How Sci-Fi Tampered with the Beginning of Farscape, Season #4 by RustySlinky

OTHER SCIENCE FICTION SERIES

How Sci-Fi Tampered with the Beginning of Farscape, Season #4

POSTED BY: RUSTYSLINKY
UPDATED: Thursday, March 27, 2003 01:21
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VIEWED: 1992
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Thursday, March 27, 2003 1:21 AM

Quote: The next “request” Kemper faced from the network was to alter the style of the show. “They were saying, if we could make it more like Stargate, everyone would love it,” he says.
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-Spoiler Warnings for season #4 and season #5
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SFX article on FS cancellation

Date: 03/25/2003
From: the_cadpig (at the DOM)

Main body of SFX article on Farscape's cancellation. Thanks go to Maayan for the scans at her blog.

Read it. Get angry. Go to www.savefarscape.com and get involved.

~cp

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Rarely has a show with so much potential been wrenched off our screens. And the bitterness in the Farscape camp is still palpable, as Paul Simpson found out when he met up with the cast and crew for the series’ post-mortem.
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The warehouse complex at Homebush Bay should be bustling with activity. But it’s dead.

Actors should be coming out of their trailers parked at the intersection of Moya Avenue and Talyn Way, and heading down to the makeup rooms, before cutting through the warehouses, or down narrow passageways to the set on which they’re filming.

In the production office, new directors should be sitting in the anterooms by the entrance, looking at maquettes made by Creature Shop Supervisor Dave Elsey of the alien races that are going to feature in their upcoming episode. The notice boards should be constantly changing with updated production schedules. Upstairs, around the large table in the writers’ room, David Kemper, Ricky Manning, Lil Taylor and the writers should be working out the broad strokes of five episodes ahead, while still breaking the story on the episode that’s due to start filming in a few days’ time.

But nobody is filming the fifth season of Farscape, and it looks as if it’ll be a long time before we know just why Crichton and Aeryn were “neutralised for inspection” at the end of the final episode. The cast and crew have scattered to the four corners of the Earth – some are in England, others in America.

Six months ago, at the start of September 2002, nearly everyone was on a high. The end of the fourth season was in sight, with only a few days of shooting left. The final episode, “Bad Timing”, was in the can. Only a few more segments for the documentary episode, “A Constellation Of Doubt”, needed to be filmed.

“I had been on location since four in the morning and was exhausted,” Gigi Edgley recalls. “So I decided to put some tunes on in my trailer and have a little dance, as aliens often do. I heard rapping outside. I thought it was Claudia, as we share trailers, asking for some quiet. I turned the music down and realised it was someone knocking on the door. My makeup artist popped her cheeky smile in and said, ‘Did you hear?’ ‘Hear what?’ ‘It’s over.’

“’What’s over?’ I asked. ‘It’s a hard wrap!’ she said. ‘Farscape’s finished.’

“’Yeah, I know,’ I said excitedly, ‘We go on holidays tomorrow.’ She replied, ‘No hon, that’s it. It’s not coming back. They’ve asked us to package up all the makeup goods and send them to the States.’

“’What? Oh frell, are you kidding? You’ve been playing with the hairspray again, haven’t you? No, this can’t be right! Shit, I’ve gotta tell my dad, my agent. I need a new job…’

“My nervous giggles fell to my trailer floor. ‘It’s lunch’, she says, ‘you coming?’

“Usually I stay in my trailer over lunch as Nebaris and sun don’t mix too well. There was no chance I was staying in my trailer today. I was done up head to toe in Nebari as they required Chi in all her fullness on this day. I stumbled out of my trailer in shock, and fumbled all my grey bits into the mini van to go down to location for lunch. The feeling was bizarre. Claudia and I gazed into each other’s eyes whilst we blurted on the phone to all the necessary people.”

Looking back, David Kemper notes that, “It was rancorous from the beginning, to a degree.” Although the Sci-Fi Channel gave the show a two-season pick up at the start of October 2001, there were some considerable strings attached, most important of which was that the show needed to widen its audience.

