Once upon a time, there was a show called Battlestar Galactica.  It was pure genius, and it got lots and lots of great critical reviews.  But all good things must come to an end, and the show ended.  Boo.  But then, it was resurrected in a prequel called Caprica, a thought provoking and fascinating show on the Science Fiction channel.  (Where, you know, it makes sense to show science fiction, instead of just wrestling.)  And all was good in the world.

So, Caprica’s been canceled.  Yes, I am bummed about it.  I was really enjoying that show,and I really think that Skiffy is cutting the strings a little too early, myself.  But at the same time, I’m not surprised.  While I love Caprica, it’s got its issues.  Some of them are its fault, some of them are not.  So here, for your (or at least my) amusement, eight problems with Caprica.

1.  Caprica is a prequel.

Let’s start there, because I think this is tricky territory.  Do you need to have watched Battlestar Galactica to get what was going on in Caprica?  No.  They did a really good job with that aspect of it.  And for all my joking that Lacy Rand should run away to Sagittaron and be Tom Zarek’s mother and teach her son to blow stuff up, they were doing a good job at not bringing in any other callbacks to other BSG characters.  It’s not that I don’t love the characters, mind you, but it’s that George Lucas thing.  You know, the one where the twelve most important people in the galaxy all happen to be related somehow?  So, no, I don’t think viewing of BSG was compulsory.

However, when you say “prequel”, people will automatically assume- right or wrong- that they needed to have seen the original.  Which means that, for the most part, you are relying on your BSG audience and your BSG audience only.  You’re going to bring in some new viewers, but you’re going to lose some, too, so I suspect that your net gain isn’t going to be all that high.   I believe the BSG finale brought in 2.4 million viewers- the highest since the season 2.5 premiere.  But compared to what other shows bring in (25 million viewers), you can’t really afford to lose a lot — I assume — from 2.4 million in order to stay profitable.  There’s not a huge margin here.  Which leads us to point 2:

2. The BSG finale was both divisive and decisive.

No matter where you fall on the scale of “Daybreak SUCKED” or “Daybreak ROCKED”, lots of fans had strong opinions.  There were a lot of fans very angry about the finale, and they left the franchise for good.  There were a lot of fans who loved the finale, and got that sense of closure.

On the sucked side, you had a lot of people who hated the “God did it” theme and were very disappointed.  They lost all interest in anything related, because, well, God did it. You know the ending, and you know that RDM isn’t above pulling direct intervention of the divine out when he can’t write himself out of a corner.  And for some people, it really did poison everything about the series.  And then, in the rocked side, you have people who just feel like the story got told.  It’s done.  Caprica is a different story.  I have to say, while I wasn’t a complete fan of the finale, I know that feeling.  After book 7 of Harry Potter, I got that feeling as well.  Case in point?  I still haven’t read Tales of the Beedle Bard yet.  And I loved book seven.  (And while I found the epilogue predictable, yes, I actually liked it.  I LIKE Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione.)

So, yeah.  You had a fanbase of BSG watchers, yes, but you lost a lot of them to anger or a sense of closure.  Caprica had to be REALLY special to woo some of them back.

3.  Caprica and BSG were entirely different beasts.

Both Caprica and Battlestar Galactica are science fiction, yes.  However, they are different genres of science fiction.  BSG is, first and foremost, apocalyptic science fiction.  Yes, it has other elements, like military sci-fi and space opera, but it is primarily apocalyptic.  Caprica is primarily space opera.

People talk about how “there weren’t enough things going boom for the fanboys.”  I think that’s a really simplistic way of saying that a lot of people liked BSG because it was a fighting-for-survival genre.  Let’s face it, there’s something really compelling about what happens at/after the end of the world.  And yes, space battles are cool.

But Caprica isn’t like that.  It’s set before the end of the world, and as a result, the tenor of the story changes.  The risks aren’t as high.  The urgency isn’t there.  The life-and-death decisions?  Not such a big part of the story.  Caprica’s story is entirely different, and yes, you are going to get a different viewing demographic from that.

4.  Caprica has too many unlikeable characters.

Let’s face it- a lot of the people on Caprica are scum.  Let’s start with Daniel Graystone.  He’s ruthless, he lies, he cheats, he steals, he steals ideas from other people (including Thomas Vergis and his own daughter), he’s an egomaniac, he deflects his wife’s accusations about his actions by making her feel guilty about their daughter’s death… Daniel is a pretty lousy human being.  And he doesn’t have much to offset that besides his charisma.  Sister Clarice is a terrorist who sends her high school students on suicide bombing missions.  Amanda Graystone is remote and guilt stricken and hard to get a handle on, especially in early episodes.  Zoe is a snot.  Joseph Adama is just boring.  (Okay, so that last one is really an opinion, but still.)  Characters need flaws, yes.  But we need to have a reason to root for someone, or it just doesn’t hook an audience.

The biggest problem, I think, is Daniel Graystone.  For all intents and purposes, he’s the lead of Caprica.  Much of the story is hanging on his shoulders.  He’s the big name actor, he’s the first one in the credits, he gets most of the screen time… he’s the Adama of Caprica.  And he’s despicable.  You can make a despicable character and it can work- take a look at Topher Brink, for example, or even Gaius Baltar.  But Topher and Gaius weren’t the center of their shows.  They were main characters, but they stood just a little off to the left of someone that was much, much easier to like.  (Also, Topher and Gaius both had much more charisma than Daniel.)

