Say farewell to SGU.

Honestly, I can't remember the last thing I watched on SyFy. (I hate the name change too.) Just nothing they've had has remotely appealed to me. So a big Meh... from me.
It would be great if they could offer something like Firefly, Farscape, or the like. But I think they'll just keep turning out Sharktopuss movies... and umm... well... I'll find other stuff to watch.

With the momentum SGU started this season, I was actually beginning to like the show a lot.

Too little, too late I guess.

Great News about the returning shows (Eureka, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary), not thrilled about Haven returning, something about that show just feels lacking.

Quote:

Originally Posted by UberGuy I too am completely nonplussed at the addition of "professional" wrestling to their lineup.

As much as I like wrestling, I don’t like it on my scifi channel…unless they have both wrestlers transform into monsters before the match, then I wouldn’t mind it.

And I see Syfy is adding a cooking show to the channel in March, they better have tentacles & fangs coming out of that cooking pot.

One reason funding was pulled away from the movies was that sales indicated that the direct-to-DVD market was gone. Then there was the whole bankruptcy thing that MGM is now starting to pull out of. Maybe they still have faith and will try to sell SGU to another channel or they will move on to something else then bring back the SG1 and SGA movies when they have the funding.

Something else that I think has hurt SGU this season was the decision to delay airing episodes on Hulu by 30 days. If I'm watching some sitcom where what happens in one episode has no effect on what happens in other episodes then I don't mind missing an episode here or there. When I'm watching a show with an overall arc then I want to see the episodes in order so that I know what's going on. Consequently when I missed an episode I just stopped watching until that episode showed up on Hulu and by delaying Hulu by 30 days that meant I missed several more episodes in the interim.

Just some quick comments on this one....

As for why wrestling is on SyFy: Essentially World Wrestling Entertainment pays networks a lot of money to air their shows and they virtually guarantee you an 18-35 demographic. WWE does bounce around networks a bit but they are normally a pretty good draw. When the wrestling did first start on SyFy, they played with zombies and weird characters on their shows, but then quickly ditched it.

As to the cancellation of SGU: I'm not surprised at all. I think the whole 'grim and realistic' type of SF show and that kind of show generally has plateaued and people know it. Having characters that are not only unlikeable to the audience but to each other is putting the noose around your neck early on. And SyFy are desperate to recreate the critical and mainstream success of BSG, but they and the producers of the BSG stable of shows are going back to that well far too often and they'll wind up diluting what goodwill remains for the original show.

I personally don't know anyone who stayed with SGU in any real meaningful way and I think it was a mistake for the Canadian producers to go this route. The original SG continuity and cast of characters had a strong genuine following and it's always a bad move to ignore that.


S.

....as it turns out.....


eli was just having a bad dream based on cheetos, an mmo, and stress.

*poof*

wakes up with keyboard face.




might as well wind up bad writing with a crappy trope. sgu, you won't be missed, and perhaps next time when writers place a group in exceptional intentional jeopardy, you don't handle it like a 1930's radio serial show.

It's kinda sad. I really wanted to like the show. The very core concept struck me as far more appealing than other 'single ship way the **** out there' type shows. But they really seemed to go out of their way to create some really unlikable or plain silly characters. Rush was good, but then he also got a ton of character development. Greer was amazing. Rhona Mitra was expectably hot in leather. Everybody else was somewhere between bland and annoying. Often both at the same time.

And the first season was some of the worst writing I've seen in the history of TV. Not necessarily on quality per se, but the lack of continuation from episode to episode, things being brought up just to be dropped again right away... It really felt like there were competing writers taking turns and always trying to shoot down the other's subplots while establishing their own. It was a ******* mess and didn't feel like it was going anywhere for the longest time.

I really wanted to like this show, but I didn't even bother to come back for season 2.

I recall a recent article where one of the SGU people said they could wrap up the storyline in 1 season. I guess now they have their chance.

This is the second time the SG team has been screwed. For years SG-1 was planning for the end and they ended every season with the "this could be the last episode" episode and every year they got renewed...so when they finally was like "we're going to have an ongoing story and intro something new" Syfylis was like "We cancel you". So now we got to the focus of SGU and Syfylis is again going "We cancel you again"

Wrestling gets good ratings and NBC Universal sticks it on USA and SyFy where they see fit.

I think when SGU was conceived, it was during the success of not only BSG but Lost but near their end. Slow moving stories full of characters, many who are morally ambiguous and basically didn't want to be where they were, trying to make the best of a bad situation. Not surprising that a network tried to take the formula for a show that works and do it again.

Problem is there is a threshold of how much dark, depressing TV we are willing to watch during an economic downturn. I commented last week that the holiday specials of Eureka and Warehouse 13 were breaths of fresh air compared to the endless stream of serious dramas.

Drawn out shows drenched in melancholy aren't doing well anymore. So the pendulum will swing back to episodic shows with 95% happy endings and clear cut heroes and villains.

Gateworld has posted an article with 6 reasons why SGU was canceled.

Edit: Fixed the link so now it goes to the first page of the article.