I was a die-hard history channel guy during shows around romans, Black Death, vikings, ect ect. The 'new version', about fake aliens and 'what about' crap, is horrendous.
They made the same mistake as EVERY pay TV channel has. EVERY SINGLE ONE ends up drifting away from it's original programming, except maybe The Food Network (and even then, they show too many of these game show style things, instead of just cooking programs). I don't know how old anyone else around here is, but I'm 47. I'm old enough to remember watching TV without cable, and when we first got, being stunned to go from getting five TV channels (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, plus two indie channels) to getting something like 20 channels! Imagine that: a world with "only" 20 TV channels (actually, there were more than that, but as I recall no one cable service carried all of them, at least not in our area). AndI remember what MTV, USA A&E, Nickelodeon, the Chrisitan Broadcasting Network were all like circa 1982. And every last one of those channels that still exists has changed drastically over the decades. Even ESPN, while still remaining sports oriented, as tweaked and changed exactly WHICH sports they show, over the years. I can remember falling asleep on the couch while trying to stay up to watch Night Flight or some of those MTV concerts, and watching reruns of Burns And Allen or The Jack Benny Program on CBN (which is now the FreeForm channel, Wikipedia says they've changed their name SIX times), and racing home from school to watch The Tomorrow People, You Can't Do That On Television and Flipper on Nickelodeon. None of that happens anymore.
You can't copyright Sci fi it's short for science fiction. A popular shows run is five seasons or less on syfy. Lost girl, haven, eureka, defiance, farscape. It's the reason I quit watching years ago. Why get invested in a show with a limited shelf life from the word go. If your lucky there will be a half ass "final episode" e.g. eureka. However more than likely there never is a season 3, 4, 5, or 6 it just ends where it does.
Kinda. People seem to conveniently forget, and the video does this, that Scifi used to have a lot of trashy content back in the day. Old trashy movies, and original trashy content. I mostly watched scifi back in the day and grew up on it. But that's the problem with nostalgia, people dig up their past and try to dust it off, but also dust off a lot of the blemishes as well, showing a cleaned up version that wasn't necessarily like what was in the past.
Also, it seems the video and people forgot the Scifi channels produced a ton of mediocre and shitty movies as well. Granted, I don't expect people to remember Alien Apoclypse or their other Asylum level movies, but still. Not to mention the video dumps on that Ghost show, but doesn't bring up Sightings series, which wasn't too dissimilar.
@@ruekurei88 They had trashy content along with good content, its not this buzzword of "nostalgia" it genuinely was better back then, surprisingly enough is is ACTUALLY possible for something to be less good now then in the past, strange, I know.
@@berlineczka It wouldn't surprise me if that was intentional. I recall hearing stories at the time about how the new CEO opening said that she doesn't like SciFi. Which is also when the started canceling flagship shows like Stargate and replacing it with Pro-wrestling and Reality shows.
SYFY is too stupid to realize that when you cancel a show on a cliffhanger (like Stargate Universe or Dark Matter), you lose future revenue from streaming. Word gets out that a show ends unsatisfyingly and people don't watch, no matter how good. At least wrap the story up with a movie, like Firefly or Sense8.
They marketed the last season of Magicians so poorly I didn't even know the show came back until it was already done with the season and cancelled. Now I debate if it's even worth finishing the show.
@@darkmagician_ I know. What basically happened was that the makers of Dark Matter took most of the financial risk of creating the show because Syfy never believed in it in the first place. When Dark Matter became big then the suits at Syfy got pissed because they realized that they would never make any money off streaming and syndication rights. Instead of accepting the fact that they made the wrong decision about not wholeheartedly supporting Dark Matter and just accepting the fact that they would make less money (but still come out profitably), they flipped over the table and told Dark Matter to get lost and made it impossible for the creators of Dark Matter to get back on another channel. It was spiteful and petty; they put a lot of people in Toronto; where most of the show was filmed out of work! Assholes!
“SyFy” is dying because they CONSTANTLY make BAD DECISIONS. Frankly, I’m glad. I’m still annoyed at how they treated the Stargate franchise. EDIT: Oh and Farscape. So many bad decisions.
My favorite was the same day/week they had the PR announcement about record ratings for farscape and sg1 they then announced farscape was getting cancelled. its was like "wtf?!?" I think the same thing happened later with stargate "oh look at this great accomplishment... now we're going to cancel it"...
@DarkVoid SGU actually picked up the pace at the end of the first season, and the second season was pretty good, but by then they had already lost most of the fans of the franchise because of the terrible first half of season 1.
I really liked/still like "Eureka" and "Warehouse 13". After Netflix stopped showing those two programs I went into mourning. Eventually I bought "Warehouse 13" on DVD and about two months ago I discovered Roku was showing both programs. I just watched the last two episodes of "Eureka" this morning. I watched Haven on Netflix several years ago from start to finish and during the lock down started watching it again. I miss the days of good sci-fi on T.V.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve also noticed that Canada puts out some really good sci-fi stuff that they was showing on syfy, and then it went away. From dark mater to Continuum, lost girl, being human, alphas, and Dominion are a bunch of others
SciFi Channel died when they changed their name to SYFY. That's when they officially gave up on airing actual sci fi or just trying to make anything good in general.
@@darrengordon-hill Sci Fi is a thing, their problem was that Sci Fi can't be trademarked because it's a think. Syfy on the other hand isn't a thing and can be trademarked.
"Syfy started airing pro-wrestling..." Haha, don't even try buddy, it's like saying the History channel started airing pawn-shop shows. Right...? Right...???
They've been screwing over their actual sci-fi shows for too long. All the way back to BSG, Stargate, Farscape, etc. They refused to agree to longer term contracts and would only renew shows at the very last minute as a shitty negotiation tactic to pressure showrunners and actors to take budget cuts or risk getting canceled. Most of the time, the writers would have no idea if the current season would be the last until very late into the season and couldn't plan for the long term without taking a huge gamble since there was always a chance they'd get cancelled and have to quickly wrap things up. The one time someone did take a gamble, SG-1's season 10, where they actually planned for a season 11, they got screwed over and canceled. Sy-Fy deserves to die for their years of shitty behavior.
And how they screwed over Eureka. They were suppose to have a final short season to wrap everything up. But at the last minute Sci-Fi pulled the plug on them and gave them 1 extra episode to wrap everything up. I do love though how that entire episode they were giving Sci-Fi the finger.
SG1 always seemed odd they had multiple seasons that seemed planed as the end point only to keep going on after and the final season ended with no conclusion. I guess they got a couple movies latter on to wrap things up but its always seemed stupid that the only season not to end with a real finale was the last one
Should have shown how the previous "Syfy" logo looked and explained why it changed. For anybody interested, it used to be called The Sci-fi Channel and adopted a cool silhouette of Saturn as it's logo. It eventually got named just Sci-fi - pretty much the channel I loved and miss. It's owned by Universal and in the late 00's they started seeing the trend of channels going "off topic" (eg. MTV was no longer about music, History Channel no longer about history etc.). Regardless, those channels were making more money that ever with their new content so they sought to do the same with Sci-fi. They changed its name to be less on the nose about the genre it represents allowing it to show more action, procedural, comedy, drama and the likes. The name Syfy is more ambiguous and abstract, they got rid of the Saturn logo and started offloading content from the Universal Channel, Studio Universal and 13th Street - technically any other channels Universal owned. It's pretty much been a shadow of itself since then.
What you're describing is known as "channel drift" or "network decay" and it's actually been going on since the mid 80's, and it's so common that it has it's own Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_drift. MTV's been drifting away from it's original programming since about 1984. At first it was ok, because I liked Monty Python and The Young Ones, but then came the game shows, the political programming, Liquid Television (which was also pretty cool, but...), Beavis & Butthead, and so on.
And yet they managed to produce The Expanse, which is to me, and not only me, the greatest science-fiction TV show of all time. Also, Dark Matter and Killjoys were pretty good shows.
I think you mean The Sci-Fi Channel would be great as a streaming service because their old stuff was indeed gold. But they probably don't have the rights to much of it anymore because most of their early programming was not original productions.
@@RedSiegfried Syfy had futurama, twilight zone, alot of trippy sci fi stuff and is only getting hate recently. I used to always go on there to watch futurama, I just want them to have a streaming service now tbh
It may not been in your usual wheelhouse, but I'd love to see a similar breakdown of the History Channel, The Learning Channel, etc. All seem to follow a similar pattern of going cheaper and cheaper on content, eventually having lineups entirely dominated by Reality TV and barely clinging to their former brand concepts.
Syfy canceled the show. Syfy was stupid and didn't plan ahead when they greenlit the show. They didn't pick up the streaming rights. Even though the show was popular on streaming, it didn't get good ratings on TV. Syfy didn't get any of the profit from streaming, only from the dwindling TV ratings. That's why they canceled it. They were paying for a show and only getting a small cut of the profits.
SyFy didn't own The Expanse and they had a pretty lousy contract with Alcon. They only made money from live viewership and DVR within 3 days of original air date. That just isn't how people watch TV anymore and I'd be surprised if they broke even. It's hard to blame them for letting it go but it's a damn shame because it was their first serious attempt at returning to hard science fiction and it failed. The show was fantastic. Easily the best science fiction television show ever made. For SyFy's part it bringing it to television I will always be grateful.
Syfy being run by Universal has a lot of red tape too, the company is quite insular when hiring new staff and picking up new shows/concepts, so a lot of really good stuff has bee rejected over the years simply because it wasn't part of their approved group. And pitching shows from the UK you can just forget about it :D
They also failed miserably at distributing anything worthwhile beyond the US. Expanse flourished when shown on Netflix for UK consumption. I am glad it has a home at Amazon
When you have no budget you have to accomdate your script to that. The best Twilight Zone episodes had little to no special effects. Smaller casts, more intimate locations and the like.
@@catsthemovie4692 season 2 shouldn't exist; is the same problem as 13RW that started as a hit (quality is questionable, but people loved watching it) and quickly went downhill... you either pick a whole franchise to adapt or make peace with the fact that your source material is limited and will only be enough to a single season.
you have a 150 years of literature to mine for ideas, from Verne and Wells to Heinlein, Bradbury, LeGuin, Zelazny, Van Vogt and Asimov and you deliver unto us Sharknado...
