The End of the Golden Age?
I saw the encounter at Farpoint. I learnt what can happen when things go a little ka-ka. I was there for the dawn of the third age, and the start of the dominion war. I know about the erlenmeyer flask. I remember graduation day, and I understand that if nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do. Look upwards, I say, and share the gorram wonders I have seen.
My teenage years seem to have coincided with a remarkable profusion of sf tv, and with an above-average percentage of good sf tv. 'Encounter at Farpoint' aired in September 1990, and from that point on there was always something to watch. Mostly rudely shoved into the 6:45pm slot on BBC2, or ignomoniously dumped on a weekday morning on C4, but they were there, a continuous stream of shows: Star Trek: The Next Generation, Quantum Leap, Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Farscape, Firefly...and Twin Peaks, and American Gothic, and Lexx, and Dark Skies, and Stargate and Futurama. I didn't watch all of all of them, and there are plenty more that I missed entirely - but they were there. A golden age?
Maybe.
The most obvious thing about that list is how American it is. Yes, there were UK shows, but not many of them. Doctor Who is not part of the foundation of my fandom. Red Dwarf is there, and Ultraviolet of course, and even the weak BBC offerings like Invasion: Earth - and more recently, there was Russell T Davies' superlative The Second Coming - but to be honest, it's slim pickings. My understanding of media sf is dominated by my understanding of American tv: of network politics and the arcane mysteries of sweeps weeks.
It wasn't like that in the sixties (which seems to me to be the last time there was a comparable burst; what's lasted from the in-between decades except Blake's 7 and Sapphire and Steel?) - back then, the UK produced a whole raft of quality telefantasy, easily enough to match up to the US offerings. For Star Trek, Doctor Who; for Lost in Space, Thunderbirds; for The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, The Avengers and The Prisoner.
I don't know why the nineties were different. A difference in culture? A difference in outlook? Or maybe just a difference in economics. Between them, the American shows changed the nature of the ballgame. Babylon 5 redefined the stories you could tell, and the The X-Files redefined the level of success you could expect. It's a simplification, of course it is, but I think those two factors ring through the decade, the former giving us Buffy and Farscape - the latter giving us for every hit a plethora of imitators.
And that's where I think the trouble started. Things have changed. The dynasty has ended: the baton that was passed from TNG to B5 to Buffy has fallen to the dust and next season, for the first time in fifteen years, there won't be a significant genre series on American network TV.. The cull has happened quite quickly, over the past few years - since 2000, really. The X-Files and Buffy limped to a close, and Trek has stagnated. More than that, Farscape and Angel have been cancelled, and the list of stillborns is growing almost too fast to count: Firefly, gone after twelve episodes. Wonderfall taken after four. There's nothing obvious on the horizon to capture hearts and minds. Smallville may be fatally handicapped; every time I think it's going to break free and fly, it falls back to earth with a thud. Dead Like Me? Don't make me laugh (or rather, doesn't make me laugh). Carnivale? It's beautiful and wonderful, but it's a niche taste, and it barely made it to a second season. The market has become more competitive. Reality tv delivers bigger ratings than anything else for lower costs than anything else, and sf, a victim of its own success, is delivering lower ratings than anything else for higher costs than anything else. Much as they'd love another X-Files - or even the critical acclaim of another Buffy, the networks are getting impatient. And consequently, trigger-happy.
Has it been a golden age, or was it just that I was twelve? We could quibble over definitions, I suppose. If you want 'golden age' to mean that period where the fundamental themes of the form are laid down, you probably have to look back at the sixties again, in which case the nineties are more like the new wave, elaborating the art with wit and sophistication and style. I wouldn't object to that. Either way, though, I think the nineties were something special, and I think things are changed now. Nobody expects the Next Big Thing, it's true...but in the current climate, I'm not sure it even has a chance.
The Fracturing
The thing about the nineties was, it had the internet.
The internet made fandom different, and arguably its greatest impact was in media fandom; suddenly it was much easier for a single, focused fandom to develop. The resultant culture clashes between snooty literature fandom and monomaniacal media fandoms are still very much with us...but I think the internet also did something else. Something more fundamental.
A case study:
On the 30th of November 2000, uk.media.tv.angel came into being. At the time, season one was about half-way through its butchered 6pm run on channel four, and season two had not yet started on Sky. I was hooked anyway, though. In the US, the most recent episode was 'The Trial.' Google groups hasn't archived the early days, but I was there, and I can say that from the start it was quite the friendliest, funkiest corner of usenet you could find, inhabited by the coolest kids you could wish for, capable of turning from incoherent silliness to serious analysis on a dime.
I posted like a crazy person over the Christmas holidays, then went
back to university just as season two was starting on Sky. I didn't have
Sky at home, and I didn't know anyone who had Sky at home, so my only
option was to strategically hijack the big-screen TV in the JCR - no easy
feat on a Friday, when facing competition from the Friends fans.
Sometimes I lost out, and had to rely on tapes kindly posted by
Yes, on a Friday night. Yes, I am a hopeless case.
