What happened to this genre?

[CmdrShep2183]

I admit I was not into science fiction until I played this video game called Mass Effect under the recommendation of a friend. I thought the Battle for the Citadel scene was epic. I wish there was stuff like that on TV. Back in the 1990s and 2000s we had space operas like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and Babylon 5. Why don't we see space opera shows on TV anymore? Did the network execs decide the genre was dead? Did people lose interest in space travel? Why is this genre dead on TV? Did people lose interest? Does this generation express no interest in shows like this? Are they now considered nerdy/geeky by this generation? Will space opera go the way of the Western?



Is it time for the epic space opera to make a comeback? Guardians of the Galaxy was huge success. If the next Star Wars is successful we can to see a flooding of more space adventures on our screens.

[007_ctrl_room]

I think we need a Mass Effect TV show

[Kato]

Nobody liked Firefly so nobody dares make a new SciFi show

Hm... from what I know the last Star Trek and Stargate shows were not that successful (citation needed) which kind of put a damper on that. I'll have to admit, I can't recall a successful show "recently", but then I might have missed/be forgetting something. I mean, obviously there are still SciFi shows of varying quality, but no "explore space!" shows that come to mind.
I guess as with many things, there are trends also in TV shows, and at the moment it's just not hip... or nobody has a good idea for one. Sure they could always make a new Star Trek what with the reboots, or turn GOTG into a series... (hah!) but in the end, not to say I don't have interest but if nobody is willing to write one I'd rather have none than one that was made just because there's a gap to fill.

[lt_murgen]

is it time for the epic space opera to make a comeback? Guardians of the Galaxy was huge success. If the next Star Wars is successful we can to see a flooding of more space adventures on our screens.

I doubt it. From a cost / benefit TV executive perspective, why waste the money on sets and special effects? You can "do a sci-fi show" without having to have the cast leave the earth. Start with shows like "might med" and "lab rats" (superheroes and cyborgs), Agents of SHIELD- have the aliens come to earth; Defiance (aliens to earth); Dominion (aliens are angels); Orphan Black (clones); and so on.

All of them fall roughly into the sci-fi genre (as opposed to fantasy genre). All have much less cost for the net effect of exploring the same large ideas sci-fi shows like Star Trek was famous for.

Also, you have the comic-book wave. How many shows are now based on comic books? How many have only limited special effects and are, in essence, dramas with exotic plotlines? How many do well enough to survive?

[Aotrs Commander]

The stupid part was when they cancelled SG-1... for one other reason than it had been going for ten years, and it was like the idea of a sci-fi show running longer than a non-sci-fi show was some sort of gross sin against the studioes or something.



I weas entirely unsurprised when SG Universe failed, since when removing the light-hearted element to make it "darker" it was removing a significant part of SG-1's charm.

Sadly, I suspect we may not see the like of Babylon 5 again. Despite the crippling idiocy of it being now cheaper than ever to do starship battles (I mean for frag's sake. B5's CGI still holds up perfectly fine twenty years later).

And in ten-twenty years, there will probably be no super-hero shows and TV might have moved on from... I dunno, where do they go after plumbing basically every permutation of crime dramas...? Maybe they won't...?

[An Enemy Spy]

Genres wax and wane over time, but they never vanish. Westerns used to be king(probably the reason Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as a Western in space) but you only have to watch Toy Story to see what happened to them. Sci Fi was big in the nineties, then CSI came out and it was all about forensic crime shows which blossomed into lots of detective shows and before too long a show with an easy to copy premise will be a huge hit and the other networks will try and get their own version of it out, maybe even making something as or even more popular and soon we'll be flooded with shows of that genre.
And after all that, people still like movies about cowboys.

[-D-]

The cheapness of Reality TV will probably just kill most genres. CSI was recently canceled because Reality TV is:

A) Cheaper
B) People still watch it

Compared to rating of Reality shows SF will always be more expensive and less popular.

[DigoDragon]

I heard from the radio DJ last week that reality TV was waning with viewership and the big thing currently are super hero shows. Dunno how true it is, but I do agree that genres cycle every few years.