I owe my love of b movies to the Sci-Fi Channel. All throughout the 2000s they would air weekend marathons of low budget horror and sci-fi movies that would normally never see the light of day. There was something really fun about reading up on what weird, obscure trashy movie they'd air each weekend. It's a shame they don't do it anymore. Crocodile, Crocodile 2: Death Roll, Larva, Blood Surf, Sabretooth, Attack of the Sabretooth, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Python, Python 2, New Alcatraz, Mortuary, Rottweiler, The Rats, Octopus, Octopus 2, Manticore, Abominable, Blood Monkey - so many classics!
The reality shows and wrestling is when I stopped watching The Sci-Fi Channel. The reality shows is when I also stopped watching the History Channel, I used to love watching both.
The History and Sci-Fi Channels were envisioned to enlighten, stimulate and challenge those who craved intellectual content. Reality shows and wrestling is for brain dead zombies.
I use to have a hard time decided what channel I wanted to watch but as they changed everything over to reality shows the decision to pick which channel to watch became easier. We finally had enough of cable and cancelled it and went with Netflix a few years ago. Thanks to my Roku tv I now have more stuff to watch both free and through subscriptions.
The reason for their demise seems to be the fact that they kept canceling the quality content that they did have, ruining any chance of them surviving or staying relevant as a channel.
Agreed it seemed to be a case of "Hey this is quality content that will be loved for decades. Cancel it. We have some more sh*t to spatter on the screen"
Who remembers the Anime Block they would air late night? That along with toonami was one of my earliest introductions to Anime, especially high concept sci-fi anime
I remember Sunday nights in Hawaii as a kid in the middle 90s me and my bros would watch the anime block 😎🤙 good stuff. It got me hooked on anime since.
I kinda liked anime on toonami but never got really into it since they kept airing stuff like Dragon ball which is good, but I could skip it for a week and miss no plot. The SciFi anime block tho: that solidified me as an anime fan.
I mostly watched Syfy, back when it was Sci-Fi, for their then popular Saturday Anime block. It had 8 Man After, Genocyber, and a ton of other hardcore, sci-fi, supernatural, ultra-violent anime. How could you forgot to mention this? I also remembered that at one point in the mid 2000s, like 2005-2007ish, they aired movies like John Carpenter's "The Thing", and the first two Alien movies with Sigourney Weaver. I stopped watching Syfy around 2010 or 11. Did I forget to mention Syfy, Lionsgate, and Marvel made a terrible Man-Thing film adaptation? I recently checked out the channel, and they don't have much going for it right now, other than airing reruns of movies that somewhat lie in the science fiction genre. I don't know how long Syfy will keep going until they go the way of the DoDo.
And this is how they're killing themselves... I can't watch a streamed show and say, 'hey, that was cool, I want more!' and even go to tv and watch it - because they've already cancelled it.
Syfy should go back to being a science fiction channel, no more reality shows, wrestling or showing movies like the remake of the magnificent seven, that have nothing to do with science fiction. Bring back the classic sifi shows and movies and those cheesy first run movies they used to play on Saturday nites. That is when the channel was fun.
I'd be okay with reality shows that still have a sci-fi theme. The one he mentioned about the masks and costumes makes sense for sci-fi. I also thought Robot Wars should have been on Sci-Fi. (What in the name of Blue Bomber was it doing on comedy central???)
you know, i hate to say it, but i would be ok with a set day/time they ran stuff like that, how about the "Death slot" they gave SGU? to me that stuff in its place, wouldnt be bad.... but they moved to mostly airing that shit during days/times... that me and my friends wanted to watch... sci-fi not.. wrestling or some random movie of the past... if they brought back a mostly actual sci-fi lineup, everything they can get thats sci-fi and could actually become beloved... im not even kidding... i know alot of people whou would gladly watch stuff like space 1999, blakes 7, classic bsg, buck rogers, on and on... hell, the night they have the death slot in, run stuff thats not sci-fi and random old B movies... and hell, even stuff thats not sci-fi but, has some link to sci-fi.. for example... i remember when USA Network was doing bsg and bonanza back to back, the link being actors, and knight rider and some other shows run back to back with more then one shared actor... hell thats another one.. Knight Rider... they could so easily im sure get alot of those shows, and regain viewership with older people who recognize shows and with younger people who dont...
Another super underrated show that was on syfy was Being Human. I watched that show from beginning to end and I loved pretty much all of it. They just had a 10th anniversary reunion and it was awesome to see all of them together again. That show needs more recognition
I’m remember when most of cable channels were born but now many years later no one except TCM is still doing what they originally started as. MTV no longer shows videos. TLC, ironically called the learning channel is endless 90 day fiancée shows. ESPN became a preachy channel instead of an escape to non political sports entertainment. E entertainment is 24 hours of the kardashian reruns. They’ve all gone trash and I hope most disappear.
I believe TCM is still successful because everything about that channel screams "classic movies." They have guests on to talk about the films. Their branding is 100% about movies. They immerse you in the experience.
Damn, I didn’t realize that SciFi went back to 92. Personally, I think that “reality” shows have been one of the worst things to happen to t.v. in general.
I have to agree with him, Face/Off was great. It only got pretty horrible in the last 2-4 seasons when it was obvious all the talented make up artists had been exhausted and the people they started to bring on were absolutely incompetent. They tried to bolster it by doing All Star seasons and events where they brought back actual talent but as a rule, by the end I could probably do better makeup with zero training than some of the people they had competing.
Not trying to sound patronizing, but I honestly feel sorry for you that you missed out on the Sci-Fi Channel's early days. You can still see some of the old cheese or in some cases really good original programming and the old commercial bumpers here on youtube to get a feel for what it was like. :)
@@RedSiegfried Their horrible mismanagement began when they utterly wrecked GvsE after moving from USA trying to make it serious (I always will love that first season) and right around the same time canceled Farscape. Then they changed their name to Syfy right after that. Someone in management discovered cocaine.
Favourite SYFY show has to be DEADLY CLASS. High production value, perfect casting and the original comic creators having full creative control. Cancelled after just one season. And even worse is that the only way for me to watch it was to pirate it because it still hasn't aired anywhere in Ireland not even on their official UK channel.
Magicians and Deadly Class are the reason why I'm not looking foward to the Raven Cycle adaptation; while the material is there it can easily end up looking awful or being great and than cancelled. Wish Netflix would have the rights instead.
I miss the old SciFi Fridays and the cool commercial and in between show lead-ins they used to do. Reminded me of the stuff toonami did. That extra little effort that tied the shows together and signified "this is the block of shows where we are putting it all on the line"
Our family showed up for Fridays, for sure. Nerd Husband and Nerd Wife loved Farscape and Babylon-5. Then we bred Nerd Twin Girl and Nerd Twin Boy and tuned in for Stargate(s), Eureka, WH13, Haven, Defiance etc. It was our family thing. BSG was high-quality prestige television. First they became SYFY and then put on pro rasslin'. Fcuk that noise.
@Naquin Green People do realise that Scifi channel pretty much made Asylum like movies right? I used to watch the channel before the name switch, and they pumped that shit out like no one's business. They weren't rip-off-y like Asylum, but a lot were bad or mediocre. Buying Asylum movies just streamlined the process.
You're totally right about the budget thing. As the Magician's progressed they kept on finding dumb story reasons to not use magic, and I honestly think that season 1 ended up looking more impressive than the rest (which is the opposite of how that is supposed to go).
In the 90s you could always find the the most obscure stuff on Sci-Fi. I remember when the weekly TV Guide would come in my brother and I would go through the channel's lineup and circle everything we wanted to watch or record.
I'm pretty sure I saw *Harry Potter* playing on there. They're trying to throw whatever at the wall and see what sticks, even if it isn't related to Sci Fi at all
Farscape, Being Human (the American version), and maybe Tremors (as long as it's not replacing Farscape after Scyfy claimed they were bringing Farscape back for at least one more season.
@@CaptainApathetic Harry Potter is fine, sci fi and fantasy often go together, it is the hours of WWE followed by Law and Order, that put me off watching.
Man I grew up watching Stargate, Galactica, Farscape and a whole host of their other shows and it is one of those things that makes me so sad to see the channel just decline. I dont mind some of their cheaper shows, but the fact it really gave up on almost respecting the genre at all. Damn, it makes me a little sad tbh.
When the Sci-Fi channel changed their name to SYFY, everyone in my household pronounced the new name as Siff-fee. (The real reason being that they couldn't legally trademark the word "Sci-Fi.") We were personally insulted by what one of the executives of the network said about why they were changing the name, with its implication that only weirdos watch science fiction and they needed to appeal to a "broader" audience.
I remember that. I also remember that they said they went through several creative teams over the years and the first thing they asked was if they could change the name of the channel.
A few good shows were mentioned, but other than that I think the best thing they did were the "imagine greater" ads to better promote their channel. While Eureka and Warehouse 13 weren't exactly that good, they were the basis of what makes "science fiction" the "what if" premise and while Ghost Hunters doesn't exactly come off as being science fiction this was probably what really started their downward spiral
@@andrewmalinowski6673 I think I'd stopped watching before then. What I remember from the good days was celebrities giving short introductions to older SF movies to provide a historical context, and reruns of FarScape and the good Anthology shows. But that Dune show was amazing, right? I mean, at least compared to the Lynch version, it totally blew me away with what they could do on a television-scale budget.
Which one? The only Dune I've seen was Frank Herbert's Dune, which was ALSO on The Sci-Fi Channel, that's what got me hooked on the channel, that and the Anime titles that they DID show during the 90's if not earlier!
@@michaelsimkins7078 That's the one, Frank Herbert's Dune. Until the new one comes out, that one remains the best. Children of Dune, the sequel series, was pretty good too :D
Prank shows ARE reality shows. Also: Face Off was good. Not as engaging as something actually telling a story, but if you’re one of those people who like TV on in the background while doing other stuff, it’s perfect. You can pay attention to the interesting parts (which are often really cool) and tune out the rest, and it won’t make a difference.
Reality shows are really just brain rot viewing. You don't even have to think, but just engage in a bunch of nonsense. You may as well devote your life to watching bad game shows. I am so glad that I rid myself of television years ago. I have some DVD and Blu-ray, so if I feel like watching something, I will select from those. I don't miss television at all. It is nice to not need it playing in the background all day every day.
Pre scripted reality tv shows trying to pass as "realistic" Ever notice no reality tv stars are movie stars. Real people are boring. That's why acting exists.
