Well, Fox did let Universal make a movie out of Firefly, to be fair.

My theory with sci-fi shows is that their fans are miles ahead in the piracy stakes so why waste time making shows for them to pinch of torrent sites. Baby Boomers on the other hand...bit thin I know, but I think TV piracy is srsly rampant.

In Aus, our tv is 90 percent deterrence fiction, people can't get enough of super science cops and sickos killing people. I can't for the life of me figure that one out, but it makes me a very sad panda.

I'm rather fond of Odo myself...... but I fear we won't be getting anything approaching DS9-level (or even Enterprise level!) for an inordinant amount of time.

Because Sci-Fi needs the space for shows closer to it's original purpose. Like Wrestlemania.

OK, I guess my OP was slightly at cross-purposes. So the best thing seems to be to completely derail my own thread with a digression about the Netflix UI starting to get spooky-smart.

I've been using them since early 2002 and on a whim decided to exempt them from my normal conservatism about giving real info on my interests to an online corporation. I think I might have rated a few thousand titles by now, and that, combined with Netflix's steady work on their customer-taste algorithms, led them to hit me recently with a row of suggestions based on my interest in "strong female leads." (It went away quickly because I mostly ignore that part of their UI and just work from my queue, but it was interesting).

So I revise my OP question to "Why is it that there only seems to be room for one strong female lead on the Siffy Network?"

Ms. Tapping's character was (not cooincidently, I suppose) my favorite in the SG-1 series (it would have been the Daniel Jackson character, but Shanks is just nothing like Spader, so the writers had to ditch smart-and-oddly-sexy in favor of blandly-sexy-despite-being-smart). But my real ire against the murederes of young SF shows with real potential is Dollhouse.

Yes, I've totally been Joss Whedon's bitch since the first episode of Buffy. But it isn't *simply* the lasting impact that Molly Millions had on me as a 20-year-old gay boy who found her by looking for something fresh on the SF shelf at my locally-owned-soon-to-die bookstore. It's because shows like Firefly and Dollhouse have been part of the bare handful of titles 'in the genre' that have done the real job of SF, which is to make you think while you've got a page-turning/no-not-another-commercial consumption experience going on. Not to mention how hot Eliza Dushko is, even after 'all these years...'

Well, in defense of SyFy (God, how they have butchered, botched, and mangled "SciFi"), they do have at least 1 shining gold piece.

"Sanctuary". I love that show. It just keeps me riveted. I have seen both 1st+most of 2nd seasons (2nd is still running ATM), and I just got the 1st season on DVD. The show (GW Swicord, you'll probably like it for the fact that it has Miss Tapping ) is about a group of people who study, capture, and protect "abnormals", beings (they aren't always "human") with unusual abilities/powers/gifts/what-have-you.

It does also have re-runs of old ST, and occasionally such jewels like "Dead Like Me" (a discontinued show; only aired 3 seasons, and likely planned for a 4th, since they had to do a "movie" version for the end. Still lots unexplained though).

Sanctuary is why I mentioned Tapping above. I caught series 1 on DVD and will probably give series 2 a try when it comes out, but the show is still a bit too heavy on action/effects and light on writing for me to really love it. For me, it's thin gruel compared to the decent meals offered by SCC and Dollhouse. Siffy's 'real SF rerun' blocks are a nice idea, but they seem to be declining in the schedule rotations in favor of making more weekdays look like the useless-to-me Saturday programming (weren't they trying for some "Most Dangerous Night on TV" or some shit like that?).

I'm bitching about the branding mess for two, sorta-conflicting reasons. 1) I believe advertising as we currently practice it is immoral and branding is for cattle. 2) Brands represent a horrifyingly large chunk of what the world still seems to believe is the wealth of the US, and if we start cocking that up as badly as we've done with our material production systems, it's gonna get ugly at a very ugly pace. If the Siffy people seriously believe their original decision to focus on an SF audience isn't good, what possible good does it do for them to try to make the oral-language term 'scifi' mean nothing in particular at all? They should have revised their niche audience goals or stopped pretending that they want to serve a niche audience. As-is, they kinda have me feeling like a non-worldly straight man who finally decided to try paying a hooker and ended up with a tranny by mistake.

Sactuary might be going somewhere, I'm not sure yet though.  Season 2 has been much less repetative than Season 1, but then they've already blown the long term plot they set up in the first with just a few episodes.  I think a cast change took them out and required a restart from their original intentions, in which case they've got real writers hiding in there.

Yes, but also be prepared to be driven away from an old show with then-revolutionary space opera graphics and a fascinating setting/backstory by a remarkable train wreck of mediocre acting and bad dialog writing.

I've never been able to watch that show start to finish because the wince-to-wow ratio is wrong for me now matter what series I start with...

Beg pardon, but I think of Lost in Space as a campy classic, not a 'serious' space opera. I can have fun with Lost in Space because of the laughs, and as a plus the show threw out the occasional chunk of thoughtful sci-fi despite being an Irwin Allen production. B5 just failed to live up to how seriously it tried to take itself, at least as far as the character shots go. It pisses me off to this day that no one helped the face-based side of B5 catch up to that show's excellence in terms of imaging space-based comabat.