No, I don’t know who the final Cylon is.
Or do I?
Hat tip Galactica Sitrep — where you can find all the latest news on Battlestar Galactica and hoped-for spin-off Caprica.
[tags] Battlestar Galactica, science fiction, politics [/tags]
Susan Getgood's personal blog
by Susan Getgood //
No, I don’t know who the final Cylon is.
Or do I?
Hat tip Galactica Sitrep — where you can find all the latest news on Battlestar Galactica and hoped-for spin-off Caprica.
[tags] Battlestar Galactica, science fiction, politics [/tags]
by Susan Getgood //
Cross posted to BlogHer
Like many of my fellow sci fi fans, I looked forward to the premiere of Sanctuary Friday night (10/3) because it is one of the few new science fiction shows we are getting this year. The other is Fringe, upon which I’ve already commented over at Snapshot Chronicles.
But Sanctuary isn’t interesting simply because there isn’t much else to divert our attention. Some of the other reasons the show appeals to me:
Amanda Tapping did a Q&A during last weekend’s Sci Fi Channel digital press tour, and addressed many of these things in her comments.
On her new role as executive producer of Sanctuary. Tapping finds it to be one of the most challenging jobs she’s ever done. She’s extraordinarily busy and commented:
“I now have the completely biased opinion that actors are wimps. Because I used to think that Sam Carter was the hardest job in the world. 10 pages of technobabble — I’m going insane. And now I’m like, please, please sweetheart. If only. Yeah I miss being an actor.”
Like many moms, she also worries that she doesn’t spend enough time at any one of her jobs – producer, mom, actor. I’m sure many of the parents reading this will recognize themselves in her comment that she doesn’t feel like she’s 100% anywhere.
She works at her acting/producing job 14-16 hours per day when they are filming and then goes home to be a mom, with weekends devoted to family. It’s a juggling act that we all play, regardless of how rich or famous. But well worth it.
“At the end of the day,” she said, “I have a really happy child. She’s well adjusted, very funny, very secure and I think if that’s the kind of child I am raising, I’m doing a good job.”
On leaving Stargate and her new character Helen Magnus. Tapping played the role of Samantha Carter in the Stargate franchise for more than 10 years. She said that only a really special character could have drawn her away, and it was a very difficult, tear-filled decision:
“The Stargate franchise has been great to me, the character has been good to me, it was a massive thing to let go of that. By the same token, to be honest, as I was bawling my eyes out, I was thinking there’s this whole new groundswell of creativity that’s coming up, a whole new challenge ahead of me. I was really excited by it, so it was this real double edged sword for a while. And slowly the excitement took over for the angst and pain.”
While it wasn’t easy to say good-bye to Carter, Tapping knew it was time, and describes it as a “soft landing:” “I did episode one of Atlantis and I just did their last episode last week so I never really left home. I just said, see you later.”
For Tapping, part of what makes Helen Magnus so interesting is her backstory and the fact she is from Victorian England:
“It [Victorian England] defined women in a a huge way. The fact that she was a woman who thought outside the box, who pushed the envelope socially and scientifically so appealed to me. In an era when it would have been so easy to toe the party line and be status quo, she blew it out.”
Another element that contributed to Tapping’s interest in the character were some of the strange choices Helen makes, including the great love of her life John Druitt (played by the excellent Christopher Heyerdahl ) and the decision to have a child. “At the bottom of it all is a 157 year old woman who is incredibly lonely,” she said.
In an episode called The Five, Tapping says we find out how the character has lived for so long.
On creatures and mythology. Tapping said that much of the mythology is taken from modern day mythology – the things that go bump inthe night, that scared us as children. They’ve also taken things in modern life, such as autism, and put a new meaning around them: “What I love about Sanctuary is that we (the characters) firmly believe that whatever we’re studying is in fact the evolution to our species.”
On green screen. Sanctuary doesn’t have sets. Everything is filmed in green screen. This presents some unique challenges to actors, but Tapping thinks the benefits are worth it. She said that once you get used to it, it’s like doing theater where you have to work with a few props and set pieces to create an environment for both yourself and the audience. The hardest thing to communicate is scope. Referring to the lovely view of the Rocky Mountains we had, she said:
“We could be in this room and all the walls would be green, but I would have to imagine a stunning panoramic view, and something that may occasionally pull my eye away. I have to create that feel, that’s the challenge.”
