Caprica Cancellation - who will dare divide an audience now?

Now I had a bit of a rant earlier today here in the comments to Sophie's post about Caprica and Egyptian Gods but I reckon it's worth discussing the cancellation of Caprica in relation to the bigger picture - of what makes good Sci-Fi and what makes commercial Sci-Fi and what the hunt for a large cohesive audience means, creatively and more broadly.

A quick look at the Customer Reviews section of the Amazon.com page for the Caprica DVDs got me thinking about what it means to have divided your audience. There was a lot of love in the comments room for Caprica, but also a lot of the other thing. Which raises the question; can a creative project that divides audiences find support in the cruel harsh light of the commercial world? It's worth considering that question for a bit and maybe broadening it.

Making stuff up, making stories, means you want to tell a tale that your audience will be compelled to hear, to be hooked by, to listen to, all the way to the end. Well, I do any way. I want to write something that people will read. Why? Well, for one thing I have a maybe misguided belief in the power of the story I'm trying to tell. I think it's not only interesting but in some way "true", that is, it is telling some kind of truth about life, the universe and everything.*

Now, just because I want people to hear my story doesn't guarantee that they will. My book is a bit on the sweary side. It's about cops, and though it doesn't swear nearly as much as they do, it probably is a bit rawer than a viewer of Midsommer Murders would care for. 

So, I know up front that I'm going to divide my audience. And frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. That's my story. That's how it has to be told. Cosy crime readers won't dig it, gritty, noir, realism crime readers will. I accept that though crime is a "genre" it has a number of sub-genres within it.

Now, the Sci-Fi genre has a long tradition of telling stories about the future that also tell us something about us, right here and now.  And that's just what Caprica set out to do when the producers and writers decided to find their conflict in the battle of ideas rather than the battle of phasers and space battles. 

As I banged on here, Caprica was all about taking the social, cultural and religious ideas explored in BSG and developing them. This made it one of the few (only?) TV dramas prepared to examine the major issue of the new millennium - extremist religious terrorism - in a way that wasn't just violent revenge porn.

Whether they got it all right, all at once is open to debate. But some viewers got pretty excited about the approach and its potential. Others got bored. The makers of Caprica divided their audience. And that is, it seems, something that can't continue.

Sy-Fy tells us that: "Unfortunately, despite its obvious quality, Caprica has not been able to build the audience necessary to justify a second season."

Now that's a pretty depressing statement which ever way you look at it because it seems to resign itself to the fact that "quality" cannot survive in a marketplace that demands a non-divided audience. And "quality" won't even earn you the time to develop complex ideas that would perhaps build an audience, the kind of audience that buys DVD box sets that give a product an exceptionally long shelf life, like say, Deadwood, The Wire, True Blood etc.

SY-FY is not HBO. That much is clear. I know that I'd love to see what HBO could have done with Caprica. Perhaps it's time HBO took on the Sci-Fi genre and gave it The Wire crime treatment, or the True Blood horror treatment, or the Deadwood western treatment. Sci-Fi that looks to go beyond laser and phasers and space battles deserves to be treated with the kind of slow burning respect HBO extends the stuff it believes in.

The hunt for the undivided audience however is not limited to TV execs. I think it's something we're seeing in politics as well.

It used to be that parties hunted for the middle ground of settled policy, meaning that their own policies became more or less indistinguishable. Whilst that has certainly continued, the introduction of easier, accurate and more predictive polling, has meant that political parties now hunt for the "swinging" voter and then tailor their policies to capture them and keep the ultimate undivided audience. Political parties now shrink from floating any policy that may divide that audience, no matter how necessary the policy may be. 

So, perhaps it is no surprise that in the world of TV politics the hunt and capture of viewers has led to the creation of programs with the widest appeal possible, programs which tend to repeat ad nauseum previous successes, which start to all look, sound and feel the same, there is less and less space for programs which are prepared to explore ideas and dare to polarize audiences.

*Douglas Adams wrote about all these things. He did it in an outrageously funny way. He also told some universal truths along the way proving you can do sci-fi genre that is smart, popular, different and intelligent. 

Telling long stories in Space - sometimes it helps to stay in one place

One of the most satisfying features of genre TV making is its embrace of long form storytelling. The concept of the long running show itself is not unique; serials and soap operas secured themselves a place on the tube early, along with that other genre stalwart, crime, although until The Wire showed how it could be done, crime tended to use its long running format to tell self-contained crime-of-the-week stories, to which the casual viewer could drop into - and out of - with ease.

In a book analogy, the crime-of-the-week, self-contained episode format is rather like a short story anthology. Maybe all the stories are set in the same place, maybe even featuring the same characters who may gradually change from story to story, but the reader doesn't need to read it cover to cover or in any particular order to enjoy the stories.

Long form storytelling in Sci-Fi, such as Torchwood, DS9, BSG, have increasingly offered their audience something more like a contract - we have a story to tell, it won't be told fast, it's going to involve layers, you're going to need to pay attention, but it'll be worth the trip.

Sci-Fi series, such as Star Trek, began with the self-contained planet-of-the-week format to tell their stories. This model was maintained when Star Trek : The Next Generation was re-launched in the late 1980s, apart from occasional two part special episodes. Within this episode based framework, characters developed and changed and made their journeys over the 7-year run of the show, most notably that of the sentient android Data who sought to become human rather than a facsimile of a human. But these developments happened often in spite of the alien of the week format, rather than because of it.

The long form narrative, a coherent detailed and expansive story remained limited to mini-series, such as V until, in 1993, two new shows launched: Babylon 5 and another iteration of the Star Trek universe Deep Space 9. Both series, though structured around the self-contained episode-based storyline format, contained one significant new element.

They were static. 

The were set on stations in a fixed location in space, with residents and neighbours and conflicts that weren't going to disappear in the rear-view mirror at the end of forty-five minutes never to be seen again. In this universe the decisions made had long lasting consequences, and the makers of those decisions had to stick around and experience the ramifications.

For the first time perhaps, in recent Sci-Fi TV making, there was a real sense of a fully developed place. Place in a literary sense of the word, containing all that that implies, not just the physical space of the station, but layers of people, politics, culture, geography, society and history that surrounded the station.

The effect of this sense of place on the storytelling that developed, particularly in DS9, was crucial. It morphed from a self-contained episode-based space opera quite early, opening its second season with the first three-part story arc in Star Trek storytelling history.

The subject matter of this extended story explored the rebuilding of the political culture of the station’s nearest neighbour, the planet Bajor. It revealed the religious and political culture of an alien world; it played out conflicts, established characters and saw decisions made that would reverberate all the way through to the conclusion of the series, five years later.

This was story telling on an epic scale.

Whether the Star Trek creators were initially aware of the narrative consequences of their decision to remain at a fixed point in space is debatable. The fact that the two subsequent series in the Star Trek world, Voyager & Enterprise, both reverted to the ship-based blast-away-at-the-end-of-the-episode structure suggests that some in the franchise were uncomfortable with the long form story format inspired by anchoring yourself in a place and creating authentic worlds and people in that place. 

The storytelling influence of Ronald D Moore, who both wrote and produced on DS9, became clear as the drama began to develop this rich and complex sense of place, and a large cast of regular supporting characters. As Moore and show-runner Ira Steven Behr’s confidence grew the story arcs became longer, richer and more complex and the creators asked their audience to check in and commit for the long ride.

Next time: Taking the long ride