You. Over there. Whining like a little bitch because FOX didn’t pick up Virtuality. Quit your whining!
Minor spoilers below.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, I watched Virtuality and I liked it. Mostly. Oh sure, there was that one glaring plot device. I’m supposed to believe these people are smart enough to create stunning virtual reality head gear, but not smart enough to go into the airlock with their space suits already on? C’mon! But otherwise, I liked it fine and would’ve no doubt watched at least a few episodes of it had it been made into a series.
But cut FOX some slack. All this “FOX, you broke my heart again” talk is nonsense.
While I can’t say why FOX feels the way about Virtuality that it does, how it felt about it was pretty clear when originally it was scheduled to air on July 4 between 8p-10pm (the good news is, by bumping it up 8 days, it’s possible that FOX could still change its mind and make Bill happy by running a ‘Til Death marathon on July 4).
July 4, the night when people go out to watch fireworks and celebrate our freedom to whine about networks not picking up TV shows that we don’t pay for.
Why did FOX make the schedule switch to air it eight days earlier? Who knows? The switch was made well in advance of the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. So it’s not like FOX planned to have tribute competition (and it wasn’t like the that competition hit the ball out of the yard ratings-wise either).
But given the numbers for Virtuality it’s hard to predict it would’ve done any worse if they’d left it on July 4. Sure, I got about 18 e-mails (ok, only 2) along the lines of “See how great Dollhouse is! HA! Look at those numbers for Virtuality! Hahahahaha Dollhouse rul3z!”
But it’s really not worth comparing a Friday in late June with a Friday in February, March or April. I’m not saying the numbers for Virtuality didn’t stink, because they indeed were plenty smelly. But who knows if Dollhouse’s numbers would’ve looked any better if it premiered on a Friday in late June with the same level of promotion Virtuality got.
Dollhouse’s renewal is probably one of the reasons why FOX didn’t pick up Virtuality. I’m not sure it’s the main reason, but FOX had to figure “OK, so two science fiction-ish shows that hardly anyone will watch, but one we know we can get dirt cheap. Hmmmm which one do we pick?!”
I think another reason might have been something like, “Hey, doesn’t Ronald D. Moore, creator of Virtuality also have another show (Caprica) that will be airing on SciiiiFiiiiii or whatever its called starting next year? And didn’t the pilot for that show revolve a lot around — wait for it — virtual reality headgear?”
For that reason alone, I don’t think there’s any chance SyFy will pick it up. Do they really want two artificial intelligence / virtual reality themed shows? Is it in SyFy’s interest to have Moore working on one two similarly themed shows that it (NBC Universal ) owns and one show produced by FOX? (edited: commenter “Peter Noble” is correct, both shows are Universal produced).
I’d be happy to see it happen. But I think that would require a miracle.
Dollhouse was renewed, so miracles can happen. And if you’re rooting for that sort of thing to happen with Virtuality, I won’t hold it against you. But if you’re gonna go all “FOX, you broke my heart. Again. I need to know how this show ends. I HATE YOU FOX! I die a little every time I give a show on your network a chance!!!” on us — well, I won’t hold that against you either, but I will mock you.
Great article! You are so so right. Folks sure be grateful they got to see this pilot/mini-movie. FOX could of just not aired it, like the dozen of others pilots not picked up.
Wasn’t Virtuality produced by NBC/U for FOX?
Watching paint dry is more entertaining than watching Virtuality, it may be better suited for Sly Fry.
you are correct, sir. Both shows are universal produced. I’ve edited the post.
Good concept, not withstanding the plot device, appalling acting. There was nobody in the cast that you would want to see again. When they killed the captain, I wished the rest of the crew was in the air lock. For real. So none ofthen would ever get cast again in anything else.
What I would like to know, beyond TV numbers (as you said, of COURSE it got bad ratings, it was hardly advertised, and at a time when it’s not going to beat out the competition it no one knows about it), is: How well is it doing online? We hear all this crap about TV ratings, but truthfully, most of the people I know (granted they’re at the lower half of the 18-40 demographic, but it’s still a fair number of people) rarely sit down and watch their tv shows anymore. Why should they? If you wait a couple days, you can watch the same shows, at your convenience, and without the 20 minutes of commercials, online. So, what are the online ratings? How many people have watched it since it has come out? Because I think THAT is really what can be used to push for this show to continue, if those ratings are terrific.
