Tag Archives: Syfy

Why Continuum May Be the Most Subversive Television Show Ever to Air

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The story is pretty interesting. It’s about a female police officer from the future of about 60 years who travels back in time to today, following a group of fugitives who are hell bent on causing terror. My friend Teramis wrote about the great writing of Continuum a few weeks ago, but I wanted to go in a different direction, mainly talking about the political implications of the show.

What makes the show so interesting is that the group that comes back in time, while being a terrorist organization, is also doing what they’re doing for the betterment of society. Which, when you think about it, is somewhat subversive on its own. The group, filled with really bad people, uses its evil tactics it used in the future to do its evil to the civilization of the past (today’s time). Their purpose is to change the past in hopes of providing for a better future.

The future is pretty interesting in this show, in that what has happened is that corporations have taken over everything, and people are now minions of the overseers, not the other way around. Freedoms are gone. People live their lives in futuristic splendor, but it’s pretty obvious that to get to that future, a lot of rights were trampled on, and a lot of people were made to live some pretty crappy lives at the expense of those who benefited.

What makes it really interesting is that when the main character returns to today’s time, her purpose is still to stop some very evil people from doing bad deeds in today’s time. But her eyes start to open up to the evil that exists in today’s time. This evil is the sort of thing that leads to the oppressive society that will one day emerge, and she is very much a cog in that wheel that uses the tools of technology to act as an enforcer of some very draconian rules.

What is interesting about the show is that there’s a real grey area here where I’m not sure she’s ever going to recognize that she’s actually the problem that came back in time. She thinks she’s doing the right thing, but as she’s doing it, the police agency she’s working with (in today’s time) is slowly becoming very much more oppressive.

I’m reminded of the whole very recent incident where the British government decided to haul in the domestic partner of a reporter it was targeting over the whole Snowden case. Without a warrant, or even a reason, the government hauled him in and imprisoned him for 9 hours (the maximum amount of time it was allowed before being forced to make a charge). What’s interesting is that no one seems to even recognize that a man’s rights were completely ignored for some kind of governmental vengeance. And no one will ever be held accountable.

That is exactly what Continuum is all about. The good guys in this show are the usual cops and white hat wearing people who always save the day. Yet, they are required to do some really horrible things in order to “get the bad guys”. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such grey area in a show before. There are times when I’m watching it when I start to lose focus on who I should be rooting for, even though the show maintains its narrative in a way that keeps you thinking the oppressors are still the good guys.

It’s an interesting premise, and it’s definitely an interesting experiment. If they play it out as the are already doing it, and SyFy doesn’t cancel it, this could turn out to be one of the most important shows to be on television.

The Struggles of Science Fiction on Modern Day Television

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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.

What it All Comes Down to

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I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.

Why Television is Failing So Much These Days

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Networks really don’t want to admit this, but they’re losing big time in the ratings wars. Oh, they’ll acknowledge it by saying really stupid things like, “we have to compete with so many other sources, like computer games, Xboxes and cable” but what they’re really not admitting is that they’ve so lost the pulse of America that they may never gain it back. The reason they don’t want to admit that they’re failing big time is that everyone who works for the networks realizes that his or her job is on the line if someone higher up realizes how incompetent they really are. So, instead of admitting it and fixing it, they’ll go on pretending that the emperor has no clothes and hope no one notices either.

Well, I’m going to put forth a couple of problems and solutions, and then we can kind of figure out if the networks are ever going to get any better.

1. The Hiatus. One of the biggest mistakes the networks could ever make is to start up a new show that starts to gain the attention of the public and then SUDDENLY yank it off the air for three or four months, and then let it reappear again. If there was a number one stupid thing to do so you could derail any chance at succeeding in ratings THIS  it is.

The origins of this stupid idea quite possibly came as a result of the infamous writer’s strike that halted all production for a period of time right in the middle of a brand new season. As a result, some really promising shows got canceled prematurely because they didn’t even get a first half of a season to gain popularity. They were pulled off the air during the strike and then never brought back.

