I won't argue with any of that. In fact it was an even more succint appraisal than mine!
The BBC gets its funding from the government. If your government isn’t exercising control over it it’s just out of luck. Money from the government ALWAYS comes with strings, and those strings will be pulled, the only question is when not if. Deny it if you chose but you’re ignoring thousands of years of recorded human history to do so.
I do so deny it. The BBC gets its funding from a form of public subscription. The government is merely the conduit through which that flows. In the same, commercial TV gets its funding through a form of public subscription. The conduit in this case is pretty much every product you buy. Because I fund it, I as a viewer and a listener have far more control over what goes on the BBC than I do over the UK's commercial channels. With them I am one step removed. I think its a better system because I'm a customer, rather than the product being sold. But that's just me.
Hey it’s 2 hours longer to see it coming than you’ve got. Might not be enough time, but it’s time.
Something like that happens over years, not hours. The old "boiling frog" analogy. Some of the storylines and characterisations that television routinely gets away with now would have caused riots twenty-thirty years back. The trick is to not give in to them. Compromise is fine, but not if only one side of the political spectrum ever does it.
No it’s because government employees tend to be idealists and lifers. Most government jobs you make less money than you would doing the same thing in the private sector, there’s a certain kind of person willing to make that sacrifice, and those people stay until retirement time usually straight out of college. So 40 to 45 years of “service” is not uncommon, so we’ve got people working in the government that got there during the Carter administration, doing their job with whatever ideals got them there in the first place, prioritizing their work according to those ideals, regardless of how those ideals match the current administration’s goals. Corporals run the army, secretaries run the office, guess who really decides what America’s priorities are.
I don't deny the truth of any of that, but I don't believe its solely the truth of the matter. Government chooses how to play the hand, but not what cards have been dealt.
BSG was a remake, but it was dramatically different than anything else on TV at the time, and still now. Much thicker character and plot development, a story largely lacking in good guys because all the characters had realistic flaws.
The character development was thicker, but only on the negative side. The storyline was incoherent and basically boiled down to an exercise in nay-saying. It was RELENTLESSLY dark. No matter what the Humans did, the Cylons always seemed to be one step ahead - no matter how unlikely a plot twist was needed to achieve that. So yes, if you like your drama to vary from deepest black all the way across to dark grey, and to be flagellated constantly for thinking that actually standing up for yourself is an ok thing to do, it was fine...
SyFy channels shows lots of sci-fi. BSG, Eureka, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, Stargate. That’s all SF, and original programming SF. Then there’s all the reruns. 3 hours a week of wrestling helps them pay the bills (it is the most popular stuff on there) but it doesn’t mean they aren’t showing SF. They ARE serving a minority audience, maybe not in a way the minority audience is willing to acknowledge, but nerds are notoriously bitchy.
Well I have been misinformed then.
The problem with the government “merely” being the conduit of funding is that it puts them in charge. Like I said, what happens to the BBC if the government decides that in this economy with these fuel prices the enforcement vans are just not worth the trouble? BBC funding will drop through the floor as very quickly only the honest people will pay the tax (which might be a higher percentage in England than the US but still will be a drop), that’s all the government has to do to exercise total control over the BBC. And that is the nature of government, to increase its own power, and to never give any back.
you might have a point IF the BBC produced a higher general level of quality than commercial TV. But it doesn’t. Whether it’s purely commercial like most of the US, charity funded like our PBS, or tax funded like the BBC, 99% of what winds up on TV is crap. Because one way or the other they’re still pandering to the taste of the average person (even if it’s a minority subsection of the average person) and the average person is a bleeding idiot that needs to be told not to put their extension ladder in cow poo (actual warning label you can find on ladders in the hardware store). As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people the medium will continue to produce crap, and the path of funding only nuances the goal, it doesn’t change it.
Actually I think it’s the other way around. I think when it comes to characterization they got away with more 30 or 40 years ago. They can show a hell of a lot more skin today, but subject matters have tightened up. One of the deep cable channels had a program about 8 years ago where they brought the heads of entertainment for he big 3 in to discuss how TV works and how it’s changed. For one segment they did “elevator pitches” for popular well regarded 70s TV shows, they didn’t mention the show though everybody always figured out what it was, they just rattled off the 30 second version of the subject, like “sit-com in a front line war hospital”. All three guys said over and over they could never show these shows: MASH, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and a handful of other shows considered classics of TV today. In the modern PC world you can’t have a war sit-com, you can’t have a main character that’s a racist, you can’t have a main character that goes to the porn theater every episode.
But how you play the hand is everything. One of the big name poker players in the 80s when discussing the game would do a “demo” where he’d play somebody and never look at his cards. He always said it was because what you thought of your cards was much more important to his victory than anything in his hand. Again look at the enforcement vans that get the BBC funding. Any low level functionary in the UK government could “decide” to lower the priority of those vans and dramatically change life for the BBC, it doesn’t have to be a high level government decision, anybody in the budget office deciding which department gets how much money for transportation can effect this change. Sure they might get overridden eventually by somebody in charge, but it’ll be months before anybody figures out what the heck is going on. That’s why they say secretaries run the office, one less or more 0 on one form can change everything, it’s the old “for the want of a nail the horse was lost” and knowing who controls the nail allotment.
I never had a hard time following the BSG storyline. And I wouldn’t say it was all nay-saying, it was human flaws bouncing off of each other, but they were always trying to do the right thing, problem is not everybody really knew what it was. It was a classic example of nobody being a villain in their own story. From their perspective everybody was a hero doing what was necessary, it was up to the audience to decide who was wrong. And it should have been relentlessly dark, when your story STARTS with a massive multi-planetary genocide that reduces the human population to a non-genetically survivable number it’s going to be a dark story. The Cylons weren’t necessarily one step ahead, and certainly weren’t at the end, the big advantage the Cylons had was a defined goal, the humans spent most of the series confused and pathless, the Cylons knew from the start what they wanted to accomplish and how. People with a goal will always beat the aimless wanderers. Nobody was flagellated for thinking for themselves, they just got to face the consequences of not thinking it through to the end. There was a lot of consequences in the show, a lot of the show was built around what happens after the quick fix stops working.
That’s how fandom is. They focus on what they don’t like and complain constantly. There’s still people whining about Farscape being canceled, that was 3 or 4 owners of the network ago, but they still hold it against the network today. So from where you’re sitting you get to hear about all the “non-SF”, because that’s all fandom talks about.