Fancast: Inside TV

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Welcome to the launch of Sci Fi Tracker, your one stop portal to television’s borgs, bogeymen and other bizarre beings.

It’s a happenin’ time in many well-known and closely monitored alternate universes. Of course, it’s frakin’ impossible to ignore the final flight path of our beloved Battlestar as it careens toward Earth, ejecting that last Cylon from the closet before docking permanently. Doctor Who is looking pretty damn good for his age while continuing to rack up those frequent flyer miles, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles will be blasting its way back into your living room come September. New shows like Fringe and Dollhouse are poised to infiltrate this lineup, while the ghosts of certain bygone fan favorites (Jericho, anyone?) still lurk in the shadows, refusing to go gently into that good (albeit radiation-soaked) night.

I rather enjoyed the inaugural episode of Fear Itself last week. Pretty gutsy stuff for a network. When was the last time we were treated to the sight of someone’s lips being sewn shut during prime time viewing hours? (In the pilot of Millennium, it turns out, as

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Ghost Hunters – and T.A.P.S. (The Atlantic Paranormal Society), whose filmed investigations provide content for the show in question - can’t help but spark debate with that whole, “Do ghosts exist? Discuss!” premise. The inherent loopholes of metaphysical musings are large enough that a fully-grown human with a sheet draped over his head could, in theory, meander through those loopholes quite comfortably on his way to stomp around in the attic and groan eerily for the benefit of a TV camera crew.

Yes, the show proves an easy target for the pragmatic when it comes to dissecting evidence. Orbs captured on film? Just a wayward mote of dust doing the Texas two-step with some refracted light. Apparitions captured by thermal imaging equipment? Who’s to say that’s not the reflection of the sound guy in a nearby mirror? There’s a whole lotta Ghost Hunters debunking and debating going on across the web, not surprisingly. Case in point - meet SAPS (short for “Skeptical Analysis of the Paranormal Society”) – an organization with a wealth of debunking experiments, statistics, and studies to show you. Elsewhere, within a lively discussion on the JREF forum, a poster named Glenn ponders how ghost meters are calibrated, since, “Unless you have a captured ghost to use as a traceable standard, any meter is useless.”

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

You have to feel sorry for the crew of Battlestar Galactica. All that pining away for Earth - season in, season out - only to discover that the planet has evidently met with the business end of a thermonuclear winter. Or so it seems. Maybe the Thirteenth Colony merely met with the business end of Jack Nicholson. It was a mere twenty-four hours or so prior to Battlestar touching down on terra firma that Jack's beloved Lakers somehow bungled a twenty-five point lead and choked on their home turf in Game 4 of the playoffs against the Celtics. And we've all seen Jack get mad, right? He cleaves doors open with axes. He channels Joan Crawford on crack as he berates our inability to handle the truth. The man is a walking H-bomb, for frak's sake.

It could happen.

And yet, while the Sci Fi Channel has been continuously reassuring us that "All! Will! Be! Revealed!", I somehow rather doubt that this potential backstory will be amongst the shocking revelations yet to come.

[watch the full Hand of God episode]

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

[see more hot Jericho photos]

While watching Doctor Who this past Friday night, the commercial for www.savejerichoagain.com blossomed before my eyes - a veritable mushroom cloud of undying grassroots tenacity.

First, the backstory, in case you’re out of the loop regarding Jericho’s current status: following the first cancellation of Jericho by CBS after its first season, it was then revived for a special abbreviated run of season two, which was canceled a second time due to “poor Nielson ratings” (more regarding this antiquated anomaly of modern television in a moment). [watch full episodes from seasons one and two here] The show’s producers are currently engaged in negotiations to attempt to find Jericho a second (and hopefully longer-term) home for a third season, and beyond, on a cable-based network.

Were I unencumbered by deadlines, I would have gladly produced pie charts and line graphs to illustrate the preceding paragraph, and instead of wading through expository muck, you would now be ogling a dizzying array of colors and fancy fonts, pie slices, and tumultuous upward and downward spikes of activity winding a treacherous path between an X axis labeled “True Grit, Jericho Style” and a Y axis labeled, “The Phantom Menace of An Outdated TV Ratings System, Not To Mention Cultural Degradation Via Reality Show Saturation and Some Other Insidious Stuff” - a plodding and heavy label, to be sure, but what can I say? That Y axis is abuzz with all sorts of untoward activity.

