Subtlety is more important than anything else, ever.

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I waited to post this until I finished up watching the second and last season of Stargate Universe. Ever since the Battlestar Galactica reboot ended, the channel hasn’t had much to stand on for really great sci-fi content. Caprica and Stargate Universe were the last two really great shows they had. And they have stood by their decision not to renew either show by citing ratings. It’s a specious argument, at best:

Another lie recently told by Syfy is that for SGU to continue it would need 2.5 to 3 times as many viewers as it currently has.

That means SGU would need to hover around 3 million viewers to survive. This is absurd to suggest when Syfy dramas like Sanctuary and Haven have been renewed averaging around 1.5-1.75 million viewers. Eureka hasn’t even been averaging 2.5 million viewers.

I’ll never believe that it was purely a numbers game, so much as they want us to believe it.

No, I blame this on the fans. Well, on SyFy’s audience, anyway.

Warehouse 13 is not a particularly great show. Neither is Eureka. Haven and Sanctuary are even worse. But they’re still around.

What’s the difference between the shows that stayed, with lower ratings, and the shows that got canceled? Depth. SGU was tonally dark and at times disturbing. It was dramatic and had a series-long plot arc, not just season-long plot arcs. No single episode can stand alone. Compared to the other shows, of which almost any episode (not counting the rare two or three part episode) can be enjoyed all by itself, without any prior knowledge of the show.

Star Trek was like that: there was no long story in it. Once in a while, a reference from a previous episode would pop up, but that was essentially novelty. And there was a little bit of character development throughout, but if you look at the characters in episode one and in the last episode, they’re basically the same.

Closer to home, SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis followed that pattern, essentially. They did setup slightly longer plot arcs, but the characters never changed. They were heroes on day one, and they ended as heroes. They had, essentially, no major flaws to speak of. The characters on SGU did. I wish I could find a link to it now, but a comment I read was that they had no appealing virtues. They fought with each other, made morally dubious decisions, were sometimes petty. They were pretty real. But they grew as characters throughout the shows run.

The characters on the previous SG shows never failed to accomplish their mission, even when things were absolutely hopeless. And they’d do it in 42 minutes. The characters on SGU often failed and one even had to be euthanized (and not in a pleasant way). They were fuckups, but they managed.

It was a lot like the wonderful dynamic on LOST and Battlestar Galactica. It was clear that the show was meant to be as separate from the previous franchise shows as it could be. Honestly, if they could have done it without it being a SG franchise at all, I think it would have been even better.

Which is why SyFy is full of shit. They’re pandering to the lowest common denominator. It’s the SyFy fans that are assholes. They like the shows with pristine, morally-upright and, so to speak, perfect heroes as the protagonists. Neither Caprica nor SGU could deliver that. It’s just not the way they were; they relied on the flaws. They were character-driven shows. The rest are driven by whatever can make a dazzling bad guy for one episode, or a half-season arc. I am talking about the same channel that killed Farscape before it’s time, so it really shouldn’t come as much of a shock. Train your audiences to be lazy, and they’ll be lazy. Then they’ll reject shows like SGU and Caprica, proving that you were right to give them Marcel’s Fucking Quantum Fucking Kitchen instead.

Here’s a prime example of the asshole SyFy fan whose opinion matters more than people who like real content:

I wasn’t shocked at all, quite the opposite. SyFy, ruined the SG series with SGU. SGU consisted of a bunch of soap opera drama that most of us simply weren’t interested in. Not to mention the “stones” with “lovers quarrels” and even sexual contact were completely absurd. I could go on and on about how absolutely retarded that show is, but canceling it proves what so many of us said from the start. What was really funny is that they tried to contain the damage at gateworld by censoring complaining posts and even suspending complaining user accounts. We all told them that wouldn’t work either! All they had to do was fire their writers’ and get back some of their old direction. Instead they abandoned their known fan base and tried to force feed us that crap. HA HA HA HA HA HA! I personally canceled SyFy LAST YEAR in protest.
Moral of the story?
If your existing franchise is working, leave it alone.
If your entire fan base starts rumbling about changes you’ve made, LISTEN.
If your show starts dealing with raping people that are not “IN” their bodies. You should probably re-think was the hell you are doing..

They alienated their fanbase? Sure, but I don’t think it’s too big of a deal when that fanbase is a bunch of dicks like this. What’s funny is that he thinks that the SG franchise pre-SGU was working. It was a miserable situation, at best. There is a response to this that pretty much sums up how I feel about it:

first off you’re a moron, and an idiot, probably why sgu didn’t appeal to you, you want boobs, guns, and explosions. sgu was broadcast as a drama, not a action show, it was heralded as a drama, something completely different from previous stargate series.Stargate universe isn’t a show where you always know the good guys from the badguys, and that the good guys always always prevail miraculously.And always have english speaking alians. sgu is a deeper and far more realistic show centered around each characters, you end up with a attachment to every person on sgu.and the alians are actually strange and alian. both sg1 and sga were entertaining series, for kids, as well as adults, but sgu is the much darker adult version of the stargate universe. and as Joshua said, “Not to mention the “stones” with “lovers quarrels” and even sexual contact were completely absurd.” when i can speak from experience, months away from family, and friends can and will lead up to love affairs, and even just “sex friends” and being confined within a preset amount of space when such thing happen can also lead to “lovers quarrels” sgu was a much more down to earth and gritty stargate series, i for one loved it, and i am a fan, i actually watched the movie back a little while after it came out, and ended up watching sg-1 and sg-a back to back when i was in Iraq.

