Last week, the news that “Caprica” was given a pink-slip set off a lot of debate among fans on our site and critics.
The series, still in its first season, has struggled in the ratings and wasn’t renewed for a second season.
HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall examines why he believes the series didn’t catch on.
Here’s a sample:
The roll-out schedule was odd. The “Caprica” pilot was released as a standalone DVD in April of 2009, only a few weeks after “BSG” ended, but the series proper didn’t launch on Syfy until January of 2010. Ten episodes aired in winter and early spring, and then the show wasn’t scheduled to come back until January 2011. Someone at Syfy realized that perhaps the waits were getting too extreme, even by cable standards, and in September the return was moved up to early October, which gave “Caprica” the benefit of a good timeslot (after “Stargate Universe”) but the detriment of little advance promotion.
Those long and/or irregular gaps in the schedule certainly didn’t help the show gain traction, but I don’t think it was a major factor.
Sepinwall also says that fan backlash from the finale of “BSG” may have played a role. You can read the full article HERE.
Lejon from Chandler says
It could also be that it was a deep brooding drama that dealt with dark, and unhappy themes, and miserable people.
Very little humor to off-set how very awful things were in people’s lives. It’s not an easy watch.
Of course, that’s what I liked about it, but I’m weird.
Mike H says
Long gaps between seasons is fine since things are either on a cliffhanger or wrapped up neatly. Long gaps in the middle of a season kill any momentum you generated in the first half of that season. You can’t expect the audience to be back at the same pace as the story when you finally decide to continue that series after so long a break. I always jokingly called it “Craprica” anyway. I watched it. It was ok, but not at the top of my DVR list where SGU, Chuck, & Smallville reside. Yes, I really enjoy Smallville. Suck it haters.
Tom says
I really hope they’ve learned their lesson about splitting up seasons, Caprica was still finding it’s feet and i suspect it would have been fantastic in it’s second season.
I’m going to miss it.
KG from DC says
No offense, but I never cared about ANYONE in the show. Thus, I never cared about the storyline or what they were trying to tell me. This failed because it forgot what made BSG so great… the enduring human spirit. This show was just a collection of broken people, doing horrible things to one another and that got old… quickly.
Mic7 says
Long periods in between seasons never help but I think the show was just too slow to begin with. I’ve said this before but the only part that really picked up for me was the part with Adama looking for Tamara in New Cap city…everything else was rather dull.
Varley Volpo says
AT least we know why the cylons were so twisted. Being created by these sick and unhappy people does not make a happy cybernetic being.
Resurrection causes pain. Pain creates anger. Anger destroyed the Human race.
Robin says
I agree that Caprica has stumbled quite a lot this season, and I think it’s largely a problem of the production team trying to serve too many masters. They started about a dozen different storylines in the first few episodes, and there was just no way to follow all of them satisfactorily, so they all got short shrift.
I didn’t mind that it was a dark show. BSG started with a shocking apocalypse; Caprica started with a society in a state of slow decay. That’s fine, and fairly compelling to watch. But the show never quite decided what it wanted to be — sci-fi drama, soap opera, political thriller, allegory — and so the audience couldn’t quite decide if it was something we liked.
TallGrrl says
Nothing was “wrong” with Caprica. Not really.
Except that now it’s not going to be allowed to continue to develop.
I only hope that whatever shows that will not be aired will show up in a DVD collection.
Times have definitely changed. “Buffy” and “The X-Files” didn’t hit their peaks until Season 3. We all know what happened to “The Dresden Files”…and let us not forget “Firefly”.
Heaven help any new show these days: if you’re not a “hit” *before* your pilot even airs, you’re probably done.
If your pilot airs and you’re not a “hit” by the *third* episode, you’re toast.
If you make it to Season 2, don’t think that you can’t be canned after 2 or 3 episodes.
Forget about finding your feet, forget about hitting your stride, forget about finding an audience.
And Geeks? If the story isn’t what *we* (and I mean “they”) want it to be, they bitch and moan and whine about it. As a result, no one watches and the show gets canned.
