Please explain the SyFy strategy to me

Cafe Society
1

I just don’t get it. I’ve loved many of the original TV series they’ve had running on this network: Eureka, Warehouse 13, Farscape, MST 3000, Tripping the Rift.

Now, sure they have just as many terrible TV series (I hate the whole ghost reality TV shows, for example - garbage TV), but what bothers me the most are the movies/mini series.

They are BAD. Every last one of them is a terrible, terrible, production. It is a stew of badness.

The terrible acting combines with the cliched and stiff writing, which is then stirred along with ridiculous costumes, 1990’s style special effects and laughably bad plots/premises to create particularly strong brew of suckage stew.

And there seems to be a new one of these steaming turds every other week!

So my question is why?

Or, more importantly: Why the heck not take the money they use to create 10 of these crappy movies and instead make 1 really good production?

That’s all it would take, like maybe a couple of movies a year, maybe 1 good miniseries in there too!

I just don’t get it. It pisses me off every time one of these abominations airs instead of something closer to the quality of HBO’s Rome or Game of Thrones.

It doesn’t even have to be quite that high quality, but I’m sure if they can the next 10 “Crocodilian Nightmare!” and “They hitchhiked from outer space!” movies they can come up with something worthwhile.

No?

Does anyone actually like these terrible movies?

2

They get eyeballs in front of the commercials. No televison channel needs any other reason to do anything.

3

So that’s their tactic? Create content so terrible, that people will pay more attention to the commercials?

:wink:

But couldn’t it be argued that actually creating GOOD content will attract even more people, and have them talking about their IP’s in a non-negative way?

4

In a word, yes, or they wouldn’t be showing them.

There’s clearly a market for bad, cheesy movies (which I suspect people are MST3K-ing on their own), and they’re filling it with brand spanking new ones.
This, sadly, is what a lot of people expect from “science fiction”, and is why the good stuff is not being pushed.
The Syfy/Sci-Fi channel has made some attempts at actually making good science fiction (The Dune movies, random adaptations. If we gave them one or two more iterations they might even get Riverworld right) and have recently turned out the entertaining series Eureka, Warehouse 13, and others (even though they;'re cancelling Eureka), but they go with what brings in the most money, and that’s evidently de;liberately cheesy movies, ghost shows, and wrestling.

5

Nooooooooooo!!!

I didn’t know this. :frowning:

Damn it, if only I was rich I would buy the station from the idiots in charge and turn it into a bastion of great Sci-Fi and Fantasy entertainment.

6

Sadly, we’ve had a thread about it

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=619686&highlight=Eureka+cancel

I’d back it, and I’d hope you’d be successful. There’s certainly enough fan geekdom out there (including myself) that I’d think that you could successfully suppport such a venture, provided you satisfied yourself with merely huge profits instead of obscenely huge profits.

7

One of the reasons the movies are so cheesy and chintzy is that the budget per movie is about the same as the catering budget for an episode of Game of Thrones. It gives people their SciFi/Fantasy/Horror fix, gives those who like bad movies their fix, and sells commercial time on a slow TV night. Sadly, whenever they’ve upped production values and tried to make better movies, they haven’t really done better critically or in the ratings than their cheaper brethren…at least not enough to warrant doing them more often.

8

They’ve run into the same issue with their series. Both Farscape and Eureka got cancelled because the shows became too expensive to produce – they pulled in pretty good ratings, by SciFi / SyFy standards, but they had non-insubstantial SFX budgets, and every year that a series is renewed, the actors and production team get new contracts, which are usually expected to include raises (after all, the show’s been successful, hasn’t it?).

The awful made-for-TV movies, and the reality shows, are, comparatively speaking, dirt-cheap to produce. Even if they only draw half the viewership of a Eureka or BSG, SyFy’s likely still making more money.

9

I do love a good Giant Killer Something movie. How can you not watch a movie called Ice Spiders?

And someday, I can only dream that they release my dream movie: Dinosharkbear vs. Cobracondapus!

10

I have seen it argued that the SyFy movies are actually the MOST traditional science fiction thing they do…in the grand tradition of such classics as ‘I Married An Alien From Outer Space’, ‘Teenagers from Space’, ‘Day of the Triffids’, etc etc. The movies get high ratings and they’re cheesy, brainless fun…I watch one occasionally and enjoy them the same way I enjoy the classic 50s SF movies. I’d be sad to see them go, but I really doubt they ever will; they do too well for them.

11

Another note; if you poke around on YouTube, you can find some clips posted by Eureka star Colin Ferguson that detail some of the work he did directing one of these movies on location in Bulgaria for SyFy. They’re definitely done as cheaply as possible.

