That brings us to the next challenge for science fiction television: It has to explain almost everything.
#The expanse series tv#
Science fiction TV has to explain everything from the ground up That’s not to say that space battles and shootouts are off limits entirely but creating 10 or more hours of science fiction TV inevitably necessitates a lot of scenes of people standing around and talking to each other. Much more than feature films, TV science fiction almost always has to be built around conversation rather than action set pieces or otherworldly visual spectacle.
The show boasts consistently impressive special effects sequences, like the Martian power armor battle that opens the second season - but there’s also an awful lot of diplomacy and negotiation going on. The spaceship and settlement sets are impressive, but most are used repeatedly in order to wring maximum value out of each location.
There are three distinct factions - Earth, Mars, and the Belt, led by a loosely organized, quasi-terroristic Belters rights organization called the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance) - all of which are vying for political influence. Corey, the pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the show is set roughly 200 years in the future, after humans have colonized the solar system. You can see this dynamic at work on The Expanse. Game of Thrones, one of the most lavish and expensive shows on TV, reportedly costs somewhere between $6 million and $10 million per episode.) But fantasy at least has the advantage of being set in something that resembles the ancient past, which means producers can expect lots of scenes set in natural environments with nothing more expensive than a few horses and some sword props. (This is a problem for fantasy series, too, of course. This means expensive sets and effects can only be used sparingly, if at all. In any case, that money has to cover 10 or more hours of screen time. In contrast, few TV shows even come close to spending $100 million per season, and full-season budgets are often less than half of that: The production budget for Netflix's Marvel comics shows is reportedly around $200 million for five seasons spread over 60 episodes, and the first 10-episode season of Westworld cost about $100 million. For a two-hour film, that comes to nearly $1 million per minute of screen time. That makes science fiction a great fit for feature films, where it’s common for studio-backed sci-fi properties to spend well in excess of $100 million on a movie. But typically, they’re also incredibly expensive to produce, because visualizing the future inevitably requires custom-built sets and props and complex computer-generated effects.
From the sprawl of futuristic urban transportation systems to cramped spaceship interiors to the particulars of fashion, weaponry, and computing, most imaginary renderings of what the future will look like are inherently interesting. There’s a built-in visual appeal to most any science fiction world. The first obstacle any science fiction show has to reckon with is the budget. Science fiction is hard to produce well on a typical TV budget But it also helps to illustrate why the genre has had such a difficult time flourishing on the small screen in recent years, and why it’s so hard to make great science fiction TV. The series, which wraps up its second season on Syfy this week, was recently nominated for a Hugo Award - science fiction’s top honor - and even though its ratings are less than stellar, Syfy has renewed it for a third season.Ī lavishly produced, politically complex drama about interplanetary rivalries as humans reach beyond the solar system, The Expanse is, by nearly any measure, one of the most ambitious science fiction shows ever made. Despite this age of peak TV and the glut of original programming that has yielded some extremely popular genre series, including Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, science fiction has struggled to find a foothold, and most of what exists is essentially contemporary in setting (think Westworld or Person of Interes t).įor the kind of classic sci-fi built around spaceships and interplanetary relations, there’s really only one choice: The Expanse.įortunately, it’s a good choice.
For fans of serious science fiction, there aren’t too many options on TV these days.
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