As to why people express an opinion about SGU despite not enjoying it... well, that's because SGU isn't a one-off series - it's got history and it's part of a much-loved franchise which tends to cause fans of that franchise to continue watching
Dont buy that at all, if you dont like something you dont watch it, life it too short to do anything else. Very few people are going to watch a show 30 episodes in that they dont like.
If the SG1 fans had all watched it the ratings would have been higher and the show kept, its the SG1 fans refusing to watch it as its not a clone of previous shows thats resulted in it getting cancelled, plain and simple really.
Wright and cooper knew this when they developed it so doubt what's happened has surprised them one bit.
It is a shame that TV shows are cancelled with no time to develop and really work out what they are trying to be like Fringe did, like X-files did, like Star Trek did. If any of these shows where made in 2010 they would all have probably been cancelled as most got widely criticised for long period before being accepted.
Your right, none of the old sci-fi shows from yesteryear would have surived if they had been released now.
Sci-fi will have its time again but its going to be many years before that happens.
Once fringe is cancelled thats it for sci-fi I am afraid.
Dont buy that at all, if you dont like something you dont watch it, life it too short to do anything else.
If the SG1 fans had all watched it the ratings would have been higher and the show kept, its the SG1 fans refusing to watch it as its not a clone of previous shows thats resulted in it getting cancelled, plain and simple really.
Obviously my comment doesn't apply to every Stargate fan, but your tired, lame and frankly ludicrous argument (which isn't even original) does mark you out as one of the more blinkered and rabid posters in this thread.
I do find it interesting how your life is so black and white though.
I get the franchise thing, but maybe it would have been better for SGU to distance itself from the original (and by this i mean dropping the frequent trips to see the old fat guy from the originals, apologies can't remeber his name), because as we all know, nothing ever lives up to the original. For examples see: Star Wars Trilogy, Star Trek Enterprise, and the only way these work is by picking up people new to a "universe", and unfortunatly with the pacing of SGU it is not going to pick up a new generation, as even the "action" sequences and CGI is quite deliberate so fails to engage.
That being said, i have found myself drawn into a universe and plan to go back and watch SG1, because i'm forever being told it was much better
I get the franchise thing, but maybe it would have been better for SGU to distance itself from the original (and by this i mean dropping the frequent trips to see the old fat guy from the originals, apologies can't remeber his name), because as we all know, nothing ever lives up to the original. For examples see: Star Wars Trilogy, Star Trek Enterprise, and the only way these work is by picking up people new to a "universe", and unfortunatly with the pacing of SGU it is not going to pick up a new generation, as even the "action" sequences and CGI is quite deliberate so fails to engage.
That being said, i have found myself drawn into a universe and plan to go back and watch SG1, because i'm forever being told it was much better
Even if it had dropped the entire Stargate connection it would still have been a poor show by pretty much any sci-fi standard. Dropping the Stargate connection would have meant that Stargate fans would no longer feel compelled to watch it, which would no doubt have reduced the already abysmal ratings even further.
It's been suggested that Stargate fans somehow "got SGU cancelled", which is of course utterly preposterous - if SGU had been any good at all it would have survived without needing fans from former shows to prop it up. The writers traded on the Stargate angle and lost, and for some time they've been trying to blame their failure on the Stargate fans.
With or without Stargate it was a terrible show, and would have been killed off much, much sooner without that connection. Without the Stargate angle, it really was just a tedious soap-opera set in space.
Dont buy that at all, if you dont like something you dont watch it, life it too short to do anything else. Very few people are going to watch a show 30 episodes in that they dont like.
If the SG1 fans had all watched it the ratings would have been higher and the show kept, its the SG1 fans refusing to watch it as its not a clone of previous shows thats resulted in it getting cancelled, plain and simple really.
Wright and cooper knew this when they developed it so doubt what's happened has surprised them one bit.
Weren't you the one who said that all the people disliking the show were SG1 fan boys and now you are saying that it was the SG1 fans not watching it got it cancelled - make up your mind either the SG1 fans were watching it or not they can't be blamed for everything you know.
Well... Wright and MGM still seen hopeful to continue the SGU story in some form after all. Whether it will be anything we watch on a tv screen remains to be seen.
