Serious Concerns About Farscape...

[Tario70]

Let me start off this post by stating I've been reading this forum since Farscape was cancelled & I've recently completed my collection of the 4 seasons of Farscape (Already have PKW pre-ordered from Creation, Thanks WatchFarscape.com!), but recently I read some information that I've been trying to confirm, So I turn to the board with my first post. I post here as this information, if true, is of serious concern to me. I love Farscape & was completely enraged at is cancellation, but if what I've read is true, we have its creators to thank for its cancellation. I ask you to read the story below, it begins on page 2 of the feature, for the full feature, just click the link below...

The Full Story can be found here... http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/559/559272p1.html

The Sci-Fi Channel had picked up Farscape for seasons 4 & 5 but there were, as usual, various clauses in the contracts that would let either side re-negotiate if the need arose. With producer David Kemper at the helm, the series lost viewers on a weekly basis which prompted Sci-Fi to take a hard look at the contract for the 5th season. The cost per episode was slated to raise dramatically and the advertising revenue projections weren't even going to come close to paying for the increase. Sci-Fi approached the producers with a request to reign in the budget, a request that was refused. To be fair, the production had contract issues of its own: various salaries were scheduled to go up in the fifth season and an increase in the licensing fee from Sci-Fi was necessary if the production was going to meet those obligations.


Sci-Fi then made an offer to produce 13 episodes for season 5 at the agreed upon license fee. That request was also denied. The network then made an attempt to not only keep the series on the air but even try to gain back some of the viewers it had lost over the past couple of years. Instead of a fifth season, the network would instead agree to a series of mini-series. This option had a lot of positives: Sci-Fi had seen great success in promoting limited run series, turning them into "event" viewing. The network could spend more in promotions and give it a higher profile, something the series could have used.

Again, the producers of Farscape said no. It was all or nothing and if Sci-Fi didn't give them what they were looking for, Kemper & Co. would set loose the dogs of war or, in this case, the group that became known as SaveFarscape.

Taking a page from the Roddenberry playbook, which is kind of like a football team using a play drawn up by Vince Lombardi, the people behind Farscape lied about the reasons their show was cancelled in an attempt to stage a similar campaign. Farscape's producers made blatant lies to their fans about the numbers involved, such as the cost per episode to produce, the ratings and how much money the series made in advertising revenue in an attempt to incite those fans into action. It worked – the fans got put into such a frenzy that some took things a little too far. Some made physical threats to Sci-Fi Channel executives and executives at other networks. A couple of fans made threats to my family that I had to turn over to the police. As of this writing, at least one person has been brought up on charges. This was clearly not the kind of reaction the producers were looking for.

The fans behind SaveFarscape did a very good job early on getting into the national press, partly because they passed on the same lies they were told by the producer of the series. Rallies were staged in places that would give them some publicity and Sci-Fi offered to sit down with the producers of the series and see if there was any way to come to some kind of agreement that would beneficial to the companies involved and the fans who felt so passionate about their series.

Given the opportunity, the producers of Farscape screwed their fans again: their demands didn't change and the financial reality hadn't changed, either. There was nothing to negotiate – Farscape, as a weekly television series, was dead and the people who had sworn to their fans that they would do anything to save it were the ones holding the knife.

With Sci-Fi now completely out of the picture, the fans were used again to try and put pressure everywhere but where it belonged in an attempt to get the series picked up. Efforts to get other networks interested failed spectacularly as some were even threatened with physical violence if they didn't pick up the show. For their part, Sci-Fi had spent money on the first four years of the series and were hoping to get something back from their investment, refusing to sell off the broadcast rights for those seasons unless they were paid handsomely for them.

Fans were somehow convinced that throwing money at the situation would make everything all right and they contributed thousands of dollars to the SaveFarscape movement. Some of the money that was contributed by the fans were used to produce amateurish looking commercials that the "movement" could somehow only afford to run once or twice, mostly at odd hours of the morning where no one watched. To make matters worse, the ads ran at a time when the series wasn't even on the air so any potential interest the ads might have brought to the series was wasted. Casual viewers who might try and sample the series had nowhere to turn to as Sci-Fi had put the series on hiatus until the new year, hoping that the publicity of the final run of new episodes would give them a spike in the ratings.

Still, the people who were most responsible for the series leaving the air were hailed for their efforts to rally the fans because it was much easier to vilify the network with statements like "they just hated Farscape and have been looking for any excuse to kill it," which most people knew were completely untrue. This was much easier than trying to fact check anything said by the producers of the series.

When the time came and Sci-Fi put Farscape back on the air, it seemed that all of the new stories drove people away from their television sets: first run episodes were beaten in the ratings by repeats of Stargate: SG-1, the series usually blamed by Farscape fans for taking the money away from their series. Like most blame for the demise of Farscape, the SG-1 blame is misplaced. According to the fans, Sci-Fi just hated the series so much that they'd cut their nose off to spite their face.

When Henson Company announced that they would be producing a mini-series that would wrap up the series, the fans obviously rejoiced. They saw it as a victory when the truth was something far less satisfying.

Yeah, the Sci-Fi Channel hated Farscape so much they picked up the mini-series, The Peacekeeper Wars, when no other network would touch it. It seems some of those networks have long memories and their contact with some of the lunatic fringe members of the SaveFarscape movement was still a little too fresh to make them want to jump at the mini they had suggested in the first place. The only difference is, had the producers taken Sci-Fi up on their offer in the first place, audiences would probably have just finished watching their second Farscape mini-series and could be anticipating the third, given the ratings that Peacekeeper Wars brought in, thanks to its status as event viewing. As it stands, this is just an out of breath stumble to a finish line that came too soon.