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Do they really see dead people? Or just a future in show biz?

I’m talking of course about the new reality show Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal on A&E. I took a gander this past Monday night. We meet three kids, ranging in age from 10 to 14, who are kicking it Haley Joel Osment style.

The show’s creators haven’t exactly come up with a bulletproof premise, but one certainly finds oneself reluctant to throw rocks at it. I mean, they trot out some kids who claim to possess psychic abilities and who are tormented by such. Geez - who wants to make fun of tormented kids? “I don’t want the other kids to make fun of me or think I’m a freak!” is a familiar and heartfelt refrain heard here. Since all of these kids have come of age with the reality TV craze in full swing, perhaps we can cut them some slack for being under the impression that such confessions are normally made in the presence of a camera crew, and not confined to a diary with a lock on it which is then tucked furtively under a mattress.

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Scare Tactics is baaaaaaaaaaack. The newest incarnation drops Tracy Morgan – currently flying high from his success on 30 Rock – into the host seat of the Sci Fi Channel’s popular hidden camera show, where Candid Camera meets Nightmare on Elm Street…..and Rosemary’s Baby…..and Fargo……and…..you get the idea.

Morgan, along with one of Scare Tactic’s executive producers and creators, Scott Hallock, faced horror of a more mundane variety – we the press [cue the Psycho shower scene music] – and fielded calls about the upcoming season in a round-table discussion this past Monday. Here are some hair-raising highlights:

Why did you sign on for this, Tracy? What interested you, and what's going to be different this season from the past?
Tracy: Well, I'm a fan of Scare Tactics, and I love the show. I was surprised when they asked me to do it. I was really happy to do it. I was excited. Besides that, I'm a big fan, long-time fan of the Twilight Zone, so this is my rendition of Rod Sterling. I got to be Rod Sterling! So I'm just excited to do it, you know.

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

You have to laugh at the report currently posted on Nielsen’s site, which insists, “TV Websites Grow More Popular, But Viewers Still Prefer Their TV Sets, According to Nielsen and CTAM.” Yeaaaaah. Isn’t that a bit like the National Rifle Association conducting studies which reveal findings like, “Guns don’t kill people – people do,” as Eddie Izzard once so deftly pointed out?

Within the sci fi genre, Nielsen seems to be responsible for nearly as many premature demises as have been cumulatively churned out by Law & Order and its myriad spawn. ‘Tis often the television industry’s equivalent of a scarlet A upon the chest when a well-written program finds itself standing under the sci fi umbrella (which often fails to protect those beneath it from falling ratings – via whatever archaic measures (abacas, maybe?) those are calculated nowadays). How many more quality shows like Battlestar and Jericho must fall by the wayside before things change? And those are only the current casualties. (Farscape, anyone? Incidentally, if you’re feeling nostalgic for life aboard Moya, and space-bound Muppets (they aren’t all Jar Jar Binks bad!), feast your eyes here….)

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Robb Demarest – the no-nonsense, globe-trotting lead investigator from Ghost Hunters International – recently took time out of his hectic schedule while on location in Romania to check in with Fancast. He discussed the July 9 start of a second season of Ghost Hunters International [watch full episodes from last season here]; why skepticism is a good thing in the field of paranormal investigation; and which TV shows he personally likes to catch up on when he’s not otherwise traveling to the ends of the earth (although, as luck would have it, Romania offers up soap operas that are awfully compelling in their own right).

Hi, Robb. How are you?
Good, thank you. Surviving the Romanian heat.

Have you encountered Vlad the Impaler yet? Well, you’re not in “Transylvania” per se……..
I’m actually in a position right now where I can see that location….