Even if it had dropped the entire Stargate connection it would still have been a poor show by pretty much any sci-fi standard. Dropping the Stargate connection would have meant that Stargate fans would no longer feel compelled to watch it, which would no doubt have reduced the already abysmal ratings even further.
It's been suggested that Stargate fans somehow "got SGU cancelled", which is of course utterly preposterous - if SGU had been any good at all it would have survived without needing fans from former shows to prop it up. The writers traded on the Stargate angle and lost, and for some time they've been trying to blame their failure on the Stargate fans.
With or without Stargate it was a terrible show, and would have been killed off much, much sooner without that connection. Without the Stargate angle, it really was just a tedious soap-opera set in space.
To be fair the Stargate tag probably meant that a lot of people who didn't like Stargate never bothered with this one just assuming it was another clone like Atlantis, many that liked Stargate didn't like this because it was too different. Add those two factors together and that makes it very difficult to get a big audience - I suspect the final viewing figures might have been larger without the Stargate name but we'll never know one way or the other.
FWIW I liked some of it and not others. I hated the "stones episodes" with a vengeance (I hated them on SG1 and Atlantis as well) but the others kept me watching. The whole idea of the stones was so ludicrous that I couldn't get into any storyline with them in - our brains are wired up for electrochemical reactions, how can you rewire a brain instantaneously to swap "consciousness"?:eek:
Weren't you the one who said that all the people disliking the show were SG1 fan boys and now you are saying that it was the SG1 fans not watching it got it cancelled
Isn't that around about one and the same thing
But just for you.......
Many SG1 fans did not watch it out of protest, this has been mentioned on many forums.
Some started to watch it and gave up for watever reason, at a guess because it was too serious and had none of the humour of the other series.
As bobcar says above SG1 shows will always be watched mostly by SG fans, many would have seen it was stargate and not bothered watching it because they disliked the other series, (I almost never bothered with it).
But if those who didn't watch it out of protest had given it a chance then it may have survived.
Many SG1 fans did not watch it out of protest, this has been mentioned on many forums.
And what were the rest of the worlds population protesting about, because they didn't feel it worth their while to watch either. Honestly, only a fool would "not watch" a TV programme and consider it a protest - a bit like refusing to watch an entire channel because one show with poor ratings has been cancelled.
Some started to watch it and gave up for watever reason, at a guess because it was too serious and had none of the humour of the other series.
"Too serious" - come on, we're all adults here. We can watch "serious" sci-fi when it is entertaining, thought provoking, involving. SGU was none of these things and was a turn off for most viewers, Stargate fan or not.
many would have seen it was stargate and not bothered watching it because they disliked the other series, (I almost never bothered with it).
Another typical geordielady sweeping statement - you need to give people more credit as we don't all live our lives according to such simplistic rules.
People that watch the SyFy channel and who like sci-fi as a genre would have had little reason not to give SGU a spin baring in mind all the pre-show advertising which made it very clear that SGU was not another SG1/SGA "clone".
But if those who didn't watch it out of protest had given it a chance then it may have survived.
Nonsense - these people just don't exist, and if they do they constitute only a tiny small-minded proportion of the viewing public
If people were interested in the SGU proposition, whether it be because of the Stargate franchise or because it was simply a new sci-fi show, they stopped watching SGU for one reason only and that was because it was sh1t and not because it wasn't like some other show they liked in the past.
Your points are pointless as they make no sense at all but considering you have watched 30 episodes to date I doubt you can possibly hate it as much as you make out.
And what were the rest of the worlds population protesting about, because they didn't feel it worth their while to watch either.
As I suggested earlier people who didn't like Stargate SG1 or Atlantis may well have not given SGU a second glance because they assumed it would be the same. It may well have had a bigger audience at the end without the Stargate tag because a larger percentage of those who didn't like Stargate may well have liked SGU but they never started to watch it in the first place because it was Stargate - that is of course conjecture and we will never know but it is not an unreasonable hypotheses.
As I suggested earlier people who didn't like Stargate SG1 or Atlantis may well have not given SGU a second glance because they assumed it would be the same. It may well have had a bigger audience at the end without the Stargate tag because a larger percentage of those who didn't like Stargate may well have liked SGU but they never started to watch it in the first place because it was Stargate - that is of course conjecture and we will never know but it is not an unreasonable hypotheses.
