Why is the “SyFy” channel so ashamed of itself?
Once again, the “SyFy” channel has cancelled one of it’s top rated shows, (Eureka) despite its popularity, ratings, and fan base.
This seems to be continuing the trend of the SyFy channel being ashamed of its SciFi genre, literally to the point of changing their branding and spending money instead of wrestling shows. Yes, WRESTLING…on SciFi…WTH?
When they changed their name from “SciFi” to SyFy, they gave ridiculous reasons, including “The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that…”. Seriously? dysfunctional geeks? Great way to alienate your customers and viewers.
The name change itself was a stroke of idiocy as well. “When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it, It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.”
Really? Because it’s “how you’d text it”? Is that the way we market everything now? I guess Comedy Central should become the “OMG epic lulz netwrk” ?
You know what, geekophobe execs…if you are so against Science Fiction, maybe you should go work for the Hunting and Fishing channel instead of trying to run the SciFi channel into the ground just so you can feel more manly and “cool”. Cancelling all of your popular SciFi series and buying 3 franchises of wrestling and scheduling them in the place of the cancelled popular shows is just pure craziness!
Is it such a leap of logic to see that, yes, SciFi is a specific genre, but IT’S WHAT YOUR VIEWERS ARE COMING TO YOUR NETWORK FOR. Do you really think people tune to the SyFy channel to watch wrestling?? This would be like going to the PlayBoy channel to watch episodes of “This Old House” or some bass fishing show.
Are you really going to spend gobs of money on wrestling, dropping all your popular SciFi series, and making public statements insulting your viewers, and then wonder why your network is is failing?
Am I the only person who notices this? Oh well, in their final days I guess they can always rename their network to “SyFail”…because you know, that’s cooler, and how people would text it :\
September 5th, 2012 at 1:41 pm
Believe me man you’re far from alone, I was completely shocked with the name change, and I don’t even watch syfy(previously sci-fi) I was also INFURIATED when they killed the stargate franchise for good by canceling stargate universe. I sent them like multiple very angry letters in regards to the complete alienation of their actual watching crowd, also they changed it from sci-fi to syfy not because it was more cool but so they could air wrestling, and they justified the wrestling because it was fictional, though it’s the exact opposite of science.
I’m not sure what to say really, I want stargate to come back so intensely, I’m a cult follower of the show and syfy just decided to backstab the longest ever running science fiction show with dr who being the only longer running, but ofcourse they had a channel with intelligence to host from….