Now, I could see this as one of those once in a lifetime situations, but somehow the networks thought this was a really good idea to subject viewers to a gap in time right in the middle of a show, as if this would cause them to come rushing back to that show, because they’ve been waiting and anticipating its return. This is supposedly what happened with LOST. But because it worked for LOST, they tried it with every other stupid show they aired. They did it with Heroes, and then Heroes went completely downhill. Then they did it with every other shows as well. SyFy became famous for doing this (even though it’s not a major network), and it is quite possibly the reason for the destruction of Caprica. Caprica was a somewhat decent show, but they cut it right in the middle of its first season so that people just stopped caring about the show. Then the second half came, and well, no one cared. So it got canceled.

That’s the problem right there. If you give us a new show and then halt it in the middle of the very first season, don’t expect us to come back. Sorry, but you lose.

2. Remake Hell. There’s a reason some shows were canceled the first time around. They failed. Remaking a failed show from yesterday may sound like a daring idea, but all it does is show that your network has no creativity whatsoever. Hawaii 5-0 might sound like a great idea, and I’m kind of liking the idea of seeing Grace Park in a bikini once a week, but to be honest, Hawaii 5-00 wasn’t all that great a show back then. I’m not all that excited about it now. So, I don’t watch it. And when others get over the fresh car smell, they probably won’t either. And that’s the most popular of the remake shows to have been done. Imagine what happens to the ones that aren’t as popular. The show V sounds like a neat idea, but it’s been done before. Even though some of the actors on the show are all from a Best of Sci Fi of all time (watching the cast is like watching a recap of who was once great in sci fi), it’s very hard to get past the fact that almost nothing in this show is original. And then they put it into half season hiatus (see complaint Number 1), which means they’re going to be seriously struggling to maintain an audience. And when they cancel it on us, they’ll blame us for not wanting to watch it.

3. No Faith in a Network. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the networks. I generally don’t watch a new television show any more until it reaches the third season because I’m so tired of a show being canceled in the first or second season, right after I’ve gotten drawn into it. They did it to me with Harsh Realms (remember that one?), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Jericho, Jeremiah, Firefly, and Dollhouse. Why would I trust a network to actually continue a television show that I started to watch? It’s really not worth the effort until they’ve decided to reward us by actually continuing the show. But they won’t continue a show because none of us are watching it (maybe because we don’t believe you’ll continue it).

4. Rehashes of Overdone Formulas. How many Law & Order or CSI franchises can we create? As a matter of fact, do we really need another cop show of any sorts? At one point, I was getting paranoid while living in San Francisco because there were more cops on television from San Francisco than there were actual cops on the streets. I was scared to walk to the corner because on TV there was a crime happening every fifteen seconds in San Francisco. And I knew not to call a cop because they were all basket cases who were having problems dealing with their sanity (or ex-cops who were scared of their own shadows…thanks, Monk). Recently, there was a show with a guy who played a drugged out mafioso in New Jersey who was now a cop in Detroit. I was starting to wonder who I could trust anymore. I mean, I’m kind of scared just now writing about it. But stop giving us more stupid cop shows. There’s not as much crime in the world as there is on television. Stop scaring the crap out of us.

5. Bad writing. This is probably my biggest complaint these days. The Event stopped being an event for me because the writing was straight out atrocious. And then they backed it up with some of the worst acting since Pauly Shore decided to make serious movies. Or maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a recurring fear I have. But either way, the writing is awful on some of these shows. I remember watching an episode of The Chase (or is it just Chase?), and three times in a row I was able to blurt out the next line of dialogue word for word before the actor could say it. And these were the “gotcha” moments that cop shows have where the hero gets to say the cool thing to the guy who is setting him or her up for a big dramatic moment. The writing was so bad that it was badly predictable.

That, in short, is why I find network television these days to be suffering. If they want to really compete with the competition that’s up against them, they have to raise their game. But they can’t raise their game if they’re going to keep doing the stupid things they keep on doing.