Despite evidence to the contrary, fans continue to believe the myth of the Roddenberry Principle and continue to stage massive write-in campaigns for their favorite shows, regardless of the ratings or any other factors involved. As of this writing, campaigns are underway to save or bring back Enterprise, Smallville, Andromeda, Mutant X, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, Starman and The Lost World, just to name a few. Producers continue to take advantage of starry eyed fans who are so in awe of the people that entertain them that those fans are willing to believe just about anything and networks continue not to care one little bit.

This just disturbs me, a 13 episode 5th season would have been better than the mini (to me), and a series of Mini-series' would have been even better.

Is there any way to confirm this? Would this, if true, change my love of Farscape? No Way, but would I support its creators so ethusiastically? No Way. I'd want some answers, and I'd love to know where I can find them.

~Tario70

[Jul]

Tario70 - you're a bit late to the party when it comes to KGB's vitriol against Farscape and the creators. Much of what he's saying is not accurate.

If you're more interested, people have gone over this here: http://www.watchfarscape.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30240

[Tario70]

Jul,

Thanks for the heads up... I'll be sure to check out that thread.

~Tario70

[RydraWong]

Short version: KJB's full of dren. And he seems to have had an axe to grind ever since his confident "insider knowledge" predictions that Farscape would never ever return turned out to be wrong.

According to what the producers said publicly at the time, yes, there was an offer for 13 eps - but that was impossible financially (because of the upfront costs like sets, 13 eps couldn't be done for 13/22 of a season's cost).

Where KJB's statements can be checked, they turn out to be bogus. Like this:

Farscape's producers made blatant lies to their fans about the numbers involved, such as the cost per episode to produce, the ratings and how much money the series made in advertising revenue in an attempt to incite those fans into action.

As far as I can find out, no such statements (false or otherwise) were made in chats, interviews, messages posted here by the producers, or anything else. Had they given us any specific data about the show's exact cost-per-ep or anything else, let alone ad revenues, I'm sure we would have jumped on it; instead, they very professionally restricted themselves to vague remarks about the rough costs (IIRC, $1.5m-2m per ep was as specific as we ever got, and I'm not sure that came from TPTB) and the fact that SciFi considered those costs to be too high.

I've never seen anything from them or anyone else about advertising revenue from the show (has anyone?), and the ratings figures that got micro-analysed all came from public sources - mainly SciFi itself.

And they not only didn't attempt to "set loose the dogs of war" on SciFi, they actually spent a considerable amount of time - even in the chat where they announced the cancellation - asking people not to bash Bonnie Hammer and the other SciFi execs, and to be polite and calm if we wanted to write letters.

[Red]

Welcome Tairo70.

First off, the person who wrote this article is not an impartial source. For some reason he's got a huge chip on his shoulder where we and Farscape are concerned, and he has since the beginning of this campaign.

They were offered a 13 episode, shortened season. But there were problems with that offer, and other issues, that the author of this article conveniently leaves out.

It wasn't as simple as saying "we'll give you $X for 13 episodes, instead of 22 episodes." A lot of the production costs, particularly going into a new season where the sets were going to need to be rebuilt, were going to be upfront. To make the season financially viable, they'd need to do a full season.

Farscape's cancellation is not a clear-cut story. It's actually a case of really lousy timing. The parent companies of both The Jim Henson Company and of the SCI FI Channel were both going bankrupt. SCI FI wanted more reruns of Farscape, for less money. They paid half the production costs for the series. When they started to back out of the fifth season, in order to try to renegotiate the deal they had for Farscape, Henson's parent company, EM.TV, who paid the other half of the production costs, saw that as an opportunity to get rid of some expenses. Farscape wasn't a cheap show to produce.

Over the course of the next year, the SCI FI Channel, as part of Universal, was sold to NBC; The Jim Henson Company, was bought back from EM.TV by the Henson family. Brian Henson found financial backers for more Farscape, and, while we don't know the particulars of the deal, obviously they felt that four hours was probably the easiest to sell, particularly as the mini-series was produced without having any distribution deal in place.

Yes, a 13 episode shortened season would have been a nice option, but despite KJB's nasty spin, it just wasn't viable. The creators didn't turn the deal down out of some sort of arrogance or hubris; the deal fell apart because it simply wasn't workable. SCI FI paid for half, somebody else was going to have to come up with the other half, much of which would have had to been up front, and as Farscape cost $1.5 million an episode, and each company was owned by a larger bankrupting parent company, the money wasn't there.

Do notice that KJB makes a lot of nasty, unsupported statements about this campaign and about Farscape, without offering any evidence to back the statements up. He's a nasty piece of work, who enjoys libeling this show, the show's creators, and the show's audience, for reasons I simply cannot fathom.

[Tario70]

RydraWong,

I appreciate the info and I'm still reading the long thread Jul linked to, but I'm just curious as to what can be checked, what is true and what isn't. I love this show (as I've loved many Sci-Fi shows, at least this one lasted 4 seasons), but if any of this is true it means that the creators themselves lied about doing anything to get Farscape on the air...