I love W13 a ton but it wasn't in the same league as BSG. battlestar could legit hold its own against breaking bad or mad men in terms of quality and complexity. W13, as much as I loved it, was just Friday 13th the series with a bit of the x files and fringe thrown in.
@@medes5597 After living through the original BSG when it was hot in the 80's, I never really had much interest (or the paid subscription to watch) in the (1st) re-boot - although Tricia Helfer (Edi from Mass Effect) would always be worth watching. Liked WH13 much, much better than the X-files because of its fun mix of comedy, great acting (Aside from Gillian Anderson, did the X-files really ever have that?), fun cases (never very gross or unexpectedly weird), and imaginative plot twists. Too bad SyFi abandoned good dramas like Eureka and WH13 for too much bogus reality TV after they ended... Love Babylon 5 too, such a well written and produced show... So nice to be able to stream and binge watch all the old, good shows these days! To each their own, enjoy it!
my friends would order a pizza and we would get together and watch 'how its made' and discuss those amazing historical docu-dramas...hell I learned more history then I ever did in school.
They cancelled the expanse, Krypton, the magicians, 12 monkeys (even these 2 shows had an ending it wasn't the directors full vision they were forced to finish them). They cancelled all may favorite shows, i'll never watch a syfy show ever
It's somewhat strange for me to even think of SyFy anymore. There was a time where it was MY favorite channel. You had the Stargates, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Farscape and many other things I never got into, but knew had followings. I still need to watch BSG at some point. The only thing I've watched on it in recent years was Krypton and after that was cancelled I had reason to see what was left on it to watch. I'll always love/miss the Sci-Fi Channel, but Syfy... meh.
@@michaelsimkins7078 The Magicians is on either Amazon Prime or NetFlix. I don't remember which... but it's pretty good if you like that genre... and now you can binge-watch the whole thing, with no cliff-hangers or months-long delays between seasons. Even better, it came to a planned and scheduled ending, so it ends pretty well.
I honestly loved their US version of Being Human, since I watched both versions as they aired, also it got me into Doctor Who as it aired, well, when they had the distribution rights, also, can't forget about Defiance, that show/game hybrid that... Utterly failed...
There was a lot of hidden gems and genre shows that you couldn't find elsewhere before broadband really took over. Sadly anything that really separated them from the pack has gone away. It was nice to have a channel dedicated to the weird and obscure but that means they'll forever lack mainstream appeal which anyone in it for the money would be against.
the show wasnt bad if you watch it threw, but the game... well the beta was good, then they locked the view into over the shoulder 3rd person with 1/3 or so of the screen taken up by the char model... and we stopped playing... the shows a decent binge.. weekly.. i duno... i watched for a while then... well... life was busy back then... and... well... the games impact on the show was... weak sauce... didnt seem to mean much...
I loved Farscape too, never missed an episode, and that meant staying home on Friday night which I was happy to do because Farscape was worth it. Remember the promo breaks during commercials with the woman welcoming you to "sci-fi"? I could never get into Lexx which followed Farscape at 10 pm though.
*Its like watching a rock climber loose his grip and frantically trying to latch on to anything, but panic just as they get a grip. Sooner or later they will either finally hold on to something or go splat.*
I hate that Stargate of any type is no longer being made. I feel that losing Stargate as a franchise was definitely a loss to Sci-fi in general! R.I.P. Stargate!
For some reason I get the feeling that if they had given the final Stargate series a few more seasons they would have kept the fantasy a little longer and kept momentum which would keep their channel alive.
They should have never ended Atlantis to start Universe. Universe started out crap, they were trying to make another Galactica, but took out most of what stargate was about. Universe just started to get interesting and they pulled the plug,
@Somewon Yuno I think it mainly has to do with whether you were a die-hard SG1 fan. I went backwards, SGU then SGA then SG1. I think most people overrate SG1, it is not as good as all these people make it out to be, especially at the beginning.
Back when they were still "sci fi" they made the Dune mini series which I still love to this day. Once they became SyFy there was nothing on their programing that interested me.
I remember when the Sci-Fi channel was home to Universal Monsters, the Universal-owned Hammer Horror films, MST3K, and reruns of Dark Shadows. It was the place to be during Halloween. Even after they began airing their original movies (which were mostly terrible), you'd still see the occasional Godzilla movie on there. It was a slow decline after the name change.
They also had the more experimental series Farscape and Lexx which catered to a more adult audience rather than to the largest common denominator with intentionally garbage movies like Lavantula and Sharknado. They can’t recapture the B-movie essence that made the channel unique with MST3K and the Hammer Horror films because movies made to be stupid lack heart and soul and feel just like a product, and who wants to check out a product?
Haven't watched SyFy in years. Loved it back in the day. GH & Josh Gates. Specials about the Blair Witch. Marathons of old Land of the Lost shows. Even reruns of Dark Shadows & Kolchak the Night Stalker.
Ghost adventures and wwe airing on syfy did it for me. I haven’t watched that channel in nearly a decade and just recently began to when it’s showing an old movie I like.
@@ChairmanMo I too am from Toronto. Let me ask you, do you remember on some Friday nights but every Saturday after midnight they'd air the softcore cut of porn on the Space channel? Our SyFY? It would be just one but they did.
I miss SciFi. I loved The Outer Limits, all the Stargate's, BSG But now I'm hesitant to start anything because it is just gonna get canceled in the first season. With all the cord cutting going on Universal needs to figure out how to get this up on a recognized streaming platform.
I will say the Chucky series was a lot of fun...though that is a joint Syfy/USA collab. Granted, if you aren't into Child's Play it may not be your cup of tea, but I'd recommend anyone give it a shot.
I loved Happy! When it starts, it really undersells the implications of the premise. But towards the end of the first season, and basically the whole second season, it seemed like the writers were trying to work out what all this crazy shit actually was. In the Happy!verse, imaginary friends exist, and can gain power up to being able to affect the real world and mind control people, basically confirming that gods are powered by belief in them. Orcus, Happy, God, all just the result of people's belief. That show had so much potential at the end of season 2. It's probably definitely too late, but god I wish someone would pick that show back up. Christopher Meloni was too good, Patton Oswalt is always a win, the amount of deep wtf sci-fi fantasy shit going on was spectacular, even if the writers hadn't quite planned it out right beforehand, and goddamnit, we need more Happy! lol sry just really really really liked that show. Happy! was out of left field, something I didn't see coming. I was scrolling instagram and saw a grizzled Detective Stabler (i love SVU) billed as a hitman, then Patton Oswalt and I was sold. Even got other people into the show. But nahh wasn't enough. The people they gather data from didn't watch it.
@@DiaXisHD one of the best hard SciFi series to come from the golden age of the channel. I literally remember the day it first aired. Hilariously enough I didn't watch it then. I was too interested in playing Zelda, Ocarina of Time. But it is seriously one of the best. It's about a test pilot astronaut who was pulled into a wormhole and is spat out on the far side of the galaxy then is caught in the middle of a prison break.
@@DiaXisHD I would describe it as the source material for Guardians of the Galaxy. Way weirder and definitely not suitable for children under 14. And I'm not so sure about 14-16. A lot of the shows are quite violent.
Farscape is, in my opinion, the greatest sci-fi show of probably the last 25 or so years. It was great, brilliant, had a sense of humor, and the they kept changing things on a regular basis so as to keep it interesting.
Language trivia time: In Polish "syfy" ("y" pronounced as "y" in the name Wynn) is a plural slang term for zits/pimples (and other common acne-related ailments). It is also used to describe a product or a service of a bad quality. So that's probably why it went downhill.
90s SciFi channel was so great. That's where I was introduced to MST3K, and they even had a "Caption This" game on their website where you could riff screenshots of what was currently playing (a lot of Dark Shadows). And apparently David Lynch even directed a few bumpers.
Man SyFy really screwed up. They have cancelled so many great shows like Dark Matter that I have zero sympathy for them. They have really ticked me off more times than I can count.
Dark Matter killed itself by killing off their everyman character who was the one person most people could identify with and the closest they had to a main character.
I remember waiting with baited breath for the SciFi channel to launch. For weeks they just had a graphic running with a bouncing ball on the screen counting down until they went live.
@@lenarr9821 ScFy when it was called Sci Fi would cancel shows because the Network Head Bonnie Hammer's husband didn't get the show. Farscape, Invisible Man were two of them. She ushered in the era of John Edwards and low budget shlock. It kept the channel going but did nothing for the fans.
I didn't start following SyFy until the last couple years, and the show that got me to treat it seriously was "Krypton" (I haven't seen many other SyFy original series, so I can't speak to them), and then "Krypton" got cancelled and I was incredibly disappointed.
They should have at least done what they did with Farscape, they at least made a finale 2 part for that show and they should have done the same for SGU!
Back on Friday night when Farscape, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica,... those were the days... And omg, the most recent season of the expanse was great. Syfy was stupid to let it go...
If syfy could commit to anything the way they committed to stargate, they'd be golden, in my opinion. They should have taken farscape much further as well- seems like they cannibalized it for doubling down on stargate, which I think was a mistake since SG1 was on its last legs anyway.
@@maxwellschmidt235 Their mistake was "a new movie every Friday"... Needless to say, all those movies were low budget crap. Hell, it would have been better to have Farscape run for 2 months solo on Friday, then SG-1 for two months solo on Friday, etc.. and rotate through the year...
I loved it when they played anime... Robot Carnival, Vampire Hunter D, and Lensman. That was during an era when American youth were starving for anime.
I quit after Faceoff was canned. I'll watch Futurama until they take it off. Then I'll move on. Who the Hell thinks sc fi fans would watch wrestling? Why won't that "sport" die?
@@JustSomeGoy yeah my buddy watched the first broadcast and was like dude this shit is crazy. Watched it and had to go watch enough anime to attain Otaku status.
When I was a kid, I would spend hours looking through the scheduled programming for the Sci-Fi Channel. I would set every horror and monster movie to record. My mom didn't let me rent violent or gory movies from Family Video, so the Sci-Fi Channel was my only contact with that kind of content. The Sci-Fi Channel is actually where I first watched the 2001 remake of _Thirteen Ghosts,_ which, to this day, is still one of my favorite movies. After they rebranded as the SyFy Channel, they became a warehouse for gimmicky, self-aware horror movies. It's a shame, really.
