[rodgerd]

My nerdy peer group say they want e.g. better sci fi & fantasy and worship Joss Whedon. They also solidly torrented Firefly, Dollhouse, etc. Then they got bitter that Whedon can't get TV series made any more.

[existencebox]

I don't normally go on "pop culture rants", but as an ex-whedon fan, he's the worst of the bunch for me, and I'd be more than happy to see his work relegated in favor of more unique IP. I can't deny the "technical quality" of his work, but eventually you watch enough sci-fi and realize that while of course everyone pulls heavily from their predecessors, Whedon takes the kitchen sink. Dollhouse was the breaking point for me, both in terms of it being a weak, less predictive imitation of RuR, and the fact that at the end of the day, he has a pattern. He has good actors for that pattern, but you see them enough times and seeing them more times isn't really adding to anything.

There's a lot of noise about mourning the death of sci-fi/cinema etc, but the gems have always been the outliers. Metropolis and later Dark City, Delicatessen/City of Lost Children, Firefly(yes, I'll give him that one, outlaw star has some things to say, but that plot trope was already as old as the Romans.), Primer, Dark Mirror, I'm rambling at this point and this is totally going to spawn another sci fi binge, but my takeaway is that there's been a reasonable stream of surprisingly good sci fi that has popped up in unpredictable places over the years, even into the torrent era. I have some faith it will continue to bubble to the top. My theory is that the only reason good sci fi seems so rare now is that it has become so swamped by bad sci fi as it has begun to fill the mainstream.

[lmm]

There was a period in the '90s when it really felt like no sci-fi was being made (except in animé). I mean, Star Trek TNG (franchise!) carried on, but that was about it. Partly the difference seems to be the BBC (which really punches above its weight in the genre); Doctor Who had been cancelled, mostly because the creators started putting too much effort into politics and too little into telling good stories, and their less-long-running efforts seemed to disappear around the same time. Partly there was less demand for it in an age of political optimism; sci-fi has always been a way to address issues we don't dare tackle head-on (see many post-2001 shows e.g. new BSG) and there was a brief period where we really thought we'd lived through the end of history. But the theory I found most interesting is that fandom itself killed sci-fi; all the people who should have been writing stories and becoming the next generation of creators instead wrote 'zines and participated in the con scene (wish I could find the reference where I first saw this).

[dragonwriter]

If you mean on TV, I think from the dawn of TV virtually no sci fi being made has been pretty much the norm. (Unless you use a broad enough definition that that wouldn't be true, even excluding ST:TNG, of the early 1990s, either.)

[lmm]

I think there's still a distinct dip in the '90s. In the '80s we have the last gasp of Dr Who, we have The Tripods, V, Day of the Triffids, and a bunch of one-off adaptations. In the '00s we have big remakes of Dr Who and Battlestar Galactica (hell, even V), or the aforemaligned Dollhouse which for all its flaws was more willing to engage with sci-fi themes than, I dunno, Quantum Leap.

I've neglected Babylon 5, which is probably unfair to the show, but I feel like it never had the cultural impact of those '80s or '00s shows. The '90s drought feels real to me, but maybe it's just a matter of perception.

[dragonwriter]

I suspect this is more a matter of what "sci fi" you like. The 1990s had lots of sci fi TV shows, including, among others:

X-Files

SeaQuest DSV / SeaQuest 2032

More Star Trek than you can shake a stick at (TNG, DS9, and VOY cover the whole decade, with most of it having two at once)

Babylon 5

Sliders

Stargate SG-1

Farscape

I think there's a better case that the 1990s were the high-point of sci fi popularity on TV than a particular drought (though I can see a case that there was something of a drought starting sometime in the mid-1980s through 1993.)

[existencebox]

You (and parent posts) leave out a few important mentions. SG1, of course; but then some more b-rate but still watchable shows like Andromeda. Stargate at least had some sort of impact, I like to think.

[dragonwriter]

Joss Whedon can't get TV series made any more?

And this in a thread that's about Hollywood's focus on franchises, and particular superhero franchises like Marvel's?

That's...funny.

[rodgerd]

He can't get his own work made any more, no. He's back to where he was in the 80s, working on other people's ideas.

[dragonwriter]

Agents of SHIELD may be part of a broader franchise, but its still Whedon's creation. And Whedon's position in TV now is hardly much like "where he was in the 80s" -- where his TV work was story editing on Roseanne and writing a handful of episodes of that same series.