Why did Americans lose interest in space and space fiction in the mid 2000s?
- Thread starter CmdrShep2183
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Well, most of Flash Gordon '07 after the first 1/3 of its season is set on an alien planet, Mongo, even if the characters don't travel through space to get there. Shows set on planets other than Earth are generally counted as "space" shows even without the spaceflight.
Really? I get the feeling that nothing I ever say will be acceptable. Well, @Sci specifically mentioned space opera and spaceship in the post. I need to quit letting my buttons get pushed and just let things go...
Since when was just exploring both sides of a question a matter of "acceptability?" It's just conversation. There's nothing to talk about if there's only one side to an issue.
I'd say they had Space 1999, Doctor Who, and in non-English speaking areas Star Blazers/Space Battleships Yamato, and in the late 70's Japan got Mobile Suit Gundam, the UK got Blake's 7, and in the US a little film called Star Wars hit the scene.
1982 to 1986 were probably the leanest years between 1966 and today as far as I remember. Doctor Who in the UK and V in the US were pretty much the only live-action space involved series in production in the English Speaking World.
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You're right, I had to be more specific.I'd say they had Space 1999, Doctor Who, and in non-English speaking areas Star Blazers/Space Battleships Yamato, and in the late 70's Japan got Mobile Suit Gundam, the UK got Blake's 7, and in the US a little film called Star Wars hit the scene.
The OP was talking specifically about American sci fi TV show set in space and really, after Star Trek TOS, was virtually a desert for this particular subgenre.
From about 1969-77, yeah, you're right. The only US-made shows I can find from that time that regularly portrayed any kind of space travel were the animated Star Trek and a couple of kids' sitcoms from Sid & Marty Krofft, Far Out Space Nuts and The Lost Saucer (though the latter was more a time-travel show than space travel). Most of the US-made SFTV in that period was Earth-based, with the main recurring themes being superheroes (the bionic shows, Wonder Woman, Shazam/Isis) and post-apocalyptic settings (Planet of the Apes, Ark II, and Roddenberry's Genesis II/Planet Earth pilots).
Americans didn't so much lose interest in space fiction in the last couple of decades.
We lost interest in space exploration.
With all that's going on right now in that field, most people are paying just about no attention. The whole country stopped to watch space launches in the 1960s. Now not many people care.
We lost interest in space exploration.
With all that's going on right now in that field, most people are paying just about no attention. The whole country stopped to watch space launches in the 1960s. Now not many people care.
True, but UFO and Doctor Who were broadcast in syndication in the States by 1972. Starlost showed in '73 and Space 1999 from '75 and Quark in '77. I'd still say 82-86 were the worst years with only V and Doctor Who being produced and broadcast.
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Yes, we already established over the past several posts that most SFTV in that period was non-US. I was just confirming how few US-made shows there were at the time.
And 1977 was when we started to see a resurgence of US-made space-based shows, for obvious reasons ("A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."). '77 gave us Quark and Space Academy, and the following years brought Battlestar Galactica, Jason of Star Command, Mork & Mindy, Project U.F.O., Salvage 1, Buck Rogers, and the animated Flash Gordon.
Well, if you count an Earthbound show like V as space-themed, then there's also The Powers of Matthew Star from '82-3. There was also a fair amount of space-themed SF in animation -- The Transformers, Droids, Ewoks, arguably He-Man (set on an alien, extradimensional world), and others. (And yes, most of those shows were animated overseas, but the writing and producing were American.) If you're counting British shows, then Terrahawks and The Tripods came along in that period. It was also when Robotech premiered, adapted from three different anime series made from '82-'84.
I don't really include cartoons, anime or puppet shows as during this era this is children's programming. Nor do I include shows that involve aliens, but don't involve much in the way of space travel, space craft or time on other worlds, or I would have included the likes of Phoenix, Starman and Gilligan's Planet. V however, was a pretty big production with spacecraft being very dominant not so with any other prime time programming during the early 80s once the Star Wars inspired resurgance died off in 1981.
And during this era I was a child. And you know what? During this era, all science fiction television was assumed to be children's programming. It was nothing like today. Back then, all of it was presumed to be mindless kid stuff, with rare exceptions like Star Trek and The Invaders. Shows that aspired to more intelligence, like The Six Million Dollar Man and Logan's Run, were pressured by the networks to dumb down the scripts and make them shallow, kid-friendly action. Even Star Trek was assumed by non-fans to be children's programming and was frequently scheduled as such by the stations that aired it in reruns. It's because a whole generation of fans like me were exposed to ST in childhood that the show developed such a large, devoted following lasting beyond its first generation of viewers. It wasn't until those of us who discovered Star Trek as children in the '60s and '70s grew up that SFTV started to mature with us. So don't dismiss the importance of children's programming to the history of the genre.
