Does it help if I ask:
Who’s Dean Cain?
He was Superman in the Lois and Clark TV show back in the '90s.
I mentioned the Sci-Fi Channel once in a panel discussion at an SF convention, and Ben Bova, who was on the panel, said, best as I remember, “You could fit all the brains and guts at the Sci-Fi Channel into a gnat’s navel and still have room for an agent’s heart.” Considering the source, I’ll take that as an informed and authoritative judgment. But one thing I’ve never heard anyone discuss is, why is that so? How could such an awesome concept for a cable station have turned into such a mound of crap? Why couldn’t they attract the best in SF writing talent and producing talent? Or is there just something about the TV industry that repels the best talent? (But then, how do we account for Star Trek?)
TV: Hey, talented persons, you give us your best work and we’ll give very little money for it. Deal?
Talented Persons: Nah, we’ll pass.
I thought the post-O’Connell brothers Sliders had some real potential. I liked the fact that they finally had the equipment to forecast where they’d slide to next – they could spend time on actual storytelling instead of wasting it on the usual “I wonder what THIS world is like?” bumbling around.
The first season of that show was pretty inventive. They hit the obvious choices for alternate universes, like the U.S. being overrun by communism and Britain successfully putting down the American Revolution, but they came up with some neat, out-of-left-field ideas like a world without antibiotics and a world where smart people are revered like athletes. But eventually the plots started wandering too often into a couple of tired formulas: post-apocalyptic and “Oooh, there’s magic in this world!”
The Kromagg subplot wore a bit thin, too.
Another thing – why does the Sci-Fi Channel carry Crossing Over? What does John Edwards’ cold-reading act have to do with SF?
Here’s an idea I’m surprised nobody at the channel has thought of: How about a show about science-fiction fandom? You know, a weekly review of SF conventions, fanac, filk concerts, doings of BNFs and SMOFs – it might be hard to make stuff interesting to anyone but SF geeks; but who else is the channel’s target audience?
Well, the fiction part is right, but I don’t think science has anything to do with it.
They did have that show. It was called Sci-fi Buzz
!!! Was it on the Sci-Fi Channel?
I just did a search on www.imdb.com. No entry for a show called Sci-Fi Buzz. Which, of course, does not mean there never was such a show.
I also think the sci-fi channel has lost a lot of it’s strength. It seems every year they go through a transition phase where they do something kinda cool, but fudge everything else. I don’t get to watch much during the day anymore, do they still do the themed days? Like Monday was Space Day, and they’d have about five episodes of Battlestar Galactica; Tuesday was Creature Day, and you’d get five episodes of The Incredible Hulk. That was pretty damn cool, because I got to see a few shows I don’t think they would have aired if they had a standard rundown (like Automan!).
Farscape by far was the best show they ever had. Letting that end was a big mistake.
As for MST3K and Sliders, well, as has been said, Sliders han its course before it even got to Sci-Fi, so they can’t be blamed for the failure of that. They did ruin MST3K in my opinion, but that had more to do with the talent getting tired and moving on. Once Forester left, and they changed the between movie bits, the show went to shit in my opinion. Still, they pushed on for the sake of the fans.
I can’t forgive them for what they did to G vs. E, though. That was an AWESOME series that they picked up from USA Network, changed the name, and fudged after about four episodes. That’s one series that they ruined.
Try Google. Lots of references to it there.
(I’ll go ahead and Pit the way SciFi cancelled Farscape, after promising both a fourth and fifth season, letting them build a fourth-season plotline that needed a fifth season to resolve, and then pulling the rug out from under them as they’re finishing up the fourth-season finale cliffhanger.)
From http://bboard.scifi.com/bboard/browse.cgi/1/9/749:
But that’s not what I was talking about. I was suggesting, not a show about the latest SF shows or movies, but a show about SF fandom.
I’m thoughly convinced that the people who manage Sci-fi are either stupid or insane.
They get great shows but never show them, screw with the times, market them incorrectly.
Case in point. They used to show a really cool show called LEXX. However, they had a very interesting marketing strategy.
They would make all the commercials for it play up the sexual inneudo of the show, far moreso then the actual show cotained. Then, when they actually showed said episodes, they’d heavily censor them.
Maybe it’s just the marketing deparment.
I’m watching “13 ghosts” right now while waiting for “Day of the Dead” to be shown later tonight. During one of the commerical breaks, they showed an ad for “Frequency”. However, they do so by saying “Starring Denis Quaid”
Okay, there were two main stars, Denis Quaid and Jim “Passion of the Christ” Caviezel. At this point in time, I would imagine that Mr. Caviezal is a much bigger name/star then Mr. Quaid. This is why I’m completely puzzled that when they name only one of the stars, they name the one who is less well known.
Sci-Fi Buzz covered fandom as well. There were regular features about conventions and other fan-centric stuff
We used to watch the opening of LEXX, just because I thought the very beginning of the theme music was unbelievably cool. Never actually watched an episode.
MST3K came to Sci-Fi at the behest of its then-president (or whatever the person-in-charge is called), who was a big fan. That person left and was replaced by the gal who had recently come from the USA Network, which she had managed to whip into shape to the extent that it was actually making money. In her eyes, MST3K wasn’t pulling its weight, and so it got the axe.
Really, though, when you think of what an expensive, difficult-to-program, downright odd show MST3K was, it’s remarkable that it ever got on TV at all; that it ran for 10 seasons (longer than Seinfeld for gosh sakes) is almost impossible to believe.
But to address the original post, yes, Sci-Fi’s original programming is ghastly, unmitigated crap, yet they appear to be doing well. Don’t ask me. I looked for info on its ratings and found this story. It’s a year and a half old, but it would suggest the network’s current approach is working.
The target audience isn’t geeks, it’s people who will sit thru Boa vs. Python, the same kind of free spending dolts who watch crappy action movies. There must be some geeks in there who read Farmer and Herbert, but the higher-ups seem pretty indifferent to the concerns of geeks, and a geek only show like the one you describe would be the equivalent of setting a pile of money on fire and then urinating on it for them. Besides, there aren’t numbers low enough to describe the ratings filk concert coverage would get.