So, the periodic slice-and-dice of show schedules has happened. Fall and midseason schedules are shaping up, and the network-TV roster is more of the same. Perhaps the only surprising element is the dearth of speculative shows that have been picked up.
Just a few months ago, a Push-inspired series was in the works and being shopped to networks, an American Torchwood remake was commissioned by Fox, FlashForward and V were midseason, and all the networks were scrambling to find the show that would replace the departing Lost.
Now, the Torchwood remake has already been scrapped, Push is nowhere to be seen, FlashForward has been canceled, and Heroes has finally been put out of its misery. Someone even came to their senses and canned Ghost Whisperer. Fringe has been renewed, and V just barely scraped by for another season, but neither show has seen much promo support by their networks. The only new sci-fi shows in the network lineup for this fall are ABC’s maybe-vampire drama The Gates, NBC’s comic-book-noir The Cape and Steven Spielberg’s suspiciously-familiar-looking Terra Nova on Fox.
So, what happened?
First of all, the good news: the TV landscape isn’t as bleak as it seems. Sure, the major networks are in trouble, but AMC’s Walking Dead continues pre-production apace, HBO has True Blood‘s third season in the works, and The Vampire Diaries is firmly at home on the CW.
SyFy, on the other hand, has done less for the genre than you’d expect by, you know, the name: it’s picked up all of its stalwarts for the new season (Stargate Universe, Caprica, Sanctuary), and it made a bid to rescue its syndicated Primeval after it was axed from the BBC, but in terms of new programming, it cranked out a backdoor pilot for Riverworld, and then put some wrestling on the schedule. (Mmm, speculative!) Then again, SyFy and its machinations will forever be a mystery; I am still not sure why it never picked up the now-canceled Legend of the Seeker, for example.
Now, the bad news: network TV is getting notoriously swift with axe-dropping, especially for comparatively expensive genre shows, which is part of the reason why several of the midseason series last year got the axe after half a dozen episodes, or even (in the case of Virtuality) before the pilot. (Yikes.)
The other part of the reason for the dearth of genre on the networks seems to be that most network genre TV is just not very good. You can make a case that V is building some steam (at the very tail end of its first season), but FlashForward flatlined early and never recovered, Defying Gravity limped for six episodes and then died, and apparently a lot of this year’s potential series weren’t even good enough to get a network pickup (or, in the case of Torchwood, get past script).
One undeniable fact is that cable channels can get away with more risqué or violent content than network shows can, which of all factors is probably the most quantifiable; you will not be seeing nearly as much skin on the networks as you will on any given episode of True Blood, and Walking Dead is probably too entrailtastic for anything but Fox (you know they’d air entrails, so long as they were a lady’s).
On the other hand, it doesn’t follow that network genre TV can’t be quality. Just look at Lost, which is often-confusing, always-complicated, minutiae-heavy, and such a ratings juggernaut that ABC execs were pre-rending their garments in preparation for the aftermath of last night’s series finale.
The key factor to this apparent fall from grace might simply be that TV’s pop-culture pendulum has swung from genre over to the hour-long spy-adventure side of the equation. Lost‘s J.J. Abrams is busy with his Mr. and Mrs. Smith knockoff-sounding Undercovers, the CW (which is getting pretty canny about when to hop on a trend) is rolling out yet another TV adaptation of La Femme Nikita, now titled simply Nikita, and even USA has a spy show coming out (Covert Affairs).
Meanwhile, in an attempt to stay in the genre game, three networks have made sci-fi bets this season. NBC is offering the superhero-noir The Cape, where a cop framed for murder goes underground, hooks up with a carnival, and emerges as his son’s favorite superhero (in order to clear his name, fight crime, and creepily haunt his son, I am assuming). ABC is hopping on the vampire bandwagon with The Gates. And Fox has scored a major coup, with Steven Spielberg offering up Terra Nova, a dinosaur-and-secrecy-heavy series, the first promo image of which makes it look very comforting, let’s say, to the large numbers of people who went to a particular movie last year. (Or a particular movie in 1993.)
So what do you think? Will these three shows fill the new, quality genre-TV quota for the major networks? Is this yet another season in which sci-fi fans have to get cable or miss out? Or are we just all migrating to spy shows this season, and we’ll meet up this time next year to see how that went?