[BannedInSchool]

I weas entirely unsurprised when SG Universe failed, since when removing the light-hearted element to make it "darker" it was removing a significant part of SG-1's charm.

I don't know that SG:Universe was exactly bad, but it wasn't Stargate at all. Some of the character conflict I liked, but overall I just rolled my eyes at how overly dramatic they were trying to make it, and Doctor McBoobs' boobs were seemingly intentionally featured, also breaking the illusion. Oh, and the body-switching drama. I guess if there weren't some things I had liked about it I wouldn't be as annoyed in the execution.

Also Futurama didn't have quite the same bite when it came back from the grave, IMO.

[Yora]

Everything comes back eventually. A second Star Trek show had been planed 10 years after the first one ended, but didn't ever get made. And it was 20 years after the end of the original series until The Next Generation came around. Sci-fi was pretty big on TV in the 60s and 70s and then it seems to have almost disappeared until TNG started the boom of the 90s.
Wouldn't be surprised if it's coming back by the end of the decade. That superhero stuff has to end some time.

[Closet_Skeleton]

Nobody liked Firefly so nobody dares make a new SciFi show

Battlestar Galactica remake was a hit afterwards, so no, that makes no sense. It got a prequel soon after it finished, which failed.

Franchise fatigue killed off most of the Space Opera shows. People got sick of them.

[BannedInSchool]

Oh, and Enterprise was just kind of meh for me. They hyped "no shields or transporters" but reneged on that pretty quickly. Charging your hull plating to defeat/deflect incoming fire is effectively shields. Jeffery Coombs (IIRC) was somewhat entertaining, but they didn't seem to really have a direction to what they were doing until the Temporal Cold War, which was just kinda weird.

[Grinner]

Franchise fatigue killed off most of the Space Opera shows. People got sick of them.

In fairness, of the ones I've watched, many of the more recent ones have a very slow, plodding way of building up drama. I can only sit on the edge of my seat so long before the anxiety becomes overwhelming.

[Rodin]

The stupid part was when they cancelled SG-1... for one other reason than it had been going for ten years, and it was like the idea of a sci-fi show running longer than a non-sci-fi show was some sort of gross sin against the studioes or something.

Eh, I wasn't sad to see SG-1 die. The series was good through season 7, but had started to go downhill in season 8 and didn't really survive Richard Dean Anderson leaving those last two seasons.

For a show with an ongoing plot, 5-7 seasons is really about as long as you want to take it before things start getting ludicrous. You can only almost-blow-up-the-world so many times.

[Derthric]

Eh, I wasn't sad to see SG-1 die. The series was good through season 7, but had started to go downhill in season 8 and didn't really survive Richard Dean Anderson leaving those last two seasons.

For a show with an ongoing plot, 5-7 seasons is really about as long as you want to take it before things start getting ludicrous. You can only almost-blow-up-the-world so many times.

They really should have relaunched SG-1, as a second spinoff when they changed from Anderson to Browder.

But I think the dearth of space opera type shows has multiple culprits. One big one is the Sci-Fi channel to SyFy rebranding. They backed off the genre shows in favor of cheaper to produce earthbound stuff, some of which I enjoyed like Warehouse 13 or Eureka, as well as "reality" programming. So what should have been a backbone of development for the genre was closed off.

Another thing is that there is still SF being produced its just changed form thanks to shows like Lost and Heroes. They add in layers of mystery and speculation and that has sort of becoming the topping of choice for today's SF. Shows become more labyrinthine character dramas with odd backdrops of magic/science/destiny. Heck this added tone of "mystery" is part of what caused the problems with SG-U and the ending of the Mass Effect Trilogy.

SyFy is trying to rebrand it's rebrand with newer scripted shows but they've lost too much cache and don't exactly have the budget for whats needed. Hell some of what they produce makes B5 look big budget *cough*Defiance*cough*.

It's basically going to take some team with vision and money to bring this genre back let alone back to glory.

[Flickerdart]

SF has been supplanted by superhero stuff. It's got the same demographic appeal, roughly, so it works out.

