COMET or EPIX
Comet is a digital broadcast network that MGM Television itself operates on behalf of the channel’s owner, Sinclair Television Group. It already has a bent toward the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres — and it has been running Stargate reruns for a couple of years now. Launched in October 2015, Comet is as close as it gets to an MGM sci-fi channel. It’s an “over-the-top” service, meaning that Comet is available both through local TV affiliates (in more than 100 national markets) and also through digital services, including major platforms such as Roku and Apple TV.
MGM also owns the premium cable channel Epix, launched in 2009. Epix does have some original scripted programming, including one from MGM Television: 10-episode Get Shorty premiered in August, 2017. But the channel has relatively low market reach: though it does offer viewers online streaming choices Epix has only one major, national carrier (Dish Network). Other major players including Comcast and DirecTV don’t carry it (and don’t plan to).
MGM actually took full control of Epix only last spring when it bought out partners Viacom and Lionsgate. This sort of home would bring Stargate full circle and back into the premium cable realm (SG-1 started on Showtime), and help the studio drive subscriptions to a young service.
UPDATE: Epix is now planning to launch a standalone, direct-to-consumer video subscription service (a la Netflix). MGM will supply original series to help acquire customers.
(MGM also owns the new family-friendly venture Light TV and well as ThisTV and a video-on-demand channel called Impact. It also programs the action-adventure network Charge! for Sinclair in an arrangement similar to Comet.)
Pros: Corporate “synergy”: MGM’s broadcast arms and TV production unit ultimately work for the same boss, and are rowing in the same direction.
Cons: Small channels with relatively low audience reach
A STREAMING GIANT
Netflix is perhaps the biggest player in town these days, spending more than $7 billion on content in 2018 (plus another $2 billion on marketing). It boasts a subscriber base of 118 million people — a number one analyst thinks could reach 200 million by the year 2020. The company also has an effective international distribution strategy, with many original series releasing simultaneously all over the globe.
The other big players in the online streaming television game are, of course, Hulu and Amazon. From House of Cards and The Crown to Orange is the New Black and Transparent, these original dramas get good budgets, lots of marketing, and viral viewership. MGM already has experience here, too: it produces the critical hit The Handmaid’s Tale, winner of the 2017 Emmy for Best Drama, for Hulu.
Netflix in particular has emerged as genre-friendly. Stranger Things has the horror nostalgia market covered, while Black Mirror is the most talk-about anthology on TV today. Marvel’s Daredevil and his Defenders friends give Netflix its own, exclusive comic book universe. Brad Wright’s Travelers is a smartly written and acted time travel show, and this month the ambitious, hard sci-fi drama Altered Carbon dropped. And on the more family-friendly side, a remake of Lost in Space will debut in April.
What Netflix doesn’t have is an established, sprawling sci-fi franchise to call its own. And this is where Stargate can deliver (especially with a deal that brings the previous series to Netflix). What would this look like in practical terms? If other Netflix originals are the pattern we’re talking about a 13-episode season, well-funded, with off-network advertising and ready to stream in its entirety in every country on the same day.That’s ideal for the fourth Stargate series for a number of reasons. The budget is right, and the audience exposure is great (just look at how quickly Stranger Things became a pop culture phenomenon). There is creative flexibility, while giving the show space to be as episodic or as serialized as it needs to be. Fans can share it with their friends, and new viewers can stumble upon it on casual a Friday night. And the millions-strong Stargate fan community all over the world can, for the very first time in franchise history, enjoy new content at the same time and on an equal footing.
Pros: International, simultaneous release; money to burn; and exposure to a massive audience
Cons: Cons … cons … hmmm. I’m drawing a blank here. I guess dropping 13 episodes all at once makes it harder to avoid spoilers online? UPDATE 2019: But see this unsettling bit of reporting on Netflix’s business model, which seems to be incentivizing it to cancel shows after just 20 or 30 episodes.
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
In any case, one thing about Stargate Origins should still be said: The short-form Web series can, and ought to, continue regardless. Additional Origins stories set at any point in the timeline can run on Stargate Command in parallel to a full-length show, offering original in-canon stories and providing quality, exclusive content — even enough to justify a conservative subscription model.
This is an exciting picture: a short-form, online series that explores the origins of characters and races we know and love, while a long-form Netflix show assembles a new Stargate team to blaze a trail into the future.
It’s likely that MGM Television is keeping a close eye on Stargate Origins and its reception as it weighs where to take the franchise next. And it sure isn’t a bad sign that the studio has recently expanded its scripted television team. It looks as though the question now is not if Stargate will return to television, but when and how.
MGM, I hope you’re reading. As someone who has been deeply invested in Stargate for 20 years now, here is my guiding question:
What is in the best interests of the Stargate franchise and its long-term health?
Answering this obviously requires a complex calculation of creative and financial factors. But it should include a strategy that exposes Stargate (new and old) to new viewers, giving people who are already paying for other content (e.g. through their Netflix subscription) the chance to discover this sci-fi gem. It should be a plan that works for newcomers and casual viewers.
And it should also work for the fans — those of us who in one way or another have poured years of love into Stargate. That entails more than keeping up 17 seasons of story continuity (as important as this is). In a time when we are no longer dependent upon broadcasters in order to access great stories, the plan for the fourth show ought to treat those fans — in the U.S. and Canada, in Italy and Croatia, in France and the Philippines, in Brazil and Ghana — equally.
What do you think? Post your thoughts below, or tag @GateWorld on Twitter.
