Sci-Fi has a long and proud history of cancellation. Perfectly good shows (and plenty of plain awful shows) have seen the axe for a multitude of different reasons. Let’s take a look at five sure-fire ways to ruin a decent show.

1) Air your show on FOX
As Firefly, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Dollhouse has shown, quality has no impact on the lifetime of your show if you choose to air it on FOX. In fact, it would seem that longevity in FOX is inversely proportional to quality. Firefly was absolute quality. Just Google “firefly cancelled” to see the outcry. Dollhouse, although still a good show, wasn’t near Firefly’s calibre, and therefore lasted for slightly longer before reaching the same grisly demise. And let’s not even get started on Sliders! That’s it, Fox: create some of the finest science fiction of the last decade before callously shooting it down. Good call!

2) Kill off the lead character (or at least get rid of them unceremoniously)
Once they’re gone, the show can’t be far behind. Although Earth: Final Conflict lasted for some time after the death of William Boone, played by Kevin Kilner. However, when you base your show so firmly around the lead character’s personality and moral conflicts, you have a huge amount of creative rebuilding and restructuring that is not easy to successfully achieve. Even Ben Browder’s introduction to Stargate SG-1 to replace Richard Dean Anderson, although relatively well managed, signalled the beginning of the end for the show (even if it did provide enough energy to delay the inevitable for a year or two)

3) Go on for too long
Star Trek is probably the finest example. You can’t keep producing top quality stories week-in, week-out for fifteen years. Voyager and Enterprise probably didn’t need to happen. Deep Space Nine was tremendous, and after that the franchise should probably have taken three or four years out to refresh and re-energise. Voyager’s premise was strong, but it’s implementation was poor. As soon as the writer’s think creating an incredibly inaccurate Irish village in the holodeck is a good idea, it’s time to panic. Being from Ireland, the whole thing was laughable. And it was never going to be good sci-fi.

4) Sex it up!
Ratings are falling, reviews are mediocre, what do you do? Get your most attractive female cast member to take her clothes off, regardless of the plot making sense. Nudity is always a winner, right? Sadly, it’s not. Enterprise’s attempts to “sex it up” in season three were, frankly, ludicrous. Star Trek, according to Gene Roddenberry, was never adverse to lascivious female aliens: Orion slave girls, anyone? But quite frankly, making Jolene Blalock little more than eye-candy was a poor call. It didn’t fit the character, and was blatantly an attempt to attract an audience of hormonal college boys. Are the same men interested in Jolene Blalock’s “assets” going to care about the ramifications of a temporal anomaly? I doubt. Voyager and Enterprise’s writers made the other cast act like giggling school girls around Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine and Blalock’s T’Pol respectively. It wasn’t clever, nor effective.

5) When all else fails, add zombies

Take this:

Note the stirring music, high production values, moral conflict and powerful premise.

Now, take five years later:

Note the alien vampires, poor acting, poor dialogue and little or no moral/emotional conflict whatsoever? Just gunshots and explosions.

The decline still brings a tear to my eye.

The creators of ABC‘s upcoming V announced Saturday that the show would premiere Tuesday, Nov. 3 in a news conference at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Pasadena, CA.

Executive producer Jeffrey Bell also promised that star Morena Baccarin, who played Inara Serra in one of my favorite TV shows, Firefly, and now will play the alien leader Anna, will indeed eat a rodent of some kind as in the original 1980’s series.

"We want to find a way to do it," Bell said, but added that if the producers simply duplicated the scene from the original miniseries, "been there, done that." He added that the new show will feature homages to other iconic moments from the original miniseries.

The new series is a re-imagining of Kenneth Johnson’s classic 1980s sci-fi miniseries, about the arrival of alien "visitors" who promise to share advanced technology in exchange for friendship, but turn out to have a darker agenda.

Executive producer

Scott Peters added that the producers were exploring a way to bring some of the original actors into the show, though not necessarily playing the same characters.

I really hope they can pull this off and make it close to being as good as the original series was with great story lines and actors. We shall see.

Jim Kirkwood, Jr.

After last night’s rather wonderful episode of Dollhouse, I think it’s fair to say that Joss Whedon’s latest creation is quickly beginning to find its feet and hit its stride.  Let’s just hope that it’s not too late in the big bad world of television execs.

However, has Dollhouse reached the heights of Whedon’s previous, much-adored shows?

Only you can decide, so vote below and decide definitively which is his greatest creation to date.

And if you feel like your opinions just can’t be summed up in a simple vote, feel free to discuss it by leaving a comment.

Sci-Fi Slice have claimed that ‘once “Dollhouse” is over, Joss Whedon is leaving TV for good…to pursue creating on-line content along the lines of “Dr. Horrible.”’.

Now, there claim has not been sourced, but let’s assume for the moment that it is true:  genre television would surely have lost one of its finest writers, and if ever there was to be a tragedy written about the demise of one of television’s talents at the hands of the executives, surely Joss’s battles with FOX would be right up there.

Those unfamiliar with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog should check its Wikipedia entry for further details, as it does strike me as the sort of thing Joss would be interested in moving towards.  Now that he has his fan following, does he really need the pencil-pushing network television executives telling him how to edit his content?  No goram way.

Then again, Sci-Fi Slice might not have a source, and might have just made it up.  In which case, disregard this post.

All I can think is: damn you FOX.