The _Channel Zero_ series is legitimately really, really good. It’s the first time in a while I tuned into watch an original Syfy property and unironically enjoyed it.
It was infuriating when they cancelled Dark Matter, but kept KIlljoys. That's when I gave up entirely. I was so glad that The Expanse was picked up by Amazon, as it was out from under SyFy's control.
One of my favorite things that Scifi/Syfy ever did was "Seeing Ear Theater." The idea was to reinvigorate the then-dead concept of the radio drama, and I had one of their compilations on cassette tape. That right there? That I think was the genesis of the modern fiction Podcast. You can draw a direct line from Seeing Ear Theater to things like the No Sleep Podcast and Homecoming. It's amazing, and groundbreaking, and they have it up still on the Internet Archive! It's great stuff, and it just shows how influential Scifi was with it's experimentation.
I enjoyed that show, but I never saw the conclusion. That's because they ran the entire final season in like one weekend or something like that I recall. That was really stupid. I tried to record it and did something wrong so I got some of it but not all of it never did see how it ended.
Yeah, he totally missed the point of Sharknado. It was making fun of those terrible 'serious' movies about 2 headed sharks and prehistoric gators and all that garbage. They'd been showing that stuff forever....
It's been painful to watch the decline of what was once my favorite channel. I helped petition our cable company in Tallahassee to offer The Sci-Fi Channel when it first launched. I was a big fan of Farscape, Lexx, the Stargate franchise, some seasons of Eureka and The Magicians, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Alphas, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary (no, seriously!), Tripping the Rift, The Outer Limits, The Expanse and several of the Sci-Fi Original miniseries, like The Lost Room, Stephen Spielberg's Taken, 5ive Days to Midnight, Frank Herbert's Dune and Children of Dune, Ascension , Firestarter: Rekindled, etc. It was nice while it lasted. Here's to good memories.
It's the channel that got me into the Guyver franchise, when they were the only channel to release Guyver 2 Dark Hero back in the 90s I became an instant fan.
What was your favorite show in the history of Syfy?
Go to buyraycon.com/midnight for 15% off your order of wireless earbuds.
captainmidnight 🦷
SYFY introduced me to ‘the Twilight Zone’ & ‘Star Trek’. Can’t knock battlestar or Happy though!
Battlestar Galactica.
DAFUQ is "syfy" and how does that relate to SCIENCE FICTION??
Magicians hands down
They made the same mistake as the History channel. They lost their identity while chasing maximum views.
What? Miss the WWII docs and don't want to watch "Burt and Ernie go antiquing" ?
Not to mention "Wile E. Pawnbroker" pay pennies on the dollar for Kitsch?
This unfortunately true of most of the genre channels. Some of the crap on Cartoon Network makes me sad.
I was a die-hard history channel guy during shows around romans, Black Death, vikings, ect ect. The 'new version', about fake aliens and 'what about' crap, is horrendous.
They made the same mistake as EVERY pay TV channel has. EVERY SINGLE ONE ends up drifting away from it's original programming, except maybe The Food Network (and even then, they show too many of these game show style things, instead of just cooking programs). I don't know how old anyone else around here is, but I'm 47. I'm old enough to remember watching TV without cable, and when we first got, being stunned to go from getting five TV channels (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, plus two indie channels) to getting something like 20 channels! Imagine that: a world with "only" 20 TV channels (actually, there were more than that, but as I recall no one cable service carried all of them, at least not in our area). AndI remember what MTV, USA A&E, Nickelodeon, the Chrisitan Broadcasting Network were all like circa 1982. And every last one of those channels that still exists has changed drastically over the decades. Even ESPN, while still remaining sports oriented, as tweaked and changed exactly WHICH sports they show, over the years. I can remember falling asleep on the couch while trying to stay up to watch Night Flight or some of those MTV concerts, and watching reruns of Burns And Allen or The Jack Benny Program on CBN (which is now the FreeForm channel, Wikipedia says they've changed their name SIX times), and racing home from school to watch The Tomorrow People, You Can't Do That On Television and Flipper on Nickelodeon. None of that happens anymore.
When Syfy was “SciFi” that’s when they were in their prime.
You can't copyright Sci fi it's short for science fiction. A popular shows run is five seasons or less on syfy. Lost girl, haven, eureka, defiance, farscape. It's the reason I quit watching years ago. Why get invested in a show with a limited shelf life from the word go. If your lucky there will be a half ass "final episode" e.g. eureka. However more than likely there never is a season 3, 4, 5, or 6 it just ends where it does.
I came to comment this
Kinda. People seem to conveniently forget, and the video does this, that Scifi used to have a lot of trashy content back in the day. Old trashy movies, and original trashy content. I mostly watched scifi back in the day and grew up on it. But that's the problem with nostalgia, people dig up their past and try to dust it off, but also dust off a lot of the blemishes as well, showing a cleaned up version that wasn't necessarily like what was in the past.
Also, it seems the video and people forgot the Scifi channels produced a ton of mediocre and shitty movies as well. Granted, I don't expect people to remember Alien Apoclypse or their other Asylum level movies, but still. Not to mention the video dumps on that Ghost show, but doesn't bring up Sightings series, which wasn't too dissimilar.
@@ruekurei88 They had trashy content along with good content, its not this buzzword of "nostalgia" it genuinely was better back then, surprisingly enough is is ACTUALLY possible for something to be less good now then in the past, strange, I know.
The major problem was after the channel changed its name from "Sci-Fi" to "SYFY". It came off as the network was ashamed of the genre.
It was an early test of the "Let's put some woman in charge! That'll be great! For reasons!" Thesis.
Yeah it was pretty much a slap in the face.
they changed the name because someone copywrighted the term scifi, and they didn't want to have to pay them
@@Trollificusv2 ya’ll misogynists love to blame women for everything eh? 🙄
It was always sci-fi for years & years. It just never looked or felt right!
The rebranding from "SciFi" to SyFy was the symbolic turning point. They just were not the Science Fiction channel anymore, it was just 4 letters.
Fan fact: syfy means zits or garbage pieces in Polish. Kinda fitting, don't you think?
Very fitting translation
@@berlineczka It wouldn't surprise me if that was intentional. I recall hearing stories at the time about how the new CEO opening said that she doesn't like SciFi. Which is also when the started canceling flagship shows like Stargate and replacing it with Pro-wrestling and Reality shows.
@@PyroMancer2k i just finished sg1 and Atlantis. Currently rewatching all star trek
@@PyroMancer2k omg can’t stand reality shows they really need to dump them
They should have picked up Firefly, Jericho, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Just to name a few
V was a good candidate to picked up. Not the 80s V. The one from the 2000s. Ended on a cliffhanger and really pissed me off.
Yeah.....it sucked when Jericho was scrapped.....a bit too controversial I guess...
let them wallow and drown a slow painful well deserved corporate death!
Ah man I miss Jericho
Some of the best shows of all time right down the drain.
When they canceled stargate and started airing wrestling I was done.
Yep, when they canceled destiny's mission I was saddened. I figured that streaming was going to make some waves in the entertainment industry.
they did ? Sounds like they were jacked by aliens is wall street costumes.
This channel was never good for wrestling. ECW had shitty ratings. I'm sure SmackDown also had shitty ratings. Weird channel to have wrestling on.
SYFY is too stupid to realize that when you cancel a show on a cliffhanger (like Stargate Universe or Dark Matter), you lose future revenue from streaming. Word gets out that a show ends unsatisfyingly and people don't watch, no matter how good. At least wrap the story up with a movie, like Firefly or Sense8.
I'm still heartbroken about Dark Matter.
They marketed the last season of Magicians so poorly I didn't even know the show came back until it was already done with the season and cancelled. Now I debate if it's even worth finishing the show.
Don't forget the viewers that are so ticked off that they leave Syfy forever.
@@BlazingOwnager It is worth finishing.
@@darkmagician_ I know. What basically happened was that the makers of Dark Matter took most of the financial risk of creating the show because Syfy never believed in it in the first place. When Dark Matter became big then the suits at Syfy got pissed because they realized that they would never make any money off streaming and syndication rights. Instead of accepting the fact that they made the wrong decision about not wholeheartedly supporting Dark Matter and just accepting the fact that they would make less money (but still come out profitably), they flipped over the table and told Dark Matter to get lost and made it impossible for the creators of Dark Matter to get back on another channel. It was spiteful and petty; they put a lot of people in Toronto; where most of the show was filmed out of work! Assholes!
“SyFy” is dying because they CONSTANTLY make BAD DECISIONS. Frankly, I’m glad. I’m still annoyed at how they treated the Stargate franchise.
EDIT: Oh and Farscape. So many bad decisions.
Cancelling Farscape, Dark Matter amongst others.
My favorite was the same day/week they had the PR announcement about record ratings for farscape and sg1 they then announced farscape was getting cancelled. its was like "wtf?!?" I think the same thing happened later with stargate "oh look at this great accomplishment... now we're going to cancel it"...
@DarkVoid SGU actually picked up the pace at the end of the first season, and the second season was pretty good, but by then they had already lost most of the fans of the franchise because of the terrible first half of season 1.
I thought SGU was cancelled due to MGM going out of business, literally no one to make the show.
I dumped the entire channel after they canceled Farscape. I tried with The Magicians but I got bored.
To be fair, I actually loved Eureka and Warehouse 13 and even the early seasons of Haven but even I never got the WWE choice.
I really liked/still like "Eureka" and "Warehouse 13". After Netflix stopped showing those two programs I went into mourning. Eventually I bought "Warehouse 13" on DVD and about two months ago I discovered Roku was showing both programs. I just watched the last two episodes of "Eureka" this morning. I watched Haven on Netflix several years ago from start to finish and during the lock down started watching it again. I miss the days of good sci-fi on T.V.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve also noticed that Canada puts out some really good sci-fi stuff that they was showing on syfy, and then it went away. From dark mater to Continuum, lost girl, being human, alphas, and Dominion are a bunch of others
@@srice8959 Wasn't Starhunter and Starhunter 2300 also Canadian or at least Canadian studios had a some part in the production of those shows.
@@dinodasbunce6224
Yes I believe that they were. Truthfully Canada really puts out some really great tv programs
As both a wrestling and a science fiction fan, I NEVER got the WWECW decision.