Below, the trailer for The Cape, which is either going to be amazing or a complete disaster. You make the call!
Genevieve secretly hopes someone brings back The Middleman as a midseason surprise. She’d also like a magical pony, as long as people are handing out wishes. She blogs about movies and TV here.
All great points.
Legend of the Seeker should have been picked up this year and last year SyFy totally blew it not picking up the Sarah Connor Chronicles.
And Fox just sucks.
I’ve been convinced for years that the reason good genre shows don’t survive on network television is because most of the people who watch network television (as opposed to cable) do not like stories. They like to laugh, they like to see people on tv that make them feel superior and they don’t want to think.
It’s the only real explanation for why so many great genre shows have gotten canceled while all the craptacular ones have gotten renewed repeatedly (Heroes being a great example). The networks are aiming for the lowest common denominator, and that’s the guy whose driving ambition in high school was to grow up to be Al Bundy.
I’m willing to bet that most of these new shows will get canceled withing the first 2 months.
Oh, and Seeker was horribly bad, just like both Hercules and Xena that inspired it.
What about No Ordinary Family on Fox?
I myself am going to be waiting around in the afterlife church for cop/lawyer/hospital shows to walk into the light; then maybe we can get more genre on tv again.
We are all still scratching our heads on why no one would pick up Legend Of the Seeker. But we won’t stop fighting to get it back. With all the horrible promotion it got where it was it still had a large number of loyal fans. It avg’d 2.3 million viewers and that doesn’t even take into account the international ones, or the iTunes/hulu/netflix viewers. The people who couldn’t get it because of poor times, preempting, or randomly changing the airing date.
It sad, all the shows out there are the same. Cops/Hospital/law shows or stupid reality TV. You find a show that you love that’s different, fun, and makes you think a bit and it gets axed for “poor ratings” when everyone you know who also watches it heard about it by word of mouth or random channel flipping. This show has so much potential and it’s all being tossed away. It had a wonderful cast who love the show just as much as the fans, dedicated crew, beautiful locals and stories. It makes me sick that would could never get it back.
http://www.saveourseeker.com
@Necrosage:
The show wasn’t horribly bad, just not quite the same as the books.
And really???? It’s really far more intelligent than Xena/Hercules and quite simply, modeled on the books, not these shows.
The thing I’ve come to realize about genre TV is that it relies on a different viewing activity than “mainstream” TV.
In my household, for example, we turn on CSI when we’re folding laundry. We watch Law & Order when it’s naptime, and How I Met Your Mother if we’re not having a sit-down dinner.
But when we watch(ed) Galactica or LOST or Torchwood, we put in a DVD (or queue up the DVR), sit down, and pay attention. Good genre shows make you *want* to pay attention, and broadcast television is a distraction medium. It’s there to fill up time, and that’s how viewers approach it. Average audiences have developed relationships with television that’s wholly different than the relationship genre fans have with their shows.
Maybe there’s a simpler explanation, though. Promos for Legend of the Seeker make it look *terrible.* I’m a huge geek, and I’ve never bothered tuning in for it, because… it just looks terrible. SGU’s promos make it look static and moody. FlashForward’s make it look boring.
Of course, FlashForward *is* boring…
New super hero family show on ABC also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbBplfoXBbY&
“No Ordinary Family”
With Michael Chiklis. Neat.
FlashForward and V were doing fine before the powers that be put them on a several month hiatus. They had taken any following and momentum those shows had and threw those out the window. To be honest, when FlashForward and V started up again, I didn’t want to bother watching them either. But I did anyway, however any “fringe” group that had started watching was totally gone. It’s nothing but utter greed on the part of the brass, attempting to capitalize on the early success of the shows, to lure in that audience for a show with a different target market. BIG SURPRISE, both shows fail because it was far too soon. The reason it didn’t kill Lost was because it was due to the writer’s strike, which was in season 4 long after the show had established an enormous fan base. Then every new show was on a break, today, people could just tune in elsewhere and didn’t care enough about shows with only a half a dozen episodes. Well congratulations TV execs! I hope more then one person lost their freakin job based on the advertising revenues that were squandered. Somehow, I doubt it, it will just be blamed on the “stupid” audience and we’ll get more “reality” TV. After all, that is SO much cheaper to produce and genuinely stupid audiences, read – more susceptible to advertising, eat that up.