So, yeah.  There were likable characters on Caprica, and some of the characters even become more likable as the series goes on.  But they aren’t in the beginning.  Which leads to the next point:

5.  Caprica isn’t the same as BSG in a very fundamental way- it lacks those shades of gray.

Richard Hatch made a point about BSG at DragonCon this year, that it was the story of good people who had lost their way.  And that, I think, sums up a lot of the appeal and genius about BSG.  The people in BSG weren’t necessarily evil, and a lot of them didn’t do terrible things because they gloried in the pain of others. They did some terrible things because they truly thought it was the best course of action. That was, I thought, what made characters like Laura Roslin and Saul Tigh and Kara Thrace and Felix Gaeta so amazingly compelling. They weren’t perfect, but they were good people, and they did things like kidnap babies and declare martial law and torture Cylons and rebel against their commanding officer because they honestly thought it was best. It wasn’t, but you could understand why they made those terrible decisions.

And to one-up that, a lot of the conflicts in the best BSG writing were the ones where you could see both sides of the issue. When the population is less than 50K, that DOES put a change on the issue of abortion. Laura Roslin never was legitimately elected President. Shutting that hatch door did mean that 80 servicemen lost their lives, but hundreds more survived. There IS a difference between the imperative of protection, which Adama accepted, and the imperative of war, which Cain took on.

Caprica doesn’t do that on a grand scale.  The characters aren’t trying to choose what’s best between two lousy options- they’re doing horrible things because they’re fairly horrible people.  We’re starting to see some redemption now, but it’s too little, too late.

6.  Caprica started slow.

Yes, good story telling takes a long time to build.  But you need that dramatic hook at the beginning to get your audience interested.  You need the Cylons to nuke all of humanity.  You need the half giant to show up and dramatically announce that the main protagonist is a wizard.  You need the plane to crash on the island and for the smoke monster to rustle the trees.  You need to establish the stakes and set the tone at the beginning.  Otherwise, people stop reading because they can’t make it through 60 pages of hobbit party, or you get canceled because they don’t know why they should be rooting for the people planning on robbing the train.

Caprica didn’t really have a great hook at the beginning.  Well, it did in the pilot, but the first two or three episodes didn’t really carry that through.  And a good TV show needs to do that, and Caprica didn’t.  These days, you really can’t start slow.

7.  Lack of cohesion between the story lines.

You have Daniel making the Cylons.  You have Tamara and Zoe kicking butt in New Cap City.  You have Clarice and her STO movement.  You have the Adama brothers and the Ha’la’tha.  And it’s taking until the last few episodes we’ve seen how they fit together.  I think this is a smaller point- every show has its difficulties (can we say midseason wasteland, as Al terms it?).  But it still is frustrating for viewers.

Aside from that, one of the big appeals of BSG was the relationships.  The people on BSG cared about each other.  BSG was at its best when they were all breaking each others’ hearts.  Caprica just doesn’t have those connections to care about.

8.  Scheduling

Up until now, I’ve made it sound like Caprica being canceled is all Caprica’s fault.  But it’s not.  Skiffy (I still refuse to call it SyFy) has a lot to own up to, too.  Let’s look at the journey, as told in the Caprica Times:

” * It began with the end of Battlestar Galactica. The last episode had 2.4 million viewers and aired 3/13 and 3/20 of 2009.
* The pilot to Caprica was experimentally released on DVD one month later, 4/21/09.
* The excitement of the remainder of BSG fans for this new show was slowly drained away as we waited 9 months more for it to debut on television 1/22/10.
* Once it did air we were treated to a show that thoughtfully moved along at a solumn pace. Just as it began to pick up speed it screeched to a halt after only 9 episodes on 3/26/10.
* By that time there were roughly 1.1 million fans – not  a great number, but not a terrible one either. To our strong disappointment we were told that the remaining episodes would air in January of 2011. This would be a 10 month wait.
* It was then passed down that Caprica would be moving from Friday to Tuesday nights to make room for WWF Smackdown. Viewers who had work in the morning now had no option but to DVR Caprica.
* On 9/9/10 it was announced with less than a months notice that Caprica was to return on 10/5/10. Many fans still don’t know that it even returned as there was a rush in promoting it.
* And here we are today, 10/27/10, with only 4 episodes shown and Syfy announcing Caprica’s cancellation and removing the remaining episodes from television despite many favorable reviews.”

Yeah.  Look, if you want to market a show, you don’t keep doing these nearly year long hiatuses.  Even geeks like me forget what happened in that time frame, and it’s hard to sustain interest.  I know there was some reworking going on during that time, but still.

This is not the first show that Skiffy has mishandled.  Talk to any fan about Battlestar itself, or talk to people about the Dresden Files, another quality show that got butchered by Skiffy’s seemingly random scheduling.  If Skiffy actually wants to keep a show on the air, they need to make the simple effort of allowing it to run and keeping it at the same time.

So, as much as I love the show, I suspect that its death was predetermined.  And to be honest, I won’t be holding my breath for the next spinoff, Blood and Chrome.  Aside from the fact it’s Adama based (Caprica’s problem was NOT too little Willie, I’m pretty sure on that!), I’m guessing it won’t last very long.