[BannedInSchool]

SyFy is trying to rebrand it's rebrand with newer scripted shows but they've lost too much cache and don't exactly have the budget for whats needed.

I only gave Continuum a look because I thought it was a Canadian show SyFy was also airing. Oh, looking it up I was right about that. Ha.

[Rodin]

SF has been supplanted by superhero stuff. It's got the same demographic appeal, roughly, so it works out.

Well, monetarily. For those of us who don't much care about superhero stuff and want to see space shows, that leaves us kinda boned.

[Kitten Champion]

SF has been supplanted by superhero stuff. It's got the same demographic appeal, roughly, so it works out.

The expansion of the comic book properties into television really seems to be hitting ground now-ish though, while the decline of the space opera came with the conclusion of BSG in 2009 - and likely slightly before that. As Derthric said, the Syfy network transitioned into doing cheaper genre shows and eventually reality series, while Abram's shows like Lost and Fringe had broader appeal with general audiences as far as network programming went.

I think if there was going to be a revival of the genre's popularity on the small screen it may begin with HBO's Foundation series, or some high quality production out of Netflix. Something that could comfortably be termed as "good" to get people interested again. Because I think the extent of quality we'll see otherwise is stuff like Dark Matter, which is okay but hardly going to light the world on fire with its innovative take on the genre.

[Traab]

I think the problem is the difficulty in pitching it. See, if you want to piggyback on an established franchise, you have to come up with a new angle that makes it awesome. As an example, ds9. Pretty massive departure from tng or voyager in content and tone. But they made it work (in a fairly big way) That gets hard when you have already gone in multiple directions with the established franchise, and it gets harder if any of them flop, or just dont perform as well as expected.

The other option is to try and come up with something new. Good luck. Having to convince people to give something brand new a lot of money to try it out is tricky. Its easier to justify a reboot or rebranding of an established franchise because everyone knows there will be people willing to watch anything with the name star trek or bsg on it. Convincing money men that this idea noone has tried before will rake in the cash isnt easy.

It gets even harder now because trends are moving away from sci fi type shows and other genres are proving to be money makers. Reality tv shows may be declining, but they are way cheaper to make since you dont need special effects, crazy costumes and designs and a lot of script writers. Tell the money men you can make this show cheap AND it has a formula proven to bring in respectable cash? They wont argue against that.

[Yora]

Oh, and Enterprise was just kind of meh for me. They hyped "no shields or transporters" but reneged on that pretty quickly. Charging your hull plating to defeat/deflect incoming fire is effectively shields. Jeffery Coombs (IIRC) was somewhat entertaining, but they didn't seem to really have a direction to what they were doing until the Temporal Cold War, which was just kinda weird.

They tried to remake a show from the late 80s in the 2000s, constantly recycling old plots. That show was good riddance.

And Jeffrey Combs is great in all his Star Trek roles.

[BannedInSchool]

A Lensmen series would split the difference between police, space opera, and superhero somewhat. Couldn't be worse that the Flash Gordon remake, which I don't remember as being BAD bad. Ah, heck, that was already seven years ago.

Heh, and on SyFy going with wrastling programming, TNT thought it was a great idea to pair Babylon 5 and Crusade with their Wrastling, but while the demographics were the same the actual individual viewers didn't cross over. And that's why TNT screwed-over JMS and Crusade; it wasn't increasing their wrastling ratings.

[Kitten Champion]

The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure if DS9 was done now it would get tremendous ratings. The binge-watching DVR-ers along with digital distribution and the BR box-set markets could easily have made the more serialized approach it took work like gangbusters now.

If I were approaching Paramount or CBS or whomever owns the current TV rights to Trek, DS9 would essentially be my pitch for how the series would go. The only thing I'd really insist on doing differently would be to recognize that there are, in fact, LGBT people in the future.

[Closet_Skeleton]

You can't have canonically homosexual characters in Star Trek, nobody would be able to slash them.

[Kitten Champion]

You can't have canonically homosexual characters in Star Trek, nobody would be able to slash them.

That's why we have the mirror universe.

