Caprica Cancelled

I suppose this isn't a surprise.

Sorry, fans of “Caprica”, but the SyFy Channel has officially canceled your show. Not only has the cable net made the cancellation official, but they are pulling the show off their schedule after the November 2nd, 2010 episode. That leaves five more unaired episodes, which the network plans to run in their entirety sometime in early 2011, though when exactly is unknown. After that, there will be no more “Caprica”.

There's a more thoughtful discussion here other than "this show sucked" that I think is worth reading. It's not that "Caprica" didn't have some interesting ideas - the conflict of monotheism and polytheism, the challenges of the military-industrial complex, the rise of true artificial intelligence, the injection of virtual reality into a mass market - it's that the producers never invested in the discussion of these ideas through their characters. Instead, they tried to run too many character plots that seemed to have their origin from the Lifetime channel. 

In the last episode, I got to watch Clarice's "family" host a natural birth in their home. Yech. That's when I pulled it off the "record" menu.

I blame the SyFy channel as a an equal partner to the death of good science fiction shows. You'd think by now that they'd have figured out that splitting seaons in half and separating the two halves by three-four months tends to lose one's audience as they forget the plot, lose the action, move on to other shows. A sci-fi fan might think that a cable channel that was more interested in hosting "WWF Smackdown" instead of fantasy and sci-fi movies didn't really have its heart - or business interest - in your kind of show. 

Now, SyFy can replace the five final (and unviewed) episodes of "Caprica" with their truly horrible original movies like "Sharktopus," "MonsterWolf," "Dinocroc vs Supergator," and "Ice Spiders." If you think I'm kidding, these are actual movie titles on SyFy's site. Goodbye, SyFy channel. I'm hoping a change of management might re-invigorate your business sense, but I'm not optimistic.

Comments

[sheerahkahn]

I think Caprica is still a good show, though the writers took their sweet time getting to where they wanted to go.
However, SyFy channel wouldn't know what a good Scifi show even it bit them in the pants...oh wait, it did...but, and this is where I kind of blame the market...all that other crap they make...doesn't even rate up there with the old B movies that I used to watch on Friday night or Saturday night...the old "Creature Feature" movies.
Unfortunately, we'll have to wait for the good stuff to come out on the big screen.
"Mountains of Madness" is one which I'm really excited about, move over Stephen King, the real master of Horror and suspense has come in, H.P. Lovecraft.
Apparently the Hobbit has cleared a major hurdle, and Cameron has signed a contract for two more Avatar like movies, hopefully without the benefit of a pirated Disney script to give backbone to the story and effects.

[George Smith]

Sharktopus, Flu Bird Horror, and similar ilk are interesting in that they show how some stars still continue to make bucks. And they actually must be good, to a certain extent. How else would you quench your disgust, like Eric Roberts in Sharktopus, if he wasn't actually a good actor?

SyFy has mercilessly retreated into LCD programming. Caprica, as slow and Shakespearean as it was, is still better than the weekday reality programming. But it's the truly intelligence-insulting stuff like Ghost Hunters and Destination Truth -- and wrestling -- that are successes at SyFy.

Really, it's a split audience. There's the many many dummkopfs who like Ghost Hunters. And then those who like things like Battlestar Galactica, or the more classicaly attempts at serial sci-fi.

How do you reconcile the two?

One of Caprica's problems was that it was way too slow. And to have made the story move along more quickly they would have had to jettison some of the characters and their sidebits, like J implied.

The thing to do would have been to get rid of Graystone's real wife and her mid-life crisis, ditch a lot of Adama's tortured introspection and his home life, get much more quickly into the employment and misemployment of the Cylon robots.

[me.yahoo.com/a/Sr9XuJIHkI0g8zz3HJQytYvRWD4Kv4kr]

People dont have time to wait for a show to get "better" these days. Plus, i think SyFy is going though a identity crisis like what MTV went though. Maybe in a couple of years SyFy will become The Wonder Channel

[elizzar]

haven't they announced that the second bsg spin-off (chrome and blood or something else that sounds a bit too like Spartacus: b+s), set in the 1st cylon war, is going to be a proper series now, with a young adama as lead character? that's the sort of show i want, i'm a big fan of the original series (cheese and all) and i want my toasters, vipers and hotpant-clad female pilots ... i digress ...

[Mark Ash]

I guess the will save me from DVRing it just to fast forward through most of each episode.

I remember about 10 years ago SciFi was planning on doing a Forgotten Realms show. It never happened (instead just two awful D&D movies, though I don't know if they were related projects). I've always kind of hoped that SyFy do it's own Discworld series. Satirical Fantasy would play well I think. Plus their are 35 or so novels so their is plenty of material (though 4 have been made into 3 2-part miniseries for British TV, Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic in 1, the Hogfather and Going Postal which I've yet to see).

Other then the odd episode of Caprica I don't DVR anything from SyFy because there just isn't anything I find interesting. Most are dull, repetitive 'chase monster' or 'find artifact' shows.

[elizzar]

the discworld films are 2 good, 1 bad (com/lf sucked, rincewind so badly cast, and it had sam gamgee in ... ) - they were made by sky though, isn't that the same company basically as fox in the US ... ?
with the success of 300, spartacus etc, i'd really like to see some shows / films based on david gemmell's novels, especially the drenai ones (waylander, legend, chronicles of druss etc).

[E]

SyFy...man I miss the days when it was the Sci Fi channel and had shows like Farscape.

[Comrade Misfit]

I can't weep for Caprica. I washed my hands of the BSG brand after the finale of BSG. I vowed that I never would trust those clowns again and I have stuck by that.

[Nader Elhefnawy]

I agree strongly.
At this point, I rarely even bother to check what's on it.