Then we get crap: Mindless, easy, dumbed-down rubbish.
And we bitch about that, too.
Heaven help us.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with Caprica having elements of soap opera and political elements in it. Why does a show have to be only one thing? A show can’t be sci-fi and have a bunch of different elements in it with sci-fi to tie it all together?
Really???
Damn.
Summer Brooks says
No, nothing was “wrong” with the show, in terms of story. We don’t know if the pacing issues came up because of programming decisions or not (meaning the production staff had no idea how much time they had to work with with the season splits, etc). Maybe if they knew, certain threads would have been tightened up, or moved to the background or dropped. But know, we’re never going to know how the story was going to unfold.
I think you can successfully mix genres without losing your core story or theme. As long as you stay true to your core themes, elements from the other genres should enhance rather than distract.
I think the year delay between the movie and the series did more to hurt than help, but it’s not the only injury. If you’re going to split seasons, do it properly, like Burn Notice. Ramp up the various threads, leave us on a cliffhanger, then come back less than 6 months later.
If that doesn’t work, then cut the seasons to 13 episodes, and set in stone that the season will run from January to April, or from June to September EACH YEAR.
We have decades of data that shows that moving a show around doesn’t improve ratings, and moving it around without starting to announce that move at least 6 weeks beforehand (and constantly running that announcement) will only result in complete viewer collapse.
And they wonder why so much of their demographic is moving to streaming, on-demand and video games. Duh.
Mark says
Dump the Ghosthunter crap and bring back Caprica!!!!!!!!!
kurt_eh says
Good news for Canadian fans. SPACE will show the final 5 starting tonight!
ejdalise says
I’m one of those guys . . . I watch 1, maybe 2 shows, and then move on if it does not grab me. Even if it does grab me, if they string a few duds together they get the boot.
I don’t go back, either, as once I am off I rather wait for it to end and get it on DVD or streaming.
The thing is I feel zero loyalty to any particular genre. The show has to entertain me, and if the characters and story don’t click, from experience it’s very unlikely they will change sufficiently for me to “grow into it”.
That said, if someone likes the show, more power to them. (Yes, there are some shows I think require diminished mental capacity to watch, but it’s no use insulting those viewers as it will likely go above their waist, and therefore a number of inches above the current location of their brains).
And yes, the current practice of a long hiatus between “seasons”, “half seasons”, “special seasons”, all contribute to turn me away.
But mostly, as likely with most viewers, at least a couple of things have to grab me. The premise, the characters, and the story. Two might carry the other for a while, but not for long. I suspect most viewers are the same way, although some do appear to follow directors, actors, or franchises irrespective of the actual offering.
To me that’s like supporting a political party regardless what they do because one is a “insert party affiliation here”. The problem with that is one validates both the good and the bad.
Michael Hickerson says
A lot of what Caprica didn’t do well was summed up in my season 1.0 DVD review….but to reiterate.
The show didn’t have a focus early on. Part of that was Sister Clarice was portrayed originally as Caprica’s version of Baltar. That didn’t work and the writers struggled to find how she should develop. They found that by the end of season 1.0 and were doing better with it in the second half.
Another thing is I feel like way too much time was spent looking for Tamra in the holoworld. It got old fast….partly because this plotline refused to really delve any new ground. It may be setting up something for later, but it felt too drawn out.
What did work were scenes between Zoe and her father with the two trying to outwit each other. Loved those.
Robin says
“…some do appear to follow directors, actors, or franchises irrespective of the actual offering.”
I’m one of those. (Well, sort of.) I definitely follow and will give a bit more leeway to shows that involve creative people I’ve enjoyed in the past. I won’t keep watching a show forever if I don’t enjoy it, but I’ll give it a few extra episodes to gain my continued viewing for the sake of actors and producers I respect. For the most part, it’s paid off.
I did almost give up on Caprica after the first couple of episodes, but I trusted the creative team behind it. And I’m glad that I did. They’ve introduced some really intriguing questions and storylines in the second half of the season. Now I’m just hoping that they got a chance to answer some of those questions in the remaining episodes and that we’ll eventually get to see them.