Ok, yeah, I am a little bitter. After getting sucked back into FlashForward, I’m irked at it being left by the wayside, due to bad management.
@jolene Danner, I know that it was based off of books. I didn’t read them, and therefore I’m also not romanticizing them nor comparing them to the books. It was just a bad series and I can see just why it got canceled. By the way, it also had the exact same team making it as both Xena/Hercules, and even “stars” and locations.
Last I heard ITV had renewed Primeval for a 4th and 5th series, though some of the characters may not be returning (and it’s never been the same without Cutter). Production started 22 March and it should start airing in the UK next January.
I’m both saddened and pleased that Fox isn’t going to host Torchwood. They just have way to shoddy a track record with great SFF and anything other than animation/sitcoms (I’m still pissed at them for Firefly and Wonderfalls). Heck, they’re almost as bad as ABC. I’m still convinced they didn’t go through with it because they wanted to tone down Jack’s omnisexuality.
Terra Nova looks like it could be Jurassic Park awesome or the 2009 remake of Land of the Lost terrible. Here’s hoping for the former. And I’m pretty sure The Cape is going to be a campier version of Unbreakable, and we all know how fantabulous that film was. But nothing has me more excited than The Walking Dead. AMC has done amazing work with having to keep to basic cable rating constraints (hell, I think I’d actually like Mad Men less if they had nudity and swearing, though I could totally use more naked Timothy Olyphant in Justified…), and amazing work with television in general, so this should be awesome.
The Ragi @@@@@ 8: No Ordinary Family has me remaining cautiously optimistic…I’ve liked Julie Benz since she was Darla, and I’m happy to hear she’s gotten some post-Dexter work. But it’s on ABC which means it’ll probably be canceled after being shunted around 15 different time slots and getting no advertising.
Ronin-alTyr @@@@@ 9: ABC is the master when it comes to ruining perfectly good TV with shite scheduling and random time changes. Most recently see Better Off Ted and Pushing Daisies. I sympathize with you totally. To bring up the ratings you (actually EVERYONE) should watch struggling shows on the studio websites and DVR – both preferably. Online streaming and DVR Neilsen ratings are gaining more and more weight and respect as more and more people turn to those sources for entertainment.
With regular TV the Neilsen ratings only actually talk to about 1000 people and extrapolate data for a national statistic. But online and DVR viewings (and, most especially, the click-throughs for the ads – which you should also do, because the more click-throughs a show gets online the more revenue the studio makes, which makes them more inclined to keep it around, even if it is just pennies to the dollar of airing ads) are counted individually. So, rather than guessing that 2.2 million people are watching something, they can actually “see” 2.2 million people watching something. One of the less publicized reasons Dollhouse got renewed was because it had a huge online and DVR audience. The airing audience was small, but when you factored in other viewing methods their ratings sky-rocketed.
I’m not sure it counts as genre, but I found myself looking forward to more episodes of Happy Town. Which, of course, meant immediate cancellation.
I liked it in spite of the fact that some of the expository dialogue in the pilot made my ears bleed (though I don’t blame the actors, who, God love ’em, gave it their very best). And I even liked it in spite of how very, very hard it tried to remind us — frequently — that this show TOTALLY took place in Minnesota. Which probably should have pissed me off, being from there, but mostly just amused me. (I’m looking at you, Wooden Moose Statue Used As Set Dressing.)
Ronin-alTyr @@@@@ 9 and Milo1313 @@@@@ 11: Yeah. I’ve dropped shows because of stupid scheduling decisions. If I have to work to find something, or have to try to remember when something is coming back from midseason hiatus, forget it.
I’m clearly way off the core demographic for this stuff, but I can’t watch most made-for-telly SF/F (though I have a soft spot for “Doctor Who” and enjoyed the UK version of “Life on Mars”). On the SF side especially, it’s either SF-and-water or anything-goes make-it-up-as-you-go-along nonsense. Fantasy doesn’t fare much better, so that what might be a useful story-generator (say, that of “Medium”) gets stretched out of recognition and/or crippled by the failure of the writers to exploit all the implications of their premises. (There’s a whole metaphysic that gets short shrift there, perhaps to avoid offending religious sensibilities.) In almost all cases, the production environment works against developing milieux and story lines with the consistency of the best non-fantastic series–say, “The Wire” or “Rome,” which seem to follow the UK model of planning and writing coherent story arcs and being willing to write endings rather than concocting ways of extending a series indefinitely.
