On the other hands, let's not romanticize the old days too much. I remember when the Sci Fi Channel was mostly just a graveyard for old, cancelled tv shows. Unless you wanted to watch ancient Bionic Woman or Incredible Hulk reruns, there was no real reason to tune in.
Don't knock the reruns. The heyday of cable TV programming that was dominated by reruns of old shows was a great time for me, because it let me discover series from before my time or shows I'd missed the first time around. I only know
The Wild, Wild West from its reruns on TNT. And the SciFi Channel was, for a time, a great showcase for the abundant short-lived SF shows that didn't last long enough to get syndicated normally. (For over 13 years I've cherished my fading, not-quite-complete collection of
RoboCop: The Series episodes taped from SciFi. Luckily, I recently found there's a Canadian DVD set available and it's on its way to me now.)
If anything, it's a shame that most of the cable reruns you find these days are for recent or current shows like
CSI, Law & Order, House, and the like. Although I did recently get an opportunity to sample
T. J. Hooker on the Sleuth channel. Sure, these days there are DVDs and Hulu, but still, there are some old shows that are hard to find.
But yes, for the first five or six years of SciFi's existence, it didn't have much of anything in the way of original fiction programming.
I guess I'll never understand the television business. Why give up your distinct nitch, where you're gauaranteed a loyal following to switch to a format where you're now directly competing with a dozen other channels showing the same cookie cutter reruns and reality shows?
A loyal following is nice, but not if it's a
small following, as niche fandoms tend to be. Wrestling has a loyal following that's much, much huger than the loyal following for
Farscape or
Stargate or
Battlestar Galactica -- heck, huger than all those followings put together. (I've seen this firsthand. When I or my fellow
Star Trek novelists have done book signings at the Simon & Schuster booth at the New York Comic-Con, we got maybe a few dozen fans seeking autographs in the course of an hour. When some wrestling star did a signing of one of their ghostwritten books, the booth was utterly swamped, with the autograph line stretching halfway down the aisle.) And reality shows, sad to say, are hugely popular too. It's always been the way that the more lowbrow something is, the more successful it is. There are a lot of people out there who don't want to use their brains when they watch TV.
Television is a business. Programmers have to maximize ratings and minimize costs. Reality programming is cheap to make and, sadly, very popular. A cheap show that brings in a large audience is preferable to an expensive show that brings in a small, loyal niche audience. It's simple economics.