I was watching another one of those obscure BBC television shows this last weekend called Outcasts. It’s a science fiction 8 part series that takes place in the future when a series of catastrophic events force colonists from Earth to take up residence on some far-away planet. Immediately, they run into political problems amongst the survivors, and then they start to discover really odd things, like the possibility that humans may have colonized this planet a long time ago (which makes absolutely no sense to anyone). It’s an interesting story arc, and as I was watching it, I immediately started thinking, “I’ll bet they didn’t renew this show, which means I’m probably watching the first season of yet another science fiction television show that didn’t make it past its freshman year.” And it turns out, I was right. The first season ends on a cliffhanger, and the viewers are left hanging yet again.
Maybe it’s me, but why don’t television networks understand that science fiction takes time to grab ahold of its audience? I don’t think there’s a science fiction show out there that didn’t take a number of seasons of trodding through really difficult character building before it finally got the to meat of its show. Look at the recent success of Battlestar Galactica. It started off a bit stale, and then it built into a brilliant final couple of seasons. Look at practically every Star Trek that came out after the original series. The Next Generation took a few seasons to catch on, people constantly comparing Picard to Kirk before realizing they weren’t the same person, but different, and that wasn’t so bad a thing. Deep Space Nine took about three or four seasons to kick off before it became possibly the most beloved of all of the Star Trek universe offerings. Voyager, well, I argue it was a lot better four seasons in and to the end, although there are some who can’t stand it at all, but it still made that same arc I’m talking about. And Enterprise was a pretty decent last season show that took a lot of “hey, we’re exploring space for the first time” episodes to get to its point.
I look at some of the greatest science fiction around, and it took a long time to get around to being great. The 4400 was a great show once you finally got beyond the beginning parts of what it was trying to do. The X-Files took some time to find its footing, as well as Fringe took about two seasons to finally reveal that it wasn’t a rip-off of the X-Files, but great science fiction all on its own. It’s still going strong.
The thing is: Science fiction takes time to tell its story. It’s not like a cop show where you throw a bunch of people into a scene after a murder, have the star do his quirky mannerisms and then jump to a chase scene/shoot out, and then cue the last insider joke before going to commercial. Some of these shows are dealing with some pretty heavy subjects, and it takes time to get an audience to buy into the characters, and sometimes even the universe we’re talking about. Stargate was an interesting piece of science fiction in that it started off strong, and then became even stronger once it played out its initial arc and had to reinvent exactly what it was doing to come to a whole new kind of show. Stargate Atlantis did practically the same thing, once its writers realized they weren’t just recreating Stargate SG1, but had a brand new animal on their hands. Stargate Universe could have evolved into something great as it was starting to get better in the second season, but like most executive decisions it never had enough time to build its audience and appeal to do what it needed to do. It was cut off way too early to finish its growth.
Outcasts is an interesting example for me because I’ve been reading the message boards concerning this show since it was shut down after its first season. People are really upset because a show they really started to get into was cut off way too early to allow itself a chance to breathe. And I don’t blame them. For all of the crappy shows that are out there, it is rare to find a show that really tries to take chances and pushes itself as it does it. It was fascinating that they were doing what they were doing with the cast they had, considering I don’t think I’ve ever really seen any of the actors before, aside from a cameo in the very first episode by Jamie Bamber, better known for playing Captain Apollo on the remake of Battlestar Galactica (I kept looking at him, thinking, “is that who I think it is?”).
Sadly, one of the few places where science fiction is welcome doesn’t seem to have a lot of science fiction anymore. I’m talking about the SyFy Channel, which used to be the SciFi Channel. Nowadays, the channel is known more for WWF wresting and ridiculous movies of the week about killer land sharks and other nutso ideas. They have a bad habit of killing any strong science fiction shows, including the cancellation of Caprica, Stargate Universe and the recent announcement of the discontinuation of Eureka. Checking through the TV Guide, I don’t find too many original programs showing up on the SyFy Channel any longer, which means my original necessity of always making sure my cable company had that channel is no longer a given.
Part of the problem of this dilemma is probably necessary to address as well, and that’s the fact that because science fiction involves special effects and unique, alien environments, the budgets for these shows can sometimes be astronomical. During the Star Trek run on UPN, there was some serious money being invested per episode to keep the quality up on that show, and every other show was trying to do the same sort of thing. Nowadays, a network isn’t really all that interested in paying that kind of money for entertainment, especially when they can get even higher ratings from crappy reality tv programming that costs a fraction of money to produce.
The other part of the problem is the perception people have for science fiction as well. For some reason, science fiction is seen as “geek” culture, which can often lead to a group of adults shunning someone who watches science fiction, while they may be gluttons of reality television and Gossip Girl-like programming instead, somehow seeing these alternatives as more “acceptable”. Science fiction gets equated with the kind of entertainment that should be enjoyed by little boys and men who never grew up.
But quite often, science fiction practically masters the concepts of the human condition by forcing us to look at social and societal issues that cannot be explored within the confines of our normal, everyday lives. Science fiction can put someone back into the shoes of someone who had to make decisions during the Trials of Nuremburg, or force a discussion on the ramifications of the ethics of genocide that are not just theories but might be happening at a particular time and place. It can allow questions of the nuances of same sex relationships by changing the species as the focus, yet still unravel a group of people on the cusp of making a life-changing decision. While it’s not impossible to do that in other genres, rarely is it done there, which leaves science fiction one of the few places where such ideas and thinkers can completely be at ease with each other.
Unfortunately, I just finished watching a great show that will never see another episode or any of its brilliant ideas examined further by the writers who presented the dilemmas in the first place. Until then, we have to search for another venue, and hopes that someone else manages to fill the void that doesn’t often get filled by those with the vision to ignite the ideas in the mind’s canvas of possibilities.