Only You Can Stop the Expanse from Becoming the Next Canceled Sci-Fi Classic
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I'm happy that the show has survived the weakest part of the book series - Detective Miller - and gotten past the admitted cribbing from Firefly without looking derivative. The show has truly gotten stronger from every episode.
One change I would make is to subtitle the Belter dialogue. It's such a fun part of the books which in translation to an audio track ends up getting lost as a word-mash.
HOWEVER! As far as whether the show will survive: The show either needs more cash, or to allocate that cash in a more narrow, strategic, and modest way. It suffers the problem endemic to all under-budgeted TV sci-fi: the low budget always visibly bleeds in at the edges. "Yeah, that actor's really not the best fit for that part, and we could have made the plot easier to grasp with an additional scene, but with the money we save, we can afford some CGI for the rail gun!" Maybe it's just me, but I would rather watch an excellently executed sci-fi drama on an obviously artificial Dogville-like set than watch an "OK" space opera that has a nominally realistic looking space-ship brig which I won't remember anyway.
(Not to diss The Expanse's actors! - the majority are quite good, subtle, and growing on me with each episode.)
Action and special effects together are the number one self-defeating conceit of all sci-fi, especially television sci-fi. In order to please the action-craving audience (I guess?), they starve the heart and soul of the show: focusing on characters. What I love about Star Trek: TNG, one of my favorite shows of all time, is that in the Riker's Beard Era, it focused on the truth and depth of the characters through and through. That focus allows the audience to overlook the latent camp of the setting, and forgive the sometimes poor execution. As a result, TNG is still watchable today.
Special effects age. Characters are immortal.
At least here in Sweden it says "A Netflix Original Serier" at the start of each episode, so I'd assume Netflix is at least partially funding it already. In fact is was only very recently that I discovered that it wasn't a Netflix exclusive show in the US.
I didn't love the books because too many of the sentences are weak, obvious, or clichés: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/04/28/briefly-noted-leviathan-w... , but I gave the show a shot and hoped for something better than what it is, or what the first few episodes showed. Still, I think the cash shortfall problem is probably real and accounts for some of the show's challenges.
I'm reminded of SyFy's making of The Magicians, which is a lovely book (https://jakeseliger.com/2009/08/28/the-magicians-lev-grossma...) and a TV show that I really wish HBO had made.
The show is made for middle/upperclass teenage white girls, is the book for a different audience?
I started reading the books and it seems like a lot of subtleties got thrown out - there's an awful lot of "Drama" injected into the series by having the characters make stupid decisions/hiding irrelevant information just so that it can be 'discovered' or reversed later,
I also get the feeling that they stopped bothering to remember the setting was mostly supposed to be "Hard" Scifi, outside of specific references to the books, but that's a pretty specific complaint.
It stings to see characters go underdeveloped for any reason, whether it's poor writing or simply mismanaged priorities like you mentioned.
So lots of people internationally who would watch it on Netflix will be pirating it.
However, I can imagine that made negotiations for them much easier (no-one who still uses a TV would watch their show on $DATE at $TIME when there's a VoD around). On the other hand, it is also nice to be able to schedule one's own progress in a show without having to go "what happened last week again?" each time. I'd argue it's even worth waiting for the Netflix "launch".
Unfortunately that's what I have to resort to at the moment. I'm in Australia, and The Expanse is a marvellous series. I watched the first episode of the first series on Netflix when I couldn't find anything else to watch - I then binge-watched the entire first series at that point.
Now that the second series is out, I am back to good ol' pirating each episode as they air in the United States, as there is no other way to obtain it. And because of this, Netflix will unfortunately miss out on me binge watching the second series on their platform and won't get the viewership / statistics for it because I would've already seen it.
Why can they not do what they're doing for The Last Kingdom, another show I discovered on Netflix and subsequently love, and air the episodes in a weekly fashion as soon as they air in the producers domestic market?
Oh well, their loss. And likely ours when the series will inevitably get cancelled due to "lack of viewership" :-(
The article even mentions that studios give no indication for what they're looking at to see if the show is successful, ie we don't even know if buying it on iTunes or Amazon or Google will make a difference
And then tell them to evangelize The Expanse, too
That is why people are talking about paying for it directly as an alternative -- because what needs to change is the funding model.
This is what ruined halt and catch fire for me, way too much sex and personal dram forced in. Does it ever help them get the demographic they're chasing? If people wanted light erotic I can imagine some better backdrops than the creation of the 486.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/tv/show/The_Expanse?id=qSBdK4f...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dulcinea/dp/B018BZ3SCM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=...
That's how Amazon works; when you buy a season any individual episodes are refunded.
Maybe it got better in Season 2, I dunno; I wasn't interested enough to find out. And I haven't read the books, so I can't say if the problems stemmed from the adaptation or from the source material. But I'm the kind of person who should be in the core audience for a show like this, so it doesn't surprise me to hear it's having ratings problems.
That said, there's a difficult to describe lack of something in the show that keeps it from being great, and it bothers me that I can't put my finger on it. I loved Firefly and BSG and have watched most episodes at least twice (possibly even ten times in the case of Firefly), and yet I can't see myself rewatching The Expanse.
And then, S2 started off bad, and midway through, completely jumped the shark. Without going into spoilers, they contrive a really, really awful bit of "romance", and place it squat in the middle of everything. Really too bad.
So maybe more would watch this show if they could?
But hey. No worries. More Sharknado is on the way!