NEXT UP: In a future post we’ll consider the options for when (and where) a fourth Stargate series should be set. Stay tuned!
Great piece. My only disagreement is with the anti-SyFy sentiment when it comes to SGU. The truth of the matter is that SyFy committed to 2 seasons of SGU before anything was filmed. The producers knew, ahead of time, that they were getting 40 episodes to film. They also knew, quite early, that it wasn’t doing well. They had the power, in their hands, to wrap the story up neatly by the end of the 40th episode, but *they* chose to end it on a cliff hanger. When the renewal didn’t come (the show wasn’t ‘cancelled’, it just wasn’t renewed… Read more »
Very fine points, Langley — thanks for your comment. “Cancelled” here (and commonly in television) simply means that the show was ended by the network before the producers wanted it to end. Network commitments are, as you say, almost always year-to-year. (We had a recent guest editorial addressing this point …) You may be right that the writing was on the wall by the start of SGU Season Two, and so ultimately the show’s writers bear some of the blame for the show ending the way that it did. But since they were hoping for a chance to tell their… Read more »
I would have to say….SyFy is out. There would be no way that they should open dialog with them if this would occur. SyFy burned the Stargate franchise once…no need in subjecting them to it twice. I would honestly say the market these days could easily be Netflix or Hulu. And the latter would be more reasonable as Hulu currently still shows ALL three SG series on their platform. So Hulu could be the best market with that notion. Netflix is possible, but MGM would have to licence the rest of the SG series to Netflix in that case to… Read more »
Thanks Darren: I’d still disagree — the guest editorial you link to is also based on the same false premise, that the cable network was at fault for the end of SGU. I’d hate to think that all this network-bashing by fans is being read by other networks, and that would cause them to pass on licensing future SG properties. I’ll also disagree with the presumption that they were going to move away from SGU’s type of SciFi because of WH13. Prior to that they had Eureka and Battlestar Galactica going side-by-side, and from this angle it looks like they… Read more »
I think the documented history of Syfy Channel just doesn’t bear this out. For years I read (and covered at GW) interview after interview where execs talked about the full scope of the 2009 and post-2009 rebranding strategy. It entailed a deliberate set of decisions to try and give the network more mainstream appeal by purging traditional hard science fiction (spaceships, time travel, aliens) and commissioning more lighthearted stuff. Eureka was the established pattern; Warehouse 13 was the ratings hit that justified the move. And a marked increase in reality shows, as well as wrestling, were the companions. Fortunately this… Read more »
I wouldn’t dismiss SyFy outright, but ultimately I think this is a pretty valid list. There are only two realistic outlet options for a new series on a real budget: a major TV network, or a major streaming service. MGM can’t carry it on its own; their subnets nor their streaming service is big enough for critical mass. With that said, while I suspect most people agree with Darren that Netflix looks like the most tantalizing option, I don’t think the problems should be dismissed out of hand. Dropping 13 episodes all at once is a big problem; viewers quickly… Read more »
One thing I am sure of… if more Stargate means more of the same production quality (in all aspects) that Origins exhibits then I would prefer not to taint the legacy of the show. I have been a torch carrying hardcore fan since the original movie. Origins is bad. The writing… the direction… the budget… And I am still trying to figure out how they are going to justify Catherine going through the gate with her revelation in the original movie that “this is as far as we have ever gotten”. No more prequels!
There could be a very convenient “excuse” for why Catherine didn’t mention it. We already know there’s a “Time Copy” of Mitchell in the past, in that exact era, he could easily tell Catherine that she needs to keep this to herself “to preserve the timeline”.
Hey Darren: Thanks for the answer! I’ve learned that to ignore what the networks ‘say’ and watch what they ‘do’. They’re nothing if not derivative. In the case of moving away from genre-heavy programming, IMHO they ‘said’ they were doing that because others ‘said’ they were doing it. Their lineup of flagship shows included SGU and Caprica, so they didn’t ‘do’ what they ‘said’ they were going to do. Ditto with the move back to more hard sci fi. The lineup really hasn’t changed *that* much, they just speak about it differently. Ditto with MGM. CBS decide to do a… Read more »
(And I’m biased, I know, because I had many good years of employment at various studios around Vancouver because of the orders and $ and commitment SyFy put into shows that were filmed here)
The end of the SG franchise is , from my standpoint, a culmination of different factors. To be more specific three big factors : the fans, SyFy and the vibe of tv audience at the time. The fans were rigid and not very open to SGU. The mainstream started to want story, immersion, darker, real. And they got it in 2011 when ironically SGU ended – (shows like True Blood, GOT, Grimm, Hell on wheels, Falling Skies, The Borgias, Alphas,….) Maybe Syfy tought they would hit gold with SGU, but they were to soon and the writers failed in the… Read more »
Is Syfy’s hold on the show over? I remember, I thought, that when SG1 was canceled that the producers couldn’t take it somewhere else (and there were claims of Showtime being interested in bringing it back) because Syfy had a right of first refusal plus veto power in their contract with MGM for anything Stargate related. If that’s still in effect than it’s Syfy or nowhere.
Emteem, thanks for your comment. Syfy’s “hold” would have been contractually specific to the individual shows, I believe. They don’t have any first-look deal with the franchise at large or shows that haven’t been created yet.
Loved SG1……. New stuff yeah sweat but old hat now…? Let go bygonnes?? I’m sure there are stories to be told but the Original stuff pretty much explained all. Like most fictional tv series they run out of ideas.? As it finished long live the f—ing Ori!!
I would love to see the next stargate series on netflix it would be easy to access since most of us use it.