Caprica - Page 11

Well I'm not surprised the show was a chore to get thru, I stuck with it, but it was drawn out, dull in spots despite its good cast.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt 
To be fair, the show was averaging well above a 1.0 rating when Stern said that. Yesterday's episode was down to a 0.5 rating (and a staggeringly low 718 thousand viewers). He could hardly have expected that the show's audience would be less than half when it came back.

 

It'd be interesting to see how much better it would have done outside of the Tuesday night slaughterhouse. Easily the most competitive night of the week this season, in my opinion.

And putting the show on Tuesday with no warning just out of the blue didn't help.
 

I was surprised they didn't just pair it with Stargate Universe in the Friday 2-hour block.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Will_B 

The cast of Caprica could, theoretically, be asked to reunite in a special episode of Blood & Chrome that would be a flashback to the time of Caprica. There could be a resolution to Caprica in this way. Just putting the idea out there.

what i thought as well

It's also possible that the Zoe and Tamara avatar subplot could be continued as-is in Blood & Chrome, since the avatars don't age. That was the most interesting storyline from Caprica anyway. Just have them wandering in cyberspace for the decade and change in between.

In strict, 20/20 hindsight terms, perhaps the entire trouble is that they (the producers of Caprica) were given a full season regardless of ratings, and because of that, they took their time, plot-wise. If they'd only been given 10 episodes, with a possible extension for good ratings, they wouldn't have kept the Cylons on ice for half a season, or waited FIVE EPISODES to reintroduce Vergis into the mix.

Unfortunately, television as a long-form storytelling medium is now dead.

Even bargain-basement soap operas aren't safe anymore, but I doubt if there will be another major, expensive science fiction "saga" series again within the coming next few years. The current network business structure simply cannot sustain such a show.

Syfy put the pilot out in 2009, showed half the season, and then told people they'd have to wait until January 2011 to catch the second half (pre-empting the buzz that the show was going to be canceled anyway).

They then announced another BSG spin-off, and moved the second half-season forward with hardly any announcement at all, then canceled the entire thing, while holding back the final episodes until next year.

This is a story-based series, where following what happens on a week-by-week basis is the entire key to success. And that's really tough to do when the story for Season One is smeared over two years, and undermined every step of the way by the network’s actions.

The core, intended audience for this sort of show have already been through this particular fire with shows like Firefly, Dollhouse, Sarah Connor, etc., and are far less likely to give a long story-based show a chance until it's already well-established, in this day and age.

If the cancellation rumor-mill is already churning, people are much less likely to tune in. You can't get established in the manner this particular show was shown and presented.  This will be doubly true of the other spin-off, as people beyond the BSG core fanbase will now be less likely to allow themselves to be sucked into a show promoted by the same bunch who mushed up this fiasco, suspecting that it, too, will suffer a similar fate.

Connecting mini-series are probably the only way to attempt it. If each volume had a defined beginning, middle, and end (filmed before broadcast) which could link to a future volume, also with a satisfying conclusion and with a bit of room to continue, a saga could be built up as a wall of story-blocs.  But you won't see this sort of show being a success using these current sorts of network production methods.

Also, it appears that Syfy never even told Universal Home Video about the impending cancellation:

At least the last people to nuke Caprica did it with style.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt 

To be fair, the show was averaging well above a 1.0 rating when Stern said that. Yesterday's episode was down to a 0.5 rating (and a staggeringly low 718 thousand viewers). He could hardly have expected that the show's audience would be less than half when it came back.

 

It'd be interesting to see how much better it would have done outside of the Tuesday night slaughterhouse. Easily the most competitive night of the week this season, in my opinion.

Although, there's Mark Stern's comments from just a couple of weeks ago, made after Season 1.5 already started airing, and when viewership was already well below the million-mark where he basically teases renewal, even though each week continued to sustain a precipitous viewership-drop: "I think our feeling is — and we’ll have done — aired about six or seven episodes by then. I think we’re definitely hopeful to have a decision before that."

I can certainly understand why they made the decision they made, on a strictly ratings-driven basis, but it was all the false, manipulated hopes that the Syfy brass continued to stir up these past few months which are rankling much of the fanbase, right now.

Between MST3K, Farscape, and now Caprica, does anyone from SyFy dare appear at a SF con to promote stuff anymore?

