Science fiction folks can be a desperate bunch. We are maligned, taken advantage of and discarded when we aren’t needed but coveted when it fits some marketing strategy. Many years ago, I remember being in the audience at Comicon where Todd McFarlane was promoting the movie Spawn. Like most trailers, there were lots of cool imagery, but the film still hadn’t been rated. One supposedly brave soul stood up, geek superiority dripping from every word he said, asking the creator of the comic if Spawn would stay true to its R rated heritage like the HBO animated series.

See, there was a highly regarded animated series that ran on HBO which was widely regarded by fans because it was in the style of anime animation and the storyline was very R rated. Todd McFarlane proudly stood up and said the movie would be faithful to the comic series and would not have a little kid or silly dog.

A few months later the movie came out, sporting a PG-13 rating and had a secondary character of a little boy who had a cute dog.

Needless to say the movie didn’t do well and fans that were in the audience, like me, who heard Todd McFarlane say what he did, then to see those elements in the film, were a bit disappointed to say the least.

I mention this because there had been grumblings about a science fiction show called Virtuality which wasn’t being picked up as a series by Fox. It was created by the same team which created Battlestar: Galactica and the web assumption was Fox was burying a possible masterpiece.

Well I was able to see the series soon after it aired as a 2 hour movie on Fox and I have to agree with a lot of the critics who reviewed the film. I can se where there might be potential but it makes perfect sense why Fox passed on the show.

People, and by people I mean fans, can forget there are big ponds and little ponds, and big fish can be kings in small ponds but minnows in big ponds. Take Galactica for example. There was talk early on when the show was doing bang up ratings for the SciFi channel, which NBC was thinking of moving the show in repeats to the network. They had done the same strategy to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which was a hit on a cable station and it did pretty well on NBC. Queer Eye, in the deadly Saturday evening slot, got around six million people to watch, which is good. When Galactica was put in that slot for three weeks, the show barely got two million viewers.

While the ratings were great on SciFi, which was averaging one million viewers for most shows which made Galactica a monster hit, the two million number didn’t help when most poorly rated NBC shows were averaging six or seven million viewers. Galactica went on to be a critical darling but ratings got around five million viewers, still not a good performer in the big network pond.

Virtuality was an ambitious show with an intriguing but ultimately dated idea. It was about a 12 person crew who was preparing to make a decision to leave the solar system to try and find an inhabited planet. After the decision was made, something went wrong and their VR unit began to display problems. The unique aspect to the show, which I believe would ultimately date the show, was the novel idea of this trip being recorded as a reality show. You had cameras all over the ship, confessional rooms and open and secret couplings. It all played out like an episode of Big Brother.

The show went wrong for me because it wanted to have it both ways. It wanted the drama and the reality show angle, both meshing in a bad way. The reality show angle gave the show the tweak it needed to be above the pack, but it wasn’t enough to make the show interesting for me. The drama part did some very boring ‘seen it before’ clichés of science fiction writer do which don’t need to be done. The ship just couldn’t go to the planet for exploration. The creators had to put in the element that Earth was dying so if the ship didn’t make the trip to the other planet, life on Earth would be extinct in a century. It has been done before and was so what to me.

With twelve crew members, the creators did something I have complained about; having a PC cast but the focus being on white characters. There was a black woman, an Asian man, someone in a wheelchair and two gay men. Everyone else was white and divided between men and women. Oh, the wheelchair person was a white male. In this pilot/TV movie we learned more about the captain, his secret girlfriend, the psychologist/producer (the secret girlfriend of the captain being his wife) the hotheaded female and the female computer expert. I’m still confused about that one because the secret girlfriend and the female computer expert (at least I think she was the computer expert) had a similar look and I got confused on which was which. The point is while should have had a large diverse cast you didn’t and when there was a chance to focus on stories it went to the white people.

Still, I have to give the creators credit not going to some stereotypes. They had the Asian man and black woman as lovers and the Asian man wasn’t the computer or tech wizard. The gay couple as cooks was pushing it, but they didn’t come out right away and say they were gay so a little plus there.

I didn’t like the VR angle because it didn’t make logical sense, when looked at in the big picture. The angle being pushed was the VR breakdown was done to either to boost ratings for the reality show or someone on the ship wanted revenge on the crew. The plot heavily implicated someone on the crew but the show was very much influenced by 2001 that the ship’s computer couldn’t be ruled out. The ratings boost angle came about because of the sponsors aspect brought up by the type of shirts they had to wear certain days for logo placements or the psychologist/producer talking a lot about how the network and the sponsors needed more drama and higher ratings. It was all too cliché about big evil corporations in the future for me.

All in all, it was a show that might have done well on the SciFi channel but on Fox it didn’t stand a chance. It wasn’t so much it was too intelligent for Middle America (which I saw some reviews claim) but the show was boring. Much like the complaints made by the network and sponsors in the show the pilot didn’t do a lot and you didn’t learn a lot about the crew, at least anything that would make them more that bowling pins stacked up to be knocked down.