MORE LIGHT! Farscape and Me and You and Everything That’s Ever Mattered In Art and Space and Time and Art That Is In Space At a Time (Patreon)

Remember when I told you all about Ted Lasso, back when everyone wasn’t watching Ted Lasso, and said very emphatically that everyone needed to be watching Ted Lasso? Was I wrong?

You know I wasn’t.

And now, even though correlation does not equal causation, everyone is watching Ted Lasso, which is inarguably a better timeline.

Well, as the meme dog says, I’LL FUKIN DO IT AGAIN.

This time I gotta talk to you about an old(ish) show that REALLY no one is watching right now, even though they should be, or more precisely, should never have stopped. I’m going to try to keep it reasonably spoiler-free as well, so as not to ruin it for anyone. It’s a show about a guy who gets punted to the far reaches of the galaxy in an astronaut accident, meets a rag-tag band of weirdos on a cool ship and they all have adventures and learn about the meaning of chosen family but also the meaning of incredible narrative and structural risk.

And space hotness.

That’s all you need to know.

I’m making this essay open to the public for the same reason my Ted Talk was open—I want people to watch this beautiful mad thing, and love it the way I do, and MY WORDS ARE HOW I MAKE THINGS HAPPEN I GOT LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE.

Ok. So. Deep breath. Here we go.

We have arrived at the wild dark screamy-singy slightly bronze-tinged puppet-packed occasionally non-sensical heart of the me.

Just call me Clarissa, because I’m about to explain it all.

Zathras Good At Doings, Not Understandings: Television Development in the Late 90s

You see, my gorgeous baby children, once upon a time and long ago, in another world, a strange, almost incomprehensible world, called “the 1990s,” a primeval chaos dimension of unruly television, mostly offline humans, genre ghettos, people who actually thought hey maybe things are just going to be generally all right from now on, and clueless cable stations, there was a show called Farscape.

And that show was everything.

Specifically, it was everything that is popular and right and good in onscreen science fiction right now in 2021, but it had the powerful misfortune to air from 1999-2003, so nobody realized it was everything back then, and thus ignored, mistreated, and cancelled the shit out of it because this was the era of geeks still actually being geeks, a niche group no one knew how to market to yet, and the general attitude toward any property that so much as sniffed the handkerchief of science fiction while having the temerity to not be Star Trek was: Nice things? For nerds? But…but why? Yes, Jenkins, I know I green-lighted it personally and it’s been going pretty well for a brand new IP and we’ve dumped a bunch of money into it, but what if, and bear with me here, we just cancel it right now and air some wrestling? That would be a nice thing for me, you see, because I am primarily motivated by the desire to re-capture the halcyon days of my youth in which I tormented nerds and stuffed them in their lockers and whatnot. And no, I don’t “know” what “halcyon” “means.”

Time for a little TV history. Not because I enjoy and have studied the history of television, even though I have, but mainly because I was there, a young dork with dreams in the late 90s/early 00s, and I personally remember the time known as the day when you could sacrifice legions of souls to an actual, literal, active and personally available hoofed Satan and still not even come close to keeping a quality science fiction show on the air.

I WAS IN THE SHIT, OK?

So give me a minute, because if you want to understand what happened to Farscape, why you may not have ever even heard of it despite this beautiful baby having been free to stream on multiple services basically since the word “stream” started meaning something you did with a remote and not a river, why it hasn’t benefitted much from the reboot renaissance and frantic corporate interest in SFF IP, and just how far ahead of its era it truly was, you gotta understand what a different time in entertainment the late 90s were, how fundamentally none of the assumptions of Stuff on Screens in 2021 applied at all or had even been imagined yet, and how deeply and pervasively disrespected speculative fiction generally, and space-centered SF specifically, was back then.

Fucking 1999, man. It was another PLANET.

A time when network executives were network executives and geeks were geeks—you know, actual geeks, outcasts and weirdos whose presence in mainstream media was pretty much…Alan Cummings in Goldeneye and like one X-Men movie nobody’s parents knew what to do with.