Sadly I doubt we will know the whole truth, there's probably a little truth in both sides of the arguements, the truth dwelles somewhere in the middle.

~Tario70




Red,

I appreciate what you've wrote and I'm sure I can find sources showing that both companies were in financial trouble during renegotiation time, but as I've recently read in the thread Jul linked to, all I'm hearing are 2 sides of an arguement with Zero links to sources. I fault KJB for this, but in all the responses, I haven't seen "proof" to state he is wrong. I'm not backing this guy 100%, but I'm also not taking the other side 100%.

~Tario70

[Red]

but if any of this is true it means that the creators themselves lied about doing anything to get Farscape on the air...
I don't think any of us here have any reason to believe that the creators have, at any point, lied about anything. There's nothing in that for them. I believe Brian Henson did everything he reasonably could to get us the fifth season and it fell apart.

This article is not about truth or facts, it's about putting the campaign, the show, and the series' creators in the worst possible light.

You might be interested in the cancellation FAQ. Granted it's a couple of years old at this point, and some of it may be out of date, but it might be a place for you to start.
http://www.watchfarscape.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8477

[RydraWong]

I'm just curious as to what can be checked, what is true and what isn't.

Well, in e-mails to people who've queried him, KJB makes big claims about having seen Super Secret documents which unfortunately he can't show to anyone.

But wherever his statements can be checked, they turn out to be pretty clearly false.

E.g. this whole deal about how the show's producers "made blatant lies" to the fans about the advertising revenues from the show, etc.. Unless I missed the chat where Brian Henson came online and said "OK, here's what we know SciFi got in advertising for season 3 ...", unless I'm somehow the only person in the whole campaign not to know about this, they never made public statements about those figures at all.

To me, that makes it pretty clear that KJB is talking out of his eema.

[Red]

all I'm hearing are 2 sides of an arguement with Zero links to sources.
Well, that's probably because in that thread that Jul linked to, everybody who replied was discussing the issue coming from the position of having already discussed these points elsewhere. There's no need to link to sources when the people you're talking to already know what's being referenced. That's no doubt inconvienient for you, but it's not really a case of "he said/she said". Nobody was trying to refute KJB in that thread because they already know he was making false or, at least, extremely vague and tenuous claims.

[Tario70]

First, let me again thank you all for at the very least, pointing me in a direction.

I'm finishing up the thread that was linked and then its time for sleep, I have to work in the morning (I'm in California, USA). I plan to do as much research as I can, and I'll definitely post any sources I can find here. I'm a proof kind of person, someone makes a claim and I want some proof either way. If the person making those claims doesn't give me that proof, I'll search for it myself. I only posted here because I hoped that some of that leg work may have already been done, apparently direct links to sources have not been done.

I will re-read the cancellation FAQs as my first stop. I thank you all again!

~Tario70

[Red]

As for information, it should all be on this board if you dig enough. You can go through all the pages of this forum here --
http://www.watchfarscape.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=70
These are articles on Farscape, on genre programming, on The SCI FI Channel, on the companies invovled, etc.

You should also do a search for chat transcripts so you can see what the creators have said to us over the course of the past two years. Here's a link to a few of them -- http://www.watchfarscape.com/archive.php?section=2

This board also has a keyword search function. Some forums have been pruned over the years, but most key threads should still be around.

[Jul]

Tario - The links that Red gave you are very, very good ones. Also, let me encourage you to do a search here on the board, entering in the terms EM-TV and Vivendi Universal, and you'll probably pull up all the articles that have been posted here in the last two years, giving you a good history of what's happened since the campaign started.. Red is right, most of the people that posted in the thread that I referred you too already know the history, while you're coming into it all fresh.. I made a mistake referring you there before referring you to other information first.

[RydraWong]

I haven't seen "proof" to state he is wrong.

If someone wants to make spurious claims, it's often hard to produce "proof" that they are wrong. All anyone can do is point to the total lack of proof that they are right, and the apparent incompatibility with what we do know.

I mean, I could say "And the producers were extra wicked because really they could have paid for season 5, 6 and 7 all from the money Brian Henson makes as a pole-dancer called Rita! I've seen secret photos of him in his nipple tassels! You can't prove me wrong!"

You could say, "Well, golly, watchfarscape.com can't prove right now that it's impossible that Brian Henson is really an erotic dancer in his spare time, therefore there's probably truth on both sides of the argument ..."

Or you could say, "Uh, looks like Rydra has been smoking' the Special Monkey Crack again." :D

I'm sure that there was plenty of spin on both sides, and that both SciFi and the producers of Farscape wanted to put their case in the best possible light. But personally, I haven't seen anything to indicate that Brian Henson and co. lied to the fans about anything, let alone to indicate that they deliberately and willfully rejected workable deals for more Farscape.

In fact, given how hard Brian Henson seems to have worked to get funding for more Farscape, we have reason to believe the opposite. As soon as the funding was available, we got more, with them even taking the huge risk of starting filming the mini before they had a network to air it.

[Browncoat Serenity]

good links but as others said this article seems baised
and maybe this person will only write about Farscape in one particular direction

[Shipscat]

Absence of evidence in this case *is* evidence of absence. I've been around since the beginning as well, and reporting news items on the cancellation on my site, and no where did any of the people involved with Farscape give us or anyone else any numbers, or inside information about prices, advertising, the details of the original contract or the details of what happened when they went back to negotiate after the protest when Farscape was cancelled. You aren't going to find anything that shows them giving us misleading info because we've never had that information. You won't find anything that says' they just hated Farscape and were looking for an excuse to kill it' because the PTB never said that to us.

