Why doesn't the success of sci-fi in the cinema translate to TV?

Dan Lester tells us to give sci-fi a chance

By Dan Lester

Already James Cameron’s painfully overrated CGI-fest about aliens and a distant world has become the most successful film of all time, Avatar having racked up a gross revenue of over £2.5 billion and counting. Last year millions flocked to see the bromance-centric Star Trek reboot, the allegoric apartheid inspired District 9, or Zowie Bowie’s brilliant low budget Moon. But whilst recent months could only be described as a stellar period for sci-fi on the big screen, our TV sets and computer screens have seen quite the opposite effect, seeing series cancellations and failed series pilots, despite sci-fi shows on TV having received equal amounts of critical acclaim. It’s partly down to sci-fi shows still having a dated reputation that seems stuck in 1970s Star Trek episodes.

     Aside from the bizarrely successful pantomimey Doctor Who, the majority of sci-fi shows on TV tend to come attached with some sort of social stigma. Robots? Lame! Aliens? Grow up! And it’s all too often as a result simply of their names. If there a title more tediously geeky sounding than Battlestar Galactica then I haven’t heard of it, which is a shame, being at heart a gripping post-apocalyptic tale that was one of the most consistently gripping, politically relevant, and yet completely character driven programs ever to air on TV - the Guardian, for instance, have on more than one occasion debated whether it is even better than ‘best thing on TV’ The Wire. Recently the US network Sci-Fi changed its name to SyFy, in an effort to distance itself from the ‘space aliens and future’ reputation.
    Clearly, then, it’s a reputation that networks and producers are going to great lengths to attempt to change, notably by mixing genres in an effort to attract audiences to sci-fi shows. Most recently, the Battlestar Galactica spin-off of Caprica has given us a bizarre mash-up up of robotics and virtual reality with soap opera and politics to partial success, while similarly but less successfully, last year saw the premiere and subsequent cancellation of Defying Gravity, which was billed as ‘Grey’s Anatomy in space’ but sadly failed to do either genre much justice.
    But look at the major TV drama successes over the past decade, and it’s clear that the best way to get a sci-fi with an audience on the small screen isn’t so much to combine it with other genres as to completely disguise it as something different. When Lost premiered it began as a straightforward character driven, Lord of the Flies-esque plane crash drama, but as the seasons have worn on the writers have shown their true colours, unveiling time travel, Egyptian mythology and, most recently, parallel universes to be an integral part of the show. In other words, they tricked us, and although many dropped out along the way, it’s still attracting a healthy 11 million viewers stateside alone - the tactic worked.
    But the big budget science fiction is a genre in danger of dying out. Battlestar finished its run earlier this year, to dwindlingly low viewing figures, whilst Lost itself is coming to its final run of episodes, and FlashForward, having been created to fill the Lost shaped gap in ABC’s programming schedule, has failed to take off and find the audience that had been hoped for. To say that sci-fi is completely dying would be wrong - there is still a decent amount of good lower-budget programs. But nonetheless it’s certainly a massively undervalued genre. To return once again to Battlestar, it was certainly the program that proved the potential of sci-fi as a method of exploring contemporary politics - the whole series was practically a huge allegory for the war on terror, exploring prisoner torture, religious fundamentalists, and sleeper cells in a way that other big budget dramas wouldn’t dare. Such was the success in doing so that the cast and crew were given the chance to speak at the UN last year.
    Yet put all the political commentary, and the space battles aside and, much like the other great space saga of recent years, Joss Whedon’s Firefly, they’re also as flat out watchable as anything else on TV - all too often the best that sci-fi has to offer is as gripping as 24, complex as The Wire, and even as emotionally engaging as Hollyoaks. Well, probably more so. Anyway, its time to put social credibility on the line and give sci-fi a chance.