I think they thought they were being artistic. It could be I’m simply too plebian to appreciate the art — but if art comes at the expense of making the story and its characters less interesting, it’s too high of a price to pay in my opinion.

I’m guessing the following assured season 4:

1. it will still be one of the better rated SciFi shows regardless of the drop off from the early years

2. I hear the DVD sales are good and coupled with your point that NBCU doesn’t have to pay licensing fees, that all goes straight to the bottom line.

3.it seems you need a few seasons worth of shows at least for syndication purposes. If there are a total of 19 new episodes left, that would put them at exactly 75 (if you count the miniseries as 2 episodes).

The S4 premiere has me somewhat optimistic they’ve taken some of the criticism to heart — we’ll see.

Regarding the “vast majority of Americans are not smart enough to follow the show”: That’s a load of garbage put out by Moore and Eick to justify some really BAD writing, particularly in Season 3. Rachel Faith explained it nicely above.

I couldn’t believe so-called professionals were allowed to put such a disjointed, incomprehensible mess on the air. It wasn’t just one episode either (every series has one or two crummy episodes), it was episode after episode after episode. I’m amazed it got a Season 4.

I would be easier on the show if it was offered as an entertaining story. If writers and showrunners ask me to think, then I’m not going to overlook incredibly stupid characters, plot holes, out-of-character dialogue, inconsistencies in basic elements, retcons, etc.

You sometimes will get reports of # of streams, but that’s fairly meaningless data as it doesn’t give you an idea on average how many watched the whole episode. I do grant that BSG is likely to have more online viewing than a lot of show, but until there are consistent metrics, there is no good way to talk about it or factor it in.

What Outlander said is right on the money. These days a 1.2 on SCI FI was like a 1.4 to 1.5 about a year and a half ago. Reason being? Because the amount of households who get SCI FI was less. Now that the number has increased to who gets SCI FI, a show can still keep the same amount of households tuned in but they will still have a lower rating.

Also like to point out that a show can score the same household rating but still have a large difference in total viewers.

And certainly there are those who don’t like having to think while watching TV.

So, let them watch those dancing shows and all that crap, I’ll just enjoy this frakking final season (as soon as I finish season three on DVD).

Also syndication and DVD sales factor into the mix. But exactly how the economics work, we don’t know. It’s not clear to me whether these shows are “profitable immediately” or whether they are OK with waiting a little bit for the payback.

I agree completely that it’s amazing how much more competitive the environment is these days.

(I’m not insulting any of those shows, I’m simply pointing out that it’s amazing how much more competitive the environment is.)

Robert, surely BSG is not much cheaper to produce than TSCC – yet TSCC’s lowest rating got a 3.0 in the demo and like a 5-6 rating overall. How do the economics work for these shows? (Put differently, with such low ratings, how can SCIFI afford to produce any original scripted programming at all?) (And no, their awful Saturday movies-of-the-week do not count. :p)

Iraq allegory to close for comfort ?

“Osama, Obama and your mamma” personality disorder ?

Thinking about Internet availability, torrent downloads and multiple airings doesn’t really factor into my thinking which was merely this: Internet Buzz is indicative of almost nothing. There was no buzz around CSI: Miami last week, even though it pulled in roughly 7x the BSG numbers.

This is also before DVR Live + 7.

As per DVR and counting… SCI FI is a leader in the C3 index, which means more people are watching the commercials show the DVR numbers are important as well.

The data Robert cites is from the single airing of the S4 premiere episode only.

Cable ratings we get do not aggregate multiple shows. Later airings would appear as separate episodes [evidence our many, many Spongebobs].

It’s a challenge for the first airing of a show like BSG to make the top 40 cable list [which is all we see, and likely all others report on], subsequent airings have effectively no chance of appearing on our radar.

As for the performance comparisons to network shows, I’d remember that it’s still on cable. As Gavin touched upon, the numbers pretty much have no chance of getting to network-quality levels anyway. Matching the likes of even Jericho would mean raw viewers would probably require a rise all the way up to (maybe even past) the levels the miniseries got, which the main series has never hit (or even come close to). There are only a handful of cable series that are getting numbers like that these days. The Closer comes to mind right away, but it’s a crime drama, something that will sell better to the mainstream audiences right now.

Sci-fi is hard to sell in the current market, I would say mainly because there are a few more choices now than back when Star Trek: TNG was one of the most watched shows in syndication. And numbers like BSG’s are probably pretty acceptable to the SciFi Channel. Especially when NBC is touting the performance so strongly. PR-speak or not, you don’t usually make a big deal out of something unless it performs at least as expected, if not better. And I don’t think those numbers are too much different from what the Stargates have managed on some occasions. So let’s compare apples to apples and stick to cable for comparisons in the future.