Any mistakes in conclusions about where, what, who and how much are entirely our own.

KJB claims to have inside information but it's completely unverified. A lot of the facts that we do know about the campaign (because we did them) are misleading or false in this article, so there's no reason to believe that his 'inside' information is any better.

And think about it logically..why would anyone count on fan protest as their secret weapon, or first line of negotiation? That doesn't even make any sense in the context of the articles, where KJB insists that fan protest don't work, and that we really *didn't* win. Fan protest couldn't be counted on-how do you know people even care enough to act? Or that anyone would listen? It makes no sense to claim that we were unleashed like dogs of war, and oh, by the way, you fans still don't count because you're buying into the myth of the Roddenberry principle.

The guy needs to buy a clue.

[Reefrunner]

Honestly, the first time the vast majority of us ever heard of KJB, he was telling us all about how FS deserved to be cancelled, how we deserved to lose our show, how ridiculous it was for us to write letters and emails and phone people and in general make any sort of noise about the cancellation because no one was going to listen to us anyway...and this was literally within days of the announcement. He's shown such hatred for us from the beginning, so much bias in his 'reports', that I'm not prepared to take anything he writes at face value. If he's got documentation, and he wants to be believed, he should put it out there where it can be checked, and where TPTB can refute it or acknowledge it.

Since you are coming in on this rather late in the game, I guess it would seem strange to you that no one has been linking proofs in this, but we've all discussed it ad nauseum over the last two years, so for us it's a matter of remembering what the PTB have said to us, and recognizing that things KJB have written don't jibe with that. It's a matter of remembering the news articles about the two parent companies involved--and believe me, people were searching the web on a daily basis looking for any and every article about FS and the companies involved, and posting the links or the articles themselves here for everyone to read. We've simply had the benefit of two years of experience to look back on, as everyone searched for the reasons behind what happened. We haven't blindly taken anyone's word for anything.

As to the fan reactions that KJB complains about? I in no way condone threats or terroristic behavior, but if you're going to go about pouring vitriol on a group of hurting people, you have got to expect that you're going to get burned. I don't for a minute think he was at all surprised by the reaction, and I'm just cynical enough to believe that maybe he stirred it up on purpose to get hits on his articles, since online writers seem to depend on hit count to keep in business. The nastier he gets, the more hits he gets because we keep coming back to see what he's written about us this time...well, you see how that goes.

By all means, do the research and satisfy yourself as to what happened. Just be aware that KJB is not impartial, and that his article is spun to put the worst possible light on a fan campaign that he loudly and very publicly proclaimed would never succeed, and on the folks behind the show that we were working to save. In his article he makes the accusation that genre fans tend to have a certain amount of arrogance to them, that you can't talk to them and get them to see reason (or some such. That's not the exact wording, but it is the thought.) He should remember that when you point a finger at someone, you're pointing four at yourself. Methinks he just didn't want us to succeed and is doing what he can to denegrate it.

[CosmicTheorist]

. . .I only posted here because I hoped that some of that leg work may have already been done, apparently direct links to sources have not been done.


;) You don't want much, do you? ;)

Actually, there have been attempts to collect all the source materials together and then post links in a single thread. Unfortunately, the nature of bboards is such that those threads get buried eventually. That is why people have recommended this site's search function and suggested some pertinent search terms, like Vivendi.

Here is an excellent compilation thread by Stargate2077 with timelines and links galore:

http://www.watchfarscape.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8865

Here is another timeline thread with links that was compiled by RustySlinky:

http://www.watchfarscape.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10446

I've also been hanging around this forum from the beginning. If you are interested in the EXACT WORDS that the Farscape Powers That Be used to "incite" this fan campaign, then I recommend that you use Red's link to the chats and read the chat transcripts from September 2002. Those are the only words that I remember getting from them.

I too like to be able to check as many facts as I can independently. When it comes to Farscape's ratings, that is one of the easiest things to check; the Sci Fi Channel has a news service called scifiwire that publishes a list of the channels top 10 shows every Monday. Unfortunately, scifiwire does not archive those lists, but fortunately, many fans do collect the lists and post them on different fan sites. I spent a lot of time tracking down the lists for the weeks when Farscape was in first runs. At the bottom of this post is a table with the ratings for all of Farscape's 88 episodes; check it out.

I have also tried to find sources giving the amount of money per episode that the Sci Fi Channel paid for Farscape and pays for any of its shows now. This information is not easy to find, but here are 2 articles that I found for Farscape:
Posted: Thurs., Jul. 29, 1999

Sci-Fi reups Henson's 'Farscape' for 2nd year

Skein is Sci-Fi Channel's highest-rated

By JOHN DEMPSEY


NEW YORK -- Jim Henson's fantasy-adventure series "Farscape" has picked up a second-season commitment for 22 episodes from the Sci-Fi Channel.
"Farscape," now running the 22 original episodes, costs about $1.2 million an hour, with Sci-Fi ponying up only $400,000 or so per episode in license fees because it's buying just the basic-cable rights to the show in the U.S. Henson, in association with Hallmark Entertainment, maintains worldwide rights to "Farscape."
'Calling card'
Rod Perth, prexy of Jim Henson TV Group Worldwide, called "Farscape" a "financially ambitious show that Henson Television is using as a calling card for the future to display the kind of production we can do."
Henson is known for the various TV incarnations of the Muppets and for children's series like "Bear in a Big Blue House" on the Disney Channel.
But Perth said Henson is eager to produce more adult-appeal series like "Farscape," which is the highest-rated series on the Sci-Fi Channel, delivering a primetime average of 576,000 cable homes every Friday in its 8 p.m. timeslot. The second season will begin in March.
Exec producers of "Farscape," shot on location in Sydney, are Brian Henson, Robert Halmi Jr. and David Kemper. Matt Carroll is producer. Rockne S. O'Bannon is the creator and executive consultant.



