However, as television moves to other models such as subscription services, like Showtime, HBO, and -- soon -- Netflix (and the more the advertising-based one it has now fails to work, it will) space opera could become viable again. Look at Game of Thrones on HBO. There's a (fantasy) program that could never work financially on network television, but on HBO it's already been guaranteed a second season.
Basic and premium cable is certainly where we should look for the good sci fi in the future. AMC's success with
The Walking Dead is a good sign. It got, what, about 6M viewers? I could see an audience for a space opera show that size. It's hit-level for cable, even if it would be cancellation-level on broadcast.
The match of subject matter and audience is very interesting. AMC's fancy-pants audience is certainly not the people I'd think would sit still for a zombie show of all things, but it just goes to show, a high-quality zombie show is a high-quality show, and that's what the AMC audience wants. Why wouldn't they embrace a high-quality space opera just as readily?
TNT is debuting
Falling Skies in under a month - more sign that acceptance of sci fi is spreading across cable. I'm keeping an eye on that one.
Perhaps the way to go then, is International co-produced to offset the cost for a single network.
Broadcast and cable both have plenty of money to fund a show they think will be successful, and I'm sure they factor international revenues into the equation. They aren't hurting for start-up money. They're leery about sci fi, which is perceived as a risky and expensive genre, even when they factor in all the expected revenue sources.
But international revenues aren't going to matter when the American audience tunes out and the show gets cancelled. That's the real problem, that at least half of all shows get cancelled, so the TV biz responds with being conservative, and focusing on safe genres like procedurals, which results in a glut of procedurals and even more of the audience flees to cable because there's nothing to watch on broadcast.
Fortunately, the wheel seems to have turned. ABC and NBC are aping AMC by putting
Mad Men inspired shows on broadcast.
Mad Men doesn't even get ratings that are that good by cable standards! There's definitely more of a philosophy now that TV can't thrive without embracing the risky nature of the business. (It probably helps that broadcast has now bowed to the superiority of cable and the head honchos of NBC and ABC are from the cable world.)
There is a wave of new non-space-opera sci fi on broadcast next year -
Alcatraz, Terra Nova, Touch, Awake, The River - and even more if you count the whole sf/f spectrum (hard to tell what genre
The River is yet).
Persons of Interest is "almost" sci fi - an example of how technology overruns a traditionally sci fi idea so that it no longer qualifies as futuristic. It's possible that we'll see space opera on broadcast again someday although I'd rather see it on Showtime.
Yet those very same people will happily pay to watch films at the cinema that fall into the Sci-Fi(Fantasy) genre. Just look at the top films.
That's just the difference between movies and TV in what their strengths and weaknesses are. Movies play to the strengths of sci fi (at least the shallow strengths) - visual spectacle, visceral action.
But TV is about characters and familiarity - people tune into shows because they relate to and care about the characters - and sci fi is inherently off-putting to a large segment of the audience. So sci fi shows tend to thrive when they can present highly relatable lead characters dealing with crazy situations - think Mulder and Scully. That means real-world, modern-day sci fi is the most palatable, and the kind of sci fi with pointy-eared aliens as lead characters is at a disadvantage.
