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Viewers tuning out of Battlestar Galactica – Metro US

Viewers tuning out of Battlestar Galactica


“No TV series was much improved by getting renewed for a fourth or fifth season.”

OH FRAK: Battlestar Galactica, one of the biggest cable TV success stories, has been suffering in ratings since its third season debut last month, according to a TV Week story.

A critical fave, the show brought unprecedented numbers to the Sci-Fi Channel in the United States. The first season averaged 2 million viewers an episode in the United States, while the second did even better, with 2.3 million, despite being split between the summer of 2005 and spring 2006.

This season, despite the hype and much fanboy anticipation, has seen viewership drop 20 per cent, recovering slightly after the debut episode drew 29 per cent fewer pairs of eyes. TV Week blames it on hubris — Sci- Fi scheduled the third season to debut in the middle of the fall network season, when all the smoke and light traditionally centres on the big four networks and their new offerings, as well as highprofile returning series.

TV critics started complaining late last spring that there were simply too many good shows on network TV this fall, and it follows that they’d think the culprit for Galactica’s apparent fall from grace was all that great new TV. TV Week points out, helpfully, that at least two of the fall’s hit network shows, Heroes and Jericho, have sci-fi themes that might be drawing away from Galactica’s target audience.

Which might be true, but there’s another likely explanation, and that’s the fact that Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica is an enormous bummer.

While the first two seasons were classic space opera stuff, roughed up and dressed down, the third season has been set on a grim, dusty planet, where most of humanity is living in a huge refugee camp, on a planet occupied by their Cylon enemies.

Much has been made of the provocative parallels between the world of Galactica and current events, but the the ongoing war against terrorism bums out almost everybody, whether they support it or not. As long as Galactica was cruising through space, it was possible to contemplate those parallels with some comfortable distance, but now that the show has suddenly moved to a place that looks like Iraq, complete with suicide bombers, it might have crossed some threshold of mental exhaustion, even for its most devoted fans.

I’m the kind of guy who thinks most bands should break up after their third album, and no TV series was much improved by getting renewed for a fourth or fifth season. As much as I love Galactica, the thought that it might get cancelled, or at least confront a finite lifespan, doesn’t agitate me much. Perhaps the falling numbers will force the writers to goose the show’s morose mood up a bit, or just accept the imminent end and try and get as much done in the remaining time they have on the small screen. Great as it might be, the world will not be a poorer place for the loss of a single frakking TV show.

DOOGIE HOWSER IS GAY! DID YOU HEAR? DOOGIE HOWSER IS GAY! Oh my God, I so don’t care.

rick.mcginnis@metronews.ca