The End of a Golden Age?

[coalescent]

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 game. Babylon 5 redefined the stories you could tell - finally taking advantage of the breadth of the canvas that tv has to offer - 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.

But things have changed. The dynasty has ended: the baton that was passed from TNG to B5 to Buffy has fallen to the dust. The cull has happened quite quickly, over the past few years - since 2000, really. The X-Files and Buffy limped to a close. 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. The networks, perhaps, are starting to suspect that The X-Files may have been a fluke.

There's nothing obvious on the horizon to capture hearts and minds. Over here we've got a new Who, and that's it. Over there, 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, perhaps 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; in fact, I have a theory that Futurama, as a show that can only exist standing on the shoulders of dozens of spandex futures, is symptomatic of the maturity of the form.

In the end, it's hard to say. Maybe everyone feels this way about the tv from their teens. The view from where I'm standing, though, is that the nineties were something special, and that the outlook now ain't that great. Nobody predicts the Next Big Thing, it's true...but in the current climate, I'm not sure it would even have a chance.

(Obviously, there's also another major difference between the nineties and the sixties. I'll talk about that in a separate post, sometime.)

Comments

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

And if only we had some older fans to tell us what their teenage tv was like...

*looks around*

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

From what I remember (in rough chronological order) Fireball XL-5, Doctor Who, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Lost In Space, Space: 1999, The Prisoner, Star Trek TOS. Stuff I ignored as I got older were things like Terrahawks and The Tomorrow People.

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

Fireball XL-5, Doctor Who, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Lost In Space, Space: 1999, The Prisoner, Star Trek TOS.

At least four of which (Who, Thunderbirds, The Prisoner and TOS) could still be said to have a following now - not a bad ratio. Another Lost in Space got a feature film (which was admittedly rather rubbish) and could be said to be considered a landmark of sorts.

So it would seem that genre TV does last, and that the two perceived golden ages (and I agree with pretty much everything Niall argues in regard to those - I'd been having much the same thoughts myself) have more to do with quality than they do nostalgia.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Lost in Space got a feature film

And now there's another series in the works, plus the new Battlestar Galactica, for which the new movie was generally received rather positively.

I don't personally hark back to the past or want to see re-workings of old formats, I actually want original and highly creative stuff of the high calibre of Farscape. That's the kind of SF I want teenagers of today and tomorrow to see.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

One I forgot to mention was Blake's 7, which as a teenager I thought was great, and is also now getting a makeover of its own.

[fba.livejournal.com]

New Blake's Seven will never happen - that I can promise you.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

They have the rights but no more money, AFAIK.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I'd been having much the same thoughts myself

Really? Any particular trigger?

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

I think I'm with Sarah as far as the term 'slump' goes - I don't think it's a death, but I do think it's the end of something. No real trigger, except the realization that next season there will be a dearth of quality genre television for the first time since TNG began.

and, bringing in the trash TV

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

Sapphire and Steel, Manimal, Blue Thunder, Robin of Sherwood (not historical -- it's fantasy, like Xena), Logan's Run (the series), plus any number of short-run, one-offs and dramas -- Marianne Dreams, Children of the Stones, there were a lot of good children's books adaptations on BBC 1. Still are, possibly. And that's just my favourites (add in The Avengers, Blakes 7 and Dr Who (Pertwee through Davidson) as already mentioned)

Interestingly, I compared older series like classic trek, space 1999 and Buck Rogers to this lot and found ithem severely wanting -- the plots were hackneyed and obvious, the characters incomprehensible. It's only when I grew up into an awareness of camp that I started to like them.

The bridging shows between the two styles were probably The Man from U.N.C.L.E and Dempsey and Makepeace -- cop shows with a fantastic element.

Re: and, bringing in the trash TV

[xsabx.livejournal.com]

The bridging shows between the two styles were probably The Man from U.N.C.L.E and Dempsey and Makepeace -- cop shows with a fantastic element.

Plus, The Champions, The Persuaders, The Professionals (yes, I know)

What else we got? Rutland Weekend Television, End of Part One, all the Anderson live action stuff, The Flipside of Dominic Hyde, Kinvig, Survivors, The Tripods, Terrahawks, any of the far-too-numerous TV cartoon shows: Mysterious Cities of Gold, Battle of the Planets...

SF is *everywhere*!

and how could I forget

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

m-m-m-Max Headroom?

20 minutes into the future ...

what, deleted? There is no justice!

(hmmm, maybe I should be repackaging my old pirates for ebay....)

Re: and, bringing in the trash TV

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Hang on, at the very least Mysterious Cities of Gold is part of my era! :-p

Also all the fab BBC children's sf shows, like Dark Season. Written by a certain Russell T Davies...

