I'm really pissed off about this. It was a really good show, based on a good series of books. It's very rare to see hard sci-fi in television, much less one appealing to a wide audience. Also the VFX team deserves a shout out here, as they managed to keep almost all visual effects physically accurate, including sneaking in scientific details at points you wouldn't ordinarily notice (like things heating up far behind invisible drive plume, sparks moving correctly on a spinning station or inside a maneuvering ship, etc.).
From what I hear, the last hope is for Amazon to pick it up. Netflix apparently is not interested. If this show gets cancelled, this will be a huge blow to both sci-fi on TV, and efforts to keep people interested in realistic space exploration.
If you like hard sci-fi books, Iain M Banks "Culture" series is excellent. Excession isn't the first in the series but it's a great standalone adventure that gives an overview of the universe (literally).
I'd start with Consider Phlebas. It's the most space-opeartic work of the series and although it's a somewhat early description of the culture, it pulls off a unique trick of describing the main protagonists of the series from the point of view of a sworn enemy (who is also a very likeable hero).
The other books suggested here, Player of Games and Excession are also quite good, but nothing beats Phlebas for sheer energy.
Well, opinion anyway!
P.S. The State of the Art, a collection of short stories with a few Culture ones (including the namesake) is also a good introduction to some of the themes and ideas in the later novels.
Strangely, the Expanse was being heavily hyped by Netflix UK earlier this year - but then Season 3 failed to make an appearance and now, apparently, Netflix won't be getting it at all.
This makes me wonder if perhaps a deal with Amazon has already quietly been done? It would be a great shame if the Expanse got cancelled. I think it's genuinely the best sci-fi show around right now.
In the U.S., "The Expanse" was picked up by Amazon Prime. It used to be that the Amazon Prime web page(s) heavily promoted it in both the top banner rotation of shows to check out and in the initially shown listings of shows under various categories ("Popular TV Shows", "Noteworthy...", "Trending...", whatever).
That's how I came across the show, after initially ignoring those placements for a few months because I didn't know how good it was and I wasn't in the mood for e.g. another "monsters" sci fi show (something I'd come to associate the SyFy channel with).
So, I watched season 1. Not too long after, season 2 launched. Amazon Video U.S. (integrated into the Prime video pages, or vise versa) had a "purchase" option for "day after broadcast" access. I purchased it and watched it. I don't remember how heavily it was promoted on the Amazon pages; I think there was at least some promotion.
Some time later, I revisited, wondering about that status of season 3. It turned out that U.S. Prime had picked up season 2. I was surprised as I'd seen absolutely zero promotion to that effect. Maybe because I'd already purchased season 2, but I'm far from certain about this.
Season 3 is now underway. And you can purchase "day after broadcast" access to it on U.S. Prime. Despite having watched both season 1 and 2, and actually paying Amazon for season 2, I've seen not one instance of promotion or listing of season 3, on U.S. Prime/Video web pages. Not one promotional email from them. Nada.
I was rather surprised at this. Amazon endlessly nags me to purchase things I'm not interested in (as well as a few that might interest me). And yet they make zero effort to upsell me on something I've already purchased?
Draw your own conclusion. To me, it seems as if they are for some reason actually actively hostile towards the show, now.
It was featured a lot in Brazil as well up until Season 2. For a whole month it was the only thing that showed featured for me. So much so that I watched the first episode and bought the books (because the story is very condensed on TV).
It is a shame... Expanse was very high quality sci-fi show.
There was a huge fan effort to get Dark Matter renewed, and then casting around to find a new home for the show which looks like it's now properly dead. It looks like it had more viewers than The Expanse, though I'm not sure if the figures I've seen are directly comparable.
Really? I saw season 1 and loved it. Then eventually found out there was a second one and was happy. Had no idead it got canceled too. I tried to see the first and second episode of expanse and didn't like it one bit. Dark matter pleased me plently. Made me remember a little of Firefly mixed with something else like stargate or something.
This comment and thread in general make me feel a little odd. I love sci-fi, hard soft and everything in between. I read all of The Expanse books so far, and they’ve been entertaining, but I don’t find them to be very memorable. The other thinf that gets me is it very quickly becomes anything, but hard sci-fi! I’m not going to spoil anything, but any real pretense of hardness goes by Abaddon’s Gate.
The show, I couldn’t get through the first season for the action and dialogue. The story was very compressed, and even in the books wasn’t deep enough to withstand compression.
But... I seem to be just about the only person to feel that way here! I feel like I read different books and watched a different show. I realize that taste has a huge variability, and I accept that, but I usually have a better grasp on why others love something I didn’t. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t love or hate it, I just think of it as bathroom/beach/airplane reading?
I'd blame it on taste variability. I'm a fan, and some of the criticism I read in the thread surprised me very much as well. Between general taste and the standards set by other stuff one reads, there's plenty of variability.
RE hardness, I'd say it's 90% hard by volume. The protomolecule is a core plot point, but its magical properties aren't big part of the story, by volume (with possible exception of Cibola Burn). Beyond that, the only "out there" elements are the absurd fuel efficiency of the Epstein drive, and the plausability-stretching stealth tech. But it may be that my threshold for hardness is lower than yours. I wonder what other things you would classify as not being properly hard?
Traversable wormholes, the “Slow Zone” and yes pretty much everything about the protomolecule. It’s hard, until you realize theres more energy and time at play than is feasible given the age and total volume of the universe. They’re also ignoring relativistic effects on approach to the wormholes, which would be necessarily extreme. Some elements are hard, but it’s just a skin of it.
I guess to me hard sci-fi = “physically possible” and that might not be fair. As I said though, I don’t mind soft sci-fi, because after all it is fiction and that’s fun. It’s just, if you’re going to throw magic into the mix, why not have at it?
If you set an absolute realism standard for hard SF, then what you're left with is a tiny rump of a subset of the stories by a tiny number of authors. There's barely any SF that meets that standard.
For me, I don't mind fantastical elements (FTL drives, wormholes, etc) as long as the rules they work by are consistent. Beyond that what makes SF 'Hard' for me is that they take real physics and explore it's consequences. That's the core of it.
