No. It was a reference to Community..."6 seasons and a movie!". A joke, if you will, though apparently not a successful one.
Dark Matter Season 3
- Thread starter JD
- Start date
No. It was a reference to Community..."6 seasons and a movie!". A joke, if you will, though apparently not a successful one.
Still, Universal appears to be the "main owners" for Killjoys - they're the ones putting out the Blu-rays, unlike Dark Matter.
A reason that's seen many a show shitcanned (or in the case of Supergirl almost shit canned)
TV these days is getting disturbingly monopolistic. If the producers of a product (the production company) and the vendors of a product (the network) are owned by the same people, that works against fair competition. I believe production companies are still required by law to offer their shows to any network willing to bid for them, so that there is fair competition, but networks are increasingly reluctant to air any shows they don't also produce. And too many shows get cancelled these days just for not being in-house productions, which hardly seems fair.
So why did it go 3 seasons then? Why even air it in the first place?
Just a reminder... slavery has been officially banned in the US for over 150 years now.
I watched Dark Matter up to a couple of episodes into season two - I was 50/50 on whether it was worth catching up on, but this decision tips it into another one of the (very) many 'genre' shows I tried but didn't persevere with.
I've seen the first episode of The Expanse. Does it get better ?
I just binge watched both seasons of The Expanse. Interesting plot that has potential. Looking forward to the next season, assuming there will be one.
Season 2 isn't available on Netflix until next Friday here but I hear it diverges from the novels and doesn't finish the second volume. I prefer the stories told in the novels - the first season was a pretty good adaptation for the most part but perhaps seemed to lose something in the process. Not sure what...
On the other hand we have the irony that the networks complain about how expensive it is to produce tv shows.
Sure with the different production companies, the networks don't make as money from tv shows but they sure as shit don't' carry any of the risk either.
All TV broadcasting is a gamble. You buy something that you believe has the potential to make a profit. If it succeeds at making enough profit to offset the cost of buying and making it, then you keep it. If it doesn't make enough profit to offset the cost, then you cancel it. The greater the cost or the lower the profit, the higher the bar becomes for its success, but you still buy it if you believe it has a chance to clear that bar. It's a riskier gamble, yes, but no show is ever guaranteed success. If a lack of guarantee scared networks off, there'd be no TV at all.
Syfy considered both Dark Matter and Killjoys worth the gamble to put on the air. But because they didn't profit as much from DM, it had a higher bar to clear in order to earn renewal. It's like horse racing. You know that some horses are more likely to win than others, but you still let the less likely ones race, because you know that at least there's a chance they could win, and just having them run will make you money because you know at least some people will bet on them. (Although I know nothing about horse racing beyond what I see in fiction, so I'm not sure how good an analogy this is.)
What they haven't figured out is that pulling people's favorite series is going to make them less likely to trust the network and more likely adversely affect future revenue. I've now been burned too many times by SyFy so I'll try actively not to contribute to their income stream in future, even indirectly.
I'll never understand why people think that way, as if these were arbitrary decisions by the networks. It's the viewers who determine whether a show succeeds or fails, by whether they watch it. Networks have no control over that, although occasionally they can make decisions that hurt viewership such as scheduling a show badly or failing to promote it. But as I said, no show is ever guaranteed success. It has to be watched. It has to have enough viewers that advertisers are willing to buy air time and thereby help fund its continued existence. Networks can't afford to keep a show that loses too much money, no matter how much they may want to. So it makes no sense to blame the network when it's the audience that determines a show's fate. It may be your favorite series, but that doesn't mean the majority of the viewing public shares your tastes.
I mean, good grief, today's sci-fi fans don't know how lucky they have it. I grew up as an SF fan in a time when SF was in the cultural ghetto, when it was a niche interest that got no respect from critics, and when it was far more expensive to make because they didn't have CGI effects yet. So it was rare for a genre show to make it past one season, and a three-year run was actually pretty good. (Five years was usually the record. Prior to ST:TNG, the only US genre shows I know of that ran more than five seasons were Adventures of Superman, Bewitched, and Dark Shadows.) I grew up expecting the shows I loved to be cancelled after one or two seasons, because it happened so often. I didn't have the luxury of believing that my favorites were everyone else's favorites too.
Meh, I think perhaps you're too forgiving - we should expect more for our money. At least, everyone should now know to expect the worst of SyFy.
No, we shouldn't. It's unwise to expect that any television show is entitled to succeed. That's ignoring how many shows get cancelled every year, frequently after one season or less. Getting renewed at all is beating the odds. This is a competitive industry and it's expensive to put a show on the air, especially a science fiction show with all its visual effects and all the sets and props and costumes other unusual things that have to be built from scratch.
That's bull. Every network cancels shows. That's a routine fact of life. The unfortunate irony is, when a network carries more of the kind of shows that you care about, that inevitably means that it will cancel more of the shows you care about, simply because a lot of shows get cancelled, period. And that means that it feels like those networks are meaner to the shows we like, when actually they're more supportive of those shows because they bought them in the first place. But they can't guarantee that enough people will watch them to avoid cancellation.