This makes perfect sense to me, some people just cant accept the reasons it got cancelled. It certainly had nothing to do with poor writing as a few here suggest.
I almost never watched it becuase of the stargate tag.
As I suggested earlier people who didn't like Stargate SG1 or Atlantis may well have not given SGU a second glance because they assumed it would be the same. It may well have had a bigger audience at the end without the Stargate tag because a larger percentage of those who didn't like Stargate may well have liked SGU but they never started to watch it in the first place because it was Stargate - that is of course conjecture and we will never know but it is not an unreasonable hypotheses.
All I can say is that people I personally know people who would never have watched the original Battlestar Galactica or many other space-based sci-fi shows (as sci-fi isn't really their cup of tea) yet they absolutely loved the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica and watched every episode...
What this says to me is that there are people out there who are prepared to give well written shows a chance without writing them off unseen, even if such shows conform to a genre they wouldn't normally enjoy.
So what I'm saying is, to claim that people didn't watch SGU simply because it was part of the Stargate franchise and contained the word "Stargate" isn't necessarily valid - no doubt there are people like that but likewise there are viewers that are more open minded than that.
The fact remains that if the show had been any good, and had it been able to stand on it's own two feet, then people - whether sci-fi fans or not, Stargate fans or not - would have watched it.
Other sci-fi shows have managed to appeal to a wider non sci-fi audience thanks to the quality of the writing. SGU tried to do likewise and failed because the writing was poor, not (IMHO) because it was part of the Stargate franchise.
So what I'm saying is, to claim that people didn't watch SGU simply because it was part of the Stargate franchise and contained the word "Stargate" isn't necessarily valid - no doubt there are people like that but likewise there are viewers that are more open minded than that.
I never claimed anything, I put forward a hypotheses which may or may not be correct - I don't see how we can ever know how much affect this had.
Obviously some people are open and others aren't, it's the relative numbers that count and which are difficult to quantify. I consider myself pretty open minded but if a new "quiz" show came along called "Deal or no deal galaxy" I would be unlikely to watch it whereas "Countdown Andromeda" I would so there is at least some possibility of the original series affecting the decision to view.
I never claimed anything, I put forward a hypotheses which may or may not be correct - I don't see how we can ever know how much affect this had.
Sorry, didn't mean it to sound as though you were the one making the claim - I meant it in a more general sense. And you're right, we'll never really know the numbers however I do believe that pointing the finger at the SG fans is merely a way for the writers to deflect the blame that lies squarely with themselves.
Obviously some people are open and others aren't, it's the relative numbers that count and which are difficult to quantify. I consider myself pretty open minded but if a new "quiz" show came along called "Deal or no deal galaxy" came along I would be unlikely to watch it whereas "Countdown Andromeda" I would so there is at least some possibility of the original series affecting the decision to view.
Oh I agree. Even my friends who watched BSG avidly were surprised that they enjoyed it so much - their initial reaction on hearing the name "Battlestar Galactica" was to immediately associate it (correctly) with the original late 70s series and to then show utter disdain for the upcoming new series. However as they saw more of BSG in the trailers in the run up to the start of the first season they began to appreciate, well you know, maybe it's actually a little bit different, not for kids, aimed at adults, could be interesting etc...
So yes, you may not initially have any interest in "Deal or no deal galaxy" but if you viewed a trailer or two with an open mind (and SGU was heavily trailed), and the show looked not half bad and likely to defy your expectations, would you or wouldn't you watch the first episode? And if the writing was good enough, maybe you'd watch the second?
I'm sure there are people who hear the word Stargate and stick their fingers in the ears while singing "lalalala not going to watch it", but I'm also fairly certain most viewers are a little more discerning. However when the writing is as poor as it was on SGU, it really doesn't matter why people chose to watch or not watch - eventually nobody is watching, and that's when the decision is made to cancel the show.
so is this show gonna have a proper ending or should i call it quits today?
Writer and producer Joe Mallozzi said in his most recent blog entry:
Major D. Davis writes: “4) Say all this doesn’t pan out…. Does Gauntlet at least give some closure and resolution…. Or is it an all out cliffhanger?”