Although, oddly enough, there's often a weird pattern of Star Trek & Doctor Who existing during opposite times of each other. The original Doctor Who ran from 1963-1989. While this does overlap with the original Star Trek from 1966-1969, that also happens to be the period where there are a lot of missing Doctor Who episodes. Star Trek: The Next Generation then started in 1987 and Doctor Who was canceled 2 years later. Star Trek then started a dominating TV run from 1987-2005, producing 25 seasons during an 18 year period. Doctor Who made a short-lived attempt to return with a made-for-TV movie in 1996 but that never went to series. 1996 also happened to be the year when Star Trek was at its peak popularity with DS9 & Voyager both running strong, First Contact doing very well at the box office, and all 4 captains gracing the cover of the first ever multi-cover issue of TV Guide. Once Doctor Who finally did make a comeback in March 2005, Enterprise ended just 2 months later. Since then, Doctor Who has been on fairly regularly, though with some gaps. Interestingly, you can kinda slot Star Trek into many of those gaps--
- 2009: Doctor Who did multiple specials but not a full season. Star Trek did the first J.J. Abrams movie.
- 2013: There was a season of Doctor Who but not a full one because it was a split season. Star Trek Into Darkness came out.
- 2016: Doctor Who was on a 1-year hiatus between Seasons 9 & 10. Star Trek Beyond came out.
- Fall 2017-Summer 2018: Apart from the usual Christmas special, Doctor Who was off the air between Seasons 10 & 11. Meanwhile, the 1st season of Star Trek: Discovery came out.
- 2019: Another 1-year hiatus for Doctor Who between Seasons 11 & 12. Also, Star Trek: Discovery Season 2.
At the time, in a world of minimal continuity from one TNG episode to the next, DS9 was stunning in terms of its reliance on arc storytelling. It's so weird to go back to watching DS9 now and seeing how few major arc episodes there actually were. Apart from the 6-part Dominion occupation arc at the beginning of Season 6 and the 9-part Final Chapter at the end of Season 7, most of the show was about 80% stand-alones.
I liked The Mandalorian, though I would agree that the arc was a bit thin. If you boiled down that story to the essentials, it easily could have been a movie instead and maybe should have been. But I liked the short episodes and some of the more episodic bits and the less-is-more characterization of the Mandalorian himself. It felt like reading a bunch of short stories out of a pulp Western magazine or something.
I love really confined 3-camera sitcoms. My favorite Red Dwarf episodes often tend to be the ones where they never leave the ship. NewsRadio only ventured beyond the confines of the radio station very rarely. Frasier was never shy about going to other locations when needed but they got a lot of mileage out of just Frasier's apartment, the radio station, & the cafe.
Syndication still exists, just not for first-run scripted shows anymore. It's pretty much exclusively the purview of reruns, talk shows (Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Springer, The Real, etc.), and game shows (Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, etc.).
I too wonder if part of the perception of the decline of space sci-fi TV shows is tied to the fact that first-run syndication went away, thus removing a major avenue for them to show up on free broadcast TV. After all, that was the home to shows like TNG, DS9, Andromeda, Earth: Final Conflict, Starhunter, and even Stargate SG-1 (originally aired on cable but treated like a first-run syndicated show).
Buffy & Angel did the best job, IMO, of balancing serialized and stand-alone storytelling. "Hush" is a good example. On its own, it's a great episode. But it also ends with Buffy & Riley both learning that the other is also a demon hunter, which has major implications for the ongoing story arc. I think it's important that every individual episode has some kind of reward for the viewer at the end of the hour while, ideally, also furthering some kind of ongoing story or character arc in some way. A big part of why I could never get into Heroes is because it felt like the episodes always just stopped because they ran out of time but never offered any substantial climax at the end of the hour.
I wouldn't call them standalones. They were episodic, yes, but they had plenty of continuity, plenty of reference to past events and impact on future events, plenty of growth and change in the characters and the status quo. This is what I'm saying. Episodic and serial storytelling are not mutually exclusive opposites, they're the ends of a spectrum. TV in the '60s was too far toward the episodic end, while TV today is too far toward the serialized end. It was in the era of DS9 and B5 that we had probably the healthiest balance between strong individual episodes and strong, developing continuity over the course of the series. They were episodic and serialized at the same time.
Shows occur in waves. Currently we're getting a lot of space shows on nearly every streaming service. CBS has two Trek shows and more on the way, Apple+ has For All Mankind, Netflix has Lost in Space, Disney+ has The Mandalorian, Amazon has The Expanse. BBC still has Doctor Who, HBO just started Avenue 5, and there are probably some more in development and some I missed.
There are some other recent shows that struck a pretty good balance, IMO, like Dark Matter & Lost Girl.
Did they ever leave Earth on Mork & Mindy?