Someone here is starting to come across like a commenter on TV Line, where every cancellation and every character death is proof that the network is evil and out to get you.
Network cancels show you don't watch = crickets. Network cancels show you do watch = hyperbole and outrage!
Network cancels show you don't watch = crickets. Network cancels show you do watch = hyperbole and outrage!
It's worth remembering that there were doubts about Dark Matter's renewal (and Killjoys' too) after both the first and second seasons. Neither show was enough of an unambiguous success to make renewal a given. So it's an accomplishment that they made it even to three seasons. We could've gotten much less. Within the past two years, Syfy has cancelled three series after only one season each, Hunters, Aftermath, and Incorporated.
Here are the run lengths of Sci Fi/Syfy's scripted shows, those that have come to an end or have known end dates, based on Wikipedia's list of shows counted as "first-run" (which includes some then-current imports):
1 season:
Mission Genesis
Welcome to Paradox
The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne
Black Scorpion
The Outer Limits (picked up from Showtime)
The Chronicle
Tremors
Andromeda (picked up from syndication)
The Dresden Files
Painkiller Jane
Flash Gordon
Caprica
Sinbad (UK import)
Primeval: New World
Olympus
Hunters
Aftermath
Incorporated
---
Total: 18
2 seasons:
Sliders (picked up from Fox)
G vs E (aka Good vs Evil)
Exposure
The Invisible Man
Stargate Universe
Alphas
The Almighty Johnsons (New Zealand import; 2 seasons shown of 3 produced)
Metal Hurlant Chronicles (French import)
Helix
Dominion
---
Total: 10
3 seasons:
First Wave
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (picked up from Comedy Central)
Tripping the Rift
Defiance
Bitten
Dark Matter
---
Total: 6
4 seasons:
Lexx
Sanctuary
Being Human
Continuum
12 Monkeys
---
Total: 5
4 seasons + miniseries:
Farscape
Battlestar Galactica
---
Total: 2
5 seasons:
Stargate SG-1 (picked up from Showtime)
Stargate Atlantis
Eureka (5 seasons spread out over 6 years)
Warehouse 13
Haven
Lost Girl
Killjoys
---
Total: 7
And as for currently ongoing shows whose final length is not known:
At least 1 season:
Blood Drive
At least 2 seasons:
Van Helsing
At least 3 seasons:
The Expanse
The Magicians
Wynonna Earp
At least 4 seasons:
Z Nation
Channel Zero
So only 45% of Syfy's shows have made it more than two seasons, 29% have made it more than three, and only 13% to date have made it to five seasons, the maximum run of any Syfy show. (The only longer-running shows they've aired are ones they picked up from another network.) That's probably pretty typical for any network -- the majority of shows get canned after a year or less. We just don't remember them as well because they came and went so quickly.
Here are the run lengths of Sci Fi/Syfy's scripted shows, those that have come to an end or have known end dates, based on Wikipedia's list of shows counted as "first-run" (which includes some then-current imports):
1 season:
Mission Genesis
Welcome to Paradox
The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne
Black Scorpion
The Outer Limits (picked up from Showtime)
The Chronicle
Tremors
Andromeda (picked up from syndication)
The Dresden Files
Painkiller Jane
Flash Gordon
Caprica
Sinbad (UK import)
Primeval: New World
Olympus
Hunters
Aftermath
Incorporated
---
Total: 18
2 seasons:
Sliders (picked up from Fox)
G vs E (aka Good vs Evil)
Exposure
The Invisible Man
Stargate Universe
Alphas
The Almighty Johnsons (New Zealand import; 2 seasons shown of 3 produced)
Metal Hurlant Chronicles (French import)
Helix
Dominion
---
Total: 10
3 seasons:
First Wave
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (picked up from Comedy Central)
Tripping the Rift
Defiance
Bitten
Dark Matter
---
Total: 6
4 seasons:
Lexx
Sanctuary
Being Human
Continuum
12 Monkeys
---
Total: 5
4 seasons + miniseries:
Farscape
Battlestar Galactica
---
Total: 2
5 seasons:
Stargate SG-1 (picked up from Showtime)
Stargate Atlantis
Eureka (5 seasons spread out over 6 years)
Warehouse 13
Haven
Lost Girl
Killjoys
---
Total: 7
And as for currently ongoing shows whose final length is not known:
At least 1 season:
Blood Drive
At least 2 seasons:
Van Helsing
At least 3 seasons:
The Expanse
The Magicians
Wynonna Earp
At least 4 seasons:
Z Nation
Channel Zero
So only 45% of Syfy's shows have made it more than two seasons, 29% have made it more than three, and only 13% to date have made it to five seasons, the maximum run of any Syfy show. (The only longer-running shows they've aired are ones they picked up from another network.) That's probably pretty typical for any network -- the majority of shows get canned after a year or less. We just don't remember them as well because they came and went so quickly.
Similar threads