Posted: Fri., Jun. 9, 2000

Sci Fi renews 'Farscape'

Channel's highest-rated show is also one of most costly

By JOHN DEMPSEY


NEW YORK -- The Sci Fi Channel has renewed "Farscape, " its highest-rated original series, for a third full season encompassing 22 hourlong episodes.
"This is the first time we've ever gone as far as a third year of production on a series we were involved in right from the get-go," said Bonnie Hammer, executive VP and G.M. of the cable network.
Each episode of "Farscape" costs about $1.5 million, making it one of the most expensive original series on cable TV. Produced in Australia, "Farscape" is a joint venture of the Jim Henson Co. and Hallmark Entertainment, with the Nine Network of Australia as a co-producer.
Hammer said "Farscape" joins three other original scripted sci-fi series -- "The Invisible Man," "Lexx" and "First Wave" -- this summer to give the channel the most ambitious firstrun lineup since it began life in September 1992.


The BEST GUESS that we have for what Sci Fi was paying for each episode of Farscape's 4th season is approximately $750,000.00, or roughly half the cost of each episode (ie $1.5 million/episode).

I wish I could help you with sources for advertising revenue, but that stuff I have NOT been able to find. And I have searched and begged, but that data is apparently a very closely held secret by television networks. Sorry.

;)

[Digger]

I'm sure I can find sources showing that both companies were in financial trouble during renegotiation timeYou'll find several threads about that very subject here on the board Tario. Some of us here got a bit carried away, and went in to excruciating detail about the financial situations at Universal and EM.TV. It got to the point where it felt like it was becoming a contest, who could come up with the most articles or the newest article about it the soonest. My head hurts just thinking about it.

[SabaceanBabe]

CT, thanks for posting those articles. They're ones I hadn't seen before and I've been around here for a pretty long time, too. :D

And I've always loved the way skiffy would say on one hand that Farscape's audience never grew because the ratings never strayed from that 1.3 or so average, and yet the average number of households grew from just over half a million to about a million and a quarter during the four years Farscape ran. :shrug:

[benaholic]

In the end it was a money issue. If SciFi was doing well money-wise they would not have let Farscape go. They were in the whole at the time, they couldn't commit to a season. Then they wanted to blame everything on Henson. Bahh !! Why not just admit you were broke, went the cheap and easy 'reality' tv way, and got caught with your creative pants down and the press questioning your judgement.

[Gaussian]

Maybe, there could be a "sticky" with links to all these articles. Having been here from the start I DO remember all of what happened and when we found out the facts of the cancellation..........but for someone new I bet it could be very confusing.

[Otto the Mild]

All,

We need to make it a point not to post links to IGN in the future, especially links to stories written by this KJB clown. By posting links, we are driving traffic to this site and these stories, in particular. That just encourages IGN to keep on giving a venue to this obviously disturbed individual. :freak:

Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing this whole thread taken down.

Thanks

[Jat]

WAH!! im gonna go kill all sci fi execs £"%"£(!£)¬!!!
Must KILL!!!!!

u guys know any scaper like that? i havent been here too long, but i never met a scaper who mentioned taking the whole convincing sci fi thing to a personal level, true they may be one of two but i just dont see it happening....

i looked into all this (gave up!) but to be honest its not worth looking into, both sides have their own spin doctors, they have been in season ever since well, the media.

Anyway, its how they convince everyone of a certian perspective, i dont want to upset anyone but ever heard tony blair give a speach? - possibly, could, in the future, its the same thing to me..... its just like when a company brings out an ace product but by some miricle your opposition produces one just as good.... thats when u send in the DOCTORS!! or when theres an argument.


What i really wanna know is what info we have on KJB....

edit - if u do find ur info plz post it in another thread once ur done!!! i would like a good read no matter what the end decision u come to.

[BillFrugge]

Okay... :rolleyes:

[blue]

Actually there is a handy post by our very own Cosmic Theorist that I happened to copy to my hard drive that might be helpful here. This was written back around Feb of 2003, I think, before we knew about the EMTV financial problems, and way before we heard about the story of the gamble that SciFi (then owned by Vivendi) made in their negotiations with EMTV where Scifi took a hard line (its this or nothing) as a negotiating ploy and tried to pay less and let EMTV pay more for the fifth season - and then instead of folding and agreeing, EMTV said OK and just walked away and Farscape ended up with no funding, --

anyway, CT said:

"I firmly believe that Skiffy entered into the 2 year renewal deal with the intention of keeping Farscape on the air through a 5th season; in other words, I think they negotiated that deal in good faith. Unfortunately, it was also under a management team that was quickly changed around and the new management team was very quickly overtaken by events that were out of their control. In the case of Farscape's mysterious cancelation timing is everything.

Let me give you my timeline for events.

