Solar Flare: Science Fiction News

The 2005/6 US television season was hailed as a great explosion of new programming by many science fiction fans. Unfortunately as 2006 rolled round that explosion was looking more like an implosion as show after show as either canceled or had its season ended early.

The cause of the sudden interest by broadcast networks in genre television shows can be placed almost entirely on the shoulders of Lost. While the SciFi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica has been both a critical and ratings success for cable, Star Trek: Enterprise floundered on network tv. As a result the latest crop of genre tv avoided the traditional trappings for sci-fi television and instead patterned themselves after the hugely successful Lost.

There were several potential advantages to copying Lost’s format. The earth based setting and heavy emphasis on psychological storytelling and character radically cuts down on special effects costs for example. It also enabled the networks to market these shows towards the mainstream audience, many of whom wouldn’t be seen dead watching a sci-fi show.

So why did Invasion, Surface and Threshold never catch on with the audience that laps up Lost? Well for a start while the copied the surface characteristics of Lost, they didn’t look deeper into what actually makes Lost so good.

Yes, Lost unfolds at an unusually slow pace for TV, but it is able to do that because the characters and situations it presents are so compelling. In many cases, and Invasion is a particularly good example of this, the quality of the writing simply couldn’t support the incredibly slow storytelling of these new shows.

Lost also came up with an unusual storytelling style which enabled them to present a relatively complete story each week while only moving the story-arc forward a small amount. Each week on Lost there is a focus on a single character and we are presented with a chunk of that character’s back story.

Since the current crop of genre shows didn’t use that technique we were instead presented with a slow moving story presented in small chunks and a bunch of characters who took weeks to become clearly defined. Really is it any wonder that the shows didn’t catch on?