all in all, stargate universe was the adult version of stargate, and because they ended up without the shallow idiots who make up the fanbase, as their basis for deciding either the show is a success or not, is the reason why it’s being canceled, it has nothing to do with the quality of the show, but rather the quality (or should i say quantity) of the viewer base. thank you, you shallow retards who only enjoy breasts, bangs, and bombshells, enjoy the wrestling, and bullshit unreality show that will overrun the channel, all because sgu wasn’t breast and explosions.

You sir, win. I’m glad to know that at least some people feel the same way about the state of televised Science Fiction that I do. But given SyFy’s recent actions, apparently we’re in the minority. More people want the shlock.

There’s a more detailed rundown of the whole cancellation debacle here. It’s worth reading and pretty frustrating. But the big take-away is here:

Other than BSG: Blood & Chrome, which has not yet been granted a full series order, Syfy has announced no such “traditional” science fiction shows on its development slate. Perhaps the closest would be Sherwood, produced by the team behind Sanctuary and described as a sort of Robin Hood meets Firefly. So far that one is just an idea, however, and hasn’t been given the go-ahead to cast and film a pilot.

SyFy’s audience might want scripted shows, but they don’t want anything too cerebral. They don’t want drama. They want action and boobs. (Well, I like those things too, but get real.) They want infallible heroes. That’s where the problem is, but SyFy will give that too them. SyFy would have canceled LOST if it had been their show (thankfully ABC was a little smarter than that). They’re appealing to the mental midgets, to the child-like capacities of their shithead viewers and they’re doing Science Fiction a grave disservice. It’s probably better that they rebranded their name away from Sci-Fi, because that is no longer what they do all that well. Also, would it kill SyFy to actually hire a goddamned military advisor and buy decent, matching uniforms for the soldiers in their monster of the week movies? Fuck SyFy. I have no use for poorly written, over CGI’d, intellectually-vacant bullshit. I’ve seen Vin Diesel movies with more brains and better acting in them.

Being Human will do well because it is expected to be a drama and it has a fresh fanbase that wants that. But it already diverged from the BBC show and in a bad way. It’s still a good show, but why is it that a show about vampires and warewolves can have character driven drama while a show about space-travel can’t? Because the fans are mostly idiots.

I’m way off into drunken ranting land, but here’s the recap: SGU was too dark, too smart, and too fucking deep for the audience SyFy wants. It scared them. It was edgier than most anything they’ve done in a long, long time – even more so than Being Human is – and it was uncomfortable for the fucking retards that want wrestling on Friday nights.

There, fuck you, SyFy. I don’t have cable and I won’t watch your bullshit.

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David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee from David Lynch on Vimeo.

Because I’m laughing too hard.

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That’s some serious anatomy. Way to go.

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Alas: The practice of fiction is no longer a vocation. It has become a profession, and professions are not characterized by creative mischief. Artistic vocations are about embracing more and more of the world with your will; professions are insular affairs that are all about the profession. The carefulness, the cautiousness, the professionalism that keeps contemporary fiction from being meaningful to the most intellectually engaged people is also what is stifling any kind of response to The New Yorker. After all, kick against The New Yorker‘s conventional taste and you might tread on some powerful person’s overlapping interest. You might anger Nicole Aragi, fiction super-agent. You might alienate a New Yorker editor! Literary triumph in Manhattan is now defined by publishing one or two pieces in The New Yorker each year. That is too narrow a definition of literary triumph.

Writing isn’t art, it’s an industry. An industry that makes Twilight and Harry Potter and… some other stuff. Profitable stuff!

While I loathe the self-publishing and POD elements that sprung up in the publishing world, I can see how they’re necessary to combat the make-the-New Yorker-happy mentality. But those people will probably never reach any real notoriety. Hell, most people who go the traditional publishing route still don’t. But it’s almost universally true that if one does, one is professional about it. And that sucks.

Could the very idea of “being professional” kill America? Maybe I’m biased from my experiences with “military professionalism”, which meant always putting up the illusion that everything is good. It was all about polishing turds. Didn’t matter what you had in your hand as long as somebody could see their reflection in it.

However, professionalism is necessary because it sets standards of courtesy and etiquette. The problem is that it can overshadow the work and its quirks and nuances are so complex that the only way to avoid catastrophic mistakes is money (one could argue that those with money simply move into a different rule set).

For about a million reasons, fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the nonfiction writers. The proof? No one would dare rank them, presume to categorize them by age or exploit them as a marketing tool. Their writing is too relevant and alive.

Fiction is not dead, sir. The business of selling real, heart-felt literary art in the grand arena of the major publishing houses may be dying, but fiction itself is not. There are more people writing simply for the sake of writing than ever, and they don’t care about professional rules or, consequently, about making money off it.