Liz, regardless of how many people watched online on advertising supported sites (as opposed to p2p downloaded), those viewers mean pennies to the network. This show is as dead as King Tut (who arrived in San Francisco this week).
Actually, more dead, no one will be lining up to view Virtuality in a few thousand years.
I have to agree with Liz. I own a TV. I rarely watch network or cable, though. I think a lot of the younger generations are going to stop using TVs and starting using computers more and more. If networks don’t start taking this into account, a lot of good programming (and not just FOX) will get cancelled from bad ratings.
I think FOX is just a little over zealous. If you’re going to judge something based on its ratings, you should probably advertise. The only reason I caught Virtuality on Friday is because my other plans were cancelled at the last minute and there wasn’t anything else on TV. I think FOX needs to lighten up a little and take a chance on something. One episode, even one season isn’t necessarily enough to build a large fan base. It looks like they’re taking a chance on Dollhouse (good for them), but as you’ve said, a lot of people out there no longer trust FOX to renew the shows they get attached to. Word of mouth is pretty powerful, but it requires time.
David, like all networks, FOX picks up some pilots and not others. Networks don’t always or even usually air the pilots of shows they don’t pick up. But in this case, given it was a two hour pilot that it had paid for anyway, I guess it figured why not air it. The decision on its fate was made by the May schedule announcements. It didn’t get picked up. Though some people seem to think FOX airing it last Friday instead of July 4th meant FOX was given it another shot to see what would happen, it seems very unlikely they had any hope for an upside ratings surprise on a late June Friday.
Thank you, Robert, for saying, “See how great Dollhouse is! HA! Look at those numbers for Virtuality! Hahahahaha Dollhouse rul3z!” I skimmed over the rest of it, but this part is clearly the best part of your post, because it’s SOOO true!
Dollhouse returns in 81 days! It rul3z!
Robert,
FOX has stated that the show was too complicated (the actual word used was “dense”) for its viewers and that’s why it was passed on.
I also heard it was bumped up a week because FOX’s option doesn’t expire until Wednesday.
As you can be certain Ron Moore and Michael Taylor are not happy with FOX–they never received any answers on the state of the show until they heard about the “movie” as advertised by FOX instead of what it actually was–an open-ended pilot.
Forget about the viewers, it’s a bad thing when FOX TV has a bad rep among the creative community.
As a SciFi fan, if this would have been pitched to me via a commercial during Fringe, I would have had awareness and probably sat down and watched it. Instead, I had no idea it was on being no current Fox shows are in my late spring/summer sphere. Maybe Fox needs to start playing a few moves ahead rather than counting on DVD sales in retrospect to fuel its business model with this type of programming…
Apparently I’m in a minority (of sorts) here because I really didn’t enjoy the Virtuality pilot at all and am actually quite thankful that Fox didn’t pick it up.
Bacchus:
Virtuality is up on Hulu and FOX On Demand, if you are in the States.
Having watched this on Hulu, I immediately looked for more episodes and came across the reality of the situation. I would have spent the rest of my day watching further episodes of this. I’m tired of the lack of “density” in just about everything I watch, and enjoyed what was at first kind of an odd beginning in a civil war / sci-fi flick. Having seen NO advertising for it whatsoever I was taken aback. It was a fun, almost a “choose my own adventure” book from my youth that took me in to the stories and left me wanting.
I hate to see it not continue, HATE. :_(
JBF, since I made no declaration of the awesomeness that is Joss Whedon, I wasn’t sure you’d catch that.
Andrea, yeah I read about the dense comments. I’m not sure I buy it, but maybe that’s what the tests indicated.
As for a bad rep among the creative community, maybe. I don’t think it’s a great rep to have, but that’s the sort of thing that seemingly manifests in blog posts and comments but doesn’t wind up mattering much anywhere else. Joss Whedon was willing to work with FOX again even after Firefly! Though I’d guess you could probably find comments like that about almost every studio/network, there are only a very limited set of shops around to sign the paychecks and like everyone else, the creative people want to get paid too.
I agree with myself.
FOX has stated that the show was too complicated (the actual word used was “dense”) for its viewers and that’s why it was passed on.