Answer: Your first three questions require answers I can’t give at this point. Regarding Gauntlet – hard to say. Most would probably consider it a cliffhanger while I would consider it a touching, bittersweet end to the series (if it comes to it).
But either way, Brad Wright apparently has been fighting hard to get the show continued in some form. He said this in the same blog entry:
Abbas Karimjee also writes: “Do you have an idea as to when some further developments on SGU’s future will be known?”
Answer: No, but “positive progress” could be made as early as next week.
I expect we'll know whether the show will continue, as a series or in some other form, long before the rest of the season starts, so you don't need to make your mind up now It could end up on another network. Spartacus: Blood and Sand set a network record for it's premiere with something like 550,000 viewers.
As for the other comments about 'if the show had been any good, people would have watched' everyone I introduced the show to, bar my dad, loves it. That ranges from SciFi fans (friends) to people who would never usually watch SciFi, on tv anyway (aunty).
I never claimed anything, I put forward a hypotheses which may or may not be correct - I don't see how we can ever know how much affect this had.
I agree with the argument. Most of the people I've introduced to the show said they would never normally have watched it, because the Stargate name was attached. It's just how it works sometimes. When we took the girlfriends to see Star Trek as a group, they enjoyed it more than we did, despite expecting to hate it. Established franchise names can have stigmas attached.
Another typical geordielady sweeping statement - you need to give people more credit as we don't all live our lives according to such simplistic rules.
The people I know who watch the show don't tend to live their lives by 'simplistic rules'... You need to realize most people don't care enough about TV shows to spend time talking about them on the net, and if they hear of something they don't think they'll like, they won't waste their time watching it. There's nothing wrong with it, it's normal. My best friend thought the first two shows were so crap that he refused to watch SGU with me, despite me telling him how different it was. Most people I've shown it to didn't actually argue about watching it before hand, but just stated when asked that it wasn't something they usually would have watched because Stargate didn't appeal to them. I don't think it was just because it was called 'Stargate', but because they'd seen some of SG1/SGA and, compared to SGU, they're very different shows.
Fact is, there's no real way to know how many viewers when SGU started were old Stargate fans, and how many were fresh faces. All I know on the subject is what I've said so far, and that a large amount of the negative comments I've read end with sentences such as 'they should never have canceled Atlantis!!!'...
I loved the Stargate film and SG1/Atlantis TV series, and even though I've watched all the SGU eps so far I've never really warmed to it and won't miss it when it's gone nor bother with the DVD's (got all the SG1 and Atlantis ones though).
The first Atlantis "movie" has indeed been shelved indefinately following SGU's cancellation... nothing more on the SG-1 front since we were told Brad Wright was fighting for it before MGM's bankruptcy.
Which is not a bad thing, it cant really go anywhere else now
How ridiculous! Anyone with an imagination can take it wherever they want to go. Of course, having an imagination doesn't guarantee it will be enjoyable, as SGU has proven. Give it a few years and some new blood and I'm sure it could be taken in a new, and successful, direction.
Comments
Dont buy that at all, if you dont like something you dont watch it, life it too short to do anything else. Very few people are going to watch a show 30 episodes in that they dont like.
If the SG1 fans had all watched it the ratings would have been higher and the show kept, its the SG1 fans refusing to watch it as its not a clone of previous shows thats resulted in it getting cancelled, plain and simple really.
Wright and cooper knew this when they developed it so doubt what's happened has surprised them one bit.
Your right, none of the old sci-fi shows from yesteryear would have surived if they had been released now.
Sci-fi will have its time again but its going to be many years before that happens.
Once fringe is cancelled thats it for sci-fi I am afraid.
Obviously my comment doesn't apply to every Stargate fan, but your tired, lame and frankly ludicrous argument (which isn't even original) does mark you out as one of the more blinkered and rabid posters in this thread.
I do find it interesting how your life is so black and white though.
That being said, i have found myself drawn into a universe and plan to go back and watch SG1, because i'm forever being told it was much better
Even if it had dropped the entire Stargate connection it would still have been a poor show by pretty much any sci-fi standard. Dropping the Stargate connection would have meant that Stargate fans would no longer feel compelled to watch it, which would no doubt have reduced the already abysmal ratings even further.