Thanks to the vagaries of scheduling, roundabout Easter time the UK
starts catching up with the US. I caught up rather faster, though, because
it was at about this time that
Still, I was hooked, and Angel became something that happened on an American timetable, not a British one. Buffy too and, although I never cared quite as much as that show as I did about its spinoff, it could be more exciting to watch because it had a better distribution network. In particular, there was the marvel of the wildfeed - the satellite transmission of the show out to the regional affiliates which happened before the official broadcast and which could, by people with the appropriate technology, be captured. It definitely adds a certain something to an episode to know that not only are you seeing it before most people in this country, you're also seeing it before most people in America.
In fact, on one occasion they sent out the wrong episode, which meant that I saw 'Villains' a whole week early. That was really fun; suddenly, the US newsgroups learnt the value of spoiler space. It's really a terrible shame that, as US networks have moved to a digital broadcast system, the wildfeed encodes have more-or-less vanished.
In the meantime, the proportion of people downloading episodes was increasing. By 2002 (the middle of season three Angel and season six Buffy), the downloaders were in the clear majority. Somewhere along the line, umta made a pact not to discuss episodes 'ahead of time,' so as not to spoil those who were sticking to a Sky schedule (or, at least in theory, a terrestrial schedule). This worked just fine, but it did occasionally feel just a touch surreal to be discussing episodes that you knew, for certain ninety percent of the group had watched up to three months earlier.
And the trend was still upwards, and by now there are no more than a handful of people posting to that group 'live'. The internet is changing the way we watch TV; the internet has changed the way at least one group of people watches TV. Because it takes time to download an episode, there is no longer such a thing as a universal schedule; different people get caught up at different rates. I'm sure that everyone has, at some point over the past few years, had the 'has everyone seen the latest episode of X?' conversation.
Obviously, this is not true in the US, because the US is the country of origin.
Not true yet, anyway.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, US TV is not a friendly place for genre right now. Angel, of course, has been cancelled, and I think the reason why is instructive: it seems to have more than a little to do with demographics. The WB, Angel's home network, goes after a specific audience. That audience is 'Females 18-34'; failing that, 'Females 12-32'; failing that, 'People 18-34'. Angel's best demographic (yes, even with Spike) is 'Men 18-34', and whilst the WB isn't against young guys per se, it's against them if they come at the expense of young gals. For lower cost, the WB can show a drama that gets more of the people they want watching than Angel does.
Combined with trigger-happy executives, this sort of niching seems to be one of the big factors shaping current US TV - and genre TV is an expensive (albeit effective) way of reaching a niche.
Enter the cable networks. A significant proportion of the most talked-about genre shows of the past few years have come from networks like HBO (Carnivale), Showtime (Dead Like Me) and the SciFi Channel (Farscape). Of these, the last is certainly the most significant. It is also currently investing heavily in miniseries: look for Earthsea, Ringworld, and Red Mars, amongst others. In the recent or relatively-recent past, from SciFi and other sources, we've also seen Dune, The 10th Kingdom, and Taken.
I think there's a pattern here, or at least a trend. There may not be a single, monolithic genre show before which all fans shall bow down in awe, but I think that limited or small-scale productions are going to become more common - and I think that subscription-based services are going to become more important in distributing them. In the short term, that means channels like SciFi or HBO: you'll subscribe because you like the brand, in the same way that you subscribe to Interzone because you like the editor's taste. In the longer term, I can't help thinking that the traditional idea of a channel might be on the way out, and direct downloading might be on the way in. It's TivoWorld: entirely personalised TV.
This is not a new idea, I know. But the thing that occurs to me about it is that, having caused so many schisms within fandom, the internet might be on course to mend them all - or at least make them a lot smaller. Why? Because I think that if TivoWorld happens, the nature of media fandom will have to change.
What makes a media fandom different from a literature fandom? In my view, two main things: volume, and regularity. A prolific author produces a novel every year, whereas a popular US TV show can run for seven-plus seasons at twenty-two episodes a season, spread out over nine months of the year. It is much easier to become engrossed in a media fandom than it is in a literature fandom, particularly if you start following news and rumours about the shows as well as just watching the episodes. There's just more of it, more frequently - and everyone gets it at the same time.
But in TivoWorld, that wouldn't be true. You'd have limited series, coming out over a relatively short span from a 'channel', and downloaded by people at various times thereafter. To me, that sounds much more like a publishing schedule. And that means, maybe, a more general fandom; one that sits back and engages in media as a whole, rather than focusing in on just one or two shows.
OK, so it's a stretch. A leap, even. Basically, it's pure wishful thinking on my part. The subdivision of media fandom into Buffy fans and B5 fans and Trek fans and all the brushfire fandoms that shoot up whenever Fox airs a new show drives me, on occasion, completely up the wall. There is no good reason to watch one of these shows and not at least try the rest; it's like the people who read Pratchett but claim they don't like fantasy.
I can dream, right?