LOST Goes Out As It Should…With Answers and a Sense of Purpose

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The finale for LOST was last night, and even though I’m not one to stay up that late these days, it was well worth the staying up. (spoiler warning for anyone reading further….) Right up to the last few minutes, I found myself thinking, wait, we’re about to go out with a nice ending, but I still don’t feel I have any answers. And then they sprung it. Just like that. And I was thinking, wow, that works. Sure, there was a lot of fighting against that thought, but in the end it really worked, and just like LOST, it waited until the last moment to just subtly explain what it’s all been about. That’s so much like LOST.

What I thought was so profound is that one of the obvious clues had been staring us in the face all along. We knew the character’s name from the start, but it was one of those shell games where you just never looked at that person’s name to realize how significant it really was. It took Kate actually just saying it out loud, in almost disbelief, for me to realize how this process of puzzle making was so well done in this show. The bizarre thing is we always knew the person’s name, but no one ever bothered to just say it out loud, all together. That one clue would have really been enough if we realized how significant it was all along. I mean, every character in the show had a significant name (well, most at least), including John Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Jacob, Faraday, and the list goes on.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever get another show like LOST ever again. We’ve lost some of the greatest written dramas on television over the last few years, including Battlestar Galactica, which like LOST took a few years to really get its groove.

I’ll admit it. I’m a big fan of good television, but unfortunately, there’s not a lot of good television to find. The big shows right now are a lot of reality TV stuff, like Dancing with the Stars. I can’t watch any of that. The few good dramas are few and very hard to find. Instead, we get really trashy television like Grey’s Anatomy. I really hate that show, even though I love Heigl, even though she’s slowly becoming an enigma on that show. But I hate the stupid premise of that show, and the few times I tried watching it in the beginning completely turned me off of it.

So what do we have left? Surprisingly, one of the more innovative shows became a victim of its own success. Actually, a few did. There was Heroes, which had a GREAT first season and then imploded on itself with the cardinal sin of television (it thought it was more important than it really was). This same cardinal sin is happening to a lot of early shows, like Fringe, FastForward and V. But they didn’t even allow themselves a chance to become important before they turned into jokes of themselves right off the start. Another show that had promise, just for the intriguing writing it was doing in the beginning was one you wouldn’t suspect, and that was Desperate Housewives. And then it turned really stupid, as if it only had to rely on its great first season to make it great by name alone. It’s difficult to watch, so I stopped.

Some of the other promising shows are on the Sci Fi channel, strangely named Syfy these days. Except they’re screwing up those as well. Stargate Universe has taken a great franchise and tried to become Battlestar Galactica, which it is not. Stargate was always light, fun and entertaining. Stargate Universe is boring, tedious and another one of those that sees itself as important without doing anything to become important. I think when they went to the “let’s put our heroes into an inescapable plot in one week and then have them just walk through the stargate unscathed WITHOUT AN EXPLANATION the next week” is what has finally destroyed the show. They keep trying, and every now and then there’s a glimmer of hope, but it’s close to being thrown on the “don’t watch” list.

However, in July a bunch of the good shows from Syfy are coming back, and that might be really interesting. Eureka, a weird, light show, is coming back. Warehouse 13 is also coming back during that time. I’m not sure when Caprica is coming back, but that’s also on the backburner of a lot of people for one of the better shows out there, even though it’s just a spinoff to Battlestar Galactica, told some decades before the events of BG erupt.

One of the other decent shows, especially decent over this last season, is Smallville, and it is going to be producing its 10th and final season, which has a lot of people going through pre-withdrawals. But this means we should finally get to see the Boy of Steel become the Man of Steel, which has always been the end game for this series. Sure, they could make a Superman TV series, but I just don’t think it would be as great as the premise for Smallville always was. The origin story is such a unique animal in fiction, and we already know how it’s supposed to turn out.

Which leaves the rest of us wondering what are we supposed to do now that LOST is gone? There are no other shows that can replace it. Sure, a lot of networks are going to try to duplicate it, but they will continue to fail because they so want people to think they have the next LOST, which is impossible to do when you are trying too hard. That was one of the beauties of LOST. It never came out and said it was great. It just was. It trodded on, telling its story as it wanted to tell it, and they didn’t fall back on stupid shark jumping tricks to keep the fans happy. But the fans were happy, and they kept viewing.

Shows just don’t do that these days. And that’s what we’ll probably miss the most.