Re: and, bringing in the trash TV

[greengolux.livejournal.com]

Wow, they made a TV drama out of Marianne Dreams? It must have been either seriously traumatising or just plain crap.

Re: and, bringing in the trash TV

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

people still rave about it, but it's long-lost in the BBC archive (as far as I know, though the BFI are slowly resurrecting these things, one fuzzy old tape at a time). There's the movie of course (Paperhouse) which captures some of the otherworld spookiness but also injects Hollywood schmaltz.

There are others --- but it's hard for me to tell if they were really good, or if it's retrospect and young eyes. Moondial's about the only one I can remember the name of -- mostly I remember them as "the one where statues came to life", that sort of thing.

Re: and, bringing in the trash TV

[squigglyruth.livejournal.com]

Moondial was pretty good. I recorded it at the time, but I'm not sure I still have it. I'll have to look through my old tapes and see what else they showed.

Arriving late..

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Speaking as an Old Person, who came officially into sf fandom in 78 and was a fan of the genre at least 5 years earlier, I don't think it's cos it was the TV of your childhood that it seemed so good. I think it *was* an unusually good time (with the possible exception of Farscape, which never grabbed me ; I wasn't into B5 or X-Files either, but I can see exactly why they were genre cult hits.) I think I'm about the same generation as flyingsauce, maybe a teeny bit younger - and I pined as a child for the lack of decent sf genre TV. What we watched instead in those days was US cop shows - remember those? - Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Cagney and Lacy. That was what was big for trashy prime time viewing with a hint of escapism; in terms of sf genre TV it was mostly the British stuff we had for occasiona guilty pleasure - Who (pretty lousy to be honest, if you exclude the nostalgia factor, except in the Tom Baker years); Tomorrow People (even worse, tho I'd kind of like to see some again - but that acting was appalling, I realised that even then) and of course Blake's 7 - the only show of the time which genuinely caught the imagination, and again, even then, I knew the special FX and much of the acting were extremely dodgy. Galactica and Buck Rogers were just unspeakably bad even I wouldn't watch them. The Seventies really were an sf desert till George Lucas saved the days. You don't know waht it ws like -- this was when an sf magazine would launch, 1000s f people would desperately buy it, and then W H Smiths would decide it wasn't worth stocking and one issue later it would go out of busines. No speciality comics or sf shops. No DVDs. Very few video rental places. Almost no sell-through market. hat was why we ionveted conventions.. You tell the young people today and They Don't believe it {end Python Yorks accent).

Star Wars (1978?) was a thunderbolt; I remember reading everything I could lay my hands on about it about it (mostly in Starburst, which now I remember, actually WAS going then).. getting hold of the novelisation, getting progressively more and more excited till the glorious thing actually arrived in the UK . (These were the days, Young Things, when you could wait for up to a year for a film to get from US to UK - god knows why.) I had the same kind of excitement about the first Superman movie (1979? 1980?) then the same again with the first Batman movie (1989?). We wouldn't have eben so excited about these movies - less so the last by which time we did have ST:NG etc - if there had been TV like Buffy and X-Files and the Trek sequels to meet our needs at the time.

So yes, the period you describe - ST: NG to the end of Angel -- probably was the Golden Age of our time. Good call.

(And why ARE you so down on Dead Like Me? I admit it's not an original like Bufy but it's smart, acute, topical, zany, amusing, sometimes poignant and well acted. Where's the bad?)

Ps

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Looking back at the original post I see that ST:NG only got started in 1990 in fact - so I was in fact right to remember the first Batman movie in 89 as the last great placeholder for the sf genre before TV really took up the reins.

Re: Arriving late..

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

So yes, the period you describe - ST: NG to the end of Angel -- probably was the Golden Age of our time. Good call.

Thanks. :)

(And why ARE you so down on Dead Like Me? I admit it's not an original like Bufy but it's smart, acute, topical, zany, amusing, sometimes poignant and well acted. Where's the bad?)

A few reasons; mostly, I admit, shallow. Firstly, I don't find it funny, and the only character I find even vaguely watchable is Rube. George, I dislike intensely. Secondly, I find it smug. I get the same vibe from Six Feet Under: 'ooh, aren't we clever. Aren't we brave and daring. See the subjects we tackle!' And my reaction is the same: well, no. Actually, you're surprisingly conservative.

The real kicker, though, from my point of view, is that I don't think the series has any real ambition. It doesn't really want to be a genre show, it wants to be a mainstream show. The genre elements are entirely window-dressing - the longer it goes on (I watched the entire first season), the more it becomes apparent that they're just not interested in exploring or developing that side of things. In fact, it doesn't really want to be much of anything, as far as I can see; just a bunch of character studies occuring more-or-less in a vacuum.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh, and maybe I'm over-rationalising from the fact that, basically, it just doesn't grab me. But that's how I see it at the moment.