodes.
I attribute this to the Firefly fans voting on a certain site which collated data on which DVD sets were most wanted. (And I believe that most of the fans would not have made it to that site if it were not for massive fan efforts like buying several banner ads on Television Without Pity.com)
As to whether “Firefly” will ever be back on the air, I can’t say. But certainly the voice of the audience is not entirely ignored, especially when it comes to money matters.
