veryone I know thinks I watch too much television. My wife. My son. My friends. But I know that you won't judge me, because, after all, can there truly ever be too much television?
Not for me. In fact, watching one screen at a time is just barely enough to stay current. There are times when I wish that I could occupy a lair such as those you see inhabited by criminal masterminds, the kind in which hundreds of TV screens are always flickering from floor to ceiling, with one tuned to each available channel. That seems to be the only solution to the fact that there always seems to be more TV to watch than there's time to watch TV. Sadly, I haven't graduated to evil genius level yet—so I have to settle for what my TV and a couple of VCRs will do. (At least until I get that TiVo installed!)
So there, I've admitted it—I'm a TV junkie. You'd think that the biggest problem in dealing with my addiction would be figuring out how to keep up with the various incarnations of Law and Order and C.S.I., since those two fictional franchises alone have taken over much of the airwaves. (How much longer do you think it will be before creators Dick Wolf and Jerry Bruckheimer each have their own cable channel?) But no, the real issue is that since my time is limited, and since I'm the editor of Science Fiction Weekly, I've got to make sure that the sci-fi that's out there comes first. So the greatest problem sometimes is—
What is a sci-fi series?
Desperate viewers
This question comes about because some readers of SF Weekly have been debating the sci-fi street cred of some of the new series on which we've shone a spotlight.
Why (some have been writing) did we waste their time writing about Desperate Housewives? For them, the fact that someone is narrating the action from beyond the grave just isn't enough. William Holden told the story of Sunset Boulevard as he floated dead in a swimming pool, and no one's embracing that film as a genre tale. And what about American Beauty, another tale told by a dead man? Would SF Weekly have reviewed that?
And why were we covering Jack & Bobby? Isn't that a show trying to have it both ways, offering an SF veneer with no true SF extrapolation?
These are valid questions that are worth debating. Because to a certain degree, the readers are right. Sometimes, what makes a show part of our genre isn't its plot, but its sensiblity. Which meant that the question we had to ask before covering these shows was, regardless of the potentially SF or fantasy trappings, was either of these series going to end up having a sci-fi sensibility? That can't be decided from the perspective of a pilot alone (and sometimes we don't even have that when it's time to first write about the show).
We often won't learn until a season progresses what the series creators intend. For example, Alias turned out to be a sci-fi show, one that no one has complained about us covering, and who would have figured that when we all first met Sydney Bristow?
Which is why I like to cast the net as widely as possible, and reference such shows as Desperate Housewives and Jack & Bobby when they premiere until the series' arcs develop and we learn for sure whether they're part of our genre or not. It's far better to point out a show that might be sci-fi, than cause you to miss one that is sci-fi because we too quickly excluded it.
After all, there's no way you're going to be able to watch everything out there—unless, that is, you're already sitting in that criminal mastermind's lair.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the new anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic.