It's been suggested that Stargate fans somehow "got SGU cancelled", which is of course utterly preposterous - if SGU had been any good at all it would have survived without needing fans from former shows to prop it up. The writers traded on the Stargate angle and lost, and for some time they've been trying to blame their failure on the Stargate fans.
With or without Stargate it was a terrible show, and would have been killed off much, much sooner without that connection. Without the Stargate angle, it really was just a tedious soap-opera set in space.
Weren't you the one who said that all the people disliking the show were SG1 fan boys and now you are saying that it was the SG1 fans not watching it got it cancelled - make up your mind either the SG1 fans were watching it or not they can't be blamed for everything you know.
FWIW I liked some of it and not others. I hated the "stones episodes" with a vengeance (I hated them on SG1 and Atlantis as well) but the others kept me watching. The whole idea of the stones was so ludicrous that I couldn't get into any storyline with them in - our brains are wired up for electrochemical reactions, how can you rewire a brain instantaneously to swap "consciousness"?:eek:
Isn't that around about one and the same thing
But just for you.......
Many SG1 fans did not watch it out of protest, this has been mentioned on many forums.
Some started to watch it and gave up for watever reason, at a guess because it was too serious and had none of the humour of the other series.
As bobcar says above SG1 shows will always be watched mostly by SG fans, many would have seen it was stargate and not bothered watching it because they disliked the other series, (I almost never bothered with it).
But if those who didn't watch it out of protest had given it a chance then it may have survived.
And what were the rest of the worlds population protesting about, because they didn't feel it worth their while to watch either. Honestly, only a fool would "not watch" a TV programme and consider it a protest - a bit like refusing to watch an entire channel because one show with poor ratings has been cancelled.
"Too serious" - come on, we're all adults here. We can watch "serious" sci-fi when it is entertaining, thought provoking, involving. SGU was none of these things and was a turn off for most viewers, Stargate fan or not.
Thanks for stating the obvious!
Another typical geordielady sweeping statement - you need to give people more credit as we don't all live our lives according to such simplistic rules.
People that watch the SyFy channel and who like sci-fi as a genre would have had little reason not to give SGU a spin baring in mind all the pre-show advertising which made it very clear that SGU was not another SG1/SGA "clone".
Nonsense - these people just don't exist, and if they do they constitute only a tiny small-minded proportion of the viewing public
If people were interested in the SGU proposition, whether it be because of the Stargate franchise or because it was simply a new sci-fi show, they stopped watching SGU for one reason only and that was because it was sh1t and not because it wasn't like some other show they liked in the past.
As I suggested earlier people who didn't like Stargate SG1 or Atlantis may well have not given SGU a second glance because they assumed it would be the same. It may well have had a bigger audience at the end without the Stargate tag because a larger percentage of those who didn't like Stargate may well have liked SGU but they never started to watch it in the first place because it was Stargate - that is of course conjecture and we will never know but it is not an unreasonable hypotheses.
This makes perfect sense to me, some people just cant accept the reasons it got cancelled. It certainly had nothing to do with poor writing as a few here suggest.
I almost never watched it becuase of the stargate tag.
All I can say is that people I personally know people who would never have watched the original Battlestar Galactica or many other space-based sci-fi shows (as sci-fi isn't really their cup of tea) yet they absolutely loved the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica and watched every episode...
What this says to me is that there are people out there who are prepared to give well written shows a chance without writing them off unseen, even if such shows conform to a genre they wouldn't normally enjoy.
So what I'm saying is, to claim that people didn't watch SGU simply because it was part of the Stargate franchise and contained the word "Stargate" isn't necessarily valid - no doubt there are people like that but likewise there are viewers that are more open minded than that.
The fact remains that if the show had been any good, and had it been able to stand on it's own two feet, then people - whether sci-fi fans or not, Stargate fans or not - would have watched it.
Other sci-fi shows have managed to appeal to a wider non sci-fi audience thanks to the quality of the writing. SGU tried to do likewise and failed because the writing was poor, not (IMHO) because it was part of the Stargate franchise.
I never claimed anything, I put forward a hypotheses which may or may not be correct - I don't see how we can ever know how much affect this had.
