Syfy blasts back to its roots
After a slate of B-movies and reality shows, Syfy is launching back into space to get its science-fiction groove back.
Ascension, a three-night miniseries premiering Monday (9 p.m. ET/PT), centers on a huge spaceship on a 100-year mission to find a habitable planet for humanity. But it also kicks off the cable network's move to reassert its focus on scripted drama, which established the cable network with seminal cult hit Battlestar Galactica.
"There's been an explosion of the genre; it is absolutely sci-fi's time, both sci-fi the genre and Syfy the brand," says Syfy President Dave Howe.
More is planned for 2015, including time-travel show 12 Monkeys, based on the 1995 Terry Gilliam film, due Jan. 16 (9 p.m. ET/PT); a second season of Helix, from Battlestar Executive Producer Ronald D. Moore; Killjoys, an adventure following intergalactic bounty hunters from the producers of Orphan Black; The Expanse, a futuristic space opera that Howe calls "absolutely the most expensive and most ambitious TV series we've ever embarked on"; and Children's End, a six-hour miniseries adapting Arthur C. Clarke's alien-invasion novel.
Rather than riding the wave of the popular but cheesy Sharknado movie franchise, the network instead aims to be "the home of great, smart, provocative, entertaining sci-fi storytelling," Howe says."You'll see that with Ascension and everything going forward. We're back in this space in a way we haven't been able to be in a number of years." (The network's average prime-time audience is 1.1 million this year, down 7%).
Created by Philip Levens (Smallville), Ascension has its origins in the military's 1950s Project Orion program that was designed to explore interstellar space with a craft propelled by nuclear explosions rather than rocket fuel.
President Kennedy mothballed it in the early 1960s "after he saw a mockup prototype of it and it kind of scared him," Levens says. But Ascension imagines a different 1963, one in which 600 men, women and children are sent on a century-long journey to populate a new planet called Proxima.
Everything's hunky-dory for 51 years, until a woman is found murdered by a gunshot — odd since there are not supposed to be any firearms aboard the Ascension — and the incident sparks a host of internal conflicts among its crew involving politics and class systems.
"In the '60s we had a presidential assassinations and the assassination of Martin Luther King, and Vietnam is the thing that really started rocking the boat and really made things unravel in a lot of ways," Levens says. "They never had any of that — this is their seminal event that's made everyone question what's come before and question their assumptions."
There are epiphanies, twists and turns galore in the first episode alone, and that's what appealed to Battlestar vet Tricia Helfer, who stars as the wife of the ship's Captain Denninger (Brian Van Holt). Viondra Denninger is a power-hungry chief stewardess who fought her way to the higher-class upper decks and isn't willing to go back.
"She thinks she and her husband are better off for the crew" than a "selfish and manipulative" alternative. "She does feel like she's the mother of humanity," says Helfer, who starred as Galactica's Cylon Six.
She often wonders if Battlestar would have the same kind of pop-culture impact of Game of Thrones if it aired now. "But 10 years ago we didn't have Twitter and now it's the norm."
Helfer says Ascension has a lot of live tweeting "watercooler talk" potential, and social media is built into the "green-light criteria" for all new programming, says Howe.
"You want to start early and build anticipation," he says. "The success of Sharknado was a year's worth of fanning the flames and that's critical. We think about how to activate our loyal and noisy audience, we start to get them information, feeding out stuff, wanting them to know more and go deeper and be evangelical about these shows."
At events such as San Diego's Comic-Con, Howe saw a hunger from fans for serialized television such as The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, just as parent Comcast's NBC Universal understood the need to invest in high-quality content.
And Syfy's promising to be even more aggressive. A Superman prequel series, Krypton, is in development, the network has ordered a pilot adaptation of Lev Grossman's The Magicians and will soon announce a major 2016 miniseries.
It's a key time to dive deep into a sci-fi genre now "being driven by a millennial audience, that younger crowd who wants to be immersed and wants to go deeper," Howe says.
"We've got this incredible audience that doesn't just want that linear experience — they want to live and breathe these deep mythologies, these characters and story arcs, and they want to be on social media and be advocates for this kind of content."