Yeah, cause fringe is pretty simple what with the alternate reality storylines and both of the male protagonists being, for lack of a better term, criminals.
Sci Fi on primetime has always been limited, hell who remembers space: Above and Beyond – I do – 10 times better than this and FOX gave it little support and cancelled it too early – but if no one watches no one watches – the people who post on blogs like this are NOT THE AVERAGE AMERICAN TV VIEWER – the nielsen system, archaic and broken as it is is the arbiter of what will live and what will die.
Besides, why have quality tv that might require the average (moron) american to think when you can put together more reality shows that let the average american think it has a clue what ‘talent’ is.
Robert,
I agree that online comments can exaggerate things, but based on what Joss, Michael Taylor, others have said in interviews is what puts up the red flag for me. Joss really had to be massaged to come back to FOX; he said it was a different set of people working there, and they were willing to give him creative room (after initially pulling on the restraints) as well as a second season–although there is still room for things to go seriously wrong with that.
I’m not so sure Ron Moore will come back to FOX–or the guys who made “Back To You”.
BTW, why do you think FOX may have passed on Virtuality if not it being too sci-fi?
Wow, another post whining about fans who whine. I love web sites who show contempt for their readers by accusing them of behaving like humans.
Here’s a clue – fans whine when someone takes their candy away. It’s not rational, it’s often pathetic, but it is what it is. People don’t like losing something they enjoy, knowing they will never get it back.
It’s possible to make the case that Fox gave Virtuality a fair break (in my opinion, they did – barely) without being abusive and condescending.
Andrea, but Ron Moore didn’t do the deal with FOX. He did the deal with NBCU and apparently neither NBC nor SciFi wanted to order a pilot. In situations like that, I think it would be rare where they get “but Fox is interested in ordering a pilot” as a response and say “Nah, screw that!” But perhaps it isn’t as rare as I think.
I *do* think FOX passed on Virtuality because its sci-fi but I doubt it was any more sci-fi before they ordered the pilot than it was in the pilot. The question I have is, why did they order it in the first place? I can’t do anything but speculate and not knowing things like how much FOX paid for the pilot, it’s hard to do anything but wildly speculate. Another day, perhaps.
Robert, I’m not sure of the specifics, but this is what Michael Taylor had to say:
“They have not made an official word, but they’re scheduling it on a night that I think has been characterized as the butt-end of the television universe. It’s sad for me and Ron — they said, “Hey come aboard. We love what you do.” And then we did what we do, and they went, “Ooh, s— man this is kind of much for us.” Given the scheduling time and the lack of promotion, call it a New Orleans funeral: We’ll be having a good time, and we’re grateful people at least have the opportunity to see what we did.”
http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2009/06/michael-taylor-interview.php
Andrea writes, “Joss really had to be massaged to come back to FOX; he said it was a different set of people working there”
Speaking of the different set of people working there when his precious “Firefly” was stinking up the ratings, one of them was the producer of “Virtuality.” Does this mean now somebody will have to massage her to come back? For the second time?
Pity for poor Princess Whedon that it was a different-different set of people working there right after “Dullhouse” started.
I thought ‘Virtuality’ was a terrific pilot, if middling TV movie, and that 0.5 in the 18-49 demo in the face of a friggin Farrah hagiography is just depressing. (I mean really…Farrah, people? What, was ‘Ow, My Balls!’ on hiatus?)
It’s a shame that quality “hard” sci-fi is such a tough brand for a network to sell these days, but the whole 40 year old virgin geek in grandma’s basement stereotype is so pervasive that those who really should know better-see: Gina Bellafonte’s New York Times review-often work to marginalize potential viewers even further than they already are. Not to mention the fact that the primary demo for a show like ‘Virtuality’ stays away from the TV in droves on Friday nights anyway.
It’s easy to blame FOX given their track record, but at least Kevin Reilly had the grace to show the pilot on something other than July 4th weekend. And It’s good that we at least had the opportunity to see it, when so many unordered pilots are just shelved. I’d just wish they’d realize that with netflix, the internet, live streaming on your x-box, opening weekend-take-all theatrical releases, and the all important ‘getting plastered at your fine local drinking establishment’, that the sub AARP target demo for growing a genre show (e.g. ‘The X-Files’) on Friday night just doesn’t exist anymore, and likely never will again.
