Oh, is this the my-show-got-cancelled-thread? Yay! I'll pitch in.
* SGU
* Caprica
* Dollhouse
* Firefly
/begin rant
Please dear god, kill SyFy (which, btw, does NOT mean anything - ScienceFiction is not pronounced "S[y]F[y]" - marketing idiocracy...). They seem to have this evil "let's show them just enough..." and cancel shows when they reach/just before they reach their top. I don't know if we all agree on which shows were good and which were bad/mediocre, but I think we can all agree that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth to cancel shows after one or two season - leaving no conclusion - and ending with a cliffhanger or preview (yes, Caprica, I am looking at you! Season 2? BAH! Lies!). This, after also having their name change for reasons unknown (read: to alienate SciFi fans and confuse regular customers), just makes me wish they'd never make another show that has the SyFy logo on it - at least then, there would be no room for disappointment
/end rant

SGU is / was a good show? Say what?

I've been watching it to kill time, but I would say that I'm glad that it got canned. The story writers were obviously amature at best, and I'll give some examples as to why:

1. They're deadly afraid of cliches, and because they go so far out of their way to avoid them, they miss out on alot of opportunities to evoke emotion from their viewers. Like when the stranded team were dialing back to the ship with seconds to spare - my heart was racing, I knew that they would make it but I was still excited - then boom. They weren't the ones that dialed in and they were left stranded. THEN in the next episode they found a way to get back to the ship and all was well.. What a let down.

2. Based off of #1, the writers are unable to see the bigger picture or rather see the direction in which they want the story to go. It's almost like they're only thinking on their feet and making things up as they record the scenes. Because of this, they keep making big things happen (chloe being infected by some virus), following her story for a few eps, realising that it was a stupid idea, and then undoing everything in one episode (Oh hey! The aliens have come to cure your virus, have a nice day!).

3. Eli. God I had to look up the character's name on wikipedia because I hate this guy so much. I get it, the producers wanted to try to make the audience relate to a civillian but it fails miserably for me. Computer gamer cracks some code imbedded into a game, gets recruited by SGU, then magically knows how to read ancient and operate an alien ship. Don't get me started on his puppy-dog woman-like-PMS personality that just makes me want to yell "Harden the f* up" at the screen everytime he makes an appearance. Makes me want to gag.

The ONLY thing that this show had was Rush. He's the only reason why I watched the show each week. The rest was complete garbage.

PS: I wasn't happy about them cancelling Caprica though. I guess people hate shows that you can't just start watching from any random episode number and be able to understand what's going on.

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I watched most if not all the SGU hoping to start liking it, and never did. The main problem for me was that they took a series about alien technology, saving the planet/universe/whatever with some humor mixed in, and turned it into a darkish soap opera in space. Why I think it failed:


1. None of the new characters were likable. Its like they all tried to annoy the crap out of me. [/font]
2. Only new tech they introduced was what, a flying camera. Wooho...
3. Stargate had a fairly large fan base, and by changing the formula entirely, SyFy and MGM managed to turn most of them away. Maybe if it wasn't named Stargate it would have had a better reception. Its not like they needed the gate anyway, the show had basically nothing to do with it.
4. The story progressed extremely slowly. Every single episode felt like filler. No clear direction. No clear antagonist.
5. Too much b****ing. Every episode you'd have to listen to some guy/girl talking about how he/she is tired of the ship and wants to go home. This goes back to point number 1. I don't care if any of the characters die, so why should I care that they're sad.

I really tried to get into SGU, mainly because I was a big fan of the other two series, and I was disappointed that Atlantis didn't get a proper ending but this show just didn't deliver.

PS: I wasn't happy about them cancelling Caprica though. I guess people hate shows that you can't just start watching from any random episode number and be able to understand what's going on.

Count me as somebody who hates such shows. Obviously I don't expect them to introduce all characters from the start within each episode, but the whole season-spanning epic arc thing has gone too far in my opinion. As a rule, each episode should tell a self-contained story that can stand on its own. If it also advances the main season arc a little, even better. But give me something that makes sense as a stand-alone episode, and I'll be so much happier.

One very concrete problem of the epic season-spanning arc disease is that it causes many episodes to feel like filler. When the writers don't strive to make each episode something that is interesting as a self-contained story, then guess what, each episode isn't interesting. In fact, such shows often feel like the writers stretched a two-hour movie out to 20 episodes. That's just plain boring.

This thread is mostly about science fiction shows, but let me illustrate this with a different example anyway: Buffy. The first few seasons were a perfect blend of self-contained stories per episode, that also often advanced the main season arc. Then in the later seasons, they got epic arc disease, and the quality just went horribly downhill - at least for my taste. The first few seasons are full of memorable episodes, because the writers obviously tried to make each episode interesting in itself. In the later seasons, the memorable episodes are very, very rare. In my opinion, that's just sad.

Begin Opinion:
Heroes was axed and Lost is over. I think even the worst episode in Heroes was better than the best of stargate. Yuck. But I hated how Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (I know it was on Fox) was axed JUST as it was actually getting good. I admit the writing was poor at the beginning, but the later part of season 2 was ace!

Battlestar Galactica was great in the first season and a half, but in my own opinion the show fell short of what it should have been due to the writers need to insert controversial and political garbage into the show. I am usually dense to these kinds of things, but it was just way too obvious in that show. Caprica was just too dark and muggy for my tastes with a bit too much whining and not enough robot apocalypse.

On a different note No Ordinary Family is one which has potential but has a serious case of bad writing where the writers have a serious and obvious hard-on for drama. So much back and forth on the characters positions will make all but the stupidest or most forgiving audience members turn the tv off and turn into a spitting rage.

I think it's time for Chuck and Psych to call it quits. The writers wrote themselves into a tiny little hole and it's time to get the axe.

End Opinion.

*brain asplodes*

Wait, what? SGU was cancelled? Goddamnit. I don't want to sound like everyone else on here but I'm getting fed up of decent SciFI shows getting cancelled because either the higher-ups in the channel don't like it, or because you can't just watch one episode and go "Hey, I liked that".

Firefly, SGU and Caprica were all shows that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I was always on the fence with SGU. Personally I would have preferred it as a survivalist show where they lost complete contact with earth, and were completely alone. I couldn't understand why Caprica got axed. I got diehard anti-sci-fi people to actually sit down and watch Caprica, and even enjoy it. I can at least take some twisted comfort in knowing that a show I only kind of liked go canned as well.

Firefly and Farscape were shows that were very good. SGU never really grabbed me. SG:A was a pale shadow to SG-1. It's a shame MacGyver didn't make it to the end of that series.

It really doesnt matter what shows you like, shows are axed based on so called 'ratings' performed by a an extremely small percentage of the market. For example Neilson ratings, the so-called main indicator used in many of these show's ratings is rated by approx 0.02% of the American households in the country. Ummm what kind of real ratings can you get from such a small percentage of the population, you can't. It explains why shows such as 'Glee' get such high ratings even though it is one of the worst shows on TV (IE they won't be cancelled anytime soon). Second, SyFy has a bad habit of moving shows around to different time slots which doesn't help in the least and their website (speaking of Rewind) is rarely updated anymore.