Fall Sci-Fi TV Shows Take Serious and Critical Hits, Retools Needed

Posted by Dominic Messier Nov 30, 2008

When I last spoke of the new shows coming down the pipeline sci-fi wise, I had mentioned big titles, which were good bets as far as the new TV season was concerned. With many of them involving fairly recognizeable Hollywood names, it was assumed that each show would recapture lost audiences who had no choice but to flock towards cinematic releases, rather than fall prey to the abominable territory that is reality television.

(I mean honestly, how long before we see Who Wants to Marry a Survivor Millionaire on Fear Factor Island?)

And so, we saw the advent of shows which showed promise. Among them, a new take on the classic Jejyll and Hyde story, a show called My Own Worst Enemy, starring Christian Slater. Also, NBC opted to revive a tried, tested and true franchise, namely Knight Rider. Also, successful shows of seasons past have come back for another round at the bat, with Heroes leading the way. All seemed on track for the first month or so, and then the biggest villain in TV Land came back from the wooded hills and spread terror to the masses.

Its name? The dreaded Nielsens ratings system.

Before you know it, Christian Slater was packing his bags after only two episodes of Enemy had aired, making it the first high profile new show the get the axe. NBC saw it had been unable to retain viewers from a previous timeslot, and gently asked it to leave out the back door, and to not make a scene.

Knight Rider is still on the air, but recent reports point at a major retooling of the current cast, which aims at reducing the crew of about 7 actors, to a much more moderate 3 or 4, namely pricipal actors Justin Bruening and Deanna Russo, and background techie characters played by Paul Campbell and Smith Cho. A stab at appealing to younger demographic? Perhaps, however the "official" reason was to change the concept of the show to reflect the old series' storyline, which was of a young crusader against injustice, rather than the current formula, which has so far consisted of fighting off the major terrorist of the week, and acting important on the national level, all under the watchful eye of the federal and national intelligence agencies.

Now, I'm not saying bring the story down to a weekly case of Michael Knight (the new one, not the Hoff) saving a scared wee little kitten from a tree, or saving a family from an evil mortgage broker. It would, however be nice to see a counter organization come up against the Knight Foundation, coming up with its own futuristic vehicles to counteract KITT and his gadgets.

Mind you, I still think Val Kilmer as the voice of KITT is badassss, though I'm not exactly crazy about the car's newfound ability to change into other models, Transformers-like, doing away with any concept of structural integrity. Give me an episode where KITT crushes a passenger, by changing too fast from a Mustang to a Jeep, or something. Now that's a Sweeps Week episode I'd like to see!

Coming back to the subject, we come to the third season of Heroes. Granted, the second season was curtailed, and they had much to regain by jumping into a third season filled with various villains. That being said, and I say this as the most ardent fan of Heroes you can find, Tim Kring needs to take a breather and stop writing himself into a corner. At this rate, he is bound to run out of plausible new abilities to steal from Marvel and DC comics (Mohinder Suresh injects himself and slowly turns into a Peter Parker-ish version of Jeff Goldblum's The Fly? Hello?!), or will start repeating himself, beginning his slow yet steady downfall towards cancellation.

Suggestions? First off, do away with the whole "prevent the future from happening" schtick. This was the basis of Season One, and Season Two. There's already a concept of flashforwards and flashbacks in Lost, thank you very much, and it's hard enough to keep track of, much less staying interested in twenty different characters, on a weekly basis.

The storyline fueled first season was awesome, the second season never fully developed (due to a different villain, the WGA-Strike-Monster), but the third season is stuck in soap opera land, and everybody's related to someone else, and who's to say when an older character will come back from the dead? Bring Susan Lucci into the show, and you've got your latest candidate for afternoon TV limbo, right between One Life to Live and General Hospital.

My other suggestion was to kill off a bunch of characters, allowing for new character interactions. It's enough that they bring back some actors, in the guise of a dead character's identical twin (be thankful you still have a job, Ali Larter!), but soon everyone will have dealt with everyone else, and the show'll have nowhere to go.

Other shows of the season have thrived on original, well thought out storylines and slowly emerging mythologies (Fringe is still going strong), while others are dying a slow death (Smallville needs to wrap things up, lest a main character starts drawing social security), while others are sitting in the wings for their January start (Lost, Dollhouse), and so who's to say how the rest of the season will play out.

However it turns out, it better show some improvement soon, lest the sci-fi masses resort to reality TV, dooming themselves forever!

(Note: Why can't Paramount start up another Trek series? 40 years of franchise success can't be wrong!)