If the audience for Science Fiction can't be realistic and understand that entertainment is subject to business rules, maybe they shouldn't bother. I've often heard it said that science fiction fans are amongst the more "thinking" of audiences, but when a show gets canceled, that all seems to go out the window and emotion rules the day.

I enjoyed everything I saw of Farscape. Eventually it didn't have enough of an audience, so it got canceled. They tied it up nicely with the Peacekeeper Wars miniseries. Three seasons and a minseries isn't exactly Firefly territory.

Caprica was an attempt to carry on the BSG universe for us BSG fans, while being different enough so that it didn't feel like a retread. It didn't catch fire, so it got canceled. SyFy still hasn't given up, and is greenlighting Blood & Chrome in the hopes that it will be able to recapture the magic of BSG. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but I appreciate them trying. If it doesn't happen, I'm not going to blame SyFy. SyFy isn't doing this for fun. If they greenlight a show and it doesn't work, they have to cut their losses at some point. IMO, attributing the lack of numbers to split seasons and such is assigning a justification that just isn't there. People find good shows. SyFy has been splitting seasons for quite awhile. They did it with BSG, and they did it with Stargate. The central problems with Caprica are problems with the product itself. It doesn't make those who really like the show wrong, but apparently there were a lot of people who didn't find it compelling viewing.

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/10/28/battlestar-galactica-blood-and-chrome-david-eick/ 

I think it was a mistake to distance Caprica from BSG, though having BSG in the title would have been a bit strange since I don't believe Galactica even exists in Caprica's timeframe. Either way, I don't think that's a significant reason why it didn't capture a greater audience. When you go from X viewers to 0.5x viewers, that's a significant segment telling you they just aren't into the show.

You mean be realistic and watch a soap opera with sci-fi trappings. Just cause you throw in one or two fantasy elements, does not make a show sci-fi. But i guess it could be SyFy? I only watched the pilot of this thing so i cannot speak on this particular show.

It's just that, I wouldn't call a show a western, just cause a guy rides a horse.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mikah Cerucco 

People find good shows. SyFy is been splitting seasons for quite awhile. They did it with BSG, and they did it with Stargate.  

Although they did it with Stargate, they did it a little differently.  It would start in June or July, run without breaks until the networks' fall schedule started, go on hiatus, and return in March/April to finish the season.  The big plus to that was that there was only a tiny break from the end of one season to the beginning of the next.  And even the break in the middle was only a few months.

Eureka was different in that while they 'said' that it had 20 episodes, aired about half then went on hiatus with no clear indication when it'd start back up.  When it finally did, a year went by, and while saying that it was the second half of the season it essentially had 2 seasons of 10 episodes.

And then there's BSG.  Correct me if I'm wrong (not a big BSG fan) but wasn't this essentially the same in that the final season was split over a year or more?

What I'm trying to get at is that while you are correct in that we have a lot more resources to know when a show returns, you're discounting the element of time.  When a show's not on, people find other things to do.  And sometimes the other things become just as important.  When a show needs time to find an audience the last thing you want to do is make the audience wait, and find other things to do with their time.

Take me for instance - while not necessarily a BSG fan, I am a sci-fi fan, so I recorded the first half of Caprica without watching it.  Over the summer I finally sat down to watch, and while not the greatest, I actually liked it - better than BSG.  But in waiting for the second half, I got busy doing other stuff and have gotten back into the same pattern - record them without watching them yet.

SyFy does a MAJOR disservce to sci-fi fans by splitting seasons.  If they returned to the earlier Stargate SG-1 model that would be one thing, but they either need to go the route of Britian and state upfront that seasons are only 10-12 episodes long (with a clear indication when shows will return) or do a better job of having a more network-like defined schedule. 
 

I actually liked Caprica more than most (not as much as BSG, but that's a level reserved for very few other series) and though I'm not surprised they cancelled it, I'm certainly disappointed.   it certainly had it's issues with finding it's footing, but I though there were 3 or 4 directions they could have taken the series into some really interesting places, but now we'll never know.   Oh well, it's just a TV show -- now I can go back to ... well Dexter, House, ugh, well Dexter and House.  

First the second half was to be shown in October, then they moved it to January, then they moved it back to October and did very little to promote the show.   Now they aren't even going to show the final 5 episodes unitl sometime in 2011.  

I;m so glad the B5 came out years ago and had a chance to fix their 1st season issues otherwise we would have missed a great series.

