MAXIMUM SyFy, By Chris Derrick – Sympathy for the Devil #4

January 5, 2012 Chris Derrick 2 Comments

As the TV season is about to kick in for the second half and the mid-season shows are about to premiere, I was thinking about what’s coming out on cable that would be a good time investment which brought to the forefront of my mind a bone that’s been stuck in my craw since the end of “Battlestar Galactica”.

For the last few years basic and pay cable have presented some of the most dynamic and compelling shows, like “Games of Thrones” and “The Killing“, “Justified” and “Damages“, and “Louie“. Oh, and who can forget “Spartacus“! So I’ve come to anxiously anticipate the new shows that are on the mid-winter horizon.

What keeps me cued in is the chokehold intensity of the shows, typically TV-MA LSV (the edge of what’s acceptable for basic cable). “Spartacus” and “Damages” took it to the max and perhaps even over the edge; last season on “Spartacus” there was a threesome between Lucy Lawless, Jamie Murray (topless no less) and John Hannah and the scene with red wine deliciously dripping down Murray’s erect nipples pretty much out does nearly any porno for fantasy sensuality (considering that’s the last thing the porn director’s mind) and was completely effective and appropriate for the context and tone of the show (it’s Ancient Rome!).

So what bugs the hell out of me in a post-Battlestar Galactica world is SyFy, and its refusal to air any TV MA-LSV content (although BSG wasn’t MA-LSV), which, if you think about it, is something expected (in terms of content intensity) in a vast majority of sci-fi lit, comics and movies (recall nearly any cyberpunk story, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Children of Men, Aliens, Philip K. Dick’s stories – screen adaptations and the written texts). So why is SyFy, THE science fiction content provider on TV, shying away from a core component to the genre?

A friend of mine and I debate this issue all the time, wringing our hands and shaking of heads at the decided lack of so-called adult content on SyFy. A couple weeks ago we were lamenting the latest foray into sci-fi on network TV – “Terra Nova” (which I’m not going to discuss at this time) – and again we got around to SyFy’s tepidness. We speculated about how SyFy should take a page from the Adult Swim playbook in order to expand its offerings. In that, Adult Swim comes on a channel (The Cartoon Network) that predominantly aims its programming at younger viewers and the whole family. Yet, when the clock ticks later into the night, Adult Swim takes over with more adult-oriented content (as the name indicates).

My favorite Adult Swim show was Aaron McGruder’s “The Boondocks”, because of its take-no-prisoners spoofing, parodying and joking with race relations in America, African-American culture and the hilarious, pointed discrepancies between various class issues within the Black community (the monolith that it is). The profligate use of “nigga” and the constantly bleeped out outbursts is usually the domain of R-Rated movies, but Adult Swim went full throttle with it. The unrestrained (to a certain extent) language and story content on an Adult Swim show adds a different level of story telling that is hilarious in its own way. Like “Robot Chicken” and its sexual innuendo; what would that show be like without it?

So this begs the question: why doesn’t SyFy introduce something called SyFy⁽²⁾ or Maximum SyFy,  a late night programming bloc that carries primarily MA-LSV content with all the expected intensity in storytelling, language and acting? When the spin-off from “Battlestar Galatica” – “Caprica” – came on, there was an pre-release version on iTunes of the pilot that was easily MA-LSV – the opening violence-filled orgy of the cyber-world pushed the content to wall… and yet when that same pilot aired on SyFy a few months later, it was judiciously edited so as not to offend (?); but those edits took nearly all of the bite out of that important, tone-setting scene. The promise of the show was removed, before it even began…

SyFy does produce solid content – “Alphas”, “Warehouse 13”, “Eureka”, “StarGate Universe” and “Haven” are all impressive – they’re like the regular DCU comics, the superhero stuff that we all like and thirst for… but where’s the Vertigo equivalent for SyFy? They don’t have one, and my proposal for Maximum SyFy is just that. So when are the execs going to call?

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