She said that green screen isn’t necessarily cheaper but it gives them more freedom to incorporate just about anywhere, anything in their storylines.
On how the show started on the web and migrated to network. Tapping said their initial intentions were to create a web-based show and social networking site on which Sanctuary fans could interact with the show and each other:
“We started on the web with the purest intention of living and breathing on the web because we understand sci fi and we understand the fan base, and we thought why not take a show straight to them.”
But they couldn’t monetize it, so they started to look for more traditional outlets. The logical choice was broadcast tv. If/when they got that going, they could go back to the web. That remains her plan. If the show is successful, she hopes to implement some of the interactive experiences they had initially planned.
On the next Stargate movie. She doesn’t know anything about it, except that she’s been asked to participate and has said yes.
On fan fiction. While she can’t read fan fiction as a producer due to legal issues, she loves that there is so much creativity devoted to her shows. She recalls showing the occasional story to the Stargate producers, telling them “See what happens with Sam and Jack. Looks good on paper.”
My question: Our kids put so many different constructs on what we do when we are not with them, what we do for a living. I asked Tapping what her daughter thinks she does for a living, given that she can’t watch the shows:
“She sees commercials, and she sees Stargate sometimes. You turn on a television, it seems impossible to turn it on without seeing Stargate somewhere. And she goes ‘Mumma.’ But she actually knows that my new show is called Sanctuary and she knows that I dyed my hair brown for my new show. I don’t know that she’s actually put together that I go to work and make a tv series. She’s been to set, she’s met Bigfoot, she’s seen things and so she knows that I go to this weird place, and that it ends up on tv but I’m not sure that at 3 and a half she’s made the full connection.”
“But she actually said to me, the best quote ever from my child is ‘Mumma, everyone has to have a plan’ and I said ‘You know what Olivia, you’re right. And I said What’s your plan?’ And she said ‘Sanctuary'”
Tapping was clearly so pleased that her daugher, at such a young age, had paid enough attention to know what her mom’s new job was, even if she didn’t really understand exactly what Mum does. It was that pleasure, more than anything else, that helped me identify with her, and reinforced my decision to at least give her show a try.
I watched a screener of the first epsode and some of the visual effects had not been added. It’s a bit slow; there’s lots of story exposition, and it dragged in places.
It also definitely falls more into the Stargate class – good TV if you like the genre and the star but it isn’t going to convert anyone. Unlike Firefly, Battlestar Galactica and Farscape, all of which pushed the envelope and brought new fans into the sci fi genre. Tapping hinted that there is a lot more to come, so I’ll with-hold final judgment until we’ve seen a few more eps.
Bottom line: There are worse ways to spend an hour. Give it a shot. I plan to.
Bonus: A fun activity you can play while you watch is spot the sci fi stars. Many of the current crop of sci fi shows are filmed in Vancouver and it’s a kick to spot favorites (or not favorites) from other shows. Kandyse McClure is danger of being typecast as bitchy gitlfriend, though. You’ll see what I mean when you watch.
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Attendees at the Sci Fi digital press event paid their own travel expenses.
[tags] science fiction, tv, Amanda Tapping, Sanctuary [/tags]
by Susan Getgood //
cross-posted to BlogHer
About a year ago, I wrote a case study on my marketing blog about the Sci Fi Channel’s first digital press tour. After my interview with the pr rep, I half jokingly said she should be sure to invite me to the next one.
So she did.
Sunday, I got back from the network’s second event for the online media, held at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park Colorado.
If you are a fan of science fiction, emphasis on FICTION, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that the network picked up Sanctuary, a series that started as webisodes. It stars Amanda Tapping, best known for her role as Samantha Carter in the Stargate franchise. The premiere airs Friday at 9pm on SciFi. More about the show and a Q&A that we had with Tapping in a subsequent post.
The bad news – if you are a fiction fan – is that Sanctuary was the only new fiction show discussed at the event. Everything else was reality, or as I like to say since it is the Sci Fi network, unreality TV.
