Tuned In

The Morning After: Syfydelity

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Syfy

Syfy

A lot of critics like myself have had our fun with Sci Fi channel’s changing its name to (the more trademark-defensible) Syfy, which kicked in yesterday. But in the long run, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll get used to it. We have a channel named Spike, for God’s sake. And do I really have a place pointing fingers at funny names? 

More than the name, I just wish Syfy would start making shows a little more ambitious than the harmlessly wacky Warehouse 13, which debuted last night. I have nothing against escapism, even if Warehouse isn’t my kind of escapism. But I worry that Battlestar Galactica, which put the network on the great-TV star chart, wasn’t an anomaly rather than a serious change in the channel’s direction. (Syfy does have the sequel, Caprica, coming up next year, but as a sequel, it feel rather grandfathered in.)

I’m a fan of sci fi, but not just any sci fi; I need strong writing, plausible characters and big ideas, like we find on BSG and Lost. My problem with many of Sci Fi’s, and now Syfy’s, shows over time is not that they’re bad so much as they’re settling. It’s as if there’s a mindset that because these are genre shows, the standards for character, writing, dialogue—the whole set of criteria we judge other drama on—are lower. And there’s no reason they should be. 

That said, Warehouse 13 itself (what I’ve seen of it), wasn’t bad, so much as it simply didn’t hold my interest. Did any Tuned Inlanders like it better than I did? And would anyone like to stick up for Syfy—or for its name?