SyFy lost my affection, frankly, when they started to feature professional wrestling, and other shows not even vaguely related to SF or fantasy.
The kind of thing you're talking about is really just rife throughout the whole entertainment industry. However, as audiences, we're just starting to wake up and notice and voice our dissatisfaction. For a long time, television trained its audiences to be passive consumers of content: "watch the Box with the pretty pictures. The Box is Good." Nowadays, the internet is training people that they can interact with their content, vote on it, comment on it, and (fans are on the cutting edge, of course) remix it and reshape it. I predict this new power will eventually change the content itself (see American Idol, where people vote on the outcome of the contests--shades of the Roman Coliseum).
Also, it takes awhile, but entertainment content mores eventually catch up with the prevailing mores of society. Just watch a show from the 60s--Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, for example--and see all the drinking and smoking and blatant objectifying of women going on. See the complete *lack* of POC. Today, we have very little onscreen drinking or smoking--smoking generally denotes a villain, or at least someone raunchy; drinking generally denotes characters letting their hair down, being debauched, or having a "problem"--it's no longer everyday and casual. Today we have POC onscreen (if not usually in the lead roles), and *women* in leading roles (even in action series! Yay, Buffy!), and *gasp* even gay characters (even though often just comic relief). Just wait, eventually media will catch up with today's societal mores...however, by then it will be tomorrow, and tomorrow society will have moved on too, and will still be complaining about how backwardly media is portraying people.
(and, yes, darlin'. Our Charmer was *lots* cooler!)
no subject
SyFy lost my affection, frankly, when they started to feature professional wrestling, and other shows not even vaguely related to SF or fantasy.
The kind of thing you're talking about is really just rife throughout the whole entertainment industry. However, as audiences, we're just starting to wake up and notice and voice our dissatisfaction. For a long time, television trained its audiences to be passive consumers of content: "watch the Box with the pretty pictures. The Box is Good." Nowadays, the internet is training people that they can interact with their content, vote on it, comment on it, and (fans are on the cutting edge, of course) remix it and reshape it. I predict this new power will eventually change the content itself (see American Idol, where people vote on the outcome of the contests--shades of the Roman Coliseum).
Also, it takes awhile, but entertainment content mores eventually catch up with the prevailing mores of society. Just watch a show from the 60s--Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, for example--and see all the drinking and smoking and blatant objectifying of women going on. See the complete *lack* of POC. Today, we have very little onscreen drinking or smoking--smoking generally denotes a villain, or at least someone raunchy; drinking generally denotes characters letting their hair down, being debauched, or having a "problem"--it's no longer everyday and casual. Today we have POC onscreen (if not usually in the lead roles), and *women* in leading roles (even in action series! Yay, Buffy!), and *gasp* even gay characters (even though often just comic relief). Just wait, eventually media will catch up with today's societal mores...however, by then it will be tomorrow, and tomorrow society will have moved on too, and will still be complaining about how backwardly media is portraying people.
(and, yes, darlin'. Our Charmer was *lots* cooler!)