I guess I don’t understand why things that ‘take risks’ where those piles of pilot cash are already spent aren’t aired in time slots where the appropriate demos will be around to take advantage of them. (Ok, to be honest T:TSCC was given a pretty fair shake before being banished to the Friday night death slot.) And if FOX wants to create an audience for scripted programming on Friday’s, why not commission the next ‘Matlock’, or just dump something like ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ into a Friday slot that’ll still have a demographic carry-over. Otherwise you end up flushing an expensive, difficult to market, but ultimately very high quality piece of work like Virtuality down the toilet at a place and time that dooms it to oblivion.
Sure, miracles like the ‘Dollhouse’ renewal have happened. But fans don’t want miracles, we want Wednesday nights in November.
Robert,
In addition to Virtuality being just plain bad you make an EXCELLENT point of Ron Moore having two virtual reality based SCI FI shows going at once.
I am also surprised I haven’t seen any conspiracy theorys that Michael Jackson’s untimely demise was some sort of plot hatched by Joss Wheddon and Dollhouse to kill Virtuality, much in the same manner DH was the reason TSCC was canned.
Real fans know numbers and profit really have nothing to do with the renewal.LOL
~Lanie~
Lanie said, “In addition to Virtuality being just plain bad you make an EXCELLENT point of Ron Moore having two virtual reality based SCI FI shows going at once.”
Wow, reading comprehension please!
FOX, you broke my heart. Again. I need to know how this show ends. I HATE YOU FOX! I die a little every time I give a show on your network a chance!!! (ok fine I didn’t even watch it.)
From Wikipedia:
“On Friday June 26, 2009 Jessica Blank, wife of actor Erik Jensen who portrayed Dr. Jules Braun, posted a call to action on her husband’s Facebook page urging people to watch the movie and write in support of more episodes.”
Oh, here we go…
It appears this thing was an extended version of Star Trek:NG’s “holodeck”. Lame premise. Any series limited to a single star ship with no chance of landing anywhere for ten years (at near light speed they’re not going to slow down) is going to become claustrophobic within a few episodes – unless of course they run into the Borg or Q. VR adventures aren’t going to change that.
Clearly this would have been better as a mini-series or simply a TV movie or two.
Richard,
instead of guessing what this show was about, why not check it out on Hulu?
@Andrea
God I love the haters, ok, here for the mentally deficient that need my comments written in crayon,
Robert you make an excellent point in the fact that Ron Moore would have two shows that the central plot was the result and/or created by virtual reality headgear.
Probably not a great idea.
Andrea, glad I could be of help. If there is anything else that confuses you like door knobs, forks and spoons or those annoying traffic signs with four letter words, just email me. Always glad to help.
~Lanie~
Is this the first time Robert has ever used the word BITCH on this website?? :O
Anon, No, but you can count the total number of times with two hands.
LMAO wow, Robert’s tongue was definitely on the loose in 2008…luckily he’s only used the word twice (…so far) in ‘09.
LOL.
I was going to go with “bitchy little girls” out of homage to Burn Notice (”you know spies are a bunch of bitchy little girls”) but I didn’t want to disparage the little girls.
And for the record, official scoring is still less than one hand! A couple of those instances were not attributed to me (one was a Gossip Girl Episode name and one was a direct quote of a line of dialogue from LOST).
Lanie, “God I love the haters, ok, here for the mentally deficient that need my comments written in crayon.”
–And that still wouldn’t deter that you need some reading comprehension, plus a better attitude.
@Andrea,
There wasn’t anything wrong with my reading comprehension, you are simply junping at any opportunity to express your fanatical anger over your little robot show getting cancelled due to lack of interest in it. The Robot Show is dead and gone, never coming back in any form. There is and never will be a S3, get over it.
Virtuality was bad, definitly not one of RDM’s better creations. Robert was dead on about the virtuality head gear, infact I thought I saw a “Caprica” logo on the one in the opening sequence LOL
Richard Steven Hack also has a valid point about the show getting claustrophobic by being confined in a ship for ten years and it does seem like a ST:TNG and DS9 holodeck ripoff. However; RSH mentions the “Q”, perhaps this could happen…..
