Interesting Take on Farscape Cancellation

Personally, I haven't been watching SciFi channel since they have canceled Farscape. Most people however got over it, and moved to bigger and better things. Many are active in SG1 and BSG fandom. While I think BSG has some potential to be enjoyable, I don't see myself going crazy over it. But I digress... It's interesting to look at FS cancellation in retrospect and ask - what really happened there. Someone has posted very interesting speculation on Gigi Enthusiast Message Board.

This might be a tinfoil hat theory, but for me it sounds plausible. If I was a big soulless suit at SciFi I would probably think the same way:

isn't it amazing how cancelling Farscape made its "two stars" available to combine into their safer-in-every-way, presold series Stargate? As far as they saw, most people still watching Farscape wanted to see Ben and Claudia, right? Right. Farscape was too difficult in many ways thanks to David Kemper's leadership, but worse, Scifi had to shell out to build its audience against the increasingly bad odds. Then they got Stargate, which was already built up bigger than Scifi would ever do it thanks to it having been backed by bigger players right? It was just getting up there in seasons for the big networks. Also Battlestar Gallactica came along to be a quality "heavy" to fill out the second spot of their bill.

Sounds about right. Get rid of the risky, envelope pushing show based in Oz, and invest in two local heavyweights that are guaranteed to succeed. Then bring over the two most prominent Farscape stars into the heavyweight show to boost the ratings.

Personally I don't think the cast swapping was part of the original plan. I think this probably only surfaced after the Peacekeper Wars did well in the ratings. The suits figured - hey, lookit that - these crazed FS zelaots can still bump the Nielsen a bit. Let's try to nab some of the US based cast members to boost SG1 cause it's been slipping.

Sigh... I do miss Gigi. She seems to have faded into obscurity lately. I hope she lands a decent gig sometime soon - preferably something that has at least remote chances of airing in US, or at least ending up as a torrent somewhere.

Oh, ExquisiteIrony - if you happen to read this, the register function on your board seems to be b0rked!

Tags: farscape, farscape cancellation, sg1, bsg, scifi channel