Old logo:
New logo:
Sigh, oh dear. Stop, SyFy…just stop…
BBC America is the new SciFi.
They actually show good scifi, which SyFy does not.
BBC America has Star Trek on an infinite loop. SciFi needs to just do that.
The Expanse is pretty great.
And 12 Monkeys isn’t bad, I have heard good things about Killjoys, and The Magicians is fantasy but it’s good. I think they’re on an upward trend if anything. The rebranding nonsense needs to stop though.
New stuff is ok, I guess. I just wish they had SOME classic scifi on.
As far as I can recall, they have zero star trek, only show the Twilight Zone on new years… never seen them show babylon 5… no quantum leap…
There are so many old scifi series that could be shown, and Syfy never shows any of them.
I’m lame. Can someone explain this to me?
“This is what E News is to E!,”
I mean, I guess that’s fair but there are a ton of easier ways to watch that stuff than one pay cable channel anymore.
Killjoys is a ton of fun, very Firefly-esque in its vibe.
There is actually a lot of great stuff on SyFy - no one has mentioned Dark Matter yet, but it’s damned good.
The Expanse is great and may end up being better than BSG in the long run. Killjoys and Dark Matter are decent. 12 Monkeys has exceeded my expectations and The Magicians is better than I expected as well. Even the b movie level series Van Helsing is entertaining. They have some classic well know sci-fi in the works as well. Things like Stranger in a Strange Land, Brave New World, GRRM’s Nightflyers, Hyperion. Honestly with the content they have and what’s in the pipe, I think Syfy is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. And frankly who cares about a flippin logo? That’s just marketing.
Wow, I didn’t know about that! Awesome!
Yeah, but it’s funny and bad.
Seriously though, the logo change is just another chance for me to point and laugh. No big deal.
The meat of this story is the reboot plan that was shown to journalists.
[quote]
“It’s a real change in how we have operated the channel,” said Chris McCumber, the NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment president of entertainment networks who oversees both Syfy and USA, in an interview. “In the past, it has been talking predominantly about our own shows. We are going to continue to do that, and our original content is key to our success, but we are also opening it up to the entire genre.”[/quote]
Along with pushing people towards Syfy Wire, they’re going to lean on their broadcast deals more while they continue to create original programming.
[quote]
The network will become a home for more than a dozen Marvel super-hero movies, and will take part in a deal its parent company struck last year that make its networks the home for all eight “Harry Potter” movies as well as the new “Fantastic Beasts” series.[/quote]
[quote]
“We took this past year to take a real hard look at ourselves,” McCumber said during an event earlier this week. “At what’s working and what’s not working. Just a few years ago the entire industry, Syfy included, really felt the need to go broader to gain market share and be successful. We believe now that the opportunity for Syfy is to do the exact opposite."[/quote]
So in other words, no more wrestling?
I said it before and I’ll say it again.
SyFy’s problem is that sci-fi/fantasy/comic-books has become extremely mainstream. Every network has a comic-book show (in some case, several). They are never going to be able to compete, budget-wise, with the broadcast networks. And they’re Pop Warner compared to the money that HBO and Netflix can commit to a series (not to mention the advantages those players have in terms of pushing language/violence/sex/mature content envelope).
So, yeah, I understand what they want to transition. Because there is a lot of pressure being applied by cable companies onto the media companies to justify the money that they’re paying in carriage fees as cord cutting gets worse.
As long as they stop at book 2. Maybe 3.
Well sure, they get progressively worse. :)
Books 1 and 2 and done.
After hearing how great the series was I picked it up a few months back. Book one was amazing. Two was really good. Three was alright, but getting a little… strange. Book four they’re like “fuck it, there is literally love magic and it’s more powerful than all the known forces of the universe, time and space.” Wait, what?
I thought about this more, and here’s the problem for SyFy.
They just spent a ton of capital on The Expense. It’s easily their biggest critical darling since BSG. Season 1 had not-so-great ratings, but they can build on that. So they spent a lot more money on Season 2. There were no shortage sof articles that I saw about why “The Expanse is the best show you’re not watching” or “The Expanse is the most relevant show at these times.”
The problem? The ratings needled didn’t budget upward. In fact, it even slipped downward as the season progressed. That’s not good. Season 3 was already greenlit by that point, but I can’t imagine a Season 4 if the ratings don’t move in a good direction next year.
And that’s one of the fundamental problems of Peak TV. You can make really good television, and you’re still going to get buried.
The BSG miniseries debuted in 2003. That was four years before Mad Men kicked off AMC’s rise. That was when Netflix only mailed DVDs to your house. That was when Amazon only sold books and music and a few other things. That was four years before the iPhone came around. Things are a lot different than from those glorious, halcyon days of BSG.
Unless you can catch some kind of cultural zeitgeist, your TV show is kinda screwed.
I used to be annoyed when Fantasy got lumped in with my beloved science fiction. Now comic books are lumped into it as well? God damn it.