There had been a brief little golden age of American SF TV in the 90s, certainly, starting with that other cult show that changed everything, Twin Peaks. But Star Trek was just about the only televised space-centered science fiction that could consistently pull a (reasonably) mainstream audience and last longer than a few seasons into the promised land of syndication. Even shows like Seaquest, Andromeda, and Earth: Final Conflict mainly got greenlit because of their connection to Roddenberry, and thus carried the aura of success that surrounded the revival of The Next Generation somehow managing, against all odds, expectations, and actual sabotage, to turn a decades-old property into a massive new franchise empire.

Sliders had been the biggest hit the Sci Fi Channel—and we’re gonna be talking about that place a lot—had had up until that point, and they ganked it from Fox when it failed to drag the X-Files crowd over. Buffy was only just in the middle of Season 3, some of its best content, but still far from its biggest numbers, and wasn’t really considered science fiction anyway, in that way that both vampires and comedy tend to get a hall pass to leave the genre woodshop and intermingle with the rest of the students. The X-Files was still limping along, but that was always treated as somewhat different, since it was at least nominally based in our world. Babylon 5 had just ended a year before, showing that…well, long-form serialized SF non-Trek SF could work on TV, but not like Seinfeld or Friends worked, and the uneven final season plus the failure of the Crusade spin-off made it seem like more of a fluke than it really was.

But in ’99, all those groundbreaking shows had either just ended, descended into the post-shark-jumping malaise of their later seasons, or like Stargate, which somehow outlasted and out-spinoff’d the whole gang, despite not being taken very seriously at all when it premiered, had just begun and not yet found their stride.

But generally speaking, the conventional wisdom was: if it’s set in space, and Gene didn’t fondle it before he passed, it’s a massive risk no one should take. They’re just too expensive per episode when it costs about $1.50 to aim a camera at Megan Mulally and tell her to cackle again. And Will & Grace will make enough episodes to achieve the grail of syndication, while Puppets in Space may never come close.

Because syndication was the big money. This was before DVD season sets, before streaming, even before TiVo, if you even remember what TiVo was. If you wanted to watch a show that had aired on television, your choices were: buy or rent VHS tapes of the episodes if the show ever put those out, or not watching that show ever.

Or catching re-runs.

And that was why all the network bobbleheads were so hostile to long-form serialized storytelling. Why everyone from Straczynski to Whedon to Carter had been struggling to tell bigger, longer, more profound stories and running smack into resistance at every turn. Because in syndication, audiences might get confused if an episode that requires having seen the previous one and knowing who everyone was and what they were about popped up on TNT some afternoon and change the channel. Sitcoms and procedurals didn’t have that problem—you could pretty much tune in any time and enjoy a self-contained story where the situation or conflict or characters were always re-established easily at the top of the hour and resolved by the bottom of it. They were easy-to-package single units of entertainment that could be aired in any order anywhere, and as long as a show made it to 100 episodes, it would air, out of order, randomly, at all hours, in all kinds of foreign markets as well, more or less forever. That was how you made long-tail money on TV. The Brady Bunch still fucking airs right now. Kind of a lot. Even in Australia, a country which, notably, and remember this for later, did not have one single thing to do with The Brady Bunch but which straight-up produced and paid for Farscape. The Brady Bunch is probably on somewhere as you’re reading this. It’s still moving ad space fifty-two years after airing. That was the goal for every show—create something people liked enough to tolerate commercials being beamed directly into their faces for as much of the hour/half-hour as could be plausibly gotten away with because no one understood yet that people actually would just sit and watch endless hours of ads with no other content as long as it was a YouTube unboxing channel, then syndicate the shit out of the thing you used to sell those ads to make new money without having to do new work, for all eternity. Like M.A.S.H. but literally forever, am I right, fellow cable boardroom guys?

Guys?

Well, the old system was just never going to work with long-arc shows, the kind we, and by we I mean marketing goblins, call binge-worthy now. But it’s not like arcs didn’t work at all. There was this constant financial push-pull concerning the most basic fundamentals of what is a story? Those big arcs in Twin Peaks and X-Files and even non-speculative shows like Dynasty did, in fact, pull enormous fuck-off numbers while they aired. Stories that developed over time kept people glued to the sets at a certain hour every week, which is gold-plated catnip to advertisers, they kept people talking and invested, created the coveted “water-cooler show” that reached its apotheosis in Lost, which began the year Farscape ended. But in syndication those numbers tanked like a Sherman trying to cross a shallow ditch.

