Monday, September 11, 2006

SciFi Channel Cancels Stargate SG-1, And No One Notices

I guess I was out trying to save this world when the news came out on the web that NBC Universal (who owns the SciFi channel) was not renewing Stargate SG-1 for an 11th season.'
Bizarrely, the spin-off series, Stargate Atlantis is not being cancelled.

Apparently the ratings were pretty awful for Stargate's 10th season, which has been airing without its blockbuster lead-in Battlestar Galactica (which returns for its third season on Friday October 6.)

Of course a lot of the "original programming" on the SciFi channel is repurposed or simply remakes. Stargate SG-1 of course is a spin-off of the curiously successful movie Stargate starring Richard Dean Anderson Kurt Russell and the famously androgynous Jaye Davidson which originally aired on the pay-cable network Showtime. The Peabody-award winning Battlestar Galactica is of course a "re-imagining" of the NBC show from the early 1980s of the same name with some clever gender-swapping of the original characters and an even cleverer decision to hire real script writers before shooting the show.

What I find interesting and appealing about the show(s) which made up "SciFi Friday" are their positively Utopian, racially harmonious, vaguely Canadian ethos. Since Star Trek is off the air (despite recently celebrating the 40th anniversary of the airing of the first episode on September 8, 1966) these SciFi channel shows are the closest thing us progressive futurist/optimists have to sate our appetite for such portrayals.

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