Regarding SyFy, here's an article on the channel from a few days ago at TV.com. A lot of fans get kinks in their tails about how the channel operates and has operated over the years. I still hold a grudge for the knee jerk cancellation of FarScape and its replacement by the miserable Tremors series. (Yes, I know that's somebody's favorite show and they love it the way I love Star Trek but they'll get over it.) The network's executives are tasked with making it as successful as possible. They aren't in the business to make science fiction. They're in the business to make money. Science fiction's just the product they chose to sell. And yet, as evidenced in this article and many others over the years, the TV merchants over at The Sci Fi Channel/Sci Fi/SyFy don''t like the product they market and would rather be shed of it and their principle market. It's as if ESPN decided sports fans with their obsession with stats and customs and language all their own—

—were to be shunned rather than embraced and chose to fill their schedule with home make-over shows and reverse mortgage infomercials instead of sports. What sense would that make? About as much as Hammer and Howe's management of Sci Fi has. If you're invited to a party, don't go, crap in the punch bowl, then complain about the frelling punch. Yet that's the farbot strategy H&H employ.

The changes are worse than the increasing generalization seen across television where History Channel's are History and show less and less of the same, airing a show like The Universe which belongs on Discovery or TLC except there's no room due to the crab-catching and hoarding on those channels. A move to Tuesdays and the fall has cut the ratings of an otherwise successful show (SGU). Move it back to Fridays and the summer rather than cancel it. Oops! Can't do that because there's a wrestling show NBC's gotta find a home for in the old slot and its pulling $olid number$. So, they're doing business with that move and aren't gonna change it. And though some folks grumble, wrestling actually kinda fits on Sci Fi. The entire milieu is that of a comic book (think X-Men with all the soap-opera) and comics are SF/F, no? Even Dragon*Con has wrestling demos, so the crying about that's a bit much. Still, if they're going to have sports, I'd prefer something more SF/F oriented. Rollerball, anyone?

In my opinion, continued erosion of the channel's genre origins is inevitable until it undergoes a complete transformation into something else, much like Discovery Health is about to become the Oprah channel. Either NBC/Universal or someone else will then create another channel to be a "real" Science Fiction channel, much as M2 was developed to be a music channel in the vein of MTV in the beginning, and the process begins again. The only way to stop it is to watch the best genre shows on the channel while shunning the garbage. Let them know you're watching. If you're not a Nielson house, email them to let them know. Don't timeshift with the DVR. Networks make money by selling advertising and if the +3 and +7 numbers look great it's worthless to them because the folks watching them have skipped the commercials. If I'm selling soap, am I gonna by a spot on a show where no one's gonna see it? No. My money's going to ESPN or CBS where college football's doing crazy numbers and people'll see my ads because they're watching live. The nerds can find their own damn soap.

Eight hundred and seventeen words. I must have a different definition of "short" than I do.