Farscape appeared right in the middle of this war over story. The Sopranos, The West Wing, and Queer As Folk also launched in 1999, you can see it shifting—but Law & Order: SVU, Family Guy, Futurama, and a lot of other adamantly episodic TV also premiered during those 12 months. It was totally unclear which style would win out, or even if one would, long-term.

So do you back a show that might make a lot of money now (or none) but very little later? Or do you back a simpler, easier-to-digest show that might make a lot of money now (but at least some) and also a lot of money later?

Oh look, executives actually do know how to think long term! And you know how they hate that fancy demon change. It’s been working since the invention of TV! Ew, why should we ever, ever do anything different? DIFFERENT HAS COOTIES.

But change, as it usually does because it’s super into prank comedy, was coming anyway. This time brought to you by your friends in Congress! LOOK AT ME GIVIN’ YOU FACTS LIKE THIS IS A YOUTUBE VIDEO ESSAY. But I only had to look up the year, I remember this happening. I remember when cable went from this freaking magical thing rich people had, like water dispensers right there on the doors of their fridges what the FUCK, to something everyone had, and if you didn’t, your family was stupid and uncool and you should change your name before anyone finds out.

1992. It was 1992.

The Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 and the subsequent, and more infamous for yeeting the Fairness Doctrine, Telecommunications Act of 1996, opened up a previously tightly-controlled system to competition because it was the 90s and “lol” as the kids were beginning to say, the market can be trusted to fix any problem! Look at our awesome Funny Channel, Kid Channel, Sports Channel, Girl Channel, Nerd Channel, and more! Surely no one will come along and start a Conservative Dickbag Channel of Lies and Screaming Assholes before the ink has even thought about drying on that Class of ’96 bad boy and ruin every actual thing for the next always! Back to you, Eureka’s Castle!

The explosion of niche cable channels in the mid/late 90s created a situation remarkably similar to the proliferation of streaming services we’re neck-deep in right now: all of the sudden, instead of the pre-80s three-channel mafia, or even the basic cable era ushered in by MTV’s famous moon man in 1981, there was so much space on the airwaves, easily and cheaply accessible to the masses. And behind all that space were a host of companies desperate to fill it quickly so they could sell ads and start making the kind of money owning and operating a whole-ass TV channel implied when, and I’m absolutely certain this happened, because some of these channels were run and backed by truly fucking weird individuals, they told their mothers that’s what they were doing now over a refreshing glass of Sunny-D while the dulcet tones of a Brady Bunch rerun burbled soothingly in the background. You could put together a station for comparatively not that much money in those early days. At least compared to what it would cost now. TNT paid $38 million for all its programming in its first year of operation, and their goal was to go 24 hours from the start.

Yes, at one point, having enough programming for a channel to never go off the air was a goal, not the status quo.

Hey hey hey remember last month when we talked about early Comedy Central and how they would just send Jeremy the Intern out into the underbelly of New York with a camera crew to find literally anyone talking in front of a brick wall and put it on the air so they could sell some fucking fabric softener and Bud Light around here for fuck’s sake? This was happening all over the place. Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, History Channel, E! Entertainment Television, Nickelodeon, on and on until we arrive at perhaps the most niche of all, and most relevant to the topic this essay is actually about, all evidence to the contrary so far, Scifi Network.

And yes, it used to be spelled normally, goddammit.

It’s actually eerily reminiscent of the last few years. There was all this weird new programming floating around, some of it quite experimental, like MST3K and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, because channels needed to fucking air something. But there was no onscreen channel guide or DVR, letting people know you had a show for them to watch in exchange for being advertised to was not terribly easy, there was suddenly a grotesque amount of competition, and a whole lot of every part of it was being run by grifters and exploitative puppet-masters whose names no one knew and whose decisions were only publicized enough to be questioned when shows got green-lit or cancelled.