For example, many of Larry Niven's stories are hard SF to me because he explores physical phenomena and their consequences. His characters encounter neutron stars and Neutronium objects, they encounter an anti-matter solar system, in one story there is a battle between buzzard ramjets which at the time he wrote it seemed like physically possible devices. OK so his characters often had to use magic FTL or other fantasy tech to get into those situations, but that doesn't change the fact that there is real science and (as far as he could get) plausible exploration of it in the books. That's all I ask for in hard SF.
As for the Expanse, they put in a lot of effort to show realistic zero gravity manoeuvring, fairly realistic space weaponry and habitats, including realistic effects of spin 'gravity'. Even the sociology was reasonably plausible. They picked a few specific things to 'break' physics for the purposes of enabling the rest of the stories to happen, and I'm ok with that.
You make a litany of good points, and I think I’ll just have to reset my “hard sci-fi-o-meter” starting today. You especially won me over with one of my favorite authors, Larry Niven.
Mostly my feelings/intuition, but here's the argument:
Name one other thing recently on air that's realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Closest thing that comes to mind would be NatGeo's Mars series, but that's half documentary, half speculative concept art, and definitely very niche. Beyond that, there's nothing. Before that, we had the trio of Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian, the former two being sorta-hardish if you squint hard enough. And before we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that's it.
It's difficult to make a space show that's both true to physics and fun/engaging at the same time. Most authors don't bother with "true to physics" part. The Expanse succeeded at both, because an excellent team took great source-material and expanded on it, instead of butchering it like usually happens. The result was a show that was interesting to non-space geeks, that still gave accurate picture of how space works. If someone asked you, "I wonder why they're doing X", or "I wonder why they didn't do Y", your answer would likely contain some explanation of real-world physics. This is how you give regular people intuition about concepts they're not encountering daily.
So yeah, losing the only show about near-future space exploration that's both engaging and highly realistic - I think it's a bad day for both science outreach and science fiction.
I would argue quite the opposite, based on anecdata, so take it with a good measure of salt, but: I know quite a few non-tech types who used The Expanse as an example of "why I don't watch space crap".
The quality (from a narrative and acting viewpoint primarily) is so low that I think it drives people away from the topic. I desperately love space-y sci-fi but the space exploration really needs higher quality productions than this.
It is of course, super subjective, and I do understand that people like the show. I'm one of the (probable) minority of techies who dislike this specific show.
So your opinion is the acting and narrative are bad. What sci-fi shows do you consider are examples of great narrative and acting? Give me 3 sci-fi TV series as examples please.
Beyond that how about non-sci-fi TV series? I'd like to know what you think are shining examples of television. Maybe 3 to 5 examples of non-sci-fi.
I know this sounds aggressive, but really, without knowing what kind of TV shows you think are "good", your opinion that The Expanse being bad, is without context. Maybe we like the same shows in general, but this one show is the exception. Who knows.
Also, maybe you watched the first 4 episodes and dismissed it as junk. That would make some sense to me, as the first few episodes were a bit rough. Or maybe you watched the entire thing, season 1 and 2, and it just wasn't for you.
I think the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica was great.
Non sci-fi:
I think Babylon Berlin is good.
I only watched the first series of The Expanse.
It's very subjective - if you enjoyed it then I'm glad. I'm certainly not in the majority among my friends in disliking The Expanse, but also not alone.
Yea, I agree that the 2003 Battlestar Galactica (re-imagined) was pretty good.
See, we have that in common. I may have to check out Babylon Berlin. Per your mention, I checked out the wikipedia entry for it. I do like a good period drama, as well as detective shows. Inspector Morse comes to mind. Anyway, I appreciate the exchange.
Babylon Berlin is also one of those things that are particularly relevant at the moment as there are lots of parallels between the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the current state of the west.
I did indeed enjoy Inspector Lewis. Endeavor is also worth a watch. I thought I would dislike Endeavor because it's a prequel, but it's really well done.
I look forward to Babylon Berlin, for exactly the reasons you mention.
> The quality (from a narrative and acting viewpoint primarily) is so low that I think it drives people away from the topic.
ive seen a couple people express this opinion in the thread, and i am wondering where it comes from. imo the plot and acting in the expanse is on par with all but the best currently airing shows. shows like the chi and fargo are certainly more sophisticated and have much more emotional depth, but the expanse easily equals the big action-oriented series (GoT, walking dead, homeland, all the super hero series), and only maybe GoT or westworld comes close to the world-building aspect. maybe it's just my hard sci-fi fanboyism showing.
Sure, I'll try. I can obviously only speak from my own perspective, though one or two things were echoed in discussions with friends.
Disclaimer: I only watched the first series, and I know most people actually like the show. Subjective dislike abounds here: you can prefix "In my eyes only" to every sentence below. I speak about the show, not the books here.
So first thing that struck me is that I'm not emotionally invested in any character. I'm not rooting for anyone. I don't care about them, and they don't have any drives or characteristics that immerses me. They are wooden, shallow, unrealistic caricatures of banal archetypes.
Amos is probably the most obvious example: he is a grab bag of overly obvious machismo and pulp tough-guy slapped together in such a way that he is concurrently completely unremarkable, unrelatable, and unbelievable. Every time he got on screen I would lose immersion and start wondering how the writers could settle for such cheap tactics and obvious low effort characterization - they basically bludgeon us with a few standard examples of machismo and violence. I end up completely uncaring about the character and I don't identify with any of his supposed drives. It just screams artifice.
Another example: the same obviousness and wooden characterization goes for Avasarala, but it's compounded by properly bad acting. I don't know what happened here - Aghdashloo was heart-achingly convincing in _House of Sand and Fog_, and her voice is so beautiful that one would think she'd be able to carry any role. But no - Avasarala is a character so badly scripted that I go from watching the story to irritation in 2 seconds flat.
In a variety of ways this goes for all characters. One cannot get a grip on their internal worlds and start caring about them - what should've been the complexity and contradiction inherent in human behaviour comes across as accidentally acting in a way counter to their shopworn character traits. Why does Miller care about Julie? Instead of adding meat (his exception to his internal rule) to Miller's character it just feels inconsistent with the rest of his actions. They flap about in thinly disguised cliché suits - thereby often acting unexpectedly in completely uncharacteristic ways (think Naomi for example), so they just come across as unbelievable.