Q could introduce the crew to a lethal human like killing machine much in the way he did with exposing Picard et al to the “Borg”. With a simple wave of his hand to punish humanity a sphere forms melting everything in it’s path.
As it subsides we see a crouched, naked Summer Glau rise and the only way for the crew to live is to run endlessly through adventure after adventure, jumping from one holodeck sequence to the next being chased all across the holodeck universe by Jameron! I know you are all over that!
But then again, FOX is too stupid to know a good show when they see one ha?
~Lanie~
I think FOX never intended to air it, but when suddenly their books looked bad, they had to air it to recover some cost. Thus, it was suddenly fast-tracked and the CG people and marketing people had to scramble to get it ready within 3 weeks. Reason why Fox didn’t promote it is simple, they wish to spend anymore money on it. Why all the buzz? Because the Fox marketing people actually liked the project.
Hey, Lanie, that sounds like a fun premise! Anything that brings Summer back to the tube, I’ll go for. Well, almost anything…if she stars in a remake of Cheers, I’ll commit suicide.
Wonder if she’d like playing a vampire on True Blood…She’d do vampire good, I think.
Wouldn’t mind seeing her on Burn Notice getting into fights with Fiona…
Hey you! What’s with the aggression? Are you a failed holodeck experiment?
Besides, Vrituality was pre-canceled – we knew that.
I thought Virtuality was too long by half, and worse yet, had an unappealing cast. Or, to put it a better way, a cast with no chemisty. Thus no one seemed very convincing in their role. I wouldn’t say that the story was too dense, but rather it was half-baked, with scenes that dragged out too long with too much talking. (It’s about MOVING PICTURES, folks, not talking heads!)
I liked the premise of the virtual-reality-game-gone-haywire, as well as the go/no-go plot device, but found the reality show idea to be lame. I don’t watch reality shows ever, so why would I want to watch a show depicting a reality show? I think the story would have plenty of tension if it had been told in a more straight-forward fashion, sort of like the Alien movies, only with the boogie man in the virtual reality game instead of a monster. The faux tension introduced by the lame reality show plot device was not only annoying but unnecessary.
But the chief sin of this show was to be utterly humorless and to take itself too seriously. There wasn’t a single flash of redeeming wit throughout the entire two hours. I like science fiction, but even so I won’t tolerate stupid or bad drama.
The movie lost me right at the beginning with its pointless 8-minute virtual reality sequences. Yeah, yeah, I know, VR is a part of it, but all it said to me was that the real plot wasn’t good enough, and rightly so it wasn’t, so let’s go jack it up first with all the VR nonsense, which only succeeds in making things more needlessly confusing. It would’ve made more sense to have had a decent plot start off the episode that gradually and naturally led into the VR stuff as a tool of sorts, but to start off with 8 mminutes of VR, how does that establish anything anyone would find worth watching in the show? Not to mention that any pilot is already in trouble when the camerawork gets all fuzzy and wonky, and not to mention again that not a single cast member was likeable or memorable on any level whatsoever with not a spark of humanity in any of them. Was Who was who again? Do I care? No. A 1,000th airing of the original Star Trek pilot of 43 years ago would still have been far more satisfying to sit through. And the ridiculously disastrous ratings Virtuality got was well deserved but, unfortunately, those kind of invisible ratings didn’t seem to deter FOX from renewing the equally horrifically awful Dollhouse. What’s with FOX lately and their seeming penchant for airing mind-numbingly bad shows that make NBC’s vile efforts look like classics?
@wy
Ratings for a first episode is not relevant – people had no idea what it was and so can’t make an informed choice.
Relevant for criticizing the content I mean, networks clearly use them to slaughter stuff
Andrea, don’t feed the troll. Lanie G thinks the entire web revolves around her and her barely coherent posts.
And yeah, I can see why Fox won’t pick it up. It’s not mainstream enough, it won’t bring in the 18-34 males. Fox needs more Dushku cleavage, now that’s quality sci-fi. Right?
From a completely quality-wise viewpoint… Vituality >>>>>>>>> Dollhouse. I’m glad FOX aired the pilot. It was great. Yes, I am sad there will be no more episodes, but whatever… win some, lose some.
I still dont understand what all this Dollhouse hostility is about?