Eureka, Warehouse 13, Being Human, Haven, The Magicians & The Expanse are some of my favorite shows to come from Sci-fi/Syfy
mine too!
My favourite is 12 monkeys
Being Human should have run for 5 or 6 seasons. It was the best
And farscape
For alot of SyFy shows they are good for a couple seasons, but then they really start to stink.
SciFi Channel died when they changed their name to SYFY. That's when they officially gave up on airing actual sci fi or just trying to make anything good in general.
WTF even is "syfy"?
SCIence FIction is a thing...
@@darrengordon-hill Sci Fi is a thing, their problem was that Sci Fi can't be trademarked because it's a think. Syfy on the other hand isn't a thing and can be trademarked.
Just got here. That's EXACTLY what I was going to write. THAT is precisely when it died, in my view.
Syence Fyction
@@The80sKickAss +1 to trademark was web search. When you googled "sci fi shows" they couldn't beat the big network shows.
"Syfy started airing pro-wrestling..."
Haha, don't even try buddy, it's like saying the History channel started airing pawn-shop shows.
Right...? Right...???
They've been screwing over their actual sci-fi shows for too long.
All the way back to BSG, Stargate, Farscape, etc. They refused to agree to longer term contracts and would only renew shows at the very last minute as a shitty negotiation tactic to pressure showrunners and actors to take budget cuts or risk getting canceled.
Most of the time, the writers would have no idea if the current season would be the last until very late into the season and couldn't plan for the long term without taking a huge gamble since there was always a chance they'd get cancelled and have to quickly wrap things up. The one time someone did take a gamble, SG-1's season 10, where they actually planned for a season 11, they got screwed over and canceled.
Sy-Fy deserves to die for their years of shitty behavior.
And how they screwed over Eureka. They were suppose to have a final short season to wrap everything up. But at the last minute Sci-Fi pulled the plug on them and gave them 1 extra episode to wrap everything up. I do love though how that entire episode they were giving Sci-Fi the finger.
KingOfMadCows agreed📼
I have to agree. Mean the list of shows scifi screwed over, it boggles the mind.
SG1 always seemed odd they had multiple seasons that seemed planed as the end point only to keep going on after and the final season ended with no conclusion.
I guess they got a couple movies latter on to wrap things up but its always seemed stupid that the only season not to end with a real finale was the last one
This is exactly the issue... I never forgave them for Farscape's demise. Greed and shortsighted, what could go wrong!
Should have shown how the previous "Syfy" logo looked and explained why it changed. For anybody interested, it used to be called The Sci-fi Channel and adopted a cool silhouette of Saturn as it's logo. It eventually got named just Sci-fi - pretty much the channel I loved and miss. It's owned by Universal and in the late 00's they started seeing the trend of channels going "off topic" (eg. MTV was no longer about music, History Channel no longer about history etc.). Regardless, those channels were making more money that ever with their new content so they sought to do the same with Sci-fi. They changed its name to be less on the nose about the genre it represents allowing it to show more action, procedural, comedy, drama and the likes. The name Syfy is more ambiguous and abstract, they got rid of the Saturn logo and started offloading content from the Universal Channel, Studio Universal and 13th Street - technically any other channels Universal owned. It's pretty much been a shadow of itself since then.
This is the best synopsis.
Summed it up well
What you're describing is known as "channel drift" or "network decay" and it's actually been going on since the mid 80's, and it's so common that it has it's own Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_drift. MTV's been drifting away from it's original programming since about 1984. At first it was ok, because I liked Monty Python and The Young Ones, but then came the game shows, the political programming, Liquid Television (which was also pretty cool, but...), Beavis & Butthead, and so on.
And yet they managed to produce The Expanse, which is to me, and not only me, the greatest science-fiction TV show of all time.
Also, Dark Matter and Killjoys were pretty good shows.
SyFy is not dying. It has been dead ever since they change their name from SciFi
Syfy would be great as a streaming service. Their old stuff is gold.
I think you mean The Sci-Fi Channel would be great as a streaming service because their old stuff was indeed gold. But they probably don't have the rights to much of it anymore because most of their early programming was not original productions.
Battlestar Galactica remake will always be their best show ever and probably the best show ever made in general next to Breaking Bad.
Yes, gold they've already sold off to various streaming services.
They have a streaming service.. just not with their whole back catalog
@@RedSiegfried Syfy had futurama, twilight zone, alot of trippy sci fi stuff and is only getting hate recently. I used to always go on there to watch futurama, I just want them to have a streaming service now tbh
They shouldn't have cancelled deadly class. It was a really good show which ended on a cliffhanger. It had so much promise
Same with Happy. It was weird and dark and funny as hell
I was really sad to hear that Deadly Class got canned.
@@zenbrown7144 I hope it gets renewed by some streaming service but I don't thinknit will happen.
That’s what SyFy did with Dark Matter
Good premise for a show, though I am happy the main actor lost his job. He’s trash.
It may not been in your usual wheelhouse, but I'd love to see a similar breakdown of the History Channel, The Learning Channel, etc. All seem to follow a similar pattern of going cheaper and cheaper on content, eventually having lineups entirely dominated by Reality TV and barely clinging to their former brand concepts.
Losing The Expanse is a huge loss for syfy
Syfy canceled the show. Syfy was stupid and didn't plan ahead when they greenlit the show. They didn't pick up the streaming rights. Even though the show was popular on streaming, it didn't get good ratings on TV. Syfy didn't get any of the profit from streaming, only from the dwindling TV ratings. That's why they canceled it. They were paying for a show and only getting a small cut of the profits.
for real. amazon winning now with the expanse.
@@KingOfMadCows Being on cable is a death knell now. This is why you see their premium channels making deals with streaming companies.
@@richardbast7243 Or straight-up becoming streaming services themselves, like HBO.
SyFy didn't own The Expanse and they had a pretty lousy contract with Alcon. They only made money from live viewership and DVR within 3 days of original air date. That just isn't how people watch TV anymore and I'd be surprised if they broke even. It's hard to blame them for letting it go but it's a damn shame because it was their first serious attempt at returning to hard science fiction and it failed. The show was fantastic. Easily the best science fiction television show ever made. For SyFy's part it bringing it to television I will always be grateful.
Syfy being run by Universal has a lot of red tape too, the company is quite insular when hiring new staff and picking up new shows/concepts, so a lot of really good stuff has bee rejected over the years simply because it wasn't part of their approved group.
And pitching shows from the UK you can just forget about it :D
did kim justice shit in any more of your mail?
Guru Larry!!!👍
Do a video on it Larry.
They also failed miserably at distributing anything worthwhile beyond the US. Expanse flourished when shown on Netflix for UK consumption. I am glad it has a home at Amazon
Guru Larry!! Hello you..
When you have no budget you have to accomdate your script to that. The best Twilight Zone episodes had little to no special effects. Smaller casts, more intimate locations and the like.
They proved that you don't need that to make great television!
Agreed.
If the Syfy channel adopts that philosophy to their channel in all aspects, they could come back.
What do you expect? Back in the day, a lot of the episodes were shot in the Mojave desert and it saved CBS a great deal of money.
@@willieg7895 I know and they made the best of it. Twilight Zone is one of the best series ever and it still stands up today.
@@cinemathequerouge317 I agree. Sure they can keep their cheesy monster films for the irony lovers but there's so much potential to do more.
And then there's netflix who throws a crazy amount of money at science fiction shows that are not ambitious at all
They had it good with altered carbon but season two was not great
100% agree with this but dark on netflix is the one exception, suchh an amazing show
@@catsthemovie4692 season 2 shouldn't exist; is the same problem as 13RW that started as a hit (quality is questionable, but people loved watching it) and quickly went downhill... you either pick a whole franchise to adapt or make peace with the fact that your source material is limited and will only be enough to a single season.
I’d pay money to have my memories of Another Life erased
@@ZeteticPhilosopher I'd pay to erase the I Land from my memory
you have a 150 years of literature to mine for ideas, from Verne and Wells to Heinlein, Bradbury, LeGuin, Zelazny, Van Vogt and Asimov and you deliver unto us Sharknado...
I'm not sure if they are suggesting their own level of intelligence, or insulting mine.
I guess you can compare this with a 3 legged stool; audience, decisions, and good ideas.
You can fill in the rest.
Don't forget Shelley
Sharknado was fun, but they should not have staked the direction of the channel on it
Would have loved to see a good adaption of the old graphic novel Camelot 3000, if i remember the name correctly. Fantasy and sci fi in one package.
I owe my love of b movies to the Sci-Fi Channel. All throughout the 2000s they would air weekend marathons of low budget horror and sci-fi movies that would normally never see the light of day. There was something really fun about reading up on what weird, obscure trashy movie they'd air each weekend. It's a shame they don't do it anymore.
Crocodile, Crocodile 2: Death Roll, Larva, Blood Surf, Sabretooth, Attack of the Sabretooth, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Python, Python 2, New Alcatraz, Mortuary, Rottweiler, The Rats, Octopus, Octopus 2, Manticore, Abominable, Blood Monkey - so many classics!
A movie that came out in 2011 called Stake Land is an underrated gem, and it aired original on the SciFi channel.
The reality shows and wrestling is when I stopped watching The Sci-Fi Channel. The reality shows is when I also stopped watching the History Channel, I used to love watching both.
But aliens are real.
Agreed on both points
The History and Sci-Fi Channels were envisioned to enlighten, stimulate and challenge those who craved intellectual content. Reality shows and wrestling is for brain dead zombies.
The "used to be about" history channel😒
I use to have a hard time decided what channel I wanted to watch but as they changed everything over to reality shows the decision to pick which channel to watch became easier. We finally had enough of cable and cancelled it and went with Netflix a few years ago. Thanks to my Roku tv I now have more stuff to watch both free and through subscriptions.
The reason for their demise seems to be the fact that they kept canceling the quality content that they did have, ruining any chance of them surviving or staying relevant as a channel.
Proving they are no longer run by sci fi fans for sci fi fans... but by financiers for chairmen of the boards.
They seem to put a five season cap on their shows.
Much of their content was shows from other networks that got canceled.
Agreed it seemed to be a case of "Hey this is quality content that will be loved for decades. Cancel it. We have some more sh*t to spatter on the screen"
Who remembers the Anime Block they would air late night? That along with toonami was one of my earliest introductions to Anime, especially high concept sci-fi anime
I remember Sunday nights in Hawaii as a kid in the middle 90s me and my bros would watch the anime block 😎🤙 good stuff. It got me hooked on anime since.
