Whither has SciFi gone?
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SciFi channel – at least here in US – is really quite despicable about LEXX these days. First they shock me by appearing to cancel it after K-Town from their normal schedule (I believe it was 2am on weekdays when I saw it). Then they insult all lexxians by only bringing it back after months of despair and remorse only at 4am on fridays!!! They also don’t live up to this schedule much since it seems every 3rd or 4th week they push Lexx off for some other junk. Then they have the audacity to simply decide not to show some episodes; first LuvLiner, then (gasp!) Nook and then the Web. Then just this week they do the most awful thing, I do my best to stay up till 4 in the morning on friday night expecting to see BoomTown … when what happens? Those idiot scramble-brain SciFi people decide (probably for the reasons as LuvLiner and Nook) to act like this episode never existed and drop in an episode from horrible season 4! Though it was nice to see Patricia Zentili put OMG! This is no way to treat folks like us! They even had in their ScheduleBot that it was ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY going to be BoomTown, then I look at their Lexx page and at the bottom where they show what are the most recent episodes and BoomTown mysteriously disappears from the lineup! It’s 769 (from season 4), then K-Town! Huh?! SciFi really has something coming for all the abuse it heaps on us lexxians.
I find it best to just accept that they are morons and breath deeply until the impulse to kill their programming staff passes.
Welcome to the boards Drak =)
You think it’s bad now? It is. But imagine LEXX was still showing new episodes and Sci-Fi was running ads before, during, and after LEXX for Farscape claiming:
“THE BEST SCI-FI SHOW ON TV!!!”
with a little * saying “claims TV-Guide”.
Well I imagine quite a few people watching LEXX for the first or second time were saying
“Why am I watching *this* then?”
Imagine LEXX heads into its 4th season after the INCREDIBLY popular 3rd series and Sci-Fi decides to promote it as,
The wackiest show on TV.
Want some Strange? Have some LEXX.
To this day, the 3rd series remains some of the best Sci-Fi on TV, period. Have no clue why they don’t miniseries it and throw it in Primetime, it’s only 11.5 hours.
Interesting premise copied and pasted from another site (though I think this is a similar premise the comic direct sale market took and the industry’s not in the best shape these days, especially with regards to attracting new people to the medium):
[quote]Want great SF for thinking adults which truly fulfills the writer’s
original vision without network wonk interference, even if it means
sacrificing some of the more expensive special effects? Why not bypass
TV and go direct to DVD! It seems to this humble viewer that it would
be very similar to producing a show for syndication. After purchasing
Firefly, my anger and frustration with the state of science fiction on
TV was rekindled. Firefly, Odyssey 5, Jeremiah, Crusade; the list goes
on. Even Andromeda, which was never more than an entertaining
diversion, has now been rendered unwatchable.Science fiction fans represent a smaller demographic, but we buy LOTS
of DVDs, as the sales of Babylon 5 and Buffy demonstrate. And those
are shows we’ve already seen. Imagine the preorders on Amazon.com if
Joss Whedon produced new episodes of Firefly without having to fight
to keep his characters true, or JMS was able to continue with Jeremiah
as it was intended, or Legend of the Rangers, or Crusade! I mention
those writers since they’ve already had successful DVD sales, but what
about Neil Gaiman, or John Ringo, or [your favorite author here]?They could start small, produce 4 episodes and throw it out there to
see if we bite. And when we show them it will work, they can invest in
more expensive special effects, or produce an entire *season* before
releasing it. If they make it, we will buy.FSFFTVT! (Free SF From TV Tyrants)[/quote]
I’d buy more Firefly for sure (and more Lexx) but I’d miss the good special effects.
Maybe if enough sold though…
I wonder what the profit margin is — TV series versus DVD sales?
Here was the eventual reply on the other forum:
[quote]The economics of television do not favor this model. Yes, selling a couple of hundred thousand copies of each B5 set makes the show a profitable item for Warner Bros., but the B5 episodes themselves were paid for long ago. The DVD sets only cost the couple of million that digitizing, authoring and mastering plus extras require. If WB had to pay almost 22 million additional dollars to produce the 22 episodes for each season, they’d be losing their collective shirt on the DVD sets. And B5 probably had the lowest cost per episode of any of the shows you’ve mentioned. Trying to produce an expensive SF series for DVD, with no broadcast revenue, no overseas sales, and no future residuals to off-set present costs is a good way to go broke in a hurry.
quote:
——————————————————————————–
If they make it, we will buy.
——————————————————————————–Not in sufficient numbers to interest anyone in Hollywood – and that includes the actors whose contracts are based on broadcast residuals and who only make a tiny amount on home video releases. (This stuff is built into the SAG basic minimum agreement.) Then there’s the whole industry perception that “direct to video” is the lowest of the low, basically an admission of failure, a statement that you can’t cut it in the real world of TV and movies, and you’ve got a serious problem selling this to the actors and the writers, directors and everybody everybody else behind the camera. Direct-to-video has worked for sequels to Disney movies produced on the cheap and for porn – neither of which bears much similarity to SF television (Well, except maybe to Lexx. )
Regards,
Joe[/quote]
Well you could take the obvious step of using something like the iTunes Music Store to distribute video for low distribution overhead. Second, hows this idea:
Sell DVDs that, like TV, interrupt your viewing with video adds or even just timed viewing still or animated web-banner style adds taken off the web that you couldn’t fast-forward over and would be forced to watch for x-amount of time. Better yet, niche add-inserted over-the-web programming? After first view, you’d be able to fast-forward / rewind so long as you kept the window open on subsequent views, but the viewer program could only keep so much programming up at a time before it would not show anymore “stored” stuff (could still watch live programming). Basically a sort of short-life expectancy TiVo, and then if you REALLY liked a certain show you could buy a permanent copy for endless future viewing witch could not be shared to others but could be “streamed” 1 to 3 times per unique recipient/sender stream (streaming recipient could watch it endless times but only in temporary-mode, or they’d have to buy it).
BTW: Your all super-famous to me and youy responding to my post is just increadible for me!
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