Welcome to the Federation Starship SS Buttcrack: The SciFi Channel Hits Itself In the Face Over and Over Again

And so, it was into this whole briar patch of upfuckery that Farscape came, a weird show on a small, little-watched network that, for the fucking span of its damn lifetime has seemed utterly embarrassed to be associated with science fiction in any way, despite the fact that it’s not as though geeks en masse kidnapped Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers and held them in a secret mountain lair demanding: Make us a cable station that will, extremely reluctantly, rerun science fiction shows and produce new ones! But, like, don’t be obvious and do a good job or anything, no no! Act coy and try very, VERY hard not to tell anyone about these shows. Preferably just take repeated huge public shits on your own content and treat everyone in the building like the scapegoat child of a narcissistic parent. If it’s not TOO much trouble, you could even make amazing, heartbreakingly wonderful shows, air them out of order and with huge gaps between episodes, then cancel them on cliffhangers! Like, you could even do that several times! Just constantly undermine your own station until y’all accidentally assplant your way into Battlestar Galactica for like five minutes of the mid 00s, then change your name to something stupid and commit fully to wrestling and Property Brothers but with ghosts or whatever, yes, that’s the ticket, all shall kneel before nerds and despair, mwa ha ha!

This did not happen. And yet from more or less the moment most Americans became aware of the SciFi Channel, the whole attitude around it purely stunk. They might as well have put up a station identification card with some random MS Paint clip art of space on it that read: THIS WAS THE ONLY NICHE LEFT WHEN WE GOT HERE SO I GUESS THIS IS WHAT’S HAPPENING BUT YOU SHOULD PROBABLY JUST GO DO YOUR HOMEWORK. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A PART OF THIS. PLAY FOOTBALL OR SOMETHING.

So look: the fact that Farscape ever saw one lousy glimmer of airtime is something of a miracle. It should never have existed. It went against all the conventional wisdom of the time, and by “the time” I very much mean “also this time right now.”

Think about it. It’s BONKERS. I cannot begin to imagine the OG pitch meeting for this beautiful beast. (Yes I know there’s a YouTube channel full of these, shut up, this is fun for me.)

“Hey, yeah, cool, so what we’re gonna do is make a VERY adult science fiction show with the Jim Henson Company and it’s going to be full of PUPPETS.”

“Like Kermit and Miss Piggie?”

“I mean, kind of? But no. Some of the puppets will actually mutilate human characters onscreen. Others will talk about their genitals quite a bit, and we plan to build this whole running thing about one of the puppets’ farts!”

“Ah, it’s a comedy then.”

“The dialogue is quite clever and witty, and we plan to reference insanely specific contemporary pop culture so often it’ll make Joss Whedon look like he’s never even heard of TV or sarcasm, but no. Genocide will feature significantly and often, and later on we have every intention of making an entire season so emotionally grueling people who are teenagers now will still cry about it in their 40s. We will also say tough noogies at one point, but it’s fine. ”

“But with the puppets and the noogies, won’t people just think it’s for kids?”

“Absolutely, a ton of people will think that and not watch it for years and years for that precise reason!”

“Well, as long as it’s cheap.”

“It is not cheap at all.”

“But the puppets will save us money over CGI, at least?”

“You’d think that, but puppets are also expensive and we’re still going to use CGI for the ship and that sort of thing so it’s pretty much going to come out in the wash.”

“Strong stoic protagonist from a military culture who kicks ass and hates feelings? Now we’re talking. That’s this Crichton guy, right?”

“Yeah, no that’s the love interest.”

“Oh, is this one of those new strong female characters I’ve heard so much about?”

“Is that a thing you want?”

“Well, it’s the 90s, so best I can do is…maybe?”

“Then yes. There are several of them, actually. Just way more women than you’re used to seeing onscreen at the same time right now.”

“Oh, ew. Well, I suppose as long as we have some big name stars to get buzz going…”

“Oh, no, no, no sir! Instead, what we’re going to do is hire complete unknowns for every single role!”

“America has a lot of untapped talent, I guess…”

“They’re all gonna be Australian or Kiwi! Except for one guy! It’s basically gonna be a tour of Sydney’s underground club scene, even for the smallest parts! And I mean that, everyone is going to be wearing leather BDSM gear 24/7, even the heroes. I’M TELLIN’ YA WE GOT MAGDA SZUBANSKI! THIS THING IS GOLD! Literally, the whole color palette is like really gold. With most of a Crayola box taped on top of it. SPACE IS AUSTRALIAN NOW. ALL OF IT. DEAL WITH IT.”