July 2001 - It is announced that Michael Jackson, who runs a British television operation Channel 4, has been hired by Barry Diller to be the president and CEO of USA Entertainment Group.

October 1, 2001 - Bonnie Hammer announces the 2 year renewal agreement for Farscape.

November 5, 2001 - Stephen Chao resigns as president of USA Cable (Chao was reported to be a very strong supporter of Farscape along with Bonnie Hammer); Michael Jackson takes over as president and CEO of USA Entertainment. Chao's old position is not filled. Jackson reports directly to Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of USA.

December 17, 2001 - Vivendi Universal (VU) acquires the entertainment assets of USA Networks and creates Vivendi Universal Entertainment (VUE) which combines Universal Studios with these newly acquired assets. Messier is CEO of Vivendi Universal; Barry Diller is to be CEO VUE.

January 2002 - Contracts for the 2 year renewal of Farscape are signed.

May 7, 2002 - VU closes acquisition of USA Networks; VUE gets $1.6 billion dollar loan to close this deal. The loan is due in November 2002.

May 30, 2002 - VU issues press release about its cash position and its deteriorating credit rating.

July 3, 2002 - Messier resigns as CEO of VU following a board meeting in Paris.

July 8, 2002 - VU press release mentions Vivendi's short term liquidity concerns that were disclosed at the board meeting.

July 10, 2002 - New VU CEO Fourtou announces a billion Euro dollar unsecured loan facility to address Vivendi's liquidity concerns and that VU is working with its bank lenders to put in place refinancing requirements.

November 27, 2002 - Vivendi announces that it has gotten an extension on the $1.6 billion loan for acquiring USA Networks.

I got all the Vivendi material from their own press archives at the following:

http://www.vivendiuniversal.com/vu2/en/_home/home.cfm

My interpretation of this timeline is that a short term cash flow crisis in the parent company Vivendi Universal forced cost cutting measures on newly created entity VUE. I don't know who ordered it, but Farscape WAS one of the COSTS that was cut. And ever since Skiffy has had to tow the company line and try not to embarass its new masters. I think this explains the otherwise inexplicable behavior of Skiffy and its published contradictory statements...."



Of course, we learned later that there was not just a cash flow problem at Vivendi, but ALSO another one going on at the same time at EMTV (then the parent of Henson)- so both of these parent companies were looking for ways to cut costs at just this fateful moment - and Farscape was an expense. So the negotiating game of chicken (take this deal or else) didn't work at that particularly bad time--instead they both walked away.

[blue]

And the other thing that was going on at the time was the regime change at Scifi that happened around Nov 2001 --where Barry Diller brings in Michael Jackson and they are overseeing Bonnie Hammer at Scifi, and they don't "get" Farscape, and move it to another time slot, and don't market it appropriately. Claire Sainsbury wrote an article about some of that called "Who Killed Farscape"
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20021014/farscape.shtml


Here's an article from
SFX April 2003:


"Browder had various concepts in mind for the fifth season, including a possible split-time episode which he would have co-written with Ricky Manning. [SFX Magazine]
------------------------------------
Rarely has a show with so much potential been wrenched off our screens. And the bitterness in the Farscape camp is still palpable, as Paul Simpson found out when he met up with the cast and crew for the series’ post-mortem.
------------------------------------

The warehouse complex at Homebush Bay should be bustling with activity. But it’s dead.

Actors should be coming out of their trailers parked at the intersection of Moya Avenue and Talyn Way, and heading down to the makeup rooms, before cutting through the warehouses, or down narrow passageways to the set on which they’re filming.

In the production office, new directors should be sitting in the anterooms by the entrance, looking at maquettes made by Creature Shop Supervisor Dave Elsey of the alien races that are going to feature in their upcoming episode. The notice boards should be constantly changing with updated production schedules. Upstairs, around the large table in the writers’ room, David Kemper, Ricky Manning, Lil Taylor and the writers should be working out the broad strokes of five episodes ahead, while still breaking the story on the episode that’s due to start filming in a few days’ time.

But nobody is filming the fifth season of Farscape, and it looks as if it’ll be a long time before we know just why Crichton and Aeryn were "neutralised for inspection" at the end of the final episode. The cast and crew have scattered to the four corners of the Earth – some are in England, others in America.

Six month ago, at the start of September 2002, nearly everyone was on a high. The end of the fourth season was in sight, with only a few days of shooting left. The final episode, "Bad Timing", was in the can. Only a few more segments for the documentary episode, "A Constellation Of Doubt", needed to be filmed.

"I had been on location since four in the morning and was exhausted," Gigi Edgley recalls. "So I decided to put some tunes on in my trailer and have a little dance, as aliens often do. I heard rapping outside. I thought it was Claudia, as we share trailers, asking for some quiet. I turned the music down and realised it was someone knocking on the door. My makeup artist popped her cheeky smile in and said, ‘Did you hear?’ ‘Hear what?’ ‘It’s over.’

"’What’s over?’ I asked. ‘It’s a hard wrap!’ she said. ‘Farscape’s finished.’

"’Yeah, I know,’ I said excitedly, ‘We go on holidays tomorrow.’ She replied, ‘No hon, that’s it. It’s not coming back. They’ve asked us to package up all the makeup goods and send them to the States.’