Yup, only know about one of my favorites of all time because of it.
I kinda liked anime on toonami but never got really into it since they kept airing stuff like Dragon ball which is good, but I could skip it for a week and miss no plot. The SciFi anime block tho: that solidified me as an anime fan.
Animondays.
I mostly watched Syfy, back when it was Sci-Fi, for their then popular Saturday Anime block. It had 8 Man After, Genocyber, and a ton of other hardcore, sci-fi, supernatural, ultra-violent anime. How could you forgot to mention this?
I also remembered that at one point in the mid 2000s, like 2005-2007ish, they aired movies like John Carpenter's "The Thing", and the first two Alien movies with Sigourney Weaver. I stopped watching Syfy around 2010 or 11. Did I forget to mention Syfy, Lionsgate, and Marvel made a terrible Man-Thing film adaptation?
I recently checked out the channel, and they don't have much going for it right now, other than airing reruns of movies that somewhat lie in the science fiction genre. I don't know how long Syfy will keep going until they go the way of the DoDo.
I cut cable years ago. I only discovered The Expanse, The Magicians and Wynonna Earp when they went to streaming.
did you watch dark matter
And this is how they're killing themselves... I can't watch a streamed show and say, 'hey, that was cool, I want more!' and even go to tv and watch it - because they've already cancelled it.
Crissa Kentavr not the expanse it’s amazing
Syfy should go back to being a science fiction channel, no more reality shows, wrestling or showing movies like the remake of the magnificent seven, that have nothing to do with science fiction. Bring back the classic sifi shows and movies and those cheesy first run movies they used to play on Saturday nites. That is when the channel was fun.
I'd be okay with reality shows that still have a sci-fi theme. The one he mentioned about the masks and costumes makes sense for sci-fi. I also thought Robot Wars should have been on Sci-Fi. (What in the name of Blue Bomber was it doing on comedy central???)
I use to love the all day marathon of sci-fi and fantasy shows.
And some of that crazy anime from the 80s and I guess early 90s
All of ya in this thread are dead on the money its why I watched them. After they stopped it and went fantasy I just got bored n moved on.
you know, i hate to say it, but i would be ok with a set day/time they ran stuff like that, how about the "Death slot" they gave SGU?
to me that stuff in its place, wouldnt be bad.... but they moved to mostly airing that shit during days/times... that me and my friends wanted to watch... sci-fi not.. wrestling or some random movie of the past...
if they brought back a mostly actual sci-fi lineup, everything they can get thats sci-fi and could actually become beloved...
im not even kidding... i know alot of people whou would gladly watch stuff like space 1999, blakes 7, classic bsg, buck rogers, on and on... hell, the night they have the death slot in, run stuff thats not sci-fi and random old B movies... and hell, even stuff thats not sci-fi but, has some link to sci-fi.. for example... i remember when USA Network was doing bsg and bonanza back to back, the link being actors, and knight rider and some other shows run back to back with more then one shared actor...
hell thats another one.. Knight Rider... they could so easily im sure get alot of those shows, and regain viewership with older people who recognize shows and with younger people who dont...
Another super underrated show that was on syfy was Being Human. I watched that show from beginning to end and I loved pretty much all of it. They just had a 10th anniversary reunion and it was awesome to see all of them together again. That show needs more recognition
Has it really been 10 years.
...that was an english show...no?
Man I loved Being Human and also Bitten too
I’m remember when most of cable channels were born but now many years later no one except TCM is still doing what they originally started as. MTV no longer shows videos. TLC, ironically called the learning channel is endless 90 day fiancée shows. ESPN became a preachy channel instead of an escape to non political sports entertainment. E entertainment is 24 hours of the kardashian reruns. They’ve all gone trash and I hope most disappear.
I remember when Bravo was a channel for foreign and independent films and artsy fartsy stuff.
You just explained how cable TV in general is dying.
And Cartoon Network played more than one or 2 shows.
I believe TCM is still successful because everything about that channel screams "classic movies." They have guests on to talk about the films. Their branding is 100% about movies. They immerse you in the experience.
Damn, I didn’t realize that SciFi went back to 92. Personally, I think that “reality” shows have been one of the worst things to happen to t.v. in general.
It resulted in an American president and kids in cages so good point
Reality shows aren't worst than soap operas but Sci-fi reality is really bad. Sci-fi was over run by Zombies and Vampires.
I have to agree with him, Face/Off was great. It only got pretty horrible in the last 2-4 seasons when it was obvious all the talented make up artists had been exhausted and the people they started to bring on were absolutely incompetent. They tried to bolster it by doing All Star seasons and events where they brought back actual talent but as a rule, by the end I could probably do better makeup with zero training than some of the people they had competing.
Not trying to sound patronizing, but I honestly feel sorry for you that you missed out on the Sci-Fi Channel's early days. You can still see some of the old cheese or in some cases really good original programming and the old commercial bumpers here on youtube to get a feel for what it was like. :)
@@RedSiegfried Their horrible mismanagement began when they utterly wrecked GvsE after moving from USA trying to make it serious (I always will love that first season) and right around the same time canceled Farscape. Then they changed their name to Syfy right after that. Someone in management discovered cocaine.
The best time for syfy was when every weekend was full of horror movie marathons.
I remember one Saturday was zombie movies all day, and being pissed I had to work because that's my favorite horror subgenre
Favourite SYFY show has to be DEADLY CLASS. High production value, perfect casting and the original comic creators having full creative control. Cancelled after just one season. And even worse is that the only way for me to watch it was to pirate it because it still hasn't aired anywhere in Ireland not even on their official UK channel.
Does Syfy have a streaming service? If they do you can use Nordvpn or some other service to change your country.
Magicians and Deadly Class are the reason why I'm not looking foward to the Raven Cycle adaptation; while the material is there it can easily end up looking awful or being great and than cancelled. Wish Netflix would have the rights instead.
@@biazacha the raven cycle adaption got cancelled
Is it just me or did anyone identified SyFy as the horror movie channel when they were young...?
I didnt, the clue was in the name of the channel.
Sci fi and horror have lots of overlap
For me it was full of Farscape and that sorta stuff
To be honest I always thought Syfy was that channel that always shows cheap shark movies
A little bit. But there was also a literal channel called the horror channel in the uk too
I miss the old SciFi Fridays and the cool commercial and in between show lead-ins they used to do. Reminded me of the stuff toonami did. That extra little effort that tied the shows together and signified "this is the block of shows where we are putting it all on the line"
Our family showed up for Fridays, for sure. Nerd Husband and Nerd Wife loved Farscape and Babylon-5. Then we bred Nerd Twin Girl and Nerd Twin Boy and tuned in for Stargate(s), Eureka, WH13, Haven, Defiance etc. It was our family thing.
BSG was high-quality prestige television.
First they became SYFY and then put on pro rasslin'. Fcuk that noise.
Agreed. I was there every week for SciFi Fridays.
Oh man. Farscape. Now there's some good memories!
Mostly of a leather daddy villain.
God damn was Scorpius such a good bad guy. Not just a bad guy in that he had power but in a totally f*ck with your mind and mess you up sort of way.
Farscape is one of best sci fi shows ever
One of the best villains ever.
Oh yea, "reality" shows = bad writing and bad acting.
EXACTLY!!!!! OMG!!! Finally, someone, who sees the same BS I see.
@@rome79735 lol I see it too. I can think of a single good reality show. Theres probably 2 or 3 but no more than that.
"We're going to go search for an identity!"
SyFy since 2006
They're running out of time to find an identity. Cable TV is dying! 😆
It's just sad how on Syfy is going downhill I always watched those low-budget horror movies on syfy those was days 😪
SyFy holding staged performance wrestling in the first place confuses me.
I can kinda see the Asylum movies but WWE? wrong channel my dude
@Naquin Green People do realise that Scifi channel pretty much made Asylum like movies right? I used to watch the channel before the name switch, and they pumped that shit out like no one's business. They weren't rip-off-y like Asylum, but a lot were bad or mediocre. Buying Asylum movies just streamlined the process.
You're totally right about the budget thing. As the Magician's progressed they kept on finding dumb story reasons to not use magic, and I honestly think that season 1 ended up looking more impressive than the rest (which is the opposite of how that is supposed to go).
In the 90s you could always find the the most obscure stuff on Sci-Fi. I remember when the weekly TV Guide would come in my brother and I would go through the channel's lineup and circle everything we wanted to watch or record.
They're dying because they stopped being a Science Fiction channel and started being a crap channel.
Bring back shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13.
Yes! More Joanne Kelly! I mean Warehouse 13. Bring back Warehouse 13.
I'm pretty sure I saw *Harry Potter* playing on there. They're trying to throw whatever at the wall and see what sticks, even if it isn't related to Sci Fi at all
Farscape, Being Human (the American version), and maybe Tremors (as long as it's not replacing Farscape after Scyfy claimed they were bringing Farscape back for at least one more season.
@@CaptainApathetic Harry Potter is fine, sci fi and fantasy often go together, it is the hours of WWE followed by Law and Order, that put me off watching.
Did you see what happened to Eureka? This might be a blessing
Man I grew up watching Stargate, Galactica, Farscape and a whole host of their other shows and it is one of those things that makes me so sad to see the channel just decline. I dont mind some of their cheaper shows, but the fact it really gave up on almost respecting the genre at all. Damn, it makes me a little sad tbh.
the moment they changed their name from SciFi to SyFy was the moment they are heading to an unsalvageable path
When the Sci-Fi channel changed their name to SYFY, everyone in my household pronounced the new name as Siff-fee. (The real reason being that they couldn't legally trademark the word "Sci-Fi.")
We were personally insulted by what one of the executives of the network said about why they were changing the name, with its implication that only weirdos watch science fiction and they needed to appeal to a "broader" audience.
I remember that. I also remember that they said they went through several creative teams over the years and the first thing they asked was if they could change the name of the channel.
In the early days of the "syfy" channel, I pronounced it "SILLY."
Eureka, warehouse 13, and haven were my favortite shows back in the day.
I never watched Eureka, but both Warehouse 13 and Haven are in my list of favourite shows.
At least we got that solid Dune mini-series before things all went straight downhill.