The Los Angeles Times just posted up a new interview with David Eick, where he drops a big character-spoiler about the upcoming BSG: Blood & Chrome movie:

They're already casting right now. Word has it that the Adama role has officially gone out to Nico Cortez, and that it's his to turn down.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mikah Cerucco 

 

Caprica was an attempt to carry on the BSG universe for us BSG fans, while being different enough so that it didn't feel like a retread. It didn't catch fire, so it got canceled. SyFy still hasn't given up, and is greenlighting Blood & Chrome in the hopes that it will be able to recapture the magic of BSG. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but I appreciate them trying. If it doesn't happen, I'm not going to blame SyFy. SyFy isn't doing this for fun. If they greenlight a show and it doesn't work, they have to cut their losses at some point. IMO, attributing the lack of numbers to split seasons and such is assigning a justification that just isn't there. People find good shows. SyFy is been splitting seasons for quite awhile. They did it with BSG, and they did it with Stargate. The central problems with Caprica are problems with the product itself. It doesn't make those who really like the show wrong, but apparently there were a lot of people who didn't find it compelling viewing.

 

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/10/28/battlestar-galactica-blood-and-chrome-david-eick/ 

 

I think it was a mistake to distance Caprica from BSG, though having BSG in the title would have been a bit strange since I don't believe Galactica even exists in Caprica's timeframe. Either way, I don't think that's a significant reason why it didn't capture a greater audience. When you go from X viewers to 0.5x viewers, that's a significant segment telling you they just aren't into the show.

Yet, one also can't deny the fact that Syfy miscalculated, pure and simple, the likely audience-retention for something as cerebral -- and FAR less action-oriented -- as Caprica, compared to its BSG remake predecessor.

Even BSG itself suffered rather serious audience dropoff in its final year, abetted by the mid-season split (admittedly partially caused by the WGA strike). But when the time came to broadcast the much-riskier Caprica, Syfy enacted the exact same strategy, seemingly oblivious to the notion that "intellectual" SF usually tends to attract far less of an audience than "action" SF does, and that a show like Caprica ran a severe chance of hemorrhaging viewers, were a mid-season split to take place.

The lack of common sense demonstrated here by the Syfy executives is still utterly breathtaking -- everyone was saying right from the very beginning how much of an uphill battle this show would have on a network where pro wrestling and on-the-cheap monster flicks pull in the majority of their viewership. Were they actually expecting the audience numbers to remain steady after nearly seven months off the air, much less grow?

...Or:

What Kevin just said.

This is actually hilarious, in a morbid kinda way:

Syfy posts official sneak-peeks for Episode #1.14 ("Blowback"), but then pulls them down.

Just when it was getting to be compelling. I really enjoyed the last few episodes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mikah Cerucco 

If the audience for Science Fiction can't be realistic and understand that entertainment is subject to business rules, maybe they shouldn't bother. I've often heard it said that science fiction fans are amongst the more "thinking" of audiences, but when a show gets canceled, that all seems to go out the window and emotion rules the day.

 

I enjoyed everything I saw of Farscape. Eventually it didn't have enough of an audience, so it got canceled. They tied it up nicely with the Peacekeeper Wars miniseries. Three seasons and a minseries isn't exactly Firefly territory.

 

IIRC, didn't SciFi lead the producers of Farscape to believe another season was "greenlit" otherwise they would not have ended on a cliffhanger the way they did? And the miniseries was only ordered in the wake of angry fans writing in?

I'm sure this is how they do business in Hollywood all the time, but, misleading fans and production people while you're sharpening that cancellation axe behind the woodshed is still a dick move.

It's a darn good thing a bunch of Star Trek fans got all emotional back in the 60's!

An excellent analysis of the entire Caprica cancellation-situation, by columnist Alan Sepinwall.

Does a good job of laying it all out, point by point.

I think that's a pretty fair article about the situation.

Someone (a total dick, actually, who was/is crowing over the show's cancellation on another message board) linked to this ratings chart that shows where the series started to plummet, in terms of viewership:

Splitting the first season of a show that needed a longer stretch to build viewership was a dumb idea right from the very beginning. Looking at the data now in hindsight, I don't know how anybody could even begin to disagree with that notion.

They (the Syfy network) tend to split up their seasons to try and take advantage of sweeps weeks -- and it's always a pathetic marketing maneuver that pisses off the audience, and is extremely unwise to do with a show that was never a ratings powerhouse to begin with.

