I say this as a fan who enjoyed the original Stargate movie but couldn't stand the TV shows it spawned.
If I had known from the beginning that SGU was a serial with hard SF elements, featuring the discovery of an ancient generation ship in the style of Revelation Space, I would have been all over it from the first episode. As it stands, I never watched the show while it was on the air and only reluctantly watched the first episode after stumbling on it on Netflix and reading the premise.
This is a failure of marketing.
I see "Stargate," and I expect McGuyver, characters with stupid symbols painted on their faces, and painfully bad writing and dialogue from the same network that brings us such fare as Giant Python vs Mega Octopus, or whatever crap they're currently peddling. (With apologies to long-time Stargate fans.)
Likewise, I never watched Battlestar Galactica when it was on the air because it was on SyFy, the network that brings us the aforementioned monster shows, several different varieties of ghost hunter shows featuring retards running around old psych wards with night vision cameras, and legendarily awful adaptations like the Dune miniseries of a few years ago.
Of course, I never knew what BSG really was until I started seeing reviews in Slate, NPR and the New York Times, where reviewers were not only praising the show, but discussing its real-world parallels with academic seriousness. I thought, "They cannot be talking about that show on SciFi." (Before it was Siffee, as Leonard Hofstadter calls it.)
Likewise with Caprica, which turned out to be a fantastic show with a stellar cast but never captured a loyal audience.
SyFy has a serious marketing problem, and it will never find success with so-called prestige shows, the serials HBO, AMC and Showtime are known for, if 1) It can't find a way to appeal to a wider audience, 2) It cannot capitalize on the mainsteaming of geek culture, 3) It cannot communicate to audiences that, yes, there are strong, smartly-written female leads like Starbuck from BSG, 4) and its executives continue to exhibit a stunning lack of patience and long-term planning.
Why is the best horror TV show, a ratings juggernaut, on AMC instead of SyFy? Why is the greatest fantasy television show of all time on HBO, and not SyFy? Why does HBO have two or three SF serials in development while SyFy is airing an eleventh-rate video game tie-in? Why is Starz getting ready to air a dramatization of the War of the Roses and a badass-looking pirate show while SyFy is still running ghost hunters repeats?
There are fundamental changes that must happen at SyFy, starting with leadership, vision and marketing, to bring the network into this century. If those changes aren't made, the network will continue to air cheap reality garbage like its ghost shows while its scripted dramas fail. And I think I speak for many fans when I say that we're tired of getting attached to shows and characters only to see them canceled not for lack of quality, but for lack of marketing.
If I had known from the beginning that SGU was a serial with hard SF elements, featuring the discovery of an ancient generation ship in the style of Revelation Space, I would have been all over it from the first episode. As it stands, I never watched the show while it was on the air and only reluctantly watched the first episode after stumbling on it on Netflix and reading the premise.
This is a failure of marketing.
I see "Stargate," and I expect McGuyver, characters with stupid symbols painted on their faces, and painfully bad writing and dialogue from the same network that brings us such fare as Giant Python vs Mega Octopus, or whatever crap they're currently peddling. (With apologies to long-time Stargate fans.)
Likewise, I never watched Battlestar Galactica when it was on the air because it was on SyFy, the network that brings us the aforementioned monster shows, several different varieties of ghost hunter shows featuring retards running around old psych wards with night vision cameras, and legendarily awful adaptations like the Dune miniseries of a few years ago.
Of course, I never knew what BSG really was until I started seeing reviews in Slate, NPR and the New York Times, where reviewers were not only praising the show, but discussing its real-world parallels with academic seriousness. I thought, "They cannot be talking about that show on SciFi." (Before it was Siffee, as Leonard Hofstadter calls it.)
Likewise with Caprica, which turned out to be a fantastic show with a stellar cast but never captured a loyal audience.
SyFy has a serious marketing problem, and it will never find success with so-called prestige shows, the serials HBO, AMC and Showtime are known for, if 1) It can't find a way to appeal to a wider audience, 2) It cannot capitalize on the mainsteaming of geek culture, 3) It cannot communicate to audiences that, yes, there are strong, smartly-written female leads like Starbuck from BSG, 4) and its executives continue to exhibit a stunning lack of patience and long-term planning.
Why is the best horror TV show, a ratings juggernaut, on AMC instead of SyFy? Why is the greatest fantasy television show of all time on HBO, and not SyFy? Why does HBO have two or three SF serials in development while SyFy is airing an eleventh-rate video game tie-in? Why is Starz getting ready to air a dramatization of the War of the Roses and a badass-looking pirate show while SyFy is still running ghost hunters repeats?
There are fundamental changes that must happen at SyFy, starting with leadership, vision and marketing, to bring the network into this century. If those changes aren't made, the network will continue to air cheap reality garbage like its ghost shows while its scripted dramas fail. And I think I speak for many fans when I say that we're tired of getting attached to shows and characters only to see them canceled not for lack of quality, but for lack of marketing.
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