“What they were always worried about was that new people couldn’t get into the show, because it was semi-serialized,” Kemper recalls. “We pointed out that new people can’t get into NYPD Blue or The Sopranos either. You have to have good promotion and advertising.”

Kemper wasn’t concerned about the publicity part of the equation – “The people at Sci-Fi do great publicity,” he notes. What concerned him was the promotion of the series on air. “They brought in a new team of people, and we understood from the get-go that they didn’t understand the show or like the show. The stuff I was seeing told me there was something wrong. I said we’d do the best we could, but you can’t get people to come to a show in the fourth year without promoting it.”

The next “request” Kemper faced from the network was to alter the style of the show. “They were saying, if we could make it more like Stargate, everyone would love it,” he says. “I knew that was wrong. We’d piss off our core audience, and nobody new is going to know the show’s on the air if it’s not promoted properly. How do people watch The Sopranos? They have good publicity, which we had, and lots of promotion, which we didn’t have. Sci-Fi kept saying they didn’t have the money to do it."

The argument continued during the pre-production period. “We were getting, ‘Make it more like South Park’ – a small show on a small cable channel that got the cable channel a lot of heat,” Kemper continues. “In the end we said to them, ‘What do you want?’ and they said they wanted a bigger audience. We said, ‘That’s not our job. Our job is to make a good show that will hold a bigger audience, but you’ve got to deliver the bigger audience.’ Then they moved us to 10pm, and it seemed like a lot of things were stacking up against the show.”

Despite this, Kemper was determined to make the fourth year the best ever. The season opened with “Crichton Kicks”, which only featured Crichton, Chiana and Rygel from the crew, as well as introducing Raelee Hill as Sikozu. “There was a mandate to reintroduce the series with season four,” Ben Browder comments, “and with the number of people we had, I think that’s one of the reasons we started with Crichton alone and reintroduced the characters. We had a chance to give the new audience a chance to catch up.”

While Browder thinks this worked for newcomers, “I’m not sure it worked for the long-time audience because they immediately want all of the characters back. There’s a certain amount of frustration at the beginning of the year from people who want to see everyone back together. Where’s D’Argo? Where’s Aeryn? Crichton on his own was designed to reintroduce the series. It may not have been the best idea to have a drunken, crazed, bearded lunatic but I think that it was an interesting choice.”

“We turned the episode in to the network, and Sci-Fi’s attitude was, ‘This stinks!’” David Kemper recalls. “We pointed out that they couldn’t change it – the episode was completed, and we’d already done the next five episodes before we turned it in. They said that they needed Claudia to come back into the show earlier. But they knew that she wasn’t going to be there – she wasn’t even in the country at the time!”

“Crichton Kicks” had a knock-on effect throughout Farscape’s final year. “When we were making it, we were sure we had a hit, and we spent a lot of money,” Kemper explains. “We spent the whole year paying for it, trying to claw it back and doing magic tricks to keep the audience from knowing we were saving money. It was supposed to be the chance to bring new people in. We had the cover of TV Guide booked – that’s why Ben, Claudia, Andrew Prowse and I were in New York on 9/11. We had negotiated Ben on the cover, and also worked out coverage in Entertainment Weekly. We were counting on having a great episode that knocked everybody out, and we were counting on getting great on-air promotion. They were trying to shoot promos that made John Crichton into someone who slept with every alien dominatrix, and who was out to save the universe. I had to go to the President of Sci-Fi, Bonnie Hammer, and say, ‘Help, this is not our show!’”

