Hello all. What I was referring to mostly was the IDEA that the SyFy channel has strayed quite a bit from the channel it began as in the early 1990s.
Nothing wrong with that. It would've been foolish for a commercial network
not to change and adapt to shifting audience tastes and business realities. If anything, Syfy has changed far
less than plenty of other niche cable channels. A&E was originally a classy channel whose name stood for Arts & Entertainment, trying to do PBS-type stuff, but now it's mostly lowbrow, generic "reality" stuff. So is Discovery, which used to be a science/educational channel. AMC used to be American Movie Classics, with the same kind of programming Turner Classic Movies has now, but these days it's known more for its original scripted dramas. CourtTV, which showed live, commercial-free coverage of trials and legal news, abandoned its entire identity to become the "reality"-based TruTV. The country music-focused The Nashville Network became the more generic TNN and then mutated into Spike TV, and is now the Paramount Network. And so on. Heck, even MTV doesn't show music videos anymore.
The problem with commercial TV is that it's dependent on ad revenue and ratings to survive, so time and time again, niche programming targeted at limited audiences has been forced to give way to more generic programming with mass appeal, and so most of the specialty channels have ceased to exist or mutated into homogenized, interchangeable entities. Yet Syfy remains what it always was, a network focused primarily on SF and fantasy. It's adapted and changed over time, yes, as any living entity does, but it's retained far more of its original character than most of the other niche/specialized cable networks we used to have.
But please try and defind the merits of Syfy having a classy movie like Oscar winning opus called Sharknado. Anyone?
It pays the bills for the good stuff. TV networks have always had a range of different kinds of programming, from prime-time dramas and sitcoms to daytime soaps and game shows to late-night infomercials. Nobody has ever been expected to watch or like 100% of the programs a single network broadcasts. They're not all supposed to appeal to a single set of tastes. They're supposed to fill the schedule and bring in ad revenue that keeps the network in business. The cheesy stuff and the infomercials bring in the profits that the network can then invest in producing the better stuff that defines it. It's no different than an award-winning actor doing commercials or working as a handyman or waitress between gigs, or a novelist making a living by writing ad copy or delivering pizzas. We all need to pay the bills.
Besides, the stuff like
Sharknado is cheesy
on purpose. It's satirical and knowingly winking at the audience about how ludicrous it is, and the audience is in on the joke and willingly playing along.
To
@Christopher and
@Mr. Adventure if my view about the theory about Marcia Lucas and the original theory holds no truth. Then what could it be then? Honestly? I ask you both.
You missed the part where I already answered that. Again, most creators would welcome the chance to revisit their earlier works and fix the parts they were dissatisfied with. Lucas is very, very far from the only creator to have done that. Many other filmmakers have done directors' cuts of their past movies. Many prose authors have rewritten their past novels or stories when they re-released them. (Heck, my upcoming novel
Arachne's Crime is a reworking and expansion of my first published story, which I've already revised two previous times for its reprints on my old website and in my first story collection.) There's nothing here that needs explaining, because it's a perfectly natural thing for a creator to do.
