Dark Matter renewal petitions

Newp. I like Killjoys but Dark Matter didn't grab me. I was happy with the way that went down.

Also happy that Sense8 is at least getting a wrap up finale. Now there was a true travesty of a cancellation.

I enjoyed the first season of Dark Matter.  But it just seemed to lose steam afterwards.

This is disappointing, loved this show, was just looking forward to season 3 coming to Netflix this month too. Such a shame.

Haven't seen Killjoys, but this is hardly the first show I liked SyFy decided to ax prematurely over the years, so I'm always a bit wary with them to begin with.

Yeah, they used to just be called The Sci-fi Channel years ago, and rebranded to SyFy right around the time they were starting to drop a lot of their scifi programming and expand out into reality tv, etc.  I did participate in an old fashioned letter writing campaign for a cancelled show on there once. It did work, we got a tv movie to wrap up the series. But that was years ago, before Twitter and social media hash tags were a thing, and before the days of streaming on Netflix, Hulu...I'd say there is a better chance now, even if still a long shot. Anyway. Recently, with Dark matter and some of their other shows, it was looking like SyFy was finally getting back to their roots with good sci-fi programming...but this kind of leaves a bad taste, and reminds me why I stopped following them.

To be impartial, it's still possible that Killjoys will also be canceled.
I am thinking it would generate too much fan hostility if they ended both of these shows at once, so they're going to wait until the public awareness of Dark Matter fades away, then remove Killjoys as well.
In order to avoid having two fanbases enraged at them simultaneously.

I did do a comparative study to work out how much of SyFy channel is still sci-fi and the results came back with 40% of content.
I didn't know they were doing reality tv though, although someone mentioned they had a wrestling show. Can't make sense of that inclusion, how is sports fictional?
I am wondering now, were they just doing a limited production of sci-fi shows in order to maintain the public impression they are still a sci-fi channel?
As in, they make a few shows they deem expendable, then go back to whatever they doing before.

If the above speculation is true, then I'm going to have even more reason to avoid this channel, as stated before, I can't take even more shows where the plot just stops because of cancellation.
And if this is what SyFy is choosing to do, give us a taste of something sweet and then take it away before we finish the meal, then I'll be avoiding any show they make, just to avoid any kind of disappointment like I experienced many times previously.

By the way, this already resulted in me having a negative response.
I just changed ISPs and part of the deal they offered was a paid sub to an internet tv bundle of my choice.
Since Dark Matter belonged to SyFy and the cancellation hadn't been announced at that time, I chose the bundle that included SyFy.
Three days later, the announcement of Dark Matter's cancellation was made and I instantly decided to change to another paid sub that didn't include SyFy in retaliation.

Yes, I am aware that just one individual denying them income doesn't make a difference, but if other subscribers make the same decision, it might have impact later on down the line.
I wonder if the loss of dedicated fans can be compensated with by viewers who aren't as committed or whether the gradual loss of viewers over time will cause the company to suffer, both in online publicity/reputation and profits.

The only show I watch on Syfy anymore is 12 Monkeys.  And they ran the last season in a long marathon rather than a weekly show (good thing I recorded it or I'd have completely missed that), so I don't know what they're thinking anymore.

I saw something similar on the local free2air channels here a while ago.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine+Voyager, Stargate SG1 and Farscape were being randomly shifted around in the schedule and were eventually removed before all the episodes were aired.
When a show goes from being shown at 9:30pm to 11:00pm or midnight, you know they don't want it anymore.

At this time, reality tv was taking off, so there was a push to make as much real life stuff as possible.
The one I remember is whatever show I was attempting to watch was deleted from the schedule because a football panel talkback show was always running 1-1.5 hours over schedule.
I thought that wasn't allowed, if a show was exceeding their allocated time, there was a 5 minute warning, a 1 minute warning, then they turn the cameras off and run the credits.
This was a realtime live2air show, so it wasn't prerecorded.

I am thinking it's all about greed now, they want to make profits and because sci-fi isn't where the money is, they're just going to follow whatever trend is the one that generates the most income.

Sah291, when you say fall back, do you mean they'll go back to no sci-fi and/or fictional based shows?
Or just cut out the sci-fi?
I don't know what their programming schedule was like, before, after or currently.

To be honest, if the shows are deemed to be too expensive, why start making them in the first place?
Surely it would save the money if they didn't start production and just spent the money on something that was guaranteed to turn a profit?
Of course, there are no gaurantees there either. If you have 10 shows and they're variations on the same theme/concept, only the best and second best will succeed, all the others probably wouldn't.
Which is why I think SyFy funding these shows is a token gesture, a public statement to use to deflect complaints that they don't want to be what they were.

But to be fair, it's not just SyFy who does this, there's a whole page on Tvtropes documenting this.
LiveActionTv, with a whole section dedicated to SyFy.
So maybe it's just a general indication of workplace trends, nobody wants to go into serious fiction anymore.

Tilarta, I'm not sure honestly. That's the reason I was surprised by this news to cancel Dark Matter, because as recently as this summer I was seeing articles about their plans to rebrand and go back to their roots...that their earlier attempts to rebrand had been intended to broaden their audience, but caused them to end up missing the boat when genre television really started to make a comeback on television. Series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones really changed perception of how profitable fantasy/horror and genre shows could be.

Looking at their programming now, they seem to be going for a mixture of story driven shows, scifi, and some horror and comic inspired stuff. They've always had their filler and movies they fall back on, to fill out the schedule, but who knows.

It was. In a surprising move however, they gave it two more seasons to wrap up.


I rather like what Lovretta had to say on it.

Funnily enough, like Killjoys, that particular show was renewed for season 4 and 5 at the same time, I was surprised SciFi renewed them for two seasons because of that.

The Farscape mini series was terrible compared to the show IMO, they basically shoved what was supposed to be the first half of season 5 into a 3 1/2hr mini series