Syfy’s The Expanse returned this month for its second season and has been getting rave reviews from the sci fi community so far (it currently holds a 92% Fresh Rating at Rotten Tomatoes). But despite the good buzz, the show hasn’t seemed to have found much of an audience, at least as far as the linear viewing numbers indicate. Its Season 2 debut pulled a 0.25 rating based on the Live + Same Day viewing with seven hundred thousand total viewers, which are decent numbers for a Syfy entry. But then it dropped to a 0.18 rating in its second week and a 0.14 score last week.
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There a more cynical element at play. The attention span of most adults is declining with progressive year. When you an intelligent adult but with the mind of a childhood, you more likely to be attracted to shiny objects. We are becoming less interactive with people and more interactive with our machines. That kind of the theme in the show called Humans. There are even articles that suggest is Google and the Internet in general is dumbing down our culture and society.
There many great Sci-fi and sci-fantasy on right now but most get beyond a year at best. That is why I find some the best Sci-fi genre in Anime. When you major authors try to sell and market their ideas and books thru coloring books, that culture is easily controlled and manipulated. A non-thinking all emotionally driven culture is not a good sign for a republic.
This all long-winded way to say our choice of entertainment, including TV, reflect our individual and national mind-set – that of being children in our minds in our adult bodies.
I really don’t think there’s an audience for science fiction television or film out there anymore.
In a long and heated conversation among a group of “science fiction fans” that consisted of a lot of complaining that there were no “hard” science fiction TV shows or movies, I recommended “The Expanse”, in addition to mentioning “The Martian” and “Gravity”… really, I don’t think you can get much “harder” science fiction out of a television drama than you get with “The Expanse”, and it’s a fun and likeable show on top of that. The complaining stopped to absolute silence for a few moments, then turned to complaining about the far more vague and subjective cliche’s of how CGI and “bad acting” are “ruining the childhoods” of adult science fiction geeks.
I can’t help concluding that today’s science fiction fans as a group and a culture simply do not seem to enjoy science fiction as much as they enjoy complaining about it, and claiming that it’s all beneath them. I hope that popular culture outgrows the kitschy “geek culture” and affected “sophistication” and dull cynicism of the whole hipster thing soon, so that perhaps a fresh generation can inherit genre television, film, etc. with fresh eyes and renewed enthusiasm.