You know, a while ago, I read a TV critic's column which noted that for all the reputation Fox has for being the cancellation monster for the genre, most of this stuff only gets a chance because Fox is willing. The rare sci-fi TV show on another network tends to be even weaker or more stupid, and most of those are copycats or trying to duplicate another success. The one genuine success I can think of on the big three alphabet networks was "Lost" which crept in under the radar as a plane-crash survival drama, hooked you with the characters and then slipped the sci-fi elements in unobtrusively by refusing to acknowledge they existed. Most of the recent sci-fi shows have been blatant attempts to scoop up some of the Lost viewers, without bothering to have interesting characters or good ideas. Aside from that, everything has been Fox or a minor network or basic cable, where they expect low ratings or premium cable, where the appeal is really the violence and nudity (though they also tend to be better on character & plot).

So even though they have to jettison most of this stuff before or after only one year, give them props for keeping it up. Where else would Fringe have got four seasons, without making its cast all models in their teens and early-20s?

It was meh. Despite the cost, there was not nearly enough of the hook (dinosaurs) and what there was suffered in quality. The characters were a typical family out of TV tropes, and the two lead actors were pretty much reprising their roles from Life on Mars and Avatar. There was a lot of silly stuff put in for political correctness, it was an absurbd and implausible community that was more interested in pretty settings than portraying any sort of real colonial/pioneer lifestyle, prefering to have the characters TALK about how different it was and how many modern conveniences they were doing with out, and then we cut to the sickbay where half of the episode time seemed to be spent, and the doctors are using touch-responsive holograms to perform noninvasive surgery. There would be "primitive"-looking sets with logs featuring heavily in the structures, but they looked more like a decor choice than genuine "built out of logs because we don't have our futuristic composites" amenities. The pioneer life-style on Terra Nova meant the last one to get up had a cold shower because the solar power could only heat so much water. And they have non-lethal guns with which to face prehistoric megafauna.

Alcatraz interested me, but it soon became clear that it was dealing with its premise in an episodic "60's villain of the week" manner, and I have not watched beyond the first episode after the two-part premier. The whole premise of a team assembled in secret to catch dangerous convicts loses credibility when the team consists of two petite women, a sexagenarian and a grotesquely fat academic. One of the more absurd scenes showed the elderly Sam Neil character hauling a prisoner into his secret prison over his shoulder like a rug. That scene pretty much sums up the absurdity of the situation on the show - the resources to build, staff and maintain a secret hidden prison, modeled after the cell blocks of Alcatraz, and with a headache-inducing pure white color scheme implying advanced technology, and he can't obtain any physically plausible teammates, only reluctant letting the only two team-members born since Alcatraz closed on board, because of the tired old cliche whereby they stumbled over the operation and refused to be put off, and their pluck & gumption helped the elite government team crack the case. Unless it turned around dramatically, with more than the single teasing hint per episode of the larger storyline, it pretty much deserves to be cancelled.

It kind of has. I've pretty much lost interest in this fourth season, and I loved the first three. It was never much for ratings, but I think they pushed the tolerance level too far by introducing yet another alternate universe and dragged the story out even more in that one. What is more, without giving any attention to the real or main timeline, they are kind of insulting the fans by demanding we watch and be invested in characters who are not the ones we have been watching for three seasons now.

A lot of them do get that, and when you look at the first seasons of most successful shows, you will see that they are fairly self-contained. Often even the first HALF of the first season could stand alone as a miniseries. This is a sign that the creators are dedicated to telling the best story they can in the time they are given to tell it. When the first season ends with a dramatic cliffhanger or major stories and arcs unresolved, that is probably an attempt at audience manipulation - to get the fans to demand a renewal of the show. Jericho pulled that trick, and got a second season, which was then killed by a combination of still-bad ratings and the writers' strike. Ironically, I felt that the story became most engaging towards the end of the second season and was actually going somewhere interesting (albeit outside the realistic SFX budget), but at the same time concluded in an acceptable manner. However, the dismal performance of shows that have been saved by fan campaigns strongly suggests that networks will probably not be as receptive to fan outrage, and any shows which do not have assurances of renewal but still fail to provide acceptable conclusions or closure are being written or plotted irresponsibly.

I saw a similar point about the discrepancy between fan service and commercial success made through a chart that showed the typical genre fan response to movies, and how films that have been embraced or accepted by the "geek" community, or which are praised for their fidelity to their source material, (Kick-Ass) have flopped at the box office, while those which are reviled as abominations and raping of childhood nostalgia (Tranformers series) are huge successes. This suggests that the love of its fans is not enough to interest networks or studios in a particular property, so the writers cannot and should not settle for appealing to the fans instead of writing characters and stories that will command attention on merit. Not that the two have to be mutually exclusive, or that a property cannot succeed without either quality, but let's not put the blame on the networks, which are staffed by people who need paychecks to feed their families, and are paid by advertising dollars, which must come from still more companies with dependent employees.