Hacker Cinema
Sanctuary
2008 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Damian Kindler
ActionAdventureScience FictionFantasy
The adventures of the beautiful, enigmatic and always surprising Dr. Helen Magnus, a brilliant scientist who holds the secrets of a clandestine population called Abnormals—a group of strange and sometimes terrifying beings that hide among humans. Magnus seeks to protect this threatened phenomena as well as unlock the mysteries behind their existence.
1 positive3 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
I think it's because it's easy. Dystopia bring automatic conflict which is easy/lazy to dramatize.
Still all isn't bad, it isn't Star Trek, but there are non-dystopic popular fictions:
- Her
- Stargate SG-1 and spinouts
- Fringe
- Warehouse 13
- Eureka
- Sanctuary
- The new crop of super hero shows and movies, Arrow, SHIELD, The Flash
- Heroes
- The short lived new V series
- Dr. Who
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Inception
- Gravity
and more....
in Literature there's a huge bounty of great non-dystopic stuff too.
- The Golden Oecumene
- The Culture series
- The Night's Dawn Trilogy
- The Gap series
You just have to know where to look.
$1million is a low/mid budget TV series I think Amanda Tapping's Sanctuary show had that sort of budget and they had tax breaks on top of that
Mad men is several million per episode. A cheapish movie is 30-40 Million.
Once technology catches up to the Avatar level in the home, coupled with ever increasing bandwidth downloading, the same people which pirate their movies now will go back to the same thing.
I think movies do to an extent go the other way, with higher production costs leading to the epic blockbuster perception the public gets which drive them to the cinemas. As long as the big budget is spent wisely on a great concept.
Innovations such as the Red camera technology and mostly green screen filming continue to drive down TV costs for those using this tech. For example I'd imagine Sanctuary is a better investment for SYFY at the moment over Stargate Universe even with low ratings just because it's production costs would be so much lower for similar effect.
I look at shows like Firefly -- any decent scifi really -- the masses aren't interested, people like me will only do on-demand (even if it is downloaded etc), and will buy merchandising. This can't work in most current network models. But in something like we are discussing, there is room for it be profitable -- maybe not insanely so -- but profitable nonetheless. This is why I think "good content" will flourish in such situations. People will still watch jersey shore, but people like me can get good content too.
An interesting thing has been going on lately anyway -- there are a lot more 12 episode seasons. And a lot more summer seasons. Content producers are starting to experiment. The syfy show Sanctuary started out as with a "pay for webisodes" model. Things are starting to move in interesting ways already.