sf/f TV development news - 2013

Is there any tv show, then, whose fans aren't a minority?

 

Not these days. As pointed out above, the modern entertainment landscape is so fractured that even the most successful shows are only watched by a small percentage of the viewing audience. According to Nielsen, the highest-rated show on all of American television in the week of March 25th, for instance, got 11.4 million viewers, which is about 10% of the nation's households. That's about as good as it gets these days. Every show's fans are a numerical minority of the country as a whole, so it's completely trivial and spurious to point that out.

Indeed, last week's Game of Thrones premiere scored higher in the ratings than any scripted show on FOX in all of 2013 so far.

 

No. There are no mythical "modern standards" that can turn ten percent of an audience into a majority. It is "completely trivial and spurious" to claim that the majority of people esteem any television show as good or great. In most contexts, such as politics, ten percent is often regarded as borderline insignificant!

 

If that's the case, then what does the fact that a show is "only" liked by a minority have to do with it being a failure or a success?

People here have named plenty of reasons why the show is a success (great ratings & dvd sales, several awards, good reviews, a phenomenal IMDb rating), so the only standard by which you can call it a failure is your own personal taste. Why do you spend countless posts trying to convince everyone that it's a "failure", when all you're really saying is that you happen to not like it?

 

This. A hundred times.

 

Exactly. Of course some people are under the sad misapprehension that their opinion is objective truth. And going so far as to say that every single TV show is a failure that's disliked by most of the public because all shows, even the hits, are only watched by a small percent of the population is just rank stupidity.

 

Well, as long as Rank is involved (Admiral, Colonel...?)

Games of Thrones doesn't appeal to me, (Not sure if it's got the same volume of sex that True Blood does, but, I watched the first couple True Blood episodes and there was 2 or 3 sex scenes in those episodes, which is way overboard for my taste. I've got no problem with a little sex, and prefer it to be pertinent to the plot, but, 2 or 3 scenes each episode is too much, an can' possibly be relevant/necessary for the plot). plus the graphic violence and the Medieval setting aren't necessarily my thing either (Though I do love The Walking Dead)

But, obviously the show is popular, since it's getting competing ratings with what's on Free TV (which is a least 3 times the available audienc HBO has) that continues getting renewed each season.

 

But this nonsense is great for keeping my thread bumped while waiting for more actual news on the thread topic.

 

You know, I'm starting to see STJ's point of view. How can Game of Thrones be a hit when the vast majority of intelligent life in the universe hasn't watched the show?? When you think about it, that 10 million people is just an infinitesimally small percentage of the possible audience. It's just.....


Sorry couldn't keep a straight face any longer.

 

Exactly. stj, you're engaged in a classic abuse of statistics: taking raw numbers out of context and thereby grossly misrepresenting what they actually mean. A majority is just a number -- a value greater than fifty percent of a total group -- but numbers are only meaningful in relation to their context. In some contexts, like an election between two candidates, it matters whether something is a majority or not. But in other contexts, it's a completely useless standard. If there's a Thanksgiving dinner attended by a family of twelve, and no one person has a majority of the pumpkin pie, that doesn't mean everybody hated the pumpkin pie. It just means that the pie was divided up among such a large number of people that it was impossible for any one of them to get anywhere near 50%. So the majority would be an irrelevant figure in that context, and citing it would demonstrate nothing except the citer's ignorance of statistics.

The figure that is relevant here is a plurality: the largest share that any of the competitors gets out of the total. If there are five shows competing for a time slot, and show A gets 15% of the viewers, B gets 9%, C gets 24%, D gets 36%, and E gets 16%, then D is obviously the most popular show. What matters isn't whether any of them gets more than half, but which one gets the largest percentage, which one does best compared to the others. And of course these days there are dozens or hundreds of shows competing for the same slot in any given market. So if one show gets even as much as 10 percent of the whole when it's one of hundreds of competitors, that's actually an amazingly good showing. Think about the math. If, say, 200 shows were all watched by equal numbers of people, each one would have to get only half a percent of the total. So for one show to get ten percent, to do twenty times better than the average, is very impressive.

 

What's funny about all this is that HBO's whole strategy is that they're not trying appeal to the majority of viewers (not that any network or channel does anymore).

They justify their premium price by deliberately creating shows that will appeal only to the select few willing to pay for premium content. They would be the first to dismiss the notion that their shows should be popular in the mass market sense.

 

Syfy, Robert Zemeckis developing gated community thriller

Also

Syfy announces scripted dramas in development

 

Thanks! Good to see any space opera sighting...lots more than I was hoping for...

Seems like some overlap between the premises of SyFy's Blake's 7 remake and Clandestine, but I don't mind there being so much space opera that they start stepping on each others' toes.

 

^^^^^^^^

Infinity, "Lost in space Richard Branson is." LOL

or

Star Ship Trump Tower - starring Donald Trump as Captain Trump, and his cast of millionaires fighting their way back from the Delta Quadrant.

 

And changing focus radically, a bit of genre from IFC:

Just a script at this point....

 

Ringworld and Childhood's End miniseries in the works at SyFy!

 

Hmm. Well, I'm glad that Syfy has so many space projects, but it's a shame they abandoned Robert Hewitt Wolfe's Defender. At least RHW has something in development, though it's an alternate-world urban fantasy instead.

Of course one can't really judge a show from these preliminary descriptions, but so far the most promising-sounding one is Sojourn. The idea of a show set on a sublight generation ship, stuck in that claustrophobic environment rather than being able to visit planets-of-the-week, is a nice one, not something that's really been done on TV, aside from the infamously bad The Starlost and a couple of failed pilots (Earth Star Voyager, Virtuality).

Infinity does sound derivative of Farscape, Stargate Universe, and the like, but the intriguing thing is that it's from Javier Grillo-Marxuach. Anything from the creator of The Middleman is worth a look (though I'd be happier if someone would just resurrect The Middleman with the original cast and crew).

I don't have a strong opinion about Orion and Clandestine, though both could potentially be worthwhile if done right. As for the former, it's always nice to see a show with a female action lead, but I'm not crazy about war stories. As for the latter, the "band of criminals" idea suggests parallels to Blake's 7 or Firefly, though I doubt it'd be much like B7 since Syfy's already making a reboot of that. Another possible way to go would be something more like Leverage or The Sting, with the criminals as comic heroes pulling elaborate scams.

 

Jamie Foxx To Write, Direct & Produce Syfy Horror Anthology Series For October Debut

Also

 

Whoa, did SyFy get taken over by Pod people?

It'd be great if even half their potential Space Operas see the light of day. We already know Blake's 7 has a guarantee of 13 episodes, plus another 4 or 5 possibilities. This could be fantastic

Last thing I watched on SyFy was the Series Finale of Sanctuary or Merlin Series 5

 

Syfy has announced they've ordered the production of a pilot for High Moon. You can read the full story here.