"’What? Oh frell, are you kidding? You’ve been playing with the hairspray again, haven’t you? No, this can’t be right! Shit, I’ve gotta tell my dad, my agent. I need a new job…’

"My nervous giggles fell to my trailer floor. ‘It’s lunch’, she says, ‘you coming?’

"Usually I stay in my trailer over lunch as Nebaris and sun don’t mix too well. There was no chance I was staying in my trailer today. I was done up head to toe in Nebari as they required Chi in all her fullness on this day. I stumbled out of my trailer in shock, and fumbled all my grey bits into the mini van to go down to location for lunch. The feeling was bizarre. Claudia and I gazed into each other’s eyes whilst we blurted on the phone to all the necessary people."

Looking back, David Kemper notes that, "It was rancorous from the beginning, to a degree." Although the Sci-Fi Channel gave the show a two-season pick up at the start of October 2001, there were some considerable strings attached, most important of which was that the show needed to widen its audience.

"What they were always worried about was that new people couldn’t get into the show, because it was semi-serialized," Kemper recalls. "We pointed out that new people can’t get into NYPD Blue or The Sopranos either. You have to have good promotion and advertising."

Kemper wasn’t concerned about the publicity part of the equation – "The people at Sci-Fi do great publicity," he notes. What concerned him was the promotion of the series on air. "They brought in a new team of people, and we understood from the get-go that they didn’t understand the show or like the show. The stuff I was seeing told me there was something wrong. I said we’d do the best we could, but you can’t get people to come to a show in the fourth year without promoting it."

The next "request" Kemper faced from the network was to alter the style of the show. "They were saying, if we could make it more like Stargate, everyone would love it," he says. "I knew that was wrong. We’d piss off our core audience, and nobody new is going to know the show’s on the air if it’s not promoted properly. How do people watch The Sopranos? They have good publicity, which we had, and lots of promotion, which we didn’t have. Sci-Fi kept saying they didn’t have the money to do it."

The argument continued during the pre-production period. "We were getting, ‘Make it more like South Park’ – a small show on a small cable channel that got the cable channel a lot of heat," Kemper continues. "In the end we said to them, ‘What do you want?’ and they said they wanted a bigger audience. We said, ‘That’s not our job. Our job is to make a good show that will hold a bigger audience, but you’ve got to deliver the bigger audience.’ Then they moved us to 10pm, and it seemed like a lot of things were stacking up against the show."

Despite this, Kemper was determined to make the fourth year the best ever. The season opened with "Crichton Kicks", which only featured Crichton, Chiana and Rygel from the crew, as well as introducing Raelee Hill as Sikozu. "There was a mandate to reintroduce the series with season four," Ben Browder comments, "and with the number of people we had, I think that’s one of the reasons we started with Crichton alone and reintroduced the characters. We had a chance to give the new audience a chance to catch up."

While Browder thinks this worked for newcomers, "I’m not sure it worked for the long-time audience because they immediately want all of the characters back. There’s a certain amount of frustration at the beginning of the year from people who want to see everyone back together. Where’s D’Argo? Where’s Aeryn? Crichton on his own was designed to reintroduce the series. It may not have been the best idea to have a drunken, crazed, bearded lunatic but I think that it was an interesting choice."

"We turned the episode in to the network, and Sci-Fi’s attitude was, ‘This stinks!’" David Kemper recalls. "We pointed out that they couldn’t change it – the episode was completed, and we’d already done the next five episodes before we turned it in. They said that they needed Claudia to come back into the show earlier. But they knew that she wasn’t going to be there – she wasn’t even in the country at the time!"

"Crichton Kicks" had a knock-on effect throughout Farscape’s final year. "When we were making it, we were sure we had a hit, and we spent a lot of money," Kemper explains. "We spent the whole year paying for it, trying to claw it back and doing magic tricks to keep the audience from knowing we were saving money. It was supposed to be the chance to bring new people in. We had the cover of TV Guide booked – that’s why Ben, Claudia, Andrew Prowse and I were in New York on 9/11. We had negotiated Ben on the cover, and also worked out coverage in Entertainment Weekly. We were counting on having a great episode that knocked everybody out, and we were counting on getting great on-air promotion. They were trying to shoot promos that made John Crichton into someone who slept with every alien dominatrix, and who was out to save the universe. I had to go to the President of Sci-Fi, Bonnie Hammer, and say, ‘Help, this is not our show!’"

Having made the decision to split the crew up at the end of the third season, Kemper took his time bringing the other characters back. D’Argo, Jool and Noranti appeared in the second episode, while Aeryn didn’t come back until episode five, "Promises". "Anyone new watching this show can watch the cast being rebuilt piece by piece," Kemper recalls explaining. "They won’t be confused as to who they are. They won’t come in and have nine people sitting around a table shouting at each other like a dysfunctional family. The whole beginning of the season was geared toward getting and keeping new fans, because if we didn’t we were going to be in trouble. A lot of our regular fans were complaining. We did the best we could, and it didn’t work. If we hadn’t done that, it would have been worse. We were on the bubble right till the end. In retrospect, you can say it was a mistake, and we didn’t get the new viewers. They didn’t come to look at the show. We didn’t double our available audience. In hindsight, the year would have been just as good developing the Farscape story, but the attempt back in that day was trying to service the possibility of new people."

Claudia Black considers that the network didn’t understand the power of the romance between Crichton and Aeryn at the heart of Farscape. "I think they wanted to have a lot of new chicks coming in to add some more sex to the show," she comments, "but even people who came to it who hadn’t watched it for long just saw the chemistry between us, and they were hooked. There was just something about it that was fun and entertaining when Crichton and Aeryn were hanging together. If you just put them in the same space it was exciting – but the network didn’t get that."