The ratings for Season 1.0, while not wonderful, were certainly much better than they were during October, even though in my opinion the series was beginning to pick up a lot of speed and storyline momentum in the last few episodes. So, clearly, the problem was that people lost interest in the show during the hiatus, rather than it being a question of the show losing "quality."

Sad, really. I was quite looking forward to the machine-uprising aspect of this show. Intelligent A.I. that gains consciousness and decides not to follow orders. Very likely robot soldiers and servants that get sick of their treatment at the hands of humanity. I know that they were getting there, but not nearly fast enough for some audience members, apparently.

Quote:

Originally Posted by joshEH 

Someone (a total dick, actually, who was/is crowing over the show's cancellation on another message board)...

I never really understood that type of response from people. I don't like American Idol (for example) but it's not like my life will somehow be enhanced when it gets cancelled/ends. I don't even need to read the guy's posts to know that, despite hating the show, he watched every episode and that he will also still be a miserable loser whether Caprica got cancelled or ran a decade.

Caprica debuted at 1.6MM viewers and steadily lost viewers until it bottomed out at under 1MM. It then had a rebound, but the mid-season finale had lower ratings than the mid-season penultimate episode. Did it lose more viewers after the break? Absolutely. About 300,000 net. But you know what? It also lost 300,000 net between episodes 2 and 3.

You see people not returning _because_ of the break, and I see the same thing differently. What I see is many people weren't captivated by the show, but stuck with it until it reached a breaking point. So I agree with you that if the show had continued with no break, more of those would have kept watching (until a later breaking point). You see the break as causing discontent, and I see the break as a convenient point to express discontent.

To an unknown degree, both are true. But I can't accept as Gospel that the reason Caprica struggled in the ratings is because of the break. I've heard from too many people who watched it, couldn't get into it, and decided the break was a convenient place to stop watching. I've also seen too many other shows navigate breaks just fine.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt 

It's also possible that the Zoe and Tamara avatar subplot could be continued as-is in Blood & Chrome, since the avatars don't age. That was the most interesting storyline from Caprica anyway. Just have them wandering in cyberspace for the decade and change in between.

only if it runs in the first year of the program,  the avatars don't age, the actresses still will, i know suspense of disbelief

i was thinking about buying this set, because it is the precursor to battlestar gallactica. I never watched the new series, because i could not get into starbuck and boomer being females. I guess it has a lot to do with growing up on the original series and seeing dirk benedict as starbuck.

I have seen some of the clips and the show looks interesting, especially the rationale why the cylons were created.

I welcome your thoughts on the show

If you are inclined to watch Caprica, you should watch the more recent BSG first.  They are meant to be viewed that way, much the way the original Star Wars trilogy should be viewed before the prequels.  As for not watching the more recent BSG over Boomer and Starbuck ... you're only spiting yourself.  If your user name indicates your birth year, you and I are about the same age.  I watched the original live and loved it.  The more recent one is one of the best TV series ever made IMO.  It has some flaws, but the casting of Boomer and Starbuck is not one of them.  Both were wonderful characters.  Get through the miniseries, which drags a little, and then watch the first two episodes, "33" and "Water."  If you aren't hooked then, you will know the show is not for you.  One other word of advice -- it's a drama, not a sci fi vehicle to show off sfx and what new language the writers could come up with.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by younger1968 

i was thinking about buying this set, because it is the precursor to battlestar gallactica. I never watched the new series, because i could not get into starbuck and boomer being females. I guess it has a lot to do with growing up on the original series and seeing dirk benedict as starbuck.

 

I have seen some of the clips and the show looks interesting, especially the rationale why the cylons were created.

 

I welcome your thoughts on the show

I agree with Charlie--if you aren't hooked after the pilot, "33," and "Water," then it's unlikely you'll be hooked later.

If you decide to start watching, I urge you to follow along with the official season threads on this forum: they are some of the best discussions on the boards.

We just watched the most recent episode "False Labor" last night. It was a fantastic episode. This show is really starting to gain momentum and it gets axed...typical.

 http://insidetv.ew.com/2010/11/19/caprica-final-five-episodes-to-air-back-to-back-on-jan-4/ 

Oh my,  what a finale.     Oh for what could have been with some patience.   I'm sorry for those who hated this show, but I loved the whole thing and the whole

concept that shows have to be perfect from Day 1. 

I'm still so glad Babylon 5 was made in a different era or we'd never have meant Sheridan and the entire memory

would have been called Babylon One and Done.