What he said: An Open Letter to the Sci-Fi Channel by Marc Bernardin
I don’t agree with his statement that the nostalgia needs to be ditched, but continuing to fund mindless substandard programming and ignoring the smarter and far better options that are out there completely confounds me and millions of other scifi fans.
I noticed this thing of SciFi Channel aiming at the wrong targets, starting with missing out on acquiring Season 5 of Babylon 5 because they’d committed money to 3 seasons of First Wave sight unseen, and for some boggling reason, it continues to this day.
Why didn’t SciFi Channel try to pick up Surface or Threshold? Even as projects they could continue as movies or miniseries to conclude them? Threshold might have been a problem, but Surface was a property that their parent company already owned, so why not take advantage of that?
Same thing now for Journeyman. Everyone who’s watched this show gets hooked on it, which makes you wonder if the people calling the shots ever watch the shows they’re keeping and killing. There’s even a chance to give fans some closure on The 4400 and The Dead Zone, which were canceled just a few weeks ago by USA Network (again, same parent company as SciFi Channel).
Aside: and while we’re mentioning NBC Universal, I’d like to give them huge props for taking advantage of new Nielsen rules at the beginning of this current season, and rebroadcasting shows across their various channels to get as big a metered audience as possible. I also regret that I must land the equivalent of one of NCIS Special Agent Jethro Gibbs’ famous head slaps on them for cowering under the whines and complaints of the other networks who claimed it was unfair because they didn’t also have similar alternate avenues to take advantage of.
It’s called “competition” for a reason. You don’t see drivers in a car race slow down because one of their competitors doesn’t have as good a car as they do; you don’t see a football team giving the ball to the opposing team at the end of the game so they can try to tie the game up or give them a fair chance to win the game because their offense didn’t get a chance to have the ball as long during the game. Why on earth would you give up that advantage if you’d worked so hard to set it up?
Okay, network cross pollination of programming to maximize viewership rant is now over.
One last plea, an appeal to your bottom line. If you keep giving viewers a steady stream of crap, eventually, they will stop watching altogether. There is a healthy and growing pool of independent content producers bringing good stories to life as film projects, internet video serials, direct-to-dvd, and audio dramas, and we can and will make use of those if we can’t get good programming anywhere else.
Oh, and did you notice that WalMart just sold off it’s online video rental service to Netflix? And that Netflix and LG are working on an on-demand system that will deliver a rental as a download you can watch on your TV, without needing a computer to handle the download?
Think about that when you hear about all the TV watchers who are renting and buying DVDs of TV shows to watch again, today because of the writers strike, but later, maybe because there’s nothing else to watch.
