I’m a fan of good science fiction TV shows. I’m especially a fan of good British SF shows.
I was quite excited to discover that Channel Nine in Australia would be showing the 2008 series of the BBC SF show, Survivors. Originally created in the 70s by Terry Nation (the guy who created the Daleks for Doctor Who), the reimaging of the show had been moderately well received in the UK, so I was very interested to see it for myself.
The first episode was shown last week, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I was hopeful for the second episode a couple of days ago… but it became upon viewing it that something was wrong. The pacing was off. The musical cues skipped around and were incomplete.
Upon reviewing the information for the show, I discovered why: instead of this being Episode 2, this was an edited version of Episodes 2, 3 and half of 4 from the original release. To make things worse, to fit it into the timeslot, they’d taken material out.
How much material? This is where it gets intolerable: Each episode of the original series is 58 minutes long. When you put two and a half episodes together, that makes approximately 145 minutes of material. You could probably save another 2-3 minute by taking out the credits.
This 142 minutes was shown in a 2-hour slot. So, you’ve already lost 22 minutes of material. Ah, but this is a commercial channel, so there were ad breaks. 142 minutes into 80 minutes of showing time.
That’s about an hour of material missing. No wonder it felt wrong. So, instead of getting all of Survivors, we got less than 60% of the show. Talk about outrageous.
Commercial TV is not your friend. I buy DVDs of anything I actually want to see.
Friendless
I pretty much do too these days. It’s how I saw all of Fringe, Firefly, Supernatural, etc.
It’s just a bit harder when it’s not out yet…