Not long ago, I was linked to a Facebook page advertising a prospective science fiction cable network called The Syzygy Network. Notwithstanding the awkward name¹ I’m still wary of introducing another genre specific television channel.

I’m Canadian so I get Space not SyFy; because of that, I haven’t experienced the tonal shift that SyFy is attempting, but when you read news about the channel picking up broadcast rights for WWE events and creating reality TV shows it’s easy to understand the audience frustration. But I don’t think a new channel will do anything but delay the inevitable. Capitalism being what it is, Mission Creep is always going to happen with niche television stations. It’s better to accept the changes while fighting for your particular interests to still be considered rather than run off and start your own channel. Maybe it’s the issues I have with The Tea Party and its cultural warriors — creating their own party because their already backwards party wasn’t backwards enough — but I think this sort of fragmentation is a bad thing.

I hate to reference the discussion among sane(r) conservatives regarding epistemic closure² but it has a certain relevance to the discussion; granted, a large group of people getting their political news from a single biased source isn’t quite the same as nerds wanting a genre-focused television channel, but that doesn’t change the broader implications embedded in that isolation.

One of the biggest problems inherent in niche television channels is ghettoification. By creating a channel dedicated to generating science fiction, you make it that much easier for larger networks to give up on science fiction for good, leaving that sort of content in the closed off ghetto of niche television. Television viewers will think less of content that can’t survive the ‘free market’ of network television, where broad appeal supposedly determines success.

I think there’s precedent for this in novels; no one thought less of HG Wells for writing science fiction, because the genre didn’t really exist, yet now when prominent authors write novels that are obviously science fiction they as work as hard as they can to deny it³.

When you look at the history of science fiction on television, there were a lot of fantastic shows that made their way through the traditional network model. And they had budgets that expressed that. The Syzygy Network is already stating they cannot produce any original content for the first five years of operation, and after that any original content they produce will doubtless be made with as frugal a budget as possible, something of a detriment in a genre dedicated to exploring the edges of possibility⁴.

I might simply be tilting at windmills here. General practitioners are becoming less common, replaced by specialists dedicating their lives to one particular subject. As Matt Ridley explains in his brilliant TED Talk, no one person knows how to make most of the products we rely on every day. The global scale is expanding faster than ever, but the individual remains mostly locked into a much narrower scope. The more there is to know, the more individuals must focus on a single field; the more there is to watch, the more people must make active decisions about the content they consume.

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Footnotes

1. One of my first thoughts upon reading the name was to jump right to famously horrific train wreck of a film, Zyzzyx Rd, known for having one of the smallest box offices ever: a grand total of $20. [↩]
2. The number of times that phrase was repeated in political blogs was maddening. [↩]
3. I myself am guilty of this thinking on occasion. When I talk about Infinite Jest, I tend not to describe it as a science fiction novel, despite it carrying many of the fundamental attributes of science fiction, because it feels like it’s more than “just” a science fiction novel. [↩]
4. I’m not saying science fiction requires astronomical budgets, but certain types of science fiction are vastly aided by them. [↩]