The world building is also so-so. For instance, I found the Belter patois to be more irritating than supportive, mainly because it comes and goes in various amounts without enough consistency. The whole backstory is also a bit... bland? Made up of cheap tropes? Two untrustworthy governments with tension between them, a possible but oh so avoidable war, oh wow that one is a double agent all along, a group of disadvantaged blue-collar outsiders being manipulated by everyone, meh. The politics is so cartoonish and predictable as to break immersion, again. Oh, and how many hackneyed sci-fi inanities do they want to repeat? Hypoxia much?
The acting: least said, soonest mended.
The random violence. I don't care about the characters, and I don't worry if they live or die, and the violence is still so unexpected and over the top that I still roll my eyes. Also, Amos again. How do characters go from trying actively to kill each other to backing each other up in a fight in 5 minutes?
If the show doesn't make you emotionally invested in characters, then no surprise you didn't like it.
I can sorta see where you're coming from. I picked up books only after watching whole S1, and then I re-watched S1. I definitely remember that the first time around, I felt that main characters are sort of... meh. Not bad, but also not very good. Just interesting enough to keep watching. The second time around I loved it, so I guess the show simply doesn't do a good enough job of letting the characters stand on their own, without the book background.
You mention Amos and I'd say you're right about him - he seems... arbitrary, without the book background. The source material does much better job at fleshing the character out. I could say the same thing about all the other examples you gave, except for Avasarala. I don't know why, but for some reason, I was in love at first sight.
RE tropes, can you give an example of a show you liked, that didn't have irritating world-building? RE that and acting, for some reason I seem to have much higher tolerance for that than a lot of my friend. I just don't notice, as long as it's not total tragedy.
Temporal is right, Amos is really hard to appreciate without the background in the books. He is actually my favorite character by far,and I think the actor is doing a fantastic job at portraying him, but that's only beacsuse I "know" what's going on in his head.
It's a shame, and a bit of a failure on the part of the show runners, that you'd have to be a fan of the books to be a fan of the show.
honestly i love him in the show (possibly my favorite character) and i haven't read the books yet. i see a rich (not random) portrayal of someone who just doesn't have an intuitive sense of right and wrong but is struggling to do the right thing anyway. i found the dialog between him and the psychopathic scientist very telling.
It's completely opposite to my perspective, but that's what actually makes me curious. I wonder what is it exactly that makes your friends consider it "space crap".
Could you go into more specifics? Also noting whether any particular applies to the show, the books, or both, and whether it's from a perspective of someone who only knows the show vs. someone who also read the books? I'm not asking in order to argue, I'm just curious about the difference in perspective.
i love the show, but i will say i found the tension between naomi and the crew this season to be a bit disappointing. the conflict felt a bit manufactured.
i know some people criticize holden's somewhat bland character, which is not entirely unfair. if perhaps unintentional, i think this still serves a purpose. the world of the expanse is very unfamiliar and, basically being a normal dude from earth, he gives the viewer a character to anchor themselves with, or even substitute themselves for. it's kinda like how gordon freeman never talks.
As much as I liked the Expanse, I really do agree with your point though. Acting was beyond ridiculous and cheesy. E.g. James Holden, Roberta Draper and Chrisjen Avasarala, though that might be due to the nature of their contrived characters.
It's not just that, though. In this context, "Space" and "sci-fi" are nothing more than plot devices that allow them to do the same thing all serials are doing these days: escalation. There is almost never a happy ending, never closure on anything, always something new and "bigger" lurking behind the scenes. Almost as if actual "creativity" is being substituted with "size" in some non-physical sense. "Heroes" is a clear example of it.
> Name one other thing recently on air that’s realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Person of Interest is on WP’s list of hard sci-fi, but isn’t about space. (This surprises me a little, it never struck me as accurate and I lost interest in the show fairly quickly.)
I mention that in part to call out that this thread is equating sci-fi with outer space. There are plenty of non-space scientific topics on earth that are covered in movies and TV. Making hard sci-fi only about space might be missing a general trend toward more rigor about science in general.
Worth noting that Expanse is not on WP’s list. Nor are Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian. Gravity is a good example of the story intentionally breaking whatever hard science might have been there.
What I do see across all the genres is a peak of interest in space between maybe 1965 and 1995. Perhaps most important is writing, short stories and novels, since those often fuel TV & films.
If I look at the trend based only on this WP page, it does look like 1990-2010 was a trough and that space is trending again.
Very much. It starts as a faux-procedural, but past S1 it quickly turns into the (IMO) most accurate and reasonable portrayal of human-level artificial intelligence in the history of TV. It doesn't go any way outside present-era technology (beyond an AI running in the background, which is _the_ sci-fi element of this show). Things I particularly liked include:
- It has some great discussion and presentation of modern surveillance state issues, including predicting Snowden. That is, it actually had an NSA whistleblower before the Snowden leaks happened.
- It stays up to date with infosec topics, and uses them, instead of inventing bullshit. Among other things, the show featured Stuxnet-based exploits (with Stuxnet code dumps visible), and a successful Shellshock attack just months after the story broke.
I loved the acting, loved the story, loved the way it discussed the friendly/unfriendly AI topics, loved the humour. I was deeply saddened that it got cancelled without advance warning, and had to wrap up all the major plot points in the second half of the last season.
(Also for those who like the writing of Westworld, Person of Interest was the previous show of that team.)
To be honest, I am getting a bit sick of both the TV Series and the book series.
The TV Series started off excellently, and I think they've cast some excellent actors. Unfortunately, some of them just grate on my nerves. I'm just not convinced by Steven Strait's performance - the character he plays (Holden) is supposed to be a shortsighted idiot a lot, but Strait comes across as more of an emo kid.
The changes in the storyline, while I can understand some changes needed to be made due to the different medium, the whole current storyline in the season is just confused and the motivations of most of the players are unconvincing at best.
With the book series, I think I'm one or two full books behind, because I just lost interest. The Philipe+Father storyline could've been interesting, but instead it was boring.
