When Scifi is Added: The Precursor to Cancellation

Without good writers, a television show tends to go bad real fast. And if a television show also goes past its expiration date, it also gets bad real fast like milk left out in the Arizona sun for seven days and nights becoming all chunky and yogurt like.  So the problem is if the writers are not good enough, or even if the writers are and the show just goes on too long, there is going to be a noticeable difference in regards to the format, tone and direction of the television show. And it seems that direction seems to most commonly involve wacky high jinks in the science fiction and fantasy genres. The writers just say “Ah fuck it” and before you know it the main character in a cop drama is pointing a freeze ray at a burglar stealing a cursed jewel. When writers get ridiculous, they result to science fiction.

The most prominent example would be Steve Urkel in Family Matters. An average sitcom about an African American family living in Chicago the show is most known for gracing the world with Urkel as he stumbled through windows doors and uttering the recognizable, nasally, “Did I do that?”, as he sheepishly tried to convince his next door neighbor Laura Winslow to go out with him. Fairly standard sitcom issues happen throughout the series, but once the writers simply could not come up with anything more- things began to get weird. In season eight they bring us “Stevil” an evil dummy that looks like Urkel decides to come to life and terrorize the Winslow family. In another episode Carl and Steve travel back in time, a transformation machine is feature throughout the series, another episodes sees them traveling back to a 1700s pirate ship, Urkel reads minds in another, with the series concluding with Urkel getting lost in space. All of this would be fine it the series was not set in the Chicago of 1990. As it stands,  a lack of ideas forced writers into becoming zany and out of the norm for their show.

 

 

Another quicker example would be Baywatch Nights, which was essentially just a cop drama starring David Hasselhoff. By the second season the entire premise had been dropped in favor of a show focusing largely on supernatural crimes with werewolves, ghosts, and other such baddies despite having nothing to do with these elements in its first season. Poor ratings were what led tot his change, and ultimately its inevitable cancellation. As well, to a lesser degree, the WB show Felicity had an episode where the overall “normal world” were ignored in the final episodes of the show when Felicity’s goth Wiccan roommate casts a spell to send her back in time and figure out her life. Of course they went to explain that those final six episodes all took place in a dream of Felicity’s due to fever.

 

 

Similar incidents pop up throughout television where a simple family drama, or cop show, even medical doctors drop their own universe rules in favor of delivering an episode that has something wierd ro freaky, or just because the writers do not have anymore ideas- and so they fall back on the usage of ridiclous ideas that are msotly found in science fiction and fantasy. Why, because most people did not take these genres as seriously as others.

 

 

Science fiction and fantasy deal with a lot of elements that are found in a kid’s toy chest; demons, aliens, ghosts, mummies,  creepy little toy dolls that are trying to kill you. For the most part the content that they dealt with was not part of the mainstream culture because objectively, much of what science fiction has is ridiculous.  So when writers need a quick fix or just trying to make filler episodes so that the network finally realizes that they have to cancel, that they cannot come up with anymore conceivable plots or situations for there characters to deal with, they resort to having them be sent back in time or deal with evil little dolls.

 

 

When shows begin to delve into genres that were previosuly unexplored- like if a cop who was shot suddenyl returns the third episode later, or witchcraft and spells are becoming the norm – it is a demosntration by the writers that they have simply run out of any relevant ideas. They are using the genres as a demosntration of how ridiculous it would be to have the series to keep going. After all, they are having a suburban black family being chased by demonic dolls or traveling back in time. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it tends to be extremely noticeable.

Or the writers just really, really suck.

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