So, what do fans of the show have to look forward to with the new season?
There are a couple changes as far as the team - trying some new people out, and some people switch in and out. Certainly Dustin Pari coming back – from the original Ghost Hunters – has been tremendous. He’s a top notch investigator as well as someone who always gives the needed brevity when things are getting a little too thick. He has been a very welcome addition. We actually had to borrow – we got in a sticky situation, we were a member short – and we’ve borrowed Kris Williams from Ghost Hunters. It was her first time out of the country, and

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Jason Moore – alias “Rubber Poultry” to those who know their way around cyberspace – is the kind of fan that most sci fi TV shows, and those responsible for making and marketing them, would kill to call their own. Any forward-thinking television executive would be well-advised to make some room in the annual budget for human cloning and duplicate this Ranger posthaste. Why? Well, if you’d been following the Save Jericho Again campaign, you wouldn’t have to ask such a silly question. But feel free to pull up a chair, sit back and enjoy the tale, anyway.

In Moore we encounter a man capable of far more than sitting back within the folds of a couch and gawking passively when watching his favorite show, Jericho - nor was he about to sit back and mourn passively when said show was cut down in its prime for no good reason. [Watch Jericho here, staring with the pilot.] In perhaps one of the best incarnations of David and Goliath in recent television history, Jason, with the help of an army of Jericho Rangers, dropped a proverbial bomb or two of his own after the streets of Jericho were evacuated not due to nuclear fallout, but network ineptitude. Moore – who wields mad production skills thanks to his “day job” - created the television commercial that put the Jericho saga front and center in the living rooms of a whole lotta people who might not have otherwise realized that some of the most epic sci fi battles going down at present don’t necessarily take place on a spaceship – or even on a television screen.

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Recently Robert Picardo and executive producer Joseph Mallozzi expounded upon what the new season of Stargate Atlantis will bring, particularly as Picardo's character - the deeply bureaucratic Woolsey - assumes command. In an action-packed and in-depth Q&A ranging from the new season to Amanda Tapping's departure to what's in store for the 100th episode, the two gentlemen explore why the Stargate franchise continues to draw fans from all corners of the universe:

What’s coming up story-wise and for the teams this new season, and how it’s going to be different from previous seasons?

Joseph Mallozzi: In previous seasons…………season one was set up, and season two was telling. Season three, I think we’re stepping out and exploring more, sort of a variety of stories.

Throughout those first three seasons, though, we were always securing resources with SG-1 - be it a series or the movies and as a result I guess ……….because of the time constriction, we weren’t able to really sit back and plan out the season quite as concisely as we could have, which is what we did in season four.

We realized there was an imbalance in some of the stories being told. I mean, there were a lot of McKay stories, but one of the things we set out to do in season four that we did in season five as well was give each character a story and a spotlight and really focus on them, and give them a chance to really step up. We did that once again in season five. Where in season four we wanted to deal with some of our standing villains. We kicked off the Wraith/Replicator war. We got rid of the Replicators. We weakened the Wraith and now season five is kind of a step forward in a couple of ways. One, in a big picture way, we are introducing a couple of new races. We’re suggesting that with the Wraith weakened in the Pegasus Galaxy, there are a number of civilizations that are basically standing up and assuming power.

In case you haven’t yet had the pleasure of catching this particular gem, Eureka is what might happen if the Nerds Gone Wild tour bus parked and plied brainiacs with unlimited government funds instead of cheap liquor.

Eureka’s Colin Ferguson and executive producer Jaime Paglia played tourist guide and fielded questions yesterday in an effort to point out some of the scenic highlights of our favorite small town. The two gents hint at what to expect in Season Three as Carter and Allison continue to dance the “Will they or won’t they?” tango, and Frances Fisher slithers into town as an ominous Cheney-esque corporate mastermind nicknamed, “The Fixer.” (Because, let’s face it - if she were nicknamed “The Nice Lady Who Makes Great Homemade Brownies,” there’d be a lot less intrigue to look forward to….)

Following are some of the rollicking Q&A highlights:

Colin, your character is a smart guy but, because of the circumstances, he still is the village idiot. What's it like to play the least intelligent guy in town?

Colin Ferguson: Well, you look for things you do well. I think it's probably most challenging from a writing aspect, because I have to be in all these scenes, and yet I can't really contribute in anything more than a problem solving capacity. It'd be great if my character had [a] science background, because I could sort of jump in like - oh, well this connects to this, and don't forget about this………….. I can't. I can only sort of ask questions. And so it's definitely challenging. For me, it's sort of an exercise in trying to stay alive in the scene………

Jaime Paglia: An exercise in futility.