Production is VERY broken at the SciFi Channel -- look at what happened with 'Painkiller Jane' and that new 'Flash Gordon' -- like their reality shows, they're deals cut with production companies rather than anyone's creative vision.

Television pilots are supposed to be, well, television pilots and NOT an oportunity for television executives to self-deal to themselves and their friends ,,, wait, what am I thinking... this is America!

Anyway, this'll be just another big flop for the SciFi Channel, which will, in turn justify the broadcast of more wrestling, more 'Braveheart' and more 'Scare Tactics'. Meanwhile, 'Doctor Who' remains the 2nd highest-rated show on the network (after ECW Wrestling), but before their moderately-rated ORIGINAL programming, SG-A and 'Battlestar Galactica', both of which are ending BEFORE 2010. 'Warehouse 13' is going to be the next big thing, eh? Even if J.J. Abrahms' 'Fringe' makes it to the end of the season, or in spite of it?

Either way, the SciFi Channel Executives are STILL behind the curve.

This is channel that batted away 'Babylon 5' producer J. Michael Straczynski to favor a pitch about 'intergalactic Vampires' (as opposed to interstellar?). 2005's 'Bloodsuckers' went straight to the circular file and Straczynski is now an A-List screenwriter and comic book writer. The SciFi Channel Executives who greenlit 'Bloodsuckers' also still have their jobs, which tells me that the 'culture of complacence' is over at NBC-Universal and *not* amid the audience members the network is losing as they spin-away from the _name_ of the network?

The SciFi Channel _should_ be Universal's low cost portal for discovering and promoting new talent by the same mechanism that brought a young director to the studio to direct a made-for-tv movie titled 'Duel', back in 1971. Inside deals with UFO, Nu Image and MGM This past summer, both 'The Dark Knight' and 'Ron Man' proved that genre can be a big earners, but SciFi Channel is drowning a babies in a sink up on the 6th floor at Rockefeller Center. Save for Ron Moore, after 'Galactica', talent seldom comes to stay.

The SciFi Channel is a PLATFORM and Universal ought to be using it to launch it's new products 6-, 9- and 24-months ahead of their street-dates. There is no reason, besides a failure of imagination, that the network shouldn't be a Discovery Channel for Fantasy, Horror and Science-Fiction, but even G4 and FEAR.net have managed to eat Skiffy's lunch at both locations. And then they wonder where their audience went.

They CAN do better.

As you wrote, The SciFi Channel _should_ be Universal's low cost portal for discovering and promoting new talent. I'd love to see some mindblowing low cost shows debut on SciFi. It's possible to garner solid ratings without massive FX in production.

And, honestly, I'm sick to fucking death of "Ghost Hunters" (all smoke and mirrors with no actual ghosts) and whatever new scientfic team takes on urban myth shit show. The myth-busting show should be good, but the way SciFi set it up, without an actual skeptic or true atheist in the group, is just kiddie crap. Maybe they grab low to moderate ratings, but such shows are paltry and insulting to thinking sci-fi fans. How about big-concept animated stories? Unusual examinations of cutting edge science? A trip inside the Large Hadron Collider that just went online near Geneva? Or even, cough cough, a science fiction news show, where they discuss ideas and bring authors, animators, scientists, comic book guys, and special FX dudes on to round-table discuss things? Could be silly and badass all at once.

But most of all, I'd love to see SciFi promote new talent. I hope some of their new shows, including "Warehouse 13," give us meat to sink our teeth into.