Showtime has been a much friendlier place for scifi than HBO. Showtime gave us Stargate, Odyssey 5, Total Recall 2070, Poltergeist and Jeremiah.
To me, Terra Nova is science fiction. Their execution was really bad but that shouldn't be the deciding factor. i do think that being overly concerned about labels hurts these type of shows. There's too much back and forth about what's scifi as opposed to fantasy or supernatural or horror or whatever. Stories about people will always be at the center of it, no matter which category you use. But I want to see stuff that can't happen in real life. Something more than just sloppy science of CSI type shows. I want shows that will keep me thinking about different possibilities.
Showtime has been a much friendlier place for scifi than HBO. Showtime gave us Stargate, Odyssey 5, Total Recall 2070, Poltergeist and Jeremiah.
To me, Terra Nova is science fiction. Their execution was really bad but that shouldn't be the deciding factor. i do think that being overly concerned about labels hurts these type of shows. There's too much back and forth about what's scifi as opposed to fantasy or supernatural or horror or whatever. Stories about people will always be at the center of it, no matter which category you use. But I want to see stuff that can't happen in real life. Something more than just sloppy science of CSI type shows. I want shows that will keep me thinking about different possibilities.
I don't really see what that last part means? Nobody suggested CSI was sci-fi (although there is a lot of fictional science in it...), the point was that sci-fi now consists and for the foreseeable future will consist primarily of procedurals because they attract more viewers than serials, hence shows like Alphas, which is primarily a procedural, but has recurring elements and season arcs.
If I may counter with 2 recent examples, Terra Nova and Outcasts.
I'd say those were just bad shows. They didn't fail to be long-running because they were or weren't based on character, but because they weren't very good.
Long-running shows are hard. In my view a long-running show requires compelling characters (and I can't think of any counter-examples). However, that's not very useful as a formula point because creating compelling characters is hard.
Consider Firefly and Dollhouse. In my view, Dollhouse had the better SF elements, and did a good job of exploring personality-programming theme from high-tech brothel to world-enslaving technology. However, it's characters were relatively weak (especially the leads; "Echo" didn't really work), and when it ended, I was content because I wasn't very interested in what they did next.
Where-as Firefly was weak as SF. Little of the premise made sense - anti-gravity, scores of worlds within one system, even details like a bar replacing mechanical pool games with virtual ones. However, it had a set of great characters. I was sad when the show ended because I could have watched those guys for much, much longer.
Comments
To me, Terra Nova is science fiction. Their execution was really bad but that shouldn't be the deciding factor. i do think that being overly concerned about labels hurts these type of shows. There's too much back and forth about what's scifi as opposed to fantasy or supernatural or horror or whatever. Stories about people will always be at the center of it, no matter which category you use. But I want to see stuff that can't happen in real life. Something more than just sloppy science of CSI type shows. I want shows that will keep me thinking about different possibilities.
Long-running shows are hard. In my view a long-running show requires compelling characters (and I can't think of any counter-examples). However, that's not very useful as a formula point because creating compelling characters is hard.
Consider Firefly and Dollhouse. In my view, Dollhouse had the better SF elements, and did a good job of exploring personality-programming theme from high-tech brothel to world-enslaving technology. However, it's characters were relatively weak (especially the leads; "Echo" didn't really work), and when it ended, I was content because I wasn't very interested in what they did next.
Where-as Firefly was weak as SF. Little of the premise made sense - anti-gravity, scores of worlds within one system, even details like a bar replacing mechanical pool games with virtual ones. However, it had a set of great characters. I was sad when the show ended because I could have watched those guys for much, much longer.