Instead of focussing on a few main aspects, it's fragmented into dozens of storylines about all sorts of inconsequential and otherwise unimportant characters, and I feel like I need to carry a reference guide with each character's backstory to-date on me to be able to follow everything.
While I'll be sad to see the TV Series die, this will be mainly be because I doubt I'll see Shohreh Aghdashloo or Wes Chatham play roles quite like those again.
I felt the books started off quite well but rapidly ran out of pace - there was just a lack of big picture development. It had a lot of potential.
I gave up after book 5 (I think) but I only really enjoyed books 1 and 2 (and parts of book 3) and couldn't face another few hundred pages of "will anything interesting actually happen any time soon?".
The characterisation got dry very rapidly (almost all of the characters are unsympathetic and boring) but that wasn't so much of a problem in the first couple of books because plot and world building drove them much more. By book 3, the world building was pretty much done and the plot seemed to become much more formulaic and the "big picture" development just got frozen it seemed. The series turned into something different which I didn't want to read.
I tried watching the TV series but gave up much earlier as I didn't think it translated properly - in TV characterisation is much more important because it's what drives shows so the flaws showed much earlier. It didn't help that the acting was pretty bad too (who knows whether because of actors or script - probably both).
To be honest, the first season was really good, but the second was a bit meh and, well, I haven't even bothered with the third. It seems the rest of the viewership mostly agrees (considering the declining ratings).
I have to agree with this. The current season is by far the most interesting ones. Things are finally starting to happen and we're getting to find out more about the protomolecule.
I agree. There is one particular piece of the story that actually made me give up on the show, and that is when a certain character was shot by a certain other character. I don't even remember the details at this point, and probably shouldn't write them out anyway so as to not spoil it for others but ugh, I remember it really annoying me. I think it was the straw that broke the camels back for me.
"The Orville" is on my to-watch list. "Discovery", well... it would stand on its own as a general sci-fi show, but it just isn't Star Trek. The same applies to the JJ Abrams reboot movies. IMO they butchered all the good things about Star Trek, while retaining all the bad ones. So for me, Star Trek franchise still ends at Nemesis (movie) / Enterprise (series).
>> "Discovery", well... it would stand on its own as a general sci-fi show, but it just isn't Star Trek.
Clearly. Such a shame too, to waste the first Trek series where the main character is a black woman, and also not a starship captain. Unfortunately, it's all just one big cheese-fest from start to end.
>> The same applies to the JJ Abrams reboot movies.
As a long-term proud trekkie (sorry) I wonder what the general opinion is about the rebooted universe. I personally agree with you, that it's Trek without the Trek, like an ice cream cone without the ice cream, but I wonder what others think.
I had high hopes for Discovery, but just after first episode I could see it's not going to be a wasted opportunity. As you wrote, they had a good set up for a great show, and proceeded to destroy it.
Star Trek is sometimes credited for bringing up an entire generation of scientists and engineers. Can you imagine someone 20 years from now saying something like that about Discovery, or the reboot movies, with a straight face?
> As a long-term proud trekkie (sorry)
Don't be. I'm a trekkie too :). In fact, I owe my career in computing and general interest in science and space to Star Trek (TNG in particular), which I watched as a kid/teenager.
Ditto. Grew up watching TOS in 70’s and 80’s. When I was 4, I started building the Enterprise in the back yard, and knew how to do it. Though I don’t know now.
The TOS heavily influenced me into electrical engineering, especially Spock building something to save the day, such as the mnemonic memory circuit with stone knives and bear claws.
> I started building the Enterprise in the back yard, and knew how to do it
Hah, I did the same when I was ~10. With a friend, we went out to the park behind some trees where people were dumping appliances, and collected 2 bags of scrap electronics. My mother wasn't too happy when I brought it all home.
I felt much the same to start with, but by the end of the season I had mostly forgiven it.
At the end of it, my main annoyance is that Those. Are. Not. Klingons.
Whatever they are, they've clearly had a species-wide Groupon deal on massive dental reconstruction surgery.
Not a single one of them can speak without sounding like they're trying to talk around a half-dozen pairs of socks that've been jammed into their mouth, and then had their jaw wired shut.
I'll still not forgive JJ Abrams for his Star Trek 90210 with Super Lens Flares reboot of Trek which completely ignored all the history. Then the obnoxious jerk has the temerity to lie to us outright "No, Bennedict Cumberbatch isn't Khan, it's a surprise!" when the trailers all made that clear.
If he were deliberately trying to sink the series, he couldn't have done a better job.
JJ's Trek Hack-Job is second only to the travesty that was the 2004 I, Robot film.
Love Orville. Discovery oscillates wildly between fantastic (the whole evil alternate universe thing) and miserably rubbish (spore hub drive and rubber Klingons).
The difference here is that the story of Expanse is rather mediocre and the acting is partially just bad.
I had the feeling like I had to chew through the first season. Not sure if I should even bother with the second.
There was definitely some "hokey" acting in season 1&2, occasionally almost on the verge of self-parody. But at other times it was really good. A little choppy and inconsistent would probably be a better description?
But if you look back at shows like BSG or Firefly, they certainly weren't any better in terms of acting - I think we just have higher standards these days!
(By the way, if you didn't enjoy Season 1 (I did!), then you won't like Season 2 any better.)
Agree. It just wasn’t quality television. Which is par for the course for SciFi original shows - mediocre acting, sophomoric writing, okay visuals but not enough to keep me hooked after I slogged through the first few episodes.
Yup, and we went a decade without a good space show.
But not really everything applies. BSG - which I absolutely love - wasn't based on a series of good books, wasn't hard sci-fi, and didn't have a VFX team doing their best to stick to real physics.
The authors promised to not end S3 with a huge cliffhanger, so even if the show dies with S3, I expect it to be fully worth watching 'till the end. So yeah, I recommend to watch the 2 seasons that are on Netflix, and then pick up S3 from wherever it's currently available at your location.
Such a shame if it dies. I love the realism of the show - just humans making life hard for other humans.
Worth noting the producers are trying to find someone else to pick up the show [0]
EDIT: There's quite the effort on the show's subreddit to rally fans to ping major players like Netflix (who've pulled out apparently) and Amazon Studios [1]. Join the fight :)
Same news on other site [0] was posted last night but not upvoted (I believe).