For my money, the best SF on TV has been comic/satiric: “Futurama” and “Third Rock from the Sun.” “Futurama” in particular is clearly written by people who get SF, even while they poke fun at it. (And the best episodes of “Hercules” and “Xena” were the ones that played comedic games with the material and characters.)
But, as I said at the top, I’m nowhere near the target demographic in age, reading/viewing experience, or tastes–couldn’t watch more than half an episode of “Lost” or “Battlestar Galactica Reinflated” or anything on SyFy. Now you’ll have to excuse me while I chase the damn kids off my lawn.
I think programmers hate genre fen — they’re too much work, require too much coddling to try a show, and too much management when story decisions tend toward the suck, in order to draw in “more normal” fen.
LOST declined in ratings after its first season, but won a small but very dedicated cadre of followers. Networks want deadheads who’ll anything, *and* the volunteer marketing staff that’ll get deadheads to watch. But I don’t think they can have it both ways anymore — even the products trufen and deadheads like differ (AXE fumigation sprays, anyone?)
If it were up to me, I’d burn Syfy to the ground. I had to avoid Boing Boing when their mouthpiece was guest blogging, lest I lose my membership due to excessive profanity and threatening tone. Let them change their name again to The WWE Channel, add Stupid Teenage Boy Theatre, and have done. There has to be some producer in the digital universe who could do better with genre work, and he/she should be allowed to try.
You forgot the big one: Futurama is returning in June! I know I should restrain my unabashed enthusiasm with cautious optimism (especially given that the movies sucked so hard), but it’s one of my favorite shows of all time. YAY.
Man, I am bummed FlashForward is gone. I’m not claiming it was the greatest show in the world, but there is something seriously wrong when a show like that isn’t even allowed to *try* to build an audience, while an atrocity like Heroes gets to drag around the eviscerated, stanky corpse of the shark it jumped for like two hundred years after the fact.
Bah.
As for SyFy, I’m beginning to be convinced those people are not only not fans of sf, but actively loathe it, and the whole marketing plan of the network is actually a nefarious scheme to undermine the genre as a whole and destroy what little credit it had in the eyes of the general populace forever.
And then TAKE OVER THE WORLD.
On second thought, maybe they are sf fans…
All i have to say is that Game of Thrones on HBO next year has me all kinds of excited.
There’s also “Being Erica” (Canadian show, aired in the U.S. on SoapNet). It isn’t (I think) being marketed to genre fans, but it IS a genre show.
Falling Skies formerly known as Spielberg’s unnamed alien invasion show also looks promising.
BBC One will run a real SF this autumn, it is already filming in South Africa called Outcasts and it is about trying to colonize an alien planet. I get a Coyote feeling about it. It has some ‘SF actors, from BSG in it too.
Leighdb @@@@@ 16:
Yeah, I’m really bummed about FlashForward getting cancelled too. I’d saved all the episodes on DVR until just a few weeks ago when I started watching them all each evening. Though I think some of the earlier episodes from last November were kind of slow and uninteresting, it really picked up steam after the extended break.
And I’m angry about the Heroes thing too. It’s just not fair.
While we’re at it, I’m still pissed off about Journeyman all these years later as well.
toryx @@@@@ 20:
Ditto on Journeyman. I guess we’re the only two people who liked that show!
@18 – As a Canadian the same age as the title character, I found [I]Being Erica[/I] to resonate deeply with me- many of the title character’s experiences mirrored many of mine ( though being male, obviously many did not )
@20 and 21 – Journeyman was an excellent concept, well executed. The reason I was underslept on Tuesday mornings during its run.
Fortunately, Chuck is sticking around for another season.
@18 mikeda
I’ve seen posters for Being Erica and it’s available on Hulu, but I haven’t checked it out yet.
@20 toryx and @21 lerris
Journeyman started off weak, but it improved, uh, over time. By the end I was disappointed it wasn’t going to continue.