My parents recently retired and moved closer to my siblings and I and they had some of our old stuff. There were some VHS tapes I had recorded of the sci fi channel back in the day and I got a tv/vcr combo at a thrift store to relive when the channel was great.
I do wonder what happened to the channel? Is it just another case of marketing to people who don’t like your product like video games and comic books? It seemed to be a great place for nerds at one point. I even liked their take on wizard of oz and Alice in wonderland, but this was when a twist on a classic could be interesting.
I used to read their website but the last straws for me was a review of fantasy novels where the author started talking about Tolkien, GRRM, and Robert Jordan only to dismiss their work due to them being white males and she went on to hype some current year fantasy written by the usual “the patriarchy is everywhere” type feminists. Then they did a review of Brightburn that talked about white supremacy and I was done.
But my original question... what happened to the channel?
I remember back when they had a new movie every weekend, and yeah most of them were trash but i remember watching Boo (dumb name but pretty fucking good ghost story) and fucking splinter, which people still talk about.
God... Its a shame they fell so far.
Didn't Syfy do that Channel Zero show? That was a cool piece of film.
Yes, and also Happy! (whose first season was probably too close to home for some in Hollywood), but it seems like any time they actually do come up with something different that people might twig onto, they cancel it.
Thanks! Good video
They hired some people that didn't know how to spell (SyFy) and it was all downhill from there.
I didn't really watch Sci-Fi growing up so I can't speak to specifics, but I can speculate as the other channels have had the same thing happen. WTF is TLC anymore? The Last Channel I'd ever want to watch I guess. Even the Food channel is nothing but a bunch of damn cake contests.
I ditched my cable channels about two years ago. There was no ROI on them. I never watched them. I get more value out of recording old sitcoms for free off the local subchannels. I always liked those old shows anyway, even as a kid. They are a hell of a lot more funny.
I thought they changed it because the new channel was all reality TV shows. It no longer contained "science" nor "fiction", and therefore would be false advertising.
I think the SyFy rebrand included some “not just sci-fi” BS too iirc
My parents had cable, but I never did. Do you have an over the air antenna? I bought one and pretty much never used it nor the TV, but it was useful to occasionally de-stress last year (mainly as background noise or some sporting events) when my bedroom-come-office became an enemy.
You can get an adequate one for as little as $25 if you're in an urban area, and not that much for an extended range in suburban places. It's an OK otherwise free fallback if you ever, rarely, have the itch to put on TV.
Yeah, I've had the antenna for about 6 years or so now. I also bought an HDHomerun that it's connected to, that lets me use streaming boxes, or my computer, etc. to watch. All in all, I think I spent about $100 for the whole setup and it's free to use ever since. The HDHomerun was sort of key in that it let me use the Plex DVR to record off of it. I've got entire series on my NAS of old shows I like. I don't think I've got anything newer than 2000. Network TV was going downhill bad by then. All in all, for TV it's the best $100 I ever spent. The tech is super slow to change, so it's not at all unreasonable to get 15-20 years out of that $100.
As much as I love ghost shows and Ancient Aliens and paranormal shit in general, it physically pains me that these are the most popular shows on History.
Like, fuck, at least Vikings was thematic.
That’s true. History channel did used to do a very good job with actual history
The problem was, their older shows didn't have much variety - I guess they assumed that if people were bored of endless shows about Rome and World War II, they must not be interested in "history" at all.
Well aliens/UFOs/paranormal are interesting to me but I get your point.
I find speculation interesting, especially if one can present modern evidence, but those shows feel like someone trying to sell me religious bullshit as historical truth. Anyone remember that Sun Media show about Noah's Ark? Yeah, like that.
History channel 2 was a pretty good watch for a long time. But one day it just evaporated, replaced by the gutter garbage Vice channel. I have never watched more than 5 minutes of Vice, I don't know why they're still on.
Millions of people complained to the cable company about the abrupt disappearance of History 2. They gave zero shits.
Jesus christ, there's even a show about heavy-truck breakdowns on the 401. I watched a little bit of it, and nearly threw up a little bit over how over-dramatic the narrator tries so hard to sound. Fuck me, but they're not doing this in fucking outer space with a leaky suit, bud.
Well, his work SHOULD be written off as horrible dross, and he should be deplatformed wherever he might be, because that is explicitly his position himself: White males should not be platformed, endorsed, awarded, etc, according to his ideology, and he is one. Therefore, since we KNOW he's not a hypocrite, to be true to his own wishes, we should deplatform him wherever possible, to leave more room for other voices.
He also includes a lot of rape in his books. He's a Male Feminist (TM) for sure, but just this once, we should probably acquiesce to his wishes, and make sure no one ever listens to him.
Everything got taken over by women's garbage. They ruined TV deliberately for us and no one can ever change my mind on that. There's no possibility that people actually enjoy the shit they created.
Second this.. women is ruining all forms of entertainment willingly or unwillingly.
Willingly. They're doing it purely to hurt us.
I've nicknamed it the Felicia Day syndrome. For some weird reason, whenever the show is nearing the end of ideas, she shows up. Sure it might have a few seasons left, but her season is the sign the show is going down.
I don't blame her. She's likely just friends with cast and crew, and they bring her in for the heck of it, and because they're running out.
Sci Fi had a bunch of shows that criss crossed with each other, and then one of them had Felicia Day as a character. Within two seasons, all the shows are gone.
I suspect all of the shows had been filmed in Vancouver BC, and the cost went up too high. The city started charging more, and the cost of life rose, so suddenly CW could make the money but sci Fi couldn't.
I remember when she showed up on Eureka, it only took a couple episodes before most major plot events revolved around her. The entire final season was basically all about her, it was a bummer. Cool storyline still, but she was annoying.
Yeah, it was a fun story, but she was the sign of things going badly. I can't remember the name of her love interest, but he really changed over those seasons.
For a little while, they had a great thing going. You could catch Eureka and Warehouse 13 and reruns of Galactica and SG1 late at night. Not everything was great but they had charm if you didn't expect much.
Then Syfy became a thing. Sharknado existed, and the channel decided to chase that same stupid fad crowd that made Snakes on a Plane popular. They thought they could ride that wave into a younger and bigger demographic, but they didn't realize or notice that crowds that follow garbage "so bad it's good" media tend to be fleeting. After a few rounds of diminishing returns, they had alienated their older viewers and lost the attention of the younger ones.
The problem with trying to make something "so bad it's good" is that you can almost never intentionally make that, sharknado excluded.
What makes a movie like The Room, so bad it's good, is that you can tell the directors/writers truly thought they were making something good. You can tell that there's some kind of heart in it and despite inane dialogue or terrible effects there's some charm in them that resonates.
When someone intentionally tries to make a bad film it's irony poisoned from the start. There's no verisimilitude in it. It's all wink wink nudge nudge, hehehe this is so bad, don't you agree it's bad but you'll watch it anyways?
I think Guns Akimbo is a good illustration of this. It's not a good movie, the premise is stupid but has the potential to be entertaining. And if they just played it straight, I would have loved that garbage, but there just kept being scenes that felt like the movie was looking at you and saying "didya see that!? Haha its sooooooo dumb haha"
While there are many factors, I think the problem with Sci-Fi is that none of their other shows were ever able to attain the success of Stargate SG-1.
The network was way too hands-off with Farscape, I really think that if they had reigned them in a little bit, and forced them to be a little more episodic, or just edit the show in a way that made it more attractive to new viewers, it would have had a much better chance of lasting longer than it did.
Fans of the channel laid it all at Bonnie Hammer’s feet, but it’s not like she did anything at Sci-Fi that wasn’t being done on every other network.