Most important aspect, which is not discussed by the Hollywood reporter:
The cancellation decision by Syfy is said to be linked to the nature of its agreement for the series, which only gives the cable network first-run linear rights in the U.S. That puts an extraordinary amount of emphasis on live, linear viewing, which is inherently challenging for sci-fi/genre series that tend to draw the lion’s share of their audiences from digital/streaming
For instance, nobody who bought it through Amazon counted towards SyFy's numbers even though they certainly counted towards the profitability of production. The people who actually finance production (not SyFy) said this:
> "... given the commercial and critical success of the show, we fully plan to pursue other opportunities for this terrific and original IP ..." (emphasis mine)
so to my uninformed sensibilities SyFy dropping the show seems more like a distribution hickup than an existential threat. At least I hope that's the case.
Two days after that (i.e. last night), it turned out that sets are being scheduled for deconstruction. So it is really an existential threat at this point (if they tear down the sets, it'll add a big up-front cost for any party that would like to pick the show up in the future).
That does sound serious. There must be something I don't understand about the SyFy relationship -- I'd think that the company who owns and finances the show would decide when to tear down the sets and that they'd want to do it after shopping the show around. Too bad, I liked the show.
It does sound as if Alcon knew it was coming, tried to shop around in secret before, didn't succeed, and wrote the current announcement to sound like they haven't already given up on the show. I hope I'm wrong about this.
Which means that it's not on Netflix UK until about 6 months later, by which time fans of hard sci-fi have either lost interest, or found other ways to watch it which are counted in nobody's revenue stream. It sucks but it's true.
That's why I prefer watching short serials like Band of Brothers or just straight series like Columbo or Star Trek.
Nowadays everyone wants to grab your full attention so they produce serials. When you're finally hooked on the story thanks to the neverending thread mill of cliff hangers and further unresolved mysteries they drop the show and leave you hanging. Because numbers ain't right, they show the audience the middle finger. The audience is upset, but not enough to recognize a vicious cycle that hurt them previously many times.
That's one of the reasons I don't intend to watch the new Star Trek serial. Or will watch a serial after it is naturally finished.
I too miss the self-contained-episode quality of TV shows. It gave viewers the ability to jump in and leave at any point in the series and still be able to follow what was going on (usually). And is it just me or do these modern serials just seem to stretch everything out to fill the season? I think that's part of what makes them un-re-watchable, because in most episodes basically nothing happens.
Some shows demonstrated that you can balance long-term plot arcs with the self-contained episode format really well, and I wish more shows would do that. One that comes immediately to mind is Stargate.
Yup. Stargate was perfect. I don't like series with fully self-contained episodes, because those tend to not have any overarching plot. But I also don't like the new trend of running as many plot points as you can in parallel, which don't get resolved for half a season. I think StarGate got the right balance (and I miss the show very much).
X-files comes to my mind as a great example. The episodic nature is built into the format - a weird thing happens, x-files are called in. Next episode, new mystery.
Its then a coin flip for whether its self contained or has a link to the broader conspiracy arc.
I found that satisying as a kid. I wanted more of the big arc but it almost certainly wouldn't have worked if it was the central theme of every show.
Maybe I am already too old, but a while ago I've learned that disappointment about something not being resolved is just part of life and it's better to look forward about what other things are too come than to be too upset that things don't go on as is forever.
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. - Orson Welles
The first season of the new Star Trek series wraps up the plot pretty well. There isn't much left unresolved after the season finale. I don't think it's guilty of what you are complaining about.
It’s completely a gimmic and infuriating. It demonstrates a lack of creativity in the writing staff when there’s essentially one plot and tons of filler. Glad I’m not the only one to not like this trend.
Hopefully Netflix picks this up - especially when the new series of Lost in Space is just full of idiotic decisions to line up the next absurd episode, and Altered Carbon plods along at a snails pace and uses nudity to gloss over the dull bits.
The Expanse is the best sci-fi series on TV by far at the moment, especially due to it having a good plot, a sweary UN woman, and mostly obeys the laws of physics.
The Siffy channel is rubbish anyway. Netfix has more sci-fi to watch.
Altered Carbon is excellent. It’s also a very different kind of show; more of a crime-drama that takes place in the far future than an actual sci-fi show.
Agreed on Altered Carbon. Some of the nudity is gratuitous, but most is not. I know the clone room scene was on some of the news sites, but why wouldn’t clones be naked? In a future where sleeves are changeable vessels, I would expect nudity, body image, etc... to be very different from today’s values.
(Spoilers) I especially like how all the implications of the few base assertions are being explored: renting bodies to visit with dead relatives, class separation, immortality and untouchable lawlessness for the rich, on and on. Just well done.
The show actually felt quite shallow to me, like it focused entertaining over presenting a coherent world. E.g. I'd expect to see identical cheap mass produced body running around everywhere.
I more fondly remember the near two decade old ghost in the shell fancies, especially for it's time. But then I don't plan to go back and may ruin my memory of it by re-watching.
If you check out the show on Rotten Tomatos it has a tomato rating of 90% with an average audience score of 95%.
That seems really high to then cancel the show?
I'm guessing the problem is it is highly loved by a small group of individuals? But given Sci-Fi in general is a wide enough demographic for many other shows - it seems strange this is not drawing in the ratings?
It's well known that Fox really pounded on Whedon to make the show lighter and funnier.
The first episode has minimal camp, as does the film. The other episodes vary. You have to admit, compared to the camp of the 70s and 80s, Whedon's camp is quite nice.
I watched the first season a few years ago. It is good, solid, hard sci-fi. But like said below, it didn't 'wow' me. Considering the current lack of good sci-fi series, I really appreciated the show.
I was missing the "wow, awesome!" effect. Only watched S1 so far and it was.. nice. solid. interesting. But it didn't spark joy or made me a fan. (Killjoys did, for example.)
Everyone is different but S1 of The Expanse gave me more joy than any other show I've watched in a long time.
While S1 did have its fair share of space battles, it was so nice watching something that wasn't all guns and fist fights and did so without having to resort to hours of dull pseudo-emotional monologues and barely relevant flashbacks.
