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.
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