To Be Continued. I’ve just watched the final episode of Farscape (recorded from last night on BBC2) Oh my god! Not content with... [From The Orient]

I had exactly the same experience.

I read that the stated reason for the axing was how much the show cost to produce.  All I can say is that nothing good comes without cost and producing good shows is why you make television.

This reminds me of something Greg Costikan said yesterday.  He was talking about games design and the way publishers will, by and large, only fund sequels to successful games & spinoffs of already successful licenses and how this leads to a dearth of innovative games.

To quote from that piece:

I'm fairly friendly with Tom Doherty, who built Tor Books from a start-up to the single largest publisher of science fiction and fantasy in the world. He has an attitude I like: There's crap you just have to publish. There's stuff that allows you to stay in business. You publish it, and you sell the hell out of it, because you know it can, and will, sell. But fundamentally, that's not why you work in publishing; there are easier ways to make a living. You stay in publishing because you sometimes get to publish books you really like.

Tom Peters, the business guru, echoes the sentiment: No successful business exists to produce a profit. Yes, you need to produce a profit; in a capitalist system (and thank god we have one), profit is the condition of survival. But profit isn't the goal; no one other than the stockholders get excited at that. A corporation is one way or organizating a group of people to strive toward an objective--but that objective, the vision they share, is always, for successful businesses, something other than mere profit.

A game publisher exists to publish games. If its managers and employees are decent human beings, a game publisher exists to publish cool games. And if they aren't decent human beings, they should go out of business instantly; there are far better and easier ways to earn a decent return on investment.

In the same way a TV publisher exists, or should exist, to publish cool TV programmes.  But Sci-Fi and it's owners Universal Television Networks are just out to make a buck.  Profit is the be-all and end-all of their existance.  Cancelling Farscape (without a better show to replace it) proves that they don't give a rats ass about the shows themselves.

A movie?  I've heard it too often.

Goodbye Farscape, you will be sorely missed.