It's hard for an old guy like me to get my mind around how low viewership numbers are now and what's considered a "success." For example,
Discovery is showing to a subscriber base that started out somewhere below two million and that CBS hopes will top 4 million in the near future. None of the current crop of sf or fantasy shows are playing to the kinds of numbers that Trek - or
Xena or
The X-Files - did in the 1990s and as a result none are truly mass phenomena as those shows were. The Internet connects people and enlarges our sense of ourselves as the audience in a wholly different way than the good old days when my hair was dark and I had all my teeth.