If the Cylons looked like her, they couldn't be all bad, right?

Unfortunately, writing about science fiction on a blog, automatically relegates my post to never being read. Sadly, if I was a television network, chances are that would mean no one would watch my show. Science fiction rarely gets the respect it deserves.

Today, it was announced that Caprica is being canceled by the Syfy Channel. For those of you who don't know, Caprica was a somewhat controversial prequel to the very popular Syfy Channel show Battlestar Galactica. Where BSG was about the Cylon (android army) invasion and final hunt to exterminate the human race, Caprica was a show that was going to explain how it all came to happen in the first place.

While BSG was popular in science fiction circles, even at is height of power, it never gained the kind of audience a show like Mad Men or Gossip Girl might get. Mainstream shows always get a huge audience, and for erroneous reasons are often considered to be more dramatic and are more likely to be taken seriously. For some bizarre reason, science fiction is always considered for geeks or children.

But even on a network like SyFy, Caprica never got the following the executives wanted. Part of the problem was that it never looked like a science fiction show, as the sets looked very 21st century, and the events of the show were mired in strong religious battles that seemed more like they belonged in the 14th century than in the futuristic society of Caprica. It was probably the religious battles of the show that caused most people to avoid watching it without realizing that the religiosity of the show is probably what gave it the power that it needed. You see, the Cyclon race was designed on a basic religious foundation that was constantly in the meta writing of the actions. They were doing what they were doing for a "purpose" and it took the conclusion of the entire series to finally realize what the purpose was.

Sadly, this never translated to the masses, so people tuning into the show expected laser battles and got religious wars between those who believed in gods and those who believed in one true god. It's hard enough to get people to go to church on Sunday; it's not hard to imagine how easy it would be to cause someone to turn the channel once he or she thought the religious lessons were being taught on a pleasure show.

So, SyFy is going to start a new series for BSG called Blood and Chrome, which will take place during the first Cylon War. In other words, it will hae lots of laser battles and explosions. The intelligent show of Caprica is being replaced with something people might actually watch.

This has always been the case with science fiction on television. It rarely gets the respect it deserves, and it's treated as one step up above a cartoon. It is very rare for a science fiction show to make a full run on a television network, so that quite often a viewer is left wondering why he or she should invest time in a new science fiction series when it's understood that it's not going to last more than two seasons anyway.

This is what happened to the original Star Trek. It was canceled almost as soon as it started. Then it got another run after a viewer campaign. And then it was canceled again. The list of shows that followed Star Trek are too numerous to even try to count, but that same formula has been a given constantly.

Picard will stick you if you don't watch more Sci Fi

Usually when a science fiction show gets a full run, it's mainly because the show was on a network that wasn't competing with the big networks and had its own metrics to decide fate. This is how the second series of Star Trek shows actually got through the gauntlet. Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were rare in that they actually completed their full series runs. Then came Star Trek: Voyager, which started to see a lot of resistance from their own network, and then Star Trek: Enterprise came along and went the way of the original series; it was canceled years before the planned completion.

Sadly, we don't get a lot of good science fiction shows to watch on television. Instead, we get hack work that wants to take advantage of shows that were successful before them. LOST was a great show, and a rarity in that it combined science fiction into an actual dramatic formula so that it sort of tricked people into watching it, even though it was on the taboo side of science fiction. Well, sure enough, we had shows attempt to be exactly what LOST is, like FastForward and The Event, and all they are doing is proving to people that science fiction shouldn't be taken seriously because these shows were badly orchestrated and quite often badly written.

The castaways spend 6 years looking for Gilligan 

There's not a lot of good science fiction left these days, and the few ones that are around are always on the cutting edge of being put on the cutting board. What was ground-breaking about a show like BSG is something those who never watched it will never know: It had some of the greatest drama and best writing television has ever produced. The same can be said for LOST as well. That both shows were on during the same time made for such a great period of time in television history. That they both ended close to each other means we lost two very good shows when it comes to the best elements of what makes television great.

Unfortunately, because of the stigma of science fiction, no one will ever give the credit due to these bround-breaking shows. People herald shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad for their dramatic elements, but I'd gladly put some of the writing of LOST and BSG up against anyone of those shows. Unfortunately, no one will ever take them seriously to consider them in the first place. The Emmys were definitely an example of that.

So, another great science fiction show gets lost so that we can replace it with another science fiction show that has gun battles. Unfortunately, no one even realizes what they are sacrificing to get that instead. Caprica had the chance of bringing sci fi into a much more serious, ground-breaking universe. Apparently, we're just not ready for it yet.