Quote:
Originally Posted by Slite
And then Joss Wheadon did something amazing, sort of combined the two and created Firefly... To bad the people with the purse couldnt understand how fantastic Firefly was.
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How fantastic it would be was irrelevant to their decision. It's all about the ratings, and the revenue generated. The best TV show in the world will get canceled after three episodes if the ratings aren't good.
I thought the best show on TV at the time, period, was Joe Straczynski's Babylon 5. But every season, there was the question of whether it would get renewed, and it's a minor miracle it lasted the full five seasons. (I think Season 5 was weak because Joe faced the possibility of not getting a renewal, and took steps to largely wrap the story up in Season 4 because of that. I sometimes wonder how things would have been had Joe known he
did have Season 5 to work in.)
And Joe had the additional complication that B5 was made for the syndication market, and sold to stations not affiliated with a larger network. As time went on, there were less and less independent stations to sell to, as more and more affiliated with someone, and the time slot was used by network programming.
TV is a
mass market medium. I consider a decent genre show to be a happy exception to the general mediocre quality of programming. Genre shows in in SF, pretty much by definition, have higher production costs and smaller audiences.
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Dennis