“But what if Americans don’t understand their accents? Do Americans even know what a Kiwi accent sounds like?”

“It’s 1999, so they definitely don’t! In fact, some of our Australian actors are so classically trained it won’t even be clear to the average American viewer of trash that they are Australian, because, and I cannot stress this enough, it’s 1999 and the only Aussie representation they’ve got in Peoria is Crocodiles, both Dundee and Hunter, the Blooming Onion, and I don’t know, fucking half of Air Supply.”

“Well…maybe. I do always get the giggles when those scamps say G’Day or Crikey or toss shrimps on or near barbies.”

“Yes, it’s very fun. So we will not be saying any of those things, providing even fewer clues as to where this show came from and why everyone in space sounds like Kylie Minogue just stopped being polite and started getting real. But don’t worry! Instead, we will be inventing an entire fake scifi slang dictionary so that we can ‘swear’ with impunity and fudge timelines because a microt isn’t a minute, iluvscorpy6969 from Cleveland. Also our version of a warp drive has the same name as an incredibly popular candy.”

“Won’t that be confusing for people? If a regular line is full of made-up words they would’ve had to have seen other episodes of the show to understand? Like, even popular SF shows don’t really do that so much, excluding that whole awkward raktajino thing. That sounds like book stuff. As a cable CEO in the 90s, I am actually allergic to book stuff. I have an epi-pen in my briefcase.”

“Well, ‘frell’ you, sir.”

“Oh god.”

“You can’t get mad because I didn’t swear though. See? Anyway, I don’t want to leave this meeting without reminding you that there will be an almost unbelievable amount of goo involved. Like if there is a Goo Department, and anyone is left over after Nickelodeon’s job fair last week, we need all the goo.”

“Because of all the sex and violence that just barely doesn’t cross the decency lines we’re still kind of feeling out right now?”

“That, too. But mostly because we need all the makeup and then after we’re done turning regular humans a TON of nutbar colors, everything else is going to be just…dripping. All the time. Just drenched in slime. Good slime, bad slime, it will constantly be hard to say. But it’s like Coco Chanel always said, before you leave the house, look in the mirror and upend a bucket of colorful sludge over your head.”

“I don’t know about this. Maybe if we just air it at a regular time to start with, but then switch to letting it go on whenever my wife is in the mood but that’s it, and then, I’m just spitballing, later when the show’s really found its stride and a totally devoted audience, we could promise them two more seasons and then cancel it super quick and no one will be upset ever. Then we can fuck ourselves so hard doing that over and over that fucking Bezos will have to save our last good show.”

“But you will’ve spent so much money on it. And time and energy and resources and moved all these writers and crew to Australia way before Australia was cool, like so long before that it was pretty cheap to live in Sydney. Why would you do that? Even out of self-interest, wouldn’t you want it to succeed?”

“I’m literally the devil. I work in cable television.”

“That makes a lot of sense.”

“I don’t know. We could just do wrestling and a couple of shows about how aliens and ghosts and conspiracy theories are real that definitely won’t be a small but measurable factor in our target demographic freaking the fuck out 20 years from now and standing around Dealey Plaza and waiting for JFK Jr to come back from the dead.”

“Well, I guess you guys aren’t ready for this yet, then. But your kids are gonna love it.”

“What’s that, is that a quote? Sounds familiar.”

“It’s science fiction, you wouldn’t be interested.”

AND SCENE.

I feel like it cannot have been too far off from that. Yet somehow, somehow the right people in the right places said yes. To a show that was exactly what the SciFi Channel should have been making all along but only occasionally actually got around to. It is a time capsule from the future of science fiction. The genre changed forever—it just took a long time for the rest of mass media to catch up to a weird, messy Australian show whose biggest name was the production company, connected to no successful IP, aired by a channel that seemed to profoundly hate itself, which barely stayed on the air for each of its four seasons.

God, the 90s were a RIDE.

Part Two