ou know you've been in the television business long enough—perhaps too long—when you realize that everything you know about it is out of date. Not the storytelling or the art of speculation or all of that unimportant jazz.
You realize that you don't understand the business model any more. You can no longer visualize the flow of money from advertising agencies to networks to studios to series.
Of course, when I first learned about these subjects, there were three major networks controlling three-quarters of the entire broadcast world—600 out of 800 commercial stations. Cable was for reruns of feature films, and only if you lived in a big city.
Within a few years of my entry into the exciting world of sci-fi television writing, Star Trek: The Next Generation had premiered in syndication, independent (not-network) stations were sprouting like mushrooms, cable channels were beginning to find audiences. The rate of change has not only continued, with the arrival of the Internet and the awe-inspiring game business, it's accelerated.
It's all I can do to keep up with the market, and especially with the aftermarket.
Change isn't necessarily good
Two stories will illustrate the way the aftermarket changes. First, the producer of a successful sci-fi series aired on cable. Series episodes in this market traditionally have budgets that are substantially less than those of prime-time network series—on the order of $1.5 million as opposed to $2.5 million. In neither case does the initial run pay that freight: A network license fee, for example, still forces a studio to "deficit" (here used as a verb) as much as a million dollars of that episodic budget. Proportionally, a cable episode is in the same situation.
You may ask, why would anyone be in a business where you lose $20 million for each seasons' worth of episodes produced?
Well, foreign sales offset a certain amount of the deficit. (A sci-fi series like the X-Files had a whopping foreign sale.)
The real payoff is the syndication aftermarket—when a series is sold to station groups or different channels, to be run five nights a week or more.
The problem is, you have to have at least 65 episodes to really qualify for syndication—certainly you need that number in order to get a good price.
And that good price can wipe out three or four years of deficits, adding a tidy profit on top of that. Look at the aftermarket for J.A.G. and the various Law & Orders.
But J.A.G., Law & Order and C.S.I. (when it enters the market), had their first runs on broadcast networks. Further, they are mainstream drama television—not sci-fi, which has traditionally found its most welcome home in niche markets like cable channels or syndication.
Series like Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, Stargate SG-1, Mutant X and The Dead Zone began their lives on cable or in syndication. The first two migrated from one non-network delivery system to the SCI FI Channel—Andromeda just last week.
The question remains: Is there an aftermarket large enough to make those series profitable?
No one seems to know. Which is bad enough in itself—uncertainty is just as deadly to a business plan as outright predictable failure.
This makes me feel better only to this degree: It means I'm not alone in failing to understand what's going on.
Another story—
A dozen years ago I was having a conversation with my friend and colleague, the well-known fantasy writer George R.R. Martin.
George had just finished a two-year tour on CBS's Beauty and the Beast, a wonderful fantasy series that fought its way onto the air (I happened to be working at CBS when the pilot arrived) and battled for an audience and a renewal, only to slide into cancellation, leaving millions of fans unhappy.
George was looking at the growing market for videotapes, and doing his own back-of-the-envelope calculations. "Suppose we could produce two original Beauty and the Beast movies for $3 million. At $60 a tape, how many would we need to sell to break even? Half a million? The audience for B&B was 20 times that! Do you think one in 20 fans would pay $60 to have new episodes?"
(I should note that George R.R. Martin is not only a fantasist, but a veteran of actual speculative fiction. In other words, he has a keen eye for future trends.)
The numbers seemed to suggest that this would work. But it didn't. Yes, two-hour-long sci-fi projects galore went "straight to video," but in almost all cases these were one-shot titles, or sequels to previous low-budget films ... not television.
That is, it didn't work until recently.
Dead series earn second chances
Joss Whedon's late, lamented, short-lived Firefly lasted less than a full season on Fox in the fall of 2002. But those episodes, along with three unaired installments, were rearranged into their proper order, supported with commentary and other goodies and released on a DVD collection from Twentieth Home Video.
Apparently they've sold like gangbusters. (Number 16 on the Amazon.com list last week.) The Firefly DVD has done so well that its encouraged Universal to make plans for a Firefly movie with Whedon at the helm.
Then there's Joe Straczynski's Babylon 5, which followed up its original run with TV movies on SCI FI, later to have a new life on DVD. It appears that Farscape is going the same route—an original movie that is likely to have its greatest aftermarket on DVD.
Is this a good thing? Or is the dying gasp of an art form, a market that has become so fragmented that nobody can afford to make a sci-fi series? It this the death of that shared experience I wrote about in Science Fiction Weekly #344?)
Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but I believe it's a good thing.
At their best, sci-fi series are the heartfelt visions of individual creators working with a group mind (think of Serling and his group of Twilight Zone writers—Matheson, Beaumont, Johnson). These are incredibly difficult to pitch and sell.
The existence of a vibrant aftermarket means that programmers at networks and cable channels might be more open to these heartfelt visions.
We'll know for sure the day we hear that a DVD company is taking pitches for sci-fi series ...
Michael Cassutt recently served as executive consultant for USA Network's The Dead Zone. His new novel, Tango Midnight, is available from Forge. He still has a lot to learn.