12

As I state in post #4:

13

I like SyFy’s cheesy movies in an MST3K way, but I’ll gladly take good stuff over the bad stuff any day. I personally think SyFy does not have a brief FOR or AGAINST quality SF, they just want cheap stuff. If it’s good, hurrah, if it sucks, so what? It still gets eyeballs to the screen.

There may also be the matter of genre stuff attracting eyeballs regardless of quality. I’ll bet you there are some on this board who will watch any superhero film SyFy puts out, no matter how cheesy. My particular subgenre weakness is sword and sandal or sword and sorcery films. I would much rather watch a Grade-Z slab o’ cheese in either genre than the best made modern disaster flick ever.

I have noticed that SyFy tends to have groups of movies in the various subgenres, in fact, whatever the subgenre of the Saturday cheesefest of the week is, that’s what all the other movies shown on Saturday are: monster flicks, alien flicks, sword and sorcery, natural disasters and what have you. So I’d say that’s probably a deliberate strategem on their part.

14

Don’t be confused into believing that you’re SyFy’s customer just because you’re the one watching. The advertisers are the customers, and you’re the product being sold.

15

These movies are the spam of television. They are so cheap to produce that it only takes a small return to make it worth while. They don’t make a big return like they would need if they made one big budget, good movie. They make a bunch of little returns that add up to more then the sum of the parts. Also, this way if one flops by their standards, they have not lost much. If they make one big one and get a Heaven’s Gate it would kill the whole year for them, if not kill the network totally.

16

For, let’s make a reasonable estimate, here, $10,000,000, right now, they can fill 20 hours of their schedule.

By your plan, they can fill…2, and fill the other 18 with REALLY cheap crap, since they’ve blown a significant portion of their budget on that first 2, thus can’t afford much for the other 18 without eating harder into their profits.

Assuming the really cheap crap will get SOME eyeballs on the screen, it probably won’t go as well as the deliberately silly cheap crap they regularly play, so they probably won’t make enough to really offset the additional cost of purchasing/producing it, so that one $10,000,000 movie will need to get ~10 times as many viewers than each of the $1,000,000 movies to deliver the same punch for the money as having 10 cheapo flicks.

But…that’s assuming they do it that way…judging from other similar channels (not American, don’t get Syfy, but get the concept), that $10,000,000 will fill the same 20 hours, whether it’s spent on one movie or 10.

So, for $10,000,000 we will fill 20 hours, either with 10 different movies, which will probably have about the same ratings as each other, as the same people watch all 10, plus a fluctuating ‘extra’ of people drawn by a particular movie, but not others, or 1 movie played 10 times, which will likely steadily declining ratings with each showing, as a few people rewatch, and others who missed it the first time (or first 5 times) catch it for the first time, which may, if they’re lucky, add up to equivalent of the 10 cheap movies due to starting with higher ratings due to better quality. (And, let’s be honest…that $10,000,000 is more likely to fill 40 or 60 hours than 20 - the ratings will decline a lot less on 2 or 3 showings each of 10 movies than 20 or 30 of one.)

Then there’s licensing it to other channels in other countries - they probably won’t be able to charge 10 times as much to license the expensive flick, and they sure as hell won’t be able to licence it to 10 times as many channels (twice as many? Maybe. 10 times, not a chance), and assuming the larger budget was spent at least partially on getting a writer, director, and cast who have both talent, and the motivation to bring their ‘A’ game (rather than just taking a pay cheque and enjoying the chance to ham it up more than a Denny’s breakfast), they’ll have a much easier time licencing the cheapos to non-English markets, because they’d be a lot easier to localize. (And if this isn’t the case, that cuts down a lot on how much it’ll improve the ratings Syfy themselves get from it.) So the profit margin on the cheapos is a lot better there, too.

17

MST3K has been airing and I wasn’t informed???

18

But is that enough? There aren’t really enough geeks out there to support pure sf. Because if there were, SyFy would be running nothing but SF. The run wrestling because it brings in viewers.

19

I suppose I could sell out a little bit.

So I’ll bring back firefly AND Eureka (god damn it!), make a couple of great Game of Throne like Mini series, and a couple of “oh my god this should of been in theater” movies.

AND I’ll include some ghost “reality” TV and wrestling. Nude Wrestling! That should make up for my extravagant Sci-Fi budget right there!

20

That alone would make their budget nut. Nude after 11. Run uncut movies and make their own. Hell, a weekly showing of Lifeforce will have every geek on the planet tuning in.