Having made the decision to split the crew up at the end of the third season, Kemper took his time bringing the other characters back. D’Argo, Jool and Noranti appeared in the second episode, while Aeryn didn’t come back until episode five, “Promises”. “Anyone new watching this show can watch the cast being rebuilt piece by piece,” Kemper recalls explaining. “They won’t be confused as to who they are. They won’t come in and have nine people sitting around a table shouting at each other like a dysfunctional family. The whole beginning of the season was geared toward getting and keeping new fans, because if we didn’t we were going to be in trouble. A lot of our regular fans were complaining. We did the best we could, and it didn’t work. If we hadn’t done that, it would have been worse. We were on the bubble right till the end. In retrospect, you can say it was a mistake, and we didn’t get the new viewers. They didn’t come to look at the show. We didn’t double our available audience. In hindsight, the year would have been just as good developing the Farscape story, but the attempt back in that day was trying to service the possibility of new people.”

Claudia Black considers that the network didn’t understand the power of the romance between Crichton and Aeryn at the heart of Farscape. “I think they wanted to have a lot of new chicks coming in to add some more sex to the show,” she comments, “but even people who came to it who hadn’t watched it for long just saw the chemistry between us, and they were hooked. There was just something about it that was fun and entertaining when Crichton and Aeryn were hanging together. If you just put them in the same space it was exciting – but the network didn’t get that.”

Believing that he had two years worth of episodes, Kemper plotted accordingly. “The whole design from the beginning of the year was that the centrepiece of the season was going to be going to Earth at Halloween in the ‘70’s or ‘80’s, and then again in real time,” he says. “I knew there had to be another episode in the middle that referenced Earth, and that became the documentary episode. I wanted to set everyone up to think that Crichton is going home, and then he closes up the wormhole in the final episode and never sees his Dad again. He’s starting a new adventure. We thought season five might be the end, and I wanted people to be wondering at the end of the year what we had in mind for year five. It would have been really startling. There was a bigger design to the story. Crichton’s purpose was not to go home. That’s what the baby was about: there’s got to be a new reason for living if you’re not going home. The main titles for the fifth year would not have had the words ‘I’m trying to get home.’ His whole reason for living had changed. He knows it, and doesn’t want to go home any more.”

Kemper has always described each year of Farscape as being like a chapter in a book, and points out that “the show was going to take a hard turn at the end of the year, and start steamrolling to the end of the show at the end either of season five or the end of season six. This was the turning point in the book, two thirds of the way through. We were entering the final third.”

Although he won’t give too many details away, Kemper drops a few hints. “Francesca Buller played a re-occurring Scarran, Minister Of War Ahkna, who would have gone right through the fifth season, as would Duncan Young as Emperor Staleek,” he says. “Jool was not done with
Farscape. The fifth season and beyond would show that the Priests on Arnessk and what they did for a living may have had something further to do with way that Farscape unfolded. But Jool needed some time on her own with these people to fulfil what I had in mind. I would have loved to have done a whole crossdressing episode with Chiana and Aeryn in man’s clothes, Crichton and D’Argo in women’s clothes so they could find out about the other side. That’s a concept that really appealed to me.”

One element that Kemper won’t miss is finding out about the edits that the BBC have made to the series. “They chose to run us at an early time when kids are watching,” he says slightly bitterly. “I think it’s up to the broadcaster to appropriately programme a show. If you buy a show, you probably should try to run it where you can show what the film-makers made. Why do this? My attitude is, are the BBC the kind of librarians who would buy a book for a library and then tear out pages from the book because they don’t want people to see it? It’s defacing artwork. If the BBC do that, it show them to be bad programmers, because they can’t figure out where to run the show, and no patron of television. It makes them mercenary and cold. People worked really hard to make these films, and it’s either up to the parents not to let their children watch it, or the BBC should put it on at 10pm or whatever time is appropriate in your market, and not screw with it.”

Even now, six months later, there’s clearly a part of Kemper that finds the cancellation amazing. “They cancelled us when we were at our creative peak,” he says. “They pulled the plug on us. That staggered us. We were at our creative zenith. It wasn’t a creative decision. It was purely politics. All of a sudden we had people who didn’t get our show who had been lobbying since we refused to shoot the promos that we weren’t playing ball. What you have is a network that only has two original programmes cancelling 50% of its line up and it’s the one that gets critical praise!” -- SFX

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