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?
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.