@Chad,
Not only will Virtuality not bring in the 18-34 males, it misses in all catagories. FOX doesn’t need SciFi at all if you want to get right down to it.
Science Fiction alone will not keep a network on the air, hence, the renaming of SciFi to SyFy and the shifting from a pure Science Fiction channel by SCiFi over the past couple of years to a broader audience.
In today’s high tech world, SciFi isn’t “All that WOW” like it was even 10, 15 or 20 years ago.
~Lanie~
“I still dont understand what all this Dollhouse hostility is about?”
Dollhouse killed TSCC. And Virtuality. And Firefly.
But, Dollhouse will get axed after 13 episodes, if not sooner come fall. Then there will be 4 failed FOX sci fi shows. BTW I liked TSCC and Virtuality and Firefly. Dollhouse I found mind-numbingly bad. Just all around horrible. But, hey, some people enjoy it so wtf do I know? And this is not hostility toward DH. It’s just an opinion from a TV watcher. Some shows i enjoy, some I don’t.
lol @ Dollhouse killed Firefly. Soon you’ll have Dollhouse responsible for JFK too.
Joss Whedon on the grassy knoll!
They should have kept this and sent Dollhouse to the Outhouse. Virtuality had promise, Dollhouse was unwatchable after 2 episodes.
Btw, lets not forget “dense” has more than one meaning
“Soon you’ll have Dollhouse responsible for JFK too.”
Nononono, the only thing Dollhouse killed is Joss Whedons credibility as a writer.
OMG, see what I did there?
Kidding. Kinda. ;D
This show was excellent and I’m very sad that nothing will probably ever come of it. But how can Fox be surprised by the numbers? There was zero advertising for this show as far as I can tell. I’m a HUGE Sci-fi fan and I only found out about this show a few days before it was on by chance. I think it was the same problem with Kings. Great shows but people out there just have no idea what they are about and why they should tune in. Your average TV viewer doesn’t actively pursue new shows I think… this stuff needs to be put in front of their eyes somehow.
I usually catch all of Fox’s shows whether it be be on TV or on my computer. I must say that Fox did a horrible job of advertising for this specific series, and in my opinion had a lot of potential. As far as Dollhouse is concerned–oh please, it not better than Virtuality and had me hoping they would cancel it after the first episode.
As far as people saying we should be “thankful” for them running Virtuality–I think not. It’s not about the fact that they actually put it up there, it’s simply the annoyance that people feel when they spend a bunch of time watching the damn show and then it not even being continued.
This always seems to happen with a ton of shows on Fox… I mean seriously…Glee? Dollhouse? Who are they advertising to anyways?
The networks should consider when they do something like this that they put up a notice saying, “This is a pilot we didn’t pick up, so enjoy it because you’ll never see it again.”
In fact, maybe somebody should start a channel called “The Pilot Channel” just showing all the pilots that were never picked up. There must be thousands – you could run the channel for five years just on previous unsold pilots, thus allowing new pilots to stack up so you could keep going afterward.
I was disappointed after watching the Global Frequency pilot that it wasn’t picked up, but in reality if they actually tried doing the GF stories as they were in the comic, the FCC would have banned the show anyway.
When Dollhouse gets yanked (in 4 episodes), I doubt they’ll throw an expensive sci-fi series there as a replacement. At least the acting was decent on Virtuality, unlike Dollhouse’s lead making me cringe.
Stargate Universe will provide me with a similar themed sci-fi series. So it’s not a major loss to me, and it also means I have no reason to bother with Fox outside of Fringe. There is a bit of concern that the new series will become Stargate Voyager 90210.
Anyway… I was under the impression that more episodes of Virtuality were already produced, but weren’t airing outside of the two hour pilot. I guess I was wrong.
What is this? I’m agreeing with Robert’s analysis? How can this be?
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT
I have to agree with the detractors. I thought the idea was interesting but the acting was bad. I only recognized the chick that was in Carnival/T3 and she was much better in both of thiose. It’s like the cast knew “This is never gonna get picked up” so why bother. I think the ending suggested a Matrix like fake reality as well. FYI, did anyone think that after Terminator-TSC and Dollhouse that Fox is a little gun shy for SciFi shows? This may have worked better as a mini-series. I just don’t see how the story could stretch over several seasons.