Usually that kind of highbrow writing is reserved for "who done it" style crime dramas. It was refreshing to watch that same formula applied to the sci-fi genre given how cheesy or needlessly "emo" the genre has been of late.
S2 has more "wow, awesome" than S1, and then the few S3 episodes that aired so far beat the crap out of S2. VFX work got better and better as the show progressed.
I’ve only read the first 3 but thats definitely not true. FTL communication, physics-defying space maneuvering, the giant space ring thing controlling the speed of the surrounding armadas...
Even if there are attempts to create some explanation for it, in a hard sci-if story, it’s basically paranormal in all but name.
In this story there is nothing supernatural about any of these things. They may be things that are as of yet unexplained, but just because we don't understand them yet doesn't make them paranormal. Just like there was nothing supernatural about flying before we understood how it works. It's just physics we haven't figured out yet.
Paranormal are things that are by definition outside the explainable universe. It's not that we don't have an explanation, it's that they are by their very nature unexplainable.
Well, it has some other means of abusing spacetime beyond FTL communications, but your description is mostly accurate. It's a sophisticated piece of nanotech built by someone with much better grasp of (in-universe) physics than humans have.
I think there were hints of that already in S2, but I don't recall it was mentioned explicitly so far. You could piece that out from the show if you knew what to look for. The books have been more explicit about it earlier in the storyline.
Definitely. I started reading only after watching entire S1. The books are better than the show.
(BTW. I found myself to prefer reading source books after watching a movie/series. In this order, my imagination is already primed by the show, so I don't experience the clash between how I imagined the characters vs. how the producers imagined them.)
I was referring to the protomolcule stuff, clearly to explainable by our current understanding of science
Citing Wikipedia: Paranormal events are phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described to lie beyond normal experience or scientific explanation.
In that case 99% of sci-fi would be classed as "paranormal". Be it warp drives, replicators, holodecks, teleporters, deep space communication platforms, shapeshifting lifeforms / changelings (DS9), ascended lifeforms (SG1) / the Q (TNG), aliens that drink lifeforce (Atlantis), artificial lifeforms, cold fusion bombs / red matter (or pretty much anything from those shitty Star Trek reboots). And lets not forget time travel.
I think it's also worth remembering that the "fi" part of "sci-fi" actually stands for "fiction" and not "factual information" :P
Reach varies around 1 million give or take a few hundred thousand depending on the season. That’s similar to other ScyFy shows but from what I read there’s some dispute over cost and rights that they couldn’t get over. Hopefully Netflix picks it up.
That's because costs escalate quickly. Which is sort of my point, people focus on how shows are good and have decent ratings and so on, but that ignores the commercial reality that Syfy exists in, where an expensive show better have stellar ratings to justify producing it instead of cheap schlock.
Netflix has worldwide rights except USA. Amazon has US streaming rights. The production is done by Alcon entertainment who should either find another network or convince one of the two streaming giants to foot the bill.
I don't think it's not going to continue.
Alcon said they're looking into it. The next day, the news broke that sets are being scheduled for disassembly, starting tomorrow. So I'm not sure just how honest Alcon was with that announcement, given it was only two days between those two pieces of info.
The current info from people involved seems to be that Netflix is most likely out as a candidate, but Amazon still might pick it up.
(All of that sourced from /r/TheExpanse, which I read regularly.)
I'm really hoping it's Fake News, but the source is (apparently) the props master of the show[0]:
Quoting for Facebook-averse:
> We need to act fast. The sets are coming down starting Monday with some assets being sold off to Star Trek Discovery or just scrapped.
> the entire crew in Toronto is heartbroken and gutted. It’s going to be hard to wrap the show for good. We all thought it was coming back for sure. It’s an incredible show to work on.
When asked for source:
> I’m the Props Master on the show for the past 3 seasons.
In a comment to another post[1], he said:
> I work on the show. Amazon was very interested in the project and wanted to stream it. They need a show like this. Netflix is out. Don’t waste your time. Amazon is our only hope. Lobby them. Hey need to know it will have a following. Show them it does!!!!
I like pretty much everything else about The Expanse, but honestly, the crew of the Rocinante are just... unsympathetic. Forgettable. They could basically be killed off and I wouldn't care. Seeing that they're (intentionally) a microcosm of the system at large, with better writing their interactions could meaningfully reflect and comment on the tensions between their homeworlds, while still making me care about them as individuals and, indeed, as a crew.
Crisjen Avarasala is pretty much the only interesting main character in the show.
Could not agree more. I still wonder what their motivation is to stay together and make each decision that puts them in ever more dangerous situations, that part was poorly developed.
I've been skipping every Holden/Nagata scene for the entirety of this season, it's pure filler and so utterly tedious to watch, excluding it entirely would have caused no damage. If it is supposed to help explain the crew's motive, well, it doesn't help with that at all. I'd have thrown myself out an airlock in preference to remaining aboard with such utterly wooden personalities
Would love to see a lower budget breakout series of Avasarala just doing her ninja politics stuff -- she is the main reason I kept watching at all. But perhaps that is just the corner of me that misses Babylon 5 :)
Have you read the books? I personally don't mind most of the scenes you mention, but that's probably because I know where they're going. Like - minor spoiler - Nagata's mention of her child in last episode. Sounds mostly irrelevant and ham-fisted if you're only watching, but if you've read the books, you know this is introducing a really huge major subplot. So maybe one of the problems of this show is that it's not tuned enough for people who don't know the source material?
> Would love to see a lower budget breakout series of Avasarala just doing her ninja politics stuff -- she is the main reason I kept watching at all. But perhaps that is just the corner of me that misses Babylon 5 :)
Me too. Avasarala carries this show by herself. And I miss Babylon 5 too. I wish someone would remaster and re-release it.
Regarding the remaster of B5: It’ll (probably) never happen.
Star Trek TNG was the first and probably last analogous show to get the remaster treatment. The issue is that, even though the acting was shot on 35mm, post production and VFX all happened at broadcast resolution.
TNG essentially redid the entire post production to bring us updated visuals. By the time CBS/Paramount got around to considering DS9, the financial cost of remastering TNG, plus the move for many people to Netflix, meant expected DVD/Blu-ray proceeds.