Obviously some people are open and others aren't, it's the relative numbers that count and which are difficult to quantify. I consider myself pretty open minded but if a new "quiz" show came along called "Deal or no deal galaxy" I would be unlikely to watch it whereas "Countdown Andromeda" I would so there is at least some possibility of the original series affecting the decision to view.
Sorry, didn't mean it to sound as though you were the one making the claim - I meant it in a more general sense. And you're right, we'll never really know the numbers however I do believe that pointing the finger at the SG fans is merely a way for the writers to deflect the blame that lies squarely with themselves.
Oh I agree. Even my friends who watched BSG avidly were surprised that they enjoyed it so much - their initial reaction on hearing the name "Battlestar Galactica" was to immediately associate it (correctly) with the original late 70s series and to then show utter disdain for the upcoming new series. However as they saw more of BSG in the trailers in the run up to the start of the first season they began to appreciate, well you know, maybe it's actually a little bit different, not for kids, aimed at adults, could be interesting etc...
So yes, you may not initially have any interest in "Deal or no deal galaxy" but if you viewed a trailer or two with an open mind (and SGU was heavily trailed), and the show looked not half bad and likely to defy your expectations, would you or wouldn't you watch the first episode? And if the writing was good enough, maybe you'd watch the second?
I'm sure there are people who hear the word Stargate and stick their fingers in the ears while singing "lalalala not going to watch it", but I'm also fairly certain most viewers are a little more discerning. However when the writing is as poor as it was on SGU, it really doesn't matter why people chose to watch or not watch - eventually nobody is watching, and that's when the decision is made to cancel the show.
Writer and producer Joe Mallozzi said in his most recent blog entry:
Major D. Davis writes: “4) Say all this doesn’t pan out…. Does Gauntlet at least give some closure and resolution…. Or is it an all out cliffhanger?”
Answer: Your first three questions require answers I can’t give at this point. Regarding Gauntlet – hard to say. Most would probably consider it a cliffhanger while I would consider it a touching, bittersweet end to the series (if it comes to it).
But either way, Brad Wright apparently has been fighting hard to get the show continued in some form. He said this in the same blog entry:
Abbas Karimjee also writes: “Do you have an idea as to when some further developments on SGU’s future will be known?”
Answer: No, but “positive progress” could be made as early as next week.
I expect we'll know whether the show will continue, as a series or in some other form, long before the rest of the season starts, so you don't need to make your mind up now
As for the other comments about 'if the show had been any good, people would have watched' everyone I introduced the show to, bar my dad, loves it. That ranges from SciFi fans (friends) to people who would never usually watch SciFi, on tv anyway (aunty).
I agree with the argument. Most of the people I've introduced to the show said they would never normally have watched it, because the Stargate name was attached. It's just how it works sometimes. When we took the girlfriends to see Star Trek as a group, they enjoyed it more than we did, despite expecting to hate it. Established franchise names can have stigmas attached.
The people I know who watch the show don't tend to live their lives by 'simplistic rules'... You need to realize most people don't care enough about TV shows to spend time talking about them on the net, and if they hear of something they don't think they'll like, they won't waste their time watching it. There's nothing wrong with it, it's normal. My best friend thought the first two shows were so crap that he refused to watch SGU with me, despite me telling him how different it was. Most people I've shown it to didn't actually argue about watching it before hand, but just stated when asked that it wasn't something they usually would have watched because Stargate didn't appeal to them. I don't think it was just because it was called 'Stargate', but because they'd seen some of SG1/SGA and, compared to SGU, they're very different shows.
Fact is, there's no real way to know how many viewers when SGU started were old Stargate fans, and how many were fresh faces. All I know on the subject is what I've said so far, and that a large amount of the negative comments I've read end with sentences such as 'they should never have canceled Atlantis!!!'...
If you like it and hope for some sort of resolution, you are probably not going to get it.
Which is not a bad thing, it cant really go anywhere else now
How ridiculous! Anyone with an imagination can take it wherever they want to go. Of course, having an imagination doesn't guarantee it will be enjoyable, as SGU has proven. Give it a few years and some new blood and I'm sure it could be taken in a new, and successful, direction.