Now, I am not a big reality tv fan, but the evidence is in: reality shows get the ratings. They are also far cheaper to produce than a fiction show. It’s not in the least surprising that Sci Fi has followed the trend and embraced the format. Especially in a year when the Screen Actors Guild is working without a contract and might strike at any time.
Not my cuppa, but it appears to be everyone else’s.
Returning shows featured included Destination Truth and Scare Tactics. Quite frankly, Scare Tactics just turns me off, but I will admit to being intrigued by Destination Truth. Its host Josh Gates and his mom were seated at my table at dinner on Friday night, and he struck me as a very genuine person. And he brought his mum to the event. How cool is that.
I’m not sure I’ll watch the show, but I’ve decided to tape it for my son. It’s sort of Indiana Jones for the modern era, and if my son is enamored of any character these days, it’s Indy.
On Saturday, and in an exclusive to the digital press, Sci Fi also announced that it had greenlighted a new show called RelicQuest. Effectively another rendition of the Indy metaphor, but with a specific focus on relics, whereas Destination Truth focuses on zoological myths. Bigfoot, the Yeti and so on.
Ghost Hunters, one of Sci Fi’s most successful shows, was also heavily featured at the event, both in the panels during the day and in a special Ghost Hunt tour in the evening. I dunno. It’s not that I don’t believe in ghosts; they are as likely to exist as anything else.
I’m just not sure why they’d want to talk to us.
But, the Ghost Hunters put on a good show. Along with the hosts of the show Jason and Grant, we “spoke” at some length with a ghost who apparently was a married man between 40 and 45 and a guest in the hotel who missed his wife. “He” was with another ghost, but no one thought to ask whether that ghost was a man or woman. I chuckled when, as we were leaving the room, I said “thank you very much” sort of generally, and the lights in the device thingy that we were using to “communicate” with said ghost blinked as if in response.
Is it real? The Ghost Hunters seem to believe in what they do, as did a number of the digital press in attendance. If nothing else, it certainly proves that Sci Fi knows its audience. There are a lot of viewers enjoying Ghost Hunters. They may not be fiction fans, but they certainly tune in, in droves, every week. Would that *my* favorite Sci Fi shows did as well in the ratings.
A brief sidebar. The format of the Ghost Hunters tour was that we moved about the Stanley Hotel in small groups, meeting and chatting with a member of the Ghost Hunters team in various rooms. Around 11:30 pm, during my group’s session with Tango, a young man on the show, he was relating a story of a possible paranormal event experienced by a previous group when we heard loud… very loud… moans.
Didn’t take us long to put together that we were hanging out in a hall in a hotel that hosted three weddings earlier in the day. Here comes the bride indeed.
Back to the matter at hand. In addition to the returning shows, Sci Fi also introduced us to two new game shows that premiere this fall. One, Chase, seems a bit like Super Mario meets the Matrix. The basic premise is that the contestants are on a live-action game board, searching for the clues and devices that will enable them to elude the hunters chasing them and win the cash prizes. You aren’t simply watching Tron, you are Tron.
They set up a little version of the game for some of the attendees to experience the thrill and fear of the hunt. I didn’t volunteer – games are not my thing – but it was fun to see how excited and engaged the producer Rick Telles was in his own game. Assessment: I’ll let Douglas watch it.
The other game show, Estate of Panic? Not so appealing. Mark Stern, evp of development for Sci Fi was just back from the filming in Argentina and was quite enthusiastic about the show. I can’t see why, but again, I’m not the target here.
Mark Stern describing a scene from Estate of Panic
There’s a thin fictional veneer; the house is supposedly owned by a reclusive millionaire, but it’s really a game show. Contestants are put in situations, gross things happen, contestants get eliminated. Last contestant faces numerous challenges to win.
It airs in the fall. If you decide to watch it, and can find something worthwhile, let me know. I’m trying to have an open mind. In the end though, it may be entertaining, but it’s not science fiction, and I’d really like to see a few more science fiction shows get greenlighted.
Which is why I am looking forward to Sanctuary, the lone new science fiction series on the network schedule. More on that in my next post.
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Attendees at the Sci Fi digital press event paid their own travel expenses.