A few good shows were mentioned, but other than that I think the best thing they did were the "imagine greater" ads to better promote their channel. While Eureka and Warehouse 13 weren't exactly that good, they were the basis of what makes "science fiction" the "what if" premise and while Ghost Hunters doesn't exactly come off as being science fiction this was probably what really started their downward spiral
@@andrewmalinowski6673 I think I'd stopped watching before then. What I remember from the good days was celebrities giving short introductions to older SF movies to provide a historical context, and reruns of FarScape and the good Anthology shows.
But that Dune show was amazing, right? I mean, at least compared to the Lynch version, it totally blew me away with what they could do on a television-scale budget.
Which one? The only Dune I've seen was Frank Herbert's Dune, which was ALSO on The Sci-Fi Channel, that's what got me hooked on the channel, that and the Anime titles that they DID show during the 90's if not earlier!
@@michaelsimkins7078 That's the one, Frank Herbert's Dune. Until the new one comes out, that one remains the best. Children of Dune, the sequel series, was pretty good too :D
Yeah the Dune Miniseries was.... Man if they did that Foundation, Childhood's End, and other Sci Fi.
Problem is they are a TV channel.
"Reality" shows suck. They are NOT reality and I refuse to watch them. This was the start of the fall of all TV!
Except for Nathan For You. It may be the most "real" or human TV show out there. Pushing cultural norms to their limits. It's fantastic.
@@TheRonster9319 I think nfy is less of a reality show, and more of an awesome prank show.
Prank shows ARE reality shows. Also: Face Off was good. Not as engaging as something actually telling a story, but if you’re one of those people who like TV on in the background while doing other stuff, it’s perfect. You can pay attention to the interesting parts (which are often really cool) and tune out the rest, and it won’t make a difference.
Reality shows are really just brain rot viewing. You don't even have to think, but just engage in a bunch of nonsense. You may as well devote your life to watching bad game shows. I am so glad that I rid myself of television years ago. I have some DVD and Blu-ray, so if I feel like watching something, I will select from those. I don't miss television at all. It is nice to not need it playing in the background all day every day.
Pre scripted reality tv shows trying to pass as "realistic"
Ever notice no reality tv stars are movie stars. Real people are boring.
That's why acting exists.
Warehouse 13 was their peak, all the bogus "Ghost Hunters" type reality crap isn't worth turning on the TV for...
And the universe building stuff (even if it was just fan service) between Eureka, Alphas, and WH13 was great. Shame none of it went anywhere.
Loved Warehouse 13 only saw an handful of episodes but it was awesome
I agree WH13 was their peak.
I love W13 a ton but it wasn't in the same league as BSG. battlestar could legit hold its own against breaking bad or mad men in terms of quality and complexity. W13, as much as I loved it, was just Friday 13th the series with a bit of the x files and fringe thrown in.
@@medes5597 After living through the original BSG when it was hot in the 80's, I never really had much interest (or the paid subscription to watch) in the (1st) re-boot - although Tricia Helfer (Edi from Mass Effect) would always be worth watching. Liked WH13 much, much better than the X-files because of its fun mix of comedy, great acting (Aside from Gillian Anderson, did the X-files really ever have that?), fun cases (never very gross or unexpectedly weird), and imaginative plot twists. Too bad SyFi abandoned good dramas like Eureka and WH13 for too much bogus reality TV after they ended... Love Babylon 5 too, such a well written and produced show... So nice to be able to stream and binge watch all the old, good shows these days! To each their own, enjoy it!
Same thing happened to history went from how it's made and historical documentaries to ancient aliens and extra testicles... I mean terrestrials
Shame really
my friends would order a pizza and we would get together and watch 'how its made' and discuss those amazing historical docu-dramas...hell I learned more history then I ever did in school.
I must admit, I really love Ancient Aliens. Guilty pleasure.
"Ancient Aliens" would be a better fit for Syfy.
I would argue that even during it's heyday all they did was cover WWII for the umpteen times.
They cancelled the expanse, Krypton, the magicians, 12 monkeys (even these 2 shows had an ending it wasn't the directors full vision they were forced to finish them). They cancelled all may favorite shows, i'll never watch a syfy show ever
How about "Futurama," without The "comedy" channel's "death by 1-second cuts" commercial interrupter?
It's somewhat strange for me to even think of SyFy anymore. There was a time where it was MY favorite channel. You had the Stargates, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Farscape and many other things I never got into, but knew had followings. I still need to watch BSG at some point.
The only thing I've watched on it in recent years was Krypton and after that was cancelled I had reason to see what was left on it to watch. I'll always love/miss the Sci-Fi Channel, but Syfy... meh.
I used to only get cable for sci-fi, but started tuning out late 2000's. Shows seemed less science and more drama creeping in.
The magicians was so good and so underrated
I've NEVER heard of it, I'm more of a 80's and 90's Sci-Fi Channel kind-of-guy!
Gotta be that person, the books are better, but the show really nailed the casting!
@@michaelsimkins7078 The Magicians is on either Amazon Prime or NetFlix. I don't remember which... but it's pretty good if you like that genre... and now you can binge-watch the whole thing, with no cliff-hangers or months-long delays between seasons. Even better, it came to a planned and scheduled ending, so it ends pretty well.
I honestly loved their US version of Being Human, since I watched both versions as they aired, also it got me into Doctor Who as it aired, well, when they had the distribution rights, also, can't forget about Defiance, that show/game hybrid that... Utterly failed...
There was a lot of hidden gems and genre shows that you couldn't find elsewhere before broadband really took over. Sadly anything that really separated them from the pack has gone away. It was nice to have a channel dedicated to the weird and obscure but that means they'll forever lack mainstream appeal which anyone in it for the money would be against.
the show wasnt bad if you watch it threw, but the game... well the beta was good, then they locked the view into over the shoulder 3rd person with 1/3 or so of the screen taken up by the char model... and we stopped playing...
the shows a decent binge.. weekly.. i duno... i watched for a while then... well... life was busy back then... and... well... the games impact on the show was... weak sauce... didnt seem to mean much...
I think that Farscape was the most brilliant thing that was ever made and the Jim Henson company did an excellent job making the puppets
I loved Farscape
True
I loved Farscape too, never missed an episode, and that meant staying home on Friday night which I was happy to do because Farscape was worth it. Remember the promo breaks during commercials with the woman welcoming you to "sci-fi"? I could never get into Lexx which followed Farscape at 10 pm though.
Went to a couple Farscape conventions around the time of the cancellation and met the cast, they were all amazing.
@Spawndude Spawndude Aeryn Sun! She was hot...
man i remember when the channel logo was Sci-Fi and a little planet. looked so cool
I miss the Anime specials they used to have throughout the 90's and 2000's!
That's when I started watching anime. I remember looking forward to it every summer.
That's what got me started on anime to 😎🤙
@@joeparrigen4982 yesssss
I blame the bean counters, they ruin everything.
*Its like watching a rock climber loose his grip and frantically trying to latch on to anything, but panic just as they get a grip. Sooner or later they will either finally hold on to something or go splat.*
Me: I just find a this awesome new series! SYFY: Cancelled :)
I hate that Stargate of any type is no longer being made. I feel that losing Stargate as a franchise was definitely a loss to Sci-fi in general! R.I.P. Stargate!
@LTNetjak Indeed!
For some reason I get the feeling that if they had given the final Stargate series a few more seasons they would have kept the fantasy a little longer and kept momentum which would keep their channel alive.
Honestly iam kinda glad SG universe is dead, when i see what they done to ST, SW for example...
They should have never ended Atlantis to start Universe. Universe started out crap, they were trying to make another Galactica, but took out most of what stargate was about. Universe just started to get interesting and they pulled the plug,
@Somewon Yuno I think it mainly has to do with whether you were a die-hard SG1 fan. I went backwards, SGU then SGA then SG1. I think most people overrate SG1, it is not as good as all these people make it out to be, especially at the beginning.
Back when they were still "sci fi" they made the Dune mini series which I still love to this day. Once they became SyFy there was nothing on their programing that interested me.
Give channel zero a shot
Try out Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, Continuum or even Dark Matter, one of my personal favorites.
I remember when the Sci-Fi channel was home to Universal Monsters, the Universal-owned Hammer Horror films, MST3K, and reruns of Dark Shadows. It was the place to be during Halloween. Even after they began airing their original movies (which were mostly terrible), you'd still see the occasional Godzilla movie on there. It was a slow decline after the name change.
I loved when they aired horror movies back in the day. I saw stuff like the Puppet Master movies, Demonic Toys, Alligator, and others.
They also had the more experimental series Farscape and Lexx which catered to a more adult audience rather than to the largest common denominator with intentionally garbage movies like Lavantula and Sharknado. They can’t recapture the B-movie essence that made the channel unique with MST3K and the Hammer Horror films because movies made to be stupid lack heart and soul and feel just like a product, and who wants to check out a product?
Haven't watched SyFy in years. Loved it back in the day. GH & Josh Gates. Specials about the Blair Witch. Marathons of old Land of the Lost shows. Even reruns of Dark Shadows & Kolchak the Night Stalker.
Ghost adventures and wwe airing on syfy did it for me. I haven’t watched that channel in nearly a decade and just recently began to when it’s showing an old movie I like.
The cleveland browns analogy in the behind was gold! As a cleveland browns fan i can confirm that is accurate
I have not forgiven tham for cancelling "Dark Matter".
It was petty what they did there! Also I'm originally from Toronto and cancelling Dark Matter put a lot of people there out of work!
@@ChairmanMo
I too am from Toronto. Let me ask you, do you remember on some Friday nights but every Saturday after midnight they'd air the softcore cut of porn on the Space channel? Our SyFY? It would be just one but they did.
Dark Matter deserved better.
@@commentcopbadge6665 I know that Showcase did but not Space.
Totally unforgivable.
I miss SciFi. I loved The Outer Limits, all the Stargate's, BSG But now I'm hesitant to start anything because it is just gonna get canceled in the first season. With all the cord cutting going on Universal needs to figure out how to get this up on a recognized streaming platform.
I will say the Chucky series was a lot of fun...though that is a joint Syfy/USA collab. Granted, if you aren't into Child's Play it may not be your cup of tea, but I'd recommend anyone give it a shot.
it sucks that Happy was canceled, that show was fantastic (especially season 1)
Im glad you enjoyed it, because I really didn't like it.