[Lethologica]

There's a big gaping hole in the high-budget TV market waiting for a good space opera show to come along and fill it. If Foundation is successful, it'll whet the networks' appetite for those sorts of shows.

[Closet_Skeleton]

There's a huge gaping hole in the market for a prime time show about BDSM, doesn't mean it would be the best use of a budget to exploit it.

If you think your demographic is underserved, there's probably a hundred potentially more financially lucrative obscure demographics that are even worse served.

The first guy to get a live action American version of a Sports manga off the ground is going to make millions, but it will probably never happen.

Its very easy to make a bad Space Opera show, a high budget one would be a massive risk. Making a lot of Space Opera shows and then cancelling the rubbish ones and giving their budget to the good one would be smarter but you'd need some kind of fad to kick that off.

The other trick is to take advantage of the fact that genre fans will put up with rubbish by making sure there's only one Space Opera. Then it doesn't matter how good it is, they won't have any choice not to watch it. Only problem is that the moment a second bad Space Opera pops up everyone will notice and both shows will fail.

[Lethologica]

So, that's a lot of angles to address.

Someone decided Foundation was a good use of budget, so insofar as you seem to be arguing that networks don't consider space opera a good use of budget, I'm not sure why that is.

There's this odd strain of 'criticizing the entitled nerd who myopically chases space opera' running through your post, and I'm not sure where it comes from.

A BDSM show has some very particular problems with prime-time viewing. Are you proposing that similar very particular problems apply to space opera? Are these problems going to keep Foundation off the air?

Live-action American adaptation of a sports manga is basically Friday Night Lights, which was critically acclaimed and commercially mediocre. I'm honestly not sure what point you're trying to make, though. Is 'American sports fan' the proposed obscure, financially lucrative, underserved demographic?

You suggest that genre fans will be trapped, whereas previous posters have suggested that genre fans can just go watch superhero series/films (not to mention a likely overlap with GoT viewership). Who am I to believe?

[Legato Endless]

Genre's might endure, but sub-genres do violently die. Part of the decline of the Space Opera is that, much like Square Enix being singled out as the only measuring stick for JRPGs, Star Trek's decline was taken as a significant sign of Space Opera's dropping out of interest. But it's more Idealistic Science Fiction that's dead. Star Trek as it was originally conceived doesn't float in today's environment. And NuTrek and DS9 (which was prescient in several ways) are proof enough of the need to adapt.

Hell, I doubt it's any coincidence that the rise of the Fantasy film in the 2000s wasn't connected beyond the tech development making it possible. As people lost their general faith in the an overtly optimistic future, the past became ripe for romanticization.

I only gave Continuum a look because I thought it was a Canadian show SyFy was also airing. Oh, looking it up I was right about that. Ha.

New season is coming out this summer, incidentally.

Genres wax and wane over time, but they never vanish. Westerns used to be king(probably the reason Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as a Western in space) but you only have to watch Toy Story to see what happened to them...And after all that, people still like movies about cowboys.

Yes, but the heyday is certainly over. Westerns are still made, but they're much more incidental. You aren't guaranteed any real number of them even within a decade or so. Especially not with a decent budget. It's not quite what genre fans want. For another example, how many Caveman films came out after Quest for Fire?

BDSM show has some very particular problems with prime-time viewing. Are you proposing that similar very particular problems apply to space opera? Are these problems going to keep Foundation off the air?

Both would have to justify the opportunity cost. Which is the real reason we are not getting one. It's not just the budget. It's...why make this when there's a dozen other things that we know will work based on the current demographics.

[Rodin]

One thing that worries me is how the demographics are being measured. Back when SG-1 was in its later seasons I saw a Q&A panel at a convention where one of the show producers requested that the viewers NOT watch the show online and NOT DVR it. And when I say "not watch online", I don't mean Torrent it or anything like that - I mean watching it on Hulu, legally.

This was because the purse strings were tied directly to LIVE television. Any other method of watching would not be counted. Given the younger audience of SG-1, this was patently insane - many of the people who watched the shows didn't even have cable.