Shark Jumping

One of the things I've been up to this summer is consuming a ridiculous amount of television. Some of it is due to some good summer series (Psych & Burn Notice deserve mention). The rest, as I mentioned previously, is a lot of scifi I'm finding thanks to the magic of the internets. In particular I've managed to consume seven full seasons of Stargate SG-1. This struck me as odd. I rarely watch things that don't interest me, which implies that I still find the show entertaining even after 150+ episodes.

Show longevity seems like a really hard thing to maintain well. I tend to feel that most shows should have ended after the first or second seasons, even if they started out as decent shows. The funny thing is that it's all too easy for everyone involved to want these things to go too far. The networks seem to enjoy earning money, the makers no doubt like having their work continue, and even the fans don't want to see a good thing die. There's the trap... just because the last season was good doesn't mean that the show can maintain the same quality. Thus, many shows seem to end on a down turn... which really is an unfortunate thing.

Ronald Moore stated at a Cornell talk that he and some of the others working on TNG felt that seven seasons was one too many as season six represented some of their best work. I can't imagine trying to write running on creative fumes... or trying to play a character that has no more room for growth... or crafting a story once everything has already been said or done.

For me, Six Feet Under is the quintessential show that just wouldn't die. By the time I finally gave up on it, the show had completely alienated me to the point where I just didn't care what happened to the characters. The plots were stale and the characters had nowhere to go but crazy. It blows my mind that daytime soaps can survive for decades with basically the same cast of characters. I suppose that some would argue that those were never any good so it's a bad example.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find something that has kept me entertained for so long. I was also glad to hear that season four will mark the end of BSG, so that wonderful show can die with some dignity.

There are obvious parallels to other entertainment mediums... including games... which I think I'll touch on next time.

Nature of Human

I've been watching quite a bit of television series scifi recently. I've watched three seasons of DS9, four of SG1, and one of Atlantis. This doesn't count my re-watching of TNG, Voyager, and Firefly. Oh, and let's not forget the wonderful show that is BSG. This all leads me to believe, without a doubt, that I have a problem. (And no, that problem is not a lack of B5 or Fascape or Doctor Who or whatever.)

Regardless, when you watch lots of programming in the same vein, you can't help but notice the patterns... start comparing and contrasting... it's what we do. The one thing that I'm stating to find irritating is the general portrayal of humanity presented in these futures. There are plenty of examples (or so it seems) of us, as a species being one of two extremes. Either we're intergalactic do-gooders, or we're arrogant, corrupt, meddlesome beings.

The former is the essence of the Roddenberry vision that permeates much of Star Trek. It's easy to see why this has infected much of scifi, certainly on television. The glorious human race with it's high-minded directives and whatnot swoop in to save the day time and time again. Anyone who shows hints of bias or lesser thinking is either an alien or someone to be despised as the villain of the episode. While I'm all for an optimistic outlook, sometimes it's taken so far that it makes the actions of the characters just seem so unbelievable... and that's where you see the heavy hand of the writers trying oh so desperately to make a point.

Now, the latter tends to make for some interesting shows, but in the end it feels like the same thing in the opposite direction. The whole Firefly world is a corrupt one, and nearly every series has the episode where humans try to play god or whatever. Mankind tries to force their values down everyone else throats... like all the freaking time it seems. Okay, we get it... we're flawed creatures... and we've got tons to learn. I don't think we need a human population of pure evil to drive the point home.

I guess what I'm getting at is that the subtlety just isn't there. I don't know why I'm surprised, because that tends to be how science fiction is written. Extrapolation and exaggeration are par for the course in scifi. It all comes down to those two little words: "what if?". It just feels like the TV writers like to scrawl those words on a bat and beat us all senseless with it.

Also, the whole simple good versus evil bit works so much better in pure fantasy where the suspension of disbelief is in full effect. I feel that scifi has to at least feel remotely feasible, otherwise some of that "hey, what if this happened at some point?" message gets lost... or at the very least muddled. Maybe that's why I've found BSG very compelling: it's tries to be realistic and its overflowing with moral ambiguity and grey areas.

Oh, which reminds me... why does the military feature so prominently in a lot of science fiction? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that action sells and the military brings the action. Regardless, it seems oddly prevalent.

I guess I should follow this whole thing up with a giant [citation needed]. I do have some choice episodes and trends in mind when I talk about this. I just wanted to avoid this becoming a ten page paper (I'd do it too). It's obviously flavored by my admittedly limited expose and probably focuses too intently on American TV scifi. Oh well... yall can deal.