Dark Matter Is Firefly's Heir Apparent

As far as sci-fi fans are concerned, Firefly was cancelled much too soon. Just as the show was finding its rhythm, the executives at Fox balked at the show's $3 million per episode budget and tepid Friday night ratings. Fox just didn't see its potential. Good space opera has always been costly to produce, and ratings-versus-cost is a repetitive cancelling theme when it comes to our speculative fiction entertainment--at least fans of the original StarTrek got 75 episodes out of that run. At long last, though, we have found Firefly's heir apparent; it is called Dark Matter, and it's already made it past its first season.

Lower production costs have made ambitious programming less risky. SyFy took the plunge recently and produced a plethora of new space operas: Killjoys, Dark Matter, The Expanse--but of all these new series, only Dark Matter captures Firefly's essence. The writing and show mythology only got better in season two, something Firefly never got its chance to prove.

NBCUniversal’s Cable Ratings Drop: Comcast Not Seeing The Forest For The Trees*



Syfy's promising new original series, Defiance, starts in April.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a piece on NBCUniversal’s (NBCU) drooping cable channel ratings, particularly for long-time revenue engines like the Syfy channel (down 4% in viewership in 2012) and E! Entertainment (down 10%). There’s an irony in this since I believe NBCU’s parent, Comcast, is to blame for the drop in its own subsidiary’s ratings due to some ambitious pricing of its properties. What were once free (or almost free) basic cable channels suddenly became part of bundled cable “packages” that you had to shell out close to $20 a month for--and that’s how Syfy lost me as a viewer.