Trying to view books as a commodity is not right. Because one books sells more than another doesn’t really say much about its quality. Just because a non-fiction book  requires less critical thought to extract the hidden social observations than a novel does not make it more relevant. Sadly, the easier-to-read book is more likely to sell these days.

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STOCKHOLM – A giant straw goat was burned down yet again early Wednesday in a Swedish city where torching it has become a Christmas tradition, to the dismay of local leaders.

Every year I see this article, it brings joy to my heart. Why can’t the city just understand that their tradition is to burn the straw goat, not to build and look upon a straw goat? They ought to make it an endorsed event. Over the last 50 years, almost half of their goats have been burned or otherwise destroyed. Just accept it – people want to see it burn.

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But let’s look back for a second at where the Modernists came from, and what exactly they did with the novel. They drew a tough hand, historically speaking. All the bad news of the modern era had just arrived more or less at the same time: mass media, advertising, psychoanalysis, mechanized warfare. The rise of electric light and internal combustion had turned their world into a noisy, reeking travesty of the gas-lit, horse-drawn world they grew up in. The orderly, complacent, optimistic Victorian novel had nothing to say to them. Worse than nothing: it felt like a lie. The novel was a mirror the Modernists needed to break, the better to reflect their broken world. So they did.

One of the things they broke was plot. To the Modernists, stories were a distortion of real life. In real life stories don’t tie up neatly. Events don’t line up in a tidy sequence and mean the same things to everybody they happen to. Ask a veteran of the Somme whether his tour of duty resembled the “Boy’s Own” war stories he grew up on. The Modernists broke the clear straight lines of causality and perception and chronological sequence, to make them look more like life as it’s actually lived. They took in “The Mill on the Floss” and spat out “The Sound and the Fury.”

Much of the entirety of the literary world rests on the complexity of the work being discussed (more difficult is always better). But one of the most important things in literature is that the plot is not really very important at all – it is simply a vehicle for the novel.

One of the biggest guidelines they tell you in writing is to show, not tell. By presenting an image of a ruddy-eyed woman instead of stating that she is sad you give the reader the benefit of evincing the emotion for themselves. This would be equivalent to micro economics. Thus the macro level would be the overall motivation and theme vs. the plot. Literature has evolved into a form of philosophy, using plot to carry its arguments rather than logical steps. To redirect the focus of literature back towards the plot rather than the philosophy is to do it a disservice I think.

Also, literature is more than entertainment; it involves critical thinking. This is lost in most Young Adult books that lay everything bare and require very little analysis. Part of the satisfaction of literature comes from the work put into it, not the result. There is no room for instant gratification – that’s what (most) movies are for.

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6. There is an even grimmer side to all this: because the studios have discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking, they don’t want to make any movies that they can’t protect themselves on. Production and advertising costs have gone so high that there is genuine nervous panic about risky projects. If an executive finances what looks like a perfectly safe, stale piece of material and packs it with stars, and the production costs skyrocket way beyond the guarantees, and the picture loses many millions, he won’t be blamed for it — he was playing the game by the same rules as everybody else.

If, however, he takes a gamble on a small project that can’t be sold in advance — something that a gifted director really wants to do, with a subtle, not easily summarized theme and no big names in the cast — and it loses just a little money, his neck is on the block. So to the executives a good script is a script that attracts a star, and they will make their deals and set the full machinery of a big production in motion and schedule the picture’s release dates, even though the script problems have never been worked out and everyone (even the director) secretly knows that the film will be a confused mess, an embarrassment.

Yes, well, I just finished watching Doomsday again. God I love that movie.

Hipster factor poses challenges for movie marketers:

Even as Hollywood studios increasingly aim at the broadest possible audience, a few companies are experimenting with the opposite approach in these summer months and beyond: They’re making smart, quirky movies for a sophisticated young audience.

The pics are trying to be the next “Garden State,” a 2004 film that, like other hipster pics, can be generally defined as trafficking in moody music, casual style and characters who are disaffected.

But to succeed, these films will need to compete in a more difficult market than “Garden State” did only five years ago — and do even bigger business than that picture’s $27 million.

I like Garden State, but uh, what? Hold on…

Gone are the days when a small movie aimed at twenty- and thirtysomethings could simply take its time to grow into a hit, something Searchlight did when it nurtured “Napoleon Dynamite” to $44 million. The film stayed in theaters for nine months and was in release for three months before it even hit 1,000 screens.

That’s in part because with media reacting faster than ever, movies don’t sneak up on consumers the way they once did. And in part it’s because budgets are swelling, raising the stakes.

Hipster movies are now big business. Warners’ fall release “Where the Wild Things Are” — based on a perennial children’s classic but directed by the idiosyncratic Spike Jonze and with music from the Arcade Fire — is a prototypical hipster pic. But the film’s budget is conservatively estimated at $75 million — not exactly a scrappy Sundance feature that can afford to play mostly to downtown artsy types.

Ah. Got it. Whatever. We can basically blame the decline of media quality on the damned kids, right?

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I will be getting the chapbook if I can scrounge enough change out from under my desk.

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