DS9 never got the TNG treatment as a result. B5 is in the same boat, needing totally redone postproduction and CG. B5 was a niche show, and the remaster would be an expensive and herculean task. In short, we’ll probably never see it done :-(
God damn it corporations, you aren't making any money off those old shows anyway. Just give them up to public domain, let the fans do the work for free, and find a way to reap the benefits of revived popularity of the franchise.
(Alas, the current owners of Star Trek rights seem to be actively hostile towards fan productions.)
Yeah, I think it would be AMAZING if the B5 rights holders would turn over the reels to a film archive who could then digitize and release those materials to the public domain.
I have no doubts that the fan base would give B5 the remaster it deserves.
DS9 too. TNG was the Star Trek I grew up with, but having rewatched all of the Treks in recent years, DS9 is the clear stand-out in terms of quality writing. DS9 deserves better as well.
As for fan productions of Trek, it’s true Axanar got some bad treatment. Star Trek Continues, on the other hand, managed to do what they set out to do.
If the book crew is better, I'd hate to see what the crew on the show is like. I've only read Leviathan Wakes so far, but I found most of the characters to be really flat. I think the book suffers from the same issue as many other books in the science fiction genre: there's so much focus on developing the setting that the characters are underdeveloped and seem very generic.
To each their own, but I personally didn't find the book characters flat in any way. They're developed just enough for my taste.
But my view is that if I wanted to read a character development story, I'd pick up just about any other genre than science fiction. A romance novel, a crime novel, a drama novel, etc. I like my sci-fi when it's about something else than usual, mundane interpersonal drama that real life is so full of already.
>I think the book suffers from the same issue as many other books in the science fiction genre: there's so much focus on developing the setting that the characters are underdeveloped and seem very generic.
Too bad, I really enjoyed how Shohreh Aghdashloo portrayed Avasarala, she made that character so much more interesting than it was in the books originally.
I agree. I'm very happy I picked the books up only after watching S1 - that way, my mental image of Avasarala was sourced from the books, and all the lovely lines of that character were read with Shohreh's voice in my head.
She is, but somehow it really came to life after I've seen Shohreh Aghdashloo character. In books there's a lot of other powerful characters Naomi, Amos, Miller, Fred Johnson, but IMHO in series Avasarala totally steals the show.
> Season two, which returned more than a year later with a significant marketing push and a solid lead-in, was down 24 percent among total viewers and averaged 457,000 total viewers. That compares more to similar returns for Syfy's inexpensive co-productions like Dark Matter and Killjoys, than to the cabler's original scripted series like The Magicians and Happy.
I'm a huge fan of both The Expanse and The Magicians, but if the above quote is true I can see where they're coming from. The Magicians is a far more accessible show than The Expanse, and if I have to decide where to stick marketing dollars I'm going to go with the show with the larger audience.
Also, although I love The Expanse, it is not nearly as compelling as BSG or Firefly. When BSG came out 14 years ago it was really a singular experience in terms of cable TV. I would say something like Westworld follows more in the footsteps of BSG than The Expanse. And Firefly tapped into the same energy as Guardians of the Galaxy but 15 years too early.
Overall, very sad but not surprised. At least the TV show got me reading the books...
Many people on sites like this probably don’t appreciate the very limited ability and desire for most people to get into shows that effectively require serial viewing, careful watching, and even reading subreddits etc. to fully grok everything going on.
I like this sort of show in principle and I’ll still get back from my current trip to having to get back into who everyone is and what’s going on assuming I bother with the series now canceled.
Agree about BSG and I also like Westworld even with the issues I have. Firefly was a fun romp with appealing characters. I never found it especially good SF though.
The acting of several lead actors is really bad. Avasarala (the "undersecretary"), Bobbie (the "marine"), Jim Holden - they all portray characters in a way that is utterly unconvincing. Every scene with Avasarala is a scene that can't end quick enough. She looks like a bad impostor. Bobbie is miscast so severely it's on par with the "bitchy teenager" Anakin from Ep2 and Ep3. Holden's facial expression for determination is that of a man about to cry. In fact, he looks like his dog just died in most of the scenes.
The story and the universe is excellent, the rest of the cast is really good, but it's not enough to balance it all out.
> Holden's facial expression for determination is that of a man about to cry. In fact, he looks like his dog just died in most of the scenes.
Hahahaha, this is too true. Bobbie is also terrible. But Avasarala I thought was really well cast.
But in general it felt like we got straight-to-dvd type D-level actors (think about crappy movies like The Human Race) in a B+ level setting (writing, CGI, set design etc). I was really confused at first as to whether this was a serious series with a relatively big budget for science fiction, or something that evolved out of a college film project.
Never really knew what to think. Like, I enjoyed Miller as a character. But I also cringe everytime I see his fedora. It feels like they do a lot of the hard things right, but somehow go out of their way to mess up some of the easy things.
I've only partially watched the series so far, but I have read the books. It's a key point of Avarasala's character that she is pretty competent (and lacking patience) as shes basically portrayed as the one running the show on Earth. That said, without the monologues and the comparison to the public power in the book, I can see how that goes way too far into arrogance.
I also found the casting of the show underwhelming. The sci-fi is terrific, but the casting made it hard to get into. The storytelling I found good enough. I bet it's hard to get a cast together that can work well enough in all those close quarters scenes with lots of choices
Well, for something extraterrestrial that has been sent to our system billions of years ago by an advanced civilization that cannot really be understood by humans, I guess artistic license is okay. The human stuff still works with mostly realistic physics (with the Epstein drive the main exception, which is needed to actually enable the world).
And even with the epstein drive they still show acceleration and deceleration changing at the mid point of the journey. They don't have inertial dumpers like star trek invented to work around the issue.
It's implied they generate gravity on the ships by burning the engines* and the engines seem to burn all the time, so you can assume for half of every trip they are accelerating towards destination and the other half they are decelerating again.
Orbital mechanics seems to only apply when convenient, e.g. an orbital mirror around a moon is damaged and "falls" straight down. I don't think that is accurate, even assuming the loss of atation-keeping thrust.