Believing that he had two years worth of episodes, Kemper plotted accordingly. "The whole design from the beginning of the year was that the centrepiece of the season was going to be going to Earth at Halloween in the ‘70’s or ‘80’s, and then again in real time," he says. "I knew there had to be another episode in the middle that referenced Earth, and that became the documentary episode. I wanted to set everyone up to think that Crichton is going home, and then he closes up the wormhole in the final episode and never sees his Dad again. He’s starting a new adventure. We thought season five might be the end, and I wanted people to be wondering at the end of the year what we had in mind for year five. It would have been really startling. There was a bigger design to the story. Crichton’s purpose was not to go home. That’s what the baby was about : there’s got to be a new reason for living if you’re not going home. The main titles for the fifth year would not have had the words ‘I’m trying to get home.’ His whole reason for living had changed. He knows it, and doesn’t want to go home any more."

Kemper has always described each year of Farscape as being like a chapter in a book, and points out that "the show was going to take a hard turn at the end of the year, and start steamrolling to the end of the show at the end either of season five or the end of season six. This was the turning point in the book, two thirds of the way through. We were entering the final third."

Although he won’t give too many details away, Kemper drops a few hints. "Francesca Buller played a re-occurring Scarran, Minister Of War Ahkna, who would have gone right through the fifth season, as would Duncan Young as Emperor Staleek," he says. "Jool was not done with
Farscape. The fifth season and beyond would show that the Priests on Arnessk and what they did for a living may have had something further to do with way that Farscape unfolded. But Jool needed some time on her own with these people to fulfil what I had in mind. I would have loved to have done a whole crossdressing episode with Chiana and Aeryn in man’s clothes, Crichton and D’Argo in women’s clothes so they could find out about the other side. That’s a concept that really appealed to me."

One element that Kemper won’t miss is finding out about the edits that the BBC have made to the series. "They chose to run us at an early time when kids are watching," he says slightly bitterly. "I think it’s up to the broadcaster to appropriately programme a show. If you buy a show, you probably should try to run it where you can show what the film-makers made. Why do this? My attitude is, are the BBC the kind of librarians who would buy a book for a library and then tear out pages from the book because they don’t want people to see it? It’s defacing artwork. If the BBC do that, it show them to be bad programmers, because they can’t figure out where to run the show, and no patron of television. It makes them mercenary and cold. People worked really hard to make these films, and it’s either up to the parents not to let their children watch it, or the BBC should put it on at 10pm or whatever time is appropriate in your market, and not screw with it."

Even now, six months later, there’s clearly a part of Kemper that finds the cancellation amazing. "They cancelled us when we were at our creative peak," he says. "They pulled the plug on us. That staggered us. We were at our creative zenith. It wasn’t a creative decision. It was purely politics. All of a sudden we had people who didn’t get our show who had been lobbying since we refused to shoot the promos that we weren’t playing ball. What you have is a network that only has two original programmes cancelling 50% of its line up and it’s the one that gets critical praise!" -- SFX

[skyboy87]

Wow. I just spent the last several hours zooming around all the links in this thread. I am just amazed at the colossal bad timing (it's all about time) this creative and interseting show has suffered. If just one little budget meeting had turned out different, we would be spending our time watching thrilling new episodes of FS rather than wondering what more we can do to convince the powers that be to bring it back.

If I had forty mil laying about, I'd fund season five myself.

Oh, and Otto The Mild? Consider this my vow never EVER to read anything that KJB person is associated with ever again. What a poisonous person!! What a sad little life he must live.

[SabaceanBabe]

Thanks for reposting those articles, blue. I had read them when they were originally posted, but had forgotten some of what DK had to say...

[Lost Like Me]

Awesome article Blue, thanks. Great insight into what they were going thru.

I can't imagine John screwing his way around the universe. That's just...wrong! The most amazing part of all is that didn't get the John/Aeryn thing. Were they blind?

Water under the bridge, I guess.

[Otto the Mild]

Oh, and Otto The Mild? Consider this my vow never EVER to read anything that KJB person is associated with ever again. What a poisonous person!! What a sad little life he must live.


Amen!
:sing:

[seattlescaper]

I've followed the campaign and read all the posts for the past two years as well. The only thing I will add is that Brian Hensen does talk about the cancellation in the new interview on vol. 1 of the ADV Starburst edition, released yesterday entitled 'In the Beginning: A Look Back with Brian Hensen."

One interesting tidbit from that I hadn't heard before was that according to Brian Hensen Farscape never made money for the SciFi channel but they justified the expense as a brand builder, it being their first original programming order. He then mentions the acquisition by Scifi of the Stargate franchise and the problems with EMTV as contributing to the collaspe at the end. It made me feel for the cast and crew who were getting conflicting reports every few days.

[Demonique]

As of this writing, campaigns are underway to save or bring back Enterprise, Smallville, Andromeda, Mutant X, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, Starman and The Lost World, just to name a few.


Enterprise hasn't been cancelled, Smallville is still going strong (the teen girl audience are falling over themselves to squeal at Tom Welling (is it just me or does anyone else think he uses lipgloss?)) and Andromeda is still continuing to stink up the airwaves

Sounds like the whole article bollocks to me