I watched the first episode and forgot its existence for a long time. found it interesting but too weak for what it wanted to be.
I loved Happy!
When it starts, it really undersells the implications of the premise. But towards the end of the first season, and basically the whole second season, it seemed like the writers were trying to work out what all this crazy shit actually was.
In the Happy!verse, imaginary friends exist, and can gain power up to being able to affect the real world and mind control people, basically confirming that gods are powered by belief in them. Orcus, Happy, God, all just the result of people's belief.
That show had so much potential at the end of season 2. It's probably definitely too late, but god I wish someone would pick that show back up. Christopher Meloni was too good, Patton Oswalt is always a win, the amount of deep wtf sci-fi fantasy shit going on was spectacular, even if the writers hadn't quite planned it out right beforehand, and goddamnit, we need more Happy!
lol sry just really really really liked that show. Happy! was out of left field, something I didn't see coming. I was scrolling instagram and saw a grizzled Detective Stabler (i love SVU) billed as a hitman, then Patton Oswalt and I was sold. Even got other people into the show. But nahh wasn't enough. The people they gather data from didn't watch it.
IM FUCKIN PISSED THAT THEY CANCELED IT
This is a public service announcement: Watch Farscape. All four seasons are on Amazon Prime Video.
Not to mention they're FREE on Prime Video. Watch this wonderfully weird show!
What is it about?
@@DiaXisHD one of the best hard SciFi series to come from the golden age of the channel. I literally remember the day it first aired. Hilariously enough I didn't watch it then. I was too interested in playing Zelda, Ocarina of Time. But it is seriously one of the best. It's about a test pilot astronaut who was pulled into a wormhole and is spat out on the far side of the galaxy then is caught in the middle of a prison break.
@@DiaXisHD I would describe it as the source material for Guardians of the Galaxy. Way weirder and definitely not suitable for children under 14. And I'm not so sure about 14-16. A lot of the shows are quite violent.
Farscape is, in my opinion, the greatest sci-fi show of probably the last 25 or so years. It was great, brilliant, had a sense of humor, and the they kept changing things on a regular basis so as to keep it interesting.
Props to Sci-Fi for being the first American cable channel with a dedicated anime block, yes, even before Toonami!
When they refused to renew The Expanse I never tuned into this channel again.
And ironically they reported about is renewal on Amazon Prime, look it up.
Language trivia time: In Polish "syfy" ("y" pronounced as "y" in the name Wynn) is a plural slang term for zits/pimples (and other common acne-related ailments). It is also used to describe a product or a service of a bad quality. So that's probably why it went downhill.
That's why they didn't change the name in Poland. Although I always heard that it was what you called syphillis.
@@nt300uk No, you heard wrong. Syphilis is called kiła.
As if Poland has any entertainment industry to boast of.
@@TheFourthWinchester Go watch Seksmisja. A very funny Polish movie from the 90s.
@@UltimatePerfection Only one movie in decades. Says everything.
90s SciFi channel was so great. That's where I was introduced to MST3K, and they even had a "Caption This" game on their website where you could riff screenshots of what was currently playing (a lot of Dark Shadows). And apparently David Lynch even directed a few bumpers.
Man SyFy really screwed up. They have cancelled so many great shows like Dark Matter that I have zero sympathy for them. They have really ticked me off more times than I can count.
I miss Beyond Reality.
Dark Matter killed itself by killing off their everyman character who was the one person most people could identify with and the closest they had to a main character.
Farscape is my favorite show that Syfy ever made (The Expanse is a close second).
I remember waiting with baited breath for the SciFi channel to launch. For weeks they just had a graphic running with a bouncing ball on the screen counting down until they went live.
You glossed over the "Let's cancel these top rated shows because my husband doesn't get it," that
@@lenarr9821 ScFy when it was called Sci Fi would cancel shows because the Network Head Bonnie Hammer's husband didn't get the show. Farscape, Invisible Man were two of them. She ushered in the era of John Edwards and low budget shlock. It kept the channel going but did nothing for the fans.
@@cryptking6283 Omg, I never thought my opinion of that "please my man" attitude could get lower.
@@celiashen5490 Right??
@@cryptking6283 THAT'S why they cancelled my beloved Farscape?!
@@WobblesandBean And G vs E, Invisible Man and others. Even ruined Syndication deals while they were at it.
I didn't start following SyFy until the last couple years, and the show that got me to treat it seriously was "Krypton" (I haven't seen many other SyFy original series, so I can't speak to them), and then "Krypton" got cancelled and I was incredibly disappointed.
Krypton sucks
Oh it’s too cerebral for you.
I was in a focus group to watch the pilot for Krypton. I got $70!
I will never forgive them for cancelling SGU and replacing it with COPS and wrestling.
They should have at least done what they did with Farscape, they at least made a finale 2 part for that show and they should have done the same for SGU!
As a wrestling fan, I'm so conflicted, but I couldn't agree more.
@@TheDatabaseNetwork I'm a wrestling fan. WWECW was a joke.
@@martinprehjan9944 Farscape earned it, SG didn’t.
@@007Fusiion ...agreed! Farscape was a much better show!
Back on Friday night when Farscape, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica,... those were the days... And omg, the most recent season of the expanse was great. Syfy was stupid to let it go...
If syfy could commit to anything the way they committed to stargate, they'd be golden, in my opinion. They should have taken farscape much further as well- seems like they cannibalized it for doubling down on stargate, which I think was a mistake since SG1 was on its last legs anyway.
@@maxwellschmidt235 Their mistake was "a new movie every Friday"... Needless to say, all those movies were low budget crap. Hell, it would have been better to have Farscape run for 2 months solo on Friday, then SG-1 for two months solo on Friday, etc.. and rotate through the year...
"SCIFI" was dead to me when Saturday Anime ended.
Anime has become kind of hard to find -- maybe that is a direction they could go.
I loved it when they played anime... Robot Carnival, Vampire Hunter D, and Lensman. That was during an era when American youth were starving for anime.
first time i saw Akira 😭
I quit after Faceoff was canned. I'll watch Futurama until they take it off. Then I'll move on. Who the Hell thinks sc fi fans would watch wrestling? Why won't that "sport" die?
@@JustSomeGoy yeah my buddy watched the first broadcast and was like dude this shit is crazy. Watched it and had to go watch enough anime to attain Otaku status.
I grew up on the Incredible Hulk reruns. That was my favorite era of Sci-Fi.
They didn’t even pickup a Kevin Bacon led Tremors series that already had a pilot shot.
I will never forgive them for that. Kevin Bacon's big return to the franchise cancelled before it ever had a a chance.
They HAD a Tremors series with Burt that only lasted one season.
Simple it's no longer the SyFy channel, just like G4 in its twilight years was no longer G4
When I was a kid, I would spend hours looking through the scheduled programming for the Sci-Fi Channel. I would set every horror and monster movie to record. My mom didn't let me rent violent or gory movies from Family Video, so the Sci-Fi Channel was my only contact with that kind of content. The Sci-Fi Channel is actually where I first watched the 2001 remake of _Thirteen Ghosts,_ which, to this day, is still one of my favorite movies. After they rebranded as the SyFy Channel, they became a warehouse for gimmicky, self-aware horror movies. It's a shame, really.
I miss Face Off.
The _Channel Zero_ series is legitimately really, really good. It’s the first time in a while I tuned into watch an original Syfy property and unironically enjoyed it.
This past weekend, the Syfy channel literally had the "Rush Hour" movies on. That's like airing "Drive" on Comedy Central.
Battle star Galactica, the expanse, dark matter. Twelve monkeys
I miss Dark Matter so so much. I wanted another season.
Miss Marvvel , yes. It was good. And once they cancelled that I was through with them . No other channel cancels as many great shows as SyFy.
It was infuriating when they cancelled Dark Matter, but kept KIlljoys. That's when I gave up entirely. I was so glad that The Expanse was picked up by Amazon, as it was out from under SyFy's control.
The Magicians got really good from season 3 onwards though- I even think they slightly upped the budget for it from that point onwards
It got really good after s5e13
@@anduinlothar9906 Is it still good?
I gave it a go. Got most of the way through season 2 and realised it had no story. It was crap.
It's a bit silly to expect someone to endure or skip 3 or 5 seasons of a show to get to the good parts.
One of my favorite things that Scifi/Syfy ever did was "Seeing Ear Theater." The idea was to reinvigorate the then-dead concept of the radio drama, and I had one of their compilations on cassette tape. That right there? That I think was the genesis of the modern fiction Podcast. You can draw a direct line from Seeing Ear Theater to things like the No Sleep Podcast and Homecoming. It's amazing, and groundbreaking, and they have it up still on the Internet Archive! It's great stuff, and it just shows how influential Scifi was with it's experimentation.
When they killed Farscape and didn't continue the Dune series after Children of Dune. I was out..
How the hell did you go through this entire video without mentioning the TV show 12 Monkeys? It is a masterpiece.
I enjoyed that show, but I never saw the conclusion. That's because they ran the entire final season in like one weekend or something like that I recall. That was really stupid. I tried to record it and did something wrong so I got some of it but not all of it never did see how it ended.
Eureka is hands down one of the best TV shows ever. It's an absolute travesty that it wasn't more popular.
The SYFY Channel had cheap, Asylum movies long before Sharknado. I remember watching them every Saturday as a kid
Yeah, he totally missed the point of Sharknado. It was making fun of those terrible 'serious' movies about 2 headed sharks and prehistoric gators and all that garbage. They'd been showing that stuff forever....
I've had beef with this channel since the ending of Farscape. They just keep screwing up.
Yep.
It's been painful to watch the decline of what was once my favorite channel. I helped petition our cable company in Tallahassee to offer The Sci-Fi Channel when it first launched. I was a big fan of Farscape, Lexx, the Stargate franchise, some seasons of Eureka and The Magicians, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Alphas, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary (no, seriously!), Tripping the Rift, The Outer Limits, The Expanse and several of the Sci-Fi Original miniseries, like The Lost Room, Stephen Spielberg's Taken, 5ive Days to Midnight, Frank Herbert's Dune and Children of Dune, Ascension , Firestarter: Rekindled, etc. It was nice while it lasted. Here's to good memories.
It's the channel that got me into the Guyver franchise, when they were the only channel to release Guyver 2 Dark Hero back in the 90s I became an instant fan.