* Not real gravity, but you can't tell the difference between gravity and acceleration. And they also account for high-G manoveurs being difficult/deadly for humans.
Protomolecule stuff, though a key to about 1/3 of the plot points, is pretty much the only "out there" stuff in the show. So sure, it seems to break a few laws of physics, but the whole story is about humans using realistic technology confronted with the unknown and the impossible.
Beyond that, the books are pretty hard. The only one physics-bending technology used by humans is the Epstein drive, and as a drive it doesn't really violate any laws of physics (it's a fusion drive) - the unrealistic part is its absurdly good fuel efficiency.
Force fields are plausible, but FTL (including telepathy and stargates) are what ruins it. However, it's one big exception that almost all space-based sci-fi allows.
Amazon has the rights Netflix would want, and Netflix isn't going to subsidize a property that is a competitive advantage for Amazon in the key market (and, conversely, Amazon would rather let the property die than let Netflix have the streaming rights.) So, if SyFy isn't going to carry the load, it's probably either Amazon taking over or it dies.
love this show but it seems the commercial arrangements are a total mess with just about everyone having a small piece of it somewhere such that nobody made any money off it and nobody can give it up either. So nobody gets it after syfy predictably walked away.
People obtaining the show from other sources before it is released on Netflix might be a reason for the show not doing well enough on Netflix to be worth picking up. Plus the marketing probably was only half-hearted, since Netflix doesn't own the US streaming rights.
They do weekly releases for some shows (maybe most shows that they don't produce themselves).
I assumed it was some ridiculous commercial arrangment that meant they couldn't show it until after the season has finished in the states - but I have no idea
I'm actually not too cut up about this - I really enjoy the show, but I'm also starting to get tired of series that get run into the ground long after they should have been tied off and finished. If the third season has a decent ending, I'll be happy.
While I feel similarly in general, I don't think this was a risk in this particular case. The show is backed by the books, which have enough high-quality source material to last another 4-6 seasons. As long as they kept mostly sticking to that, I wouldn't worry about the quality.
End of season 3 is a key decision point (the expanse in the expanse :)). Stop it there or finance another 6+ seasons. I really hate it, but it is the right point in time.
And there are still the books for the people that really want to follow. The divergence from the book are not big in season 1 and 2.
I have not read the rest of the series, but there is a risk of change of tone of the series from close to realistic to more fantasy space opera setting.
I found weird alien physics tricks in later books well beyond realism. The “spaceship speed limit” thing in particular. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it was kind of inconsistent, applying to some objects and not the others as it fit the plot.
It was consistent AFAIR, though it dropped at least once during that book. For those who haven't read (spoiler), the "spaceship speed limit" refers to a particular region of artificial space, where there was an alien object whose defense mechanisms involved capturing everything moving faster than a set limit relative to it. That limit was adjusted by the object based on perceived danger, and if you happened to cross it, you'd be slowed down without any regard to what sudden high deceleration does to you.
Personally, I liked the protomolecule stuff, and my biggest complain was that there's so little of it in the books. 90% of the writing involves bog-standard real physics, and the protomolecule trickery only shows up occasionally.
I have given up on TV shows. I imagine many others have too. I no longer bother to watch them until I know there is a completed story. Nothing worse than watching a show and it just ends on a cliff hanger never to be resolved because the show got canceled. I don't think production companies realize how much they hurt themselves in the long run, because they are too busy looking at short-term figures.
'The Expanse' went from really exciting in the first season to really boring in the second season. I watched the whole first season at once, but couldn't handle a single episode of the second season.
There are few hard sci fi shows on television right now -- having this cancelled is a pretty big blow to a type of entertainment that a lot people on this board take very seriously.
50% because it is a good hard-scifi show with a lot of fans here.
50% because the distribution licensing for this show places it in a vortex at the center of traditional cable, Netflix, and Amazon. Making it an interesting case to read tea leaves and discuss the future of programming between those platforms.
I'd much prefer a spin off show based on the Investigator (not introduced in series yet, but I think about to be in E7) ;). But I would love a Miller series too.
Most of all though, I'd love an Avasarala spinoff.
TL;DR: Obsolete distribution methods hamper creators. SyFy can't distribute the series through the Internet directly to viewers for some weird reason, and it prevents them from making a profit.
I don't quite get why they had to sign such weird contracts to begin with.
> TL;DR: Obsolete distribution methods hamper creators.
If by that you mean cable TV, apparently Amazon wouldn't pay for the full cost of the show (or even enough with Netflix buying non-Us streaming rights), so it wasn't for SyFy being will to pay (apparently, too much, ultimately) for the rights to distribute it via an obsolete method, it wouldn't have been produced at all.
> SyFy can't distribute the series through the Internet directly to viewers for some weird reason
“Amazon has purchased the exclusive rights to do that (in the US, Netflix elsewhere)” is not a particularly weird reason.
The problem here isn't obsolete distribution mechanisms, it's that the sum total people are willing to pay for it is less than the people that make it are willing to accept to keep making it.
> The Expanse, based on a series of popular novels by a duo of authors who write under the pen name James S.A. Corey, was critically acclaimed and beloved by fans, but it was expensive to produce, it delivered poor on-air ratings, and critically, Syfy had only first-run linear rights. In other words, the network did not have the OTT (over-the-top: streaming and other digital distribution as opposed to broadcast air) rights. For a show like The Expanse, OTT viewing is key for long-term revenue. The show was only made available on cable television or by purchasing episodes or season passes on digital storefronts like iTunes and Amazon.
> is not a particularly weird reason.
I'd say it is. Exclusivity harms creators and users too, who can't access the result in stores and ways that are convenient to them. In the ideal world, Alcon Entertainment would make the series and sell it in every Internet store, including their own DRM-free option :)
> that the sum total people are willing to pay for it is less than the people that make it are willing to accept to keep making it.
No, people are willing to pay enough, but distributors should stop hampering competition with exclusivity restrictions. No exclusivity means wider reach, which means more profit for creators to do their work.
From what I hear, the last hope is for Amazon to pick it up. Netflix apparently is not interested. If this show gets cancelled, this will be a huge blow to both sci-fi on TV, and efforts to keep people interested in realistic space exploration.