Medium had something like 25 million viewers its first season, didn't it?

I also maintain that the idea of having a U.S. President as principled as Jed Bartlet in this day and age involved as much fantasy as any Whedon show.

I think there's an audience more endeared to sci-fi. You know, the kind of person who'll check out a sci-fi show because it's.. uhm.. sci-fi. In a way, that audience acts as a nice bonus.

However, there's also the more casual viewer who doesn't care what speed the ship flies at, and doesn't want to know if it's one solar system or 12 and a half. Those are the people you have to reach to be successful, as they provide the viewing figures.

"Serenity" is a great example of this. A large section of Browncoats could be described as the SF audience - they were suspible to the show, they gathered around it and hunted out the DVDs, trailers etc. They set up booths at cons (me included), they did their own posters, got in newspapers, got everywhere they could... But ultimately, it didn't reach out of that audience as much as it needed to for sequels. In TV land, that'd be cancellation of a Sci-Fi show - because it failed to reach outside of the built in audience of the genre.

I don't think that there's a select group of "SF people" who are the only ones who'll watch SF shows. That's what I tried to say before. If the audience is that limited, it's odd that so many successful movies are SF.

It's way early in the morning, so caveat lector...but I wonder if, when SF is presented as a feature film--maybe it attracts fans of the action movie, as well. Isn't there usually big, spectacular stuff in SF films--special effects, etc.?

I've never really understood why SF struggles on tv. I reckon you could argue that 27 of the top 30 all time highest grossing films at the US box office are genre films. Colour me confused :)

Isn't there usually big, spectacular stuff in SF films--special effects, etc.?

Yup. Whereas your general sci-fi show, while it might have a lot of special effects, aren't very often flashy.

I've never really understood why SF struggles on tv. I reckon you could argue that 27 of the top 30 all time highest grossing films at the US box office are genre films.

I imagine it's also a commitment thing. A couple of hours in a movie theatre vs. potentially years for a tv show (or at least once a week for a while).

Actually, I would argue that part of the reason that SF shows fail is because they are aggressively written for non-SF fans. That was the whole bit that the ST staff repeated in interviews for the last few seasons of VOY and ENT.

Which I think is a mistake. It has to be respectful to SF fans but welcoming to casual viewers.

The story has to be welcoming to casual viewers

The setting has to be respectful to genre fans.

To analyze Firefly for a moment, you could strip out the sci-fi aspects of every story and you still would have (for the most part) a excellent story, that wouldn't have required any handwaving to get. That is what people who don't care about sci-fi enjoy, not having to understand tech, or the goobley gook to understand what is going on, and understand people's motivations.

But Firefly was clearly a sci-fi show, with consistent rules and setting, where the setting was NOT just a tool to be randomly manipulated for the story. It allows one to explore concepts and ideas that are not our everyday ones, or explore them in novel ways, but the characters react to them as we can, even if we don't

That spirit is best exemplified in the final episode, where Wash and Zoe have the exchange about living on starship. Because it is sci-fi and normal at the same time...

Just random musings...

ETA the highlighted NOT

By that argument, Firefly should have been a huge hit.

ijs.

Hrm. Let me say that this are necessary preconditions.

Let me take it back to something that was a huge hit, X-Files. The good years at least, the first two-three seasons. I would argue that those early episodes follow this formula mostly...

By that argument, Firefly should have been a huge hit.

While I'd like to blame most of the failure of FIREFLY on World Series pre-emption, a Friday night death slot, and wacky episode re-ordering (in multiple senses), I also think the fact that it dealt in western genre tropes as much as it did sci-fi ones may have been the biggest factor in why people might have watched and not stayed with it. Indeed the fans of one genre were probably put off by the presence of the other.

IOW, there was a lot more stacked against FIREFLY than the fact that it was sci-fi, however well the sci-fi was handled.