The Unfulfilled Promise of Gritty Space Opera

I found this article on facebook earlier today on io9's newsfeed, and thought it was interesting, as one thing I miss at the moment on television - is that there is no space operas showing. And I really wish there was.

Linky

 

I've never cared much for "gritty realism" in my space opera (in fact, I don't care for the term in general).

Maybe it's tough to get a show like that off the ground since all the comparisons now are either to Star Trek or nuBattlestar? Those are a lot to live up to.

 

I think two of the big factors are how popular fantasy has become since Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter first came out in 2001 and the fact TV production has changed to try and get an immediate hit with a pilot rather then give a show a season to make its money back which is obviously very important for a space opera with a lot of large sets.

 

I don't think many people want to see it. That's why there isn't any on the horizon, except for movies.

 

There was a space opere during the naughties.

Andromeda.

 

I think for any future projects to work, they are going to have to get someone who has read a lot of scifi and can adapt things to the television world.
The modern audience is too sophisticated to be captured with mediocre writing and hackneyed concepts dating back to the 50s. BSG expl;ored the gritty side-now they have to find and take the next step.

 

In BSG they actually had something resembling sex now and then too.

 

"What happened" is that space opera - gritty or bubbly - is expensive, and audiences are fragmenting into smaller groups, meaning it's harder to justify a big budget to serve their tastes vs doing something that is nichey & cheap (aka, the SyFy channel strategy).

Somebody figure out that conundrum, you win a kewpie doll.

If that article's theories about why people don't want "gritty" space opera are true (and I'm skeptical that the whole thing isn't 90% economic), then a good old fashioned corny us-vs-them space opera could really catch on. But who's going to take that chance vs just doing another cop show in sci fi window dressing?

nuBSG would never appear on a major network because no space opera, not even an old-fashioned corny one, can get the audience needed to justify the cost. That will happen only on cable, where they have more than advertising to support their programming.

Ideally, it should happen on the most well-heeled segment of TV - premium cable - but then the question is, are they too damn sophisticated to give their audience something as "silly" as space opera? HBO and Showtime don't seem very interested in sci fi at all.

 

They would be if all the female charcaters were half-naked and they all fucked the hero twenty minutes after a bloody set-piece battle. It's doing wonders for Spartacus.

 

Spartacus is on Starz! A space opera on Starz would be like Lex, but sleazier and less restrained. On HBO or Showtime, it would be more like Game of Thrones, not something you can sneer at.

I'd love it if there was a space opera on: Starz, HBO or Showtime (they're pretty interchangeable in their approach), AMC, FX, TNT and yeah let's let Skiffy play, too. They'd all be distinctly different. I'd watch some and avoid the others, but at least there would be several to choose from.

 

I find the argument that's it more about space opera in general being expensive quite persuasive. I am not generally a fan of gritty sci-fi shows (depth is not synonymous with grit) but I don't think a light-hearted one can be explosive enough out of the audience blocks to be cost-effective either.

The series that would theoretically stand the best chance of changing this dynamic would be the much-promised Star Wars live action TV show. It has the brand to capture lots of viewers, and if it worked it would have potential to act as a tentpole, enabling a diverse range of other sci-fi TV series (including "gritty" ones) to be commissioned in its wake as being "like SW, but..."

 

Problem solved. Make Star Trek a fantasy - a Talosian illusion and set it on Talos IV. Turn Kirk into Vina, etc., create a religion around the Talosians and have a primitive society led by Captain Pike (Mr. delusional, himself). Therefore none of it is real. Include V'ger and Q and walah! it's grounded in fantasy, almost similar to Planet of Titans even.

 

The Star Wars brand name would get attention, but if the SFX aren't as spectacular as the movies, and they won't be, people will bitch. If Lucas makes good on his threat to make it a dark and gritty show about bounty hunters and not Jedi, the bitching will reach catastrophic proportions.

A dark and gritty show about space bounty hunters on, say, FX, could be a big hit - but I wouldn't slap the Star Wars brand on it. Far too confusing. If someone wants to make a live-action show that has the same character types and style as The Clone Wars, that could work - but since animation is working fine, is there a point to doing that?

 

The TNT series, Falling Skies while it doesn't fit the catagory perfectly of 'space opera,' because it isn't set in space, I personally consider it the sci-fi alternative to The Walking Dead and has many components of the drama that you're speaking of.

 

Star Trek is a fantasy.

 

space-based space opera.

Virtuality (2009), Revolution (2009) didn't make it.

Defying Gravity (2009)was science-based science fiction to me set on a new ship but felt real and very heavy baggage characters with flawed characters. YMMV

nuBSG was successful and gritty.
Farscape felt gritty to me.
While a fantasy the Star Wars franchise production design has always felt lived-in and dirty.

as the article states:

T'Pol's drug addition being a major flawed character nod in season 3.

I felt the feature film Moon (2009) had this dirty lived-in production design feeling.

currently there is an upcoming kids TV show that is a space opera.
Bravest Warriors!
that is the next thing for kids to at least see space opera while they are very young even if it's not gritty.

 

Still got blood and nekkid people in it...

 

My point is, Starz is not the same as HBO or Showtime.

 

Some loose ideas of what constitutes "space opera", I guess it's become more generalized to any sci-fi in space now.

I wonder if we got spoiled in the post-TNG age, historically we had a lot of cash-strapped sci-fi but now we expect it to be high-end glossiness. I'd love to get another space rogue series like Lexx, Red Dwarf, Firefly and so on. Though instead of Farscape I'd probably get Starhunter LOL.

Lexx actually was on Showtime, as was Outer Limits, Odyssey 5, Stargate, Total Recall 2070, Jeremiah and the like. I wonder if in this new age of cable series though if they couldn't cook up something interesting.

 

Meanwhile our good friends at SyFy are doing their damnedest to destroy peoples impression of what science fiction is all about.