MovieChat Forums > Colony (2016) Discussion > Why do you think the series failed?

Why do you think the series failed?

posted 6 years ago by dt123 (704)
51 replies | jump to latest

From AV Club:

"This is the season finale of Colony, but as of yesterday, it’s now also the series finale. The critically resurgent but chronically under-seen show is wrapping up its third season with a cancelation notice from USA. The current arc has felt like two years’ worth of story in one, as the fight against alien overlords has turned its attention to the messy realities of the various human factions trying to carry on some semblance of life within the Seattle colony—and the secrets contained therein. Tune in to find out just how much of a cliffhanger we’re going to be stuck with as the grace note of this flawed but fascinating series."

I blame the lack of ALIENS. Key to a story about alien overlords, yes? You can't just dribble out little alien teasers every few episodes and keep your numbers up. I honestly think the writers didn't know what to do next so wasted our time with family interplay and looks of worry. So many good teasers of things to come without ever getting there.

[–] kenburke (2369) 6 years ago

I think what did it in was its being a sci fi series to begin with. Good sci fi calls for good special effects which calls for an above average budget to pay for the special effects which calls for an above average number of viewers to justify the above average budget. Since the series didn't maintain an above average number of viewers, it sank (killing off Charlie didn't help matter either).

[–] filmtenk (765) 6 years ago

Killing off Charlie was necessary to the story. They had to take a loss at some point so the stakes were raised. Consequences exist.

[–] kenburke (2369) 6 years ago

Oh well, what has been has been. If nothing else, it give me good cosplay ideas.

[–] filmtenk (765) 6 years ago

Cosplay as Charlie Bowman’s corpse?

[–] kenburke (2369) 6 years ago

A collaborator police agent, of course!!!

[–] DarthJJ (341) 6 years ago

Sci-Fi fans are like children, in that we always ask "WHY?". This show spent two seasons building up and we lost interest along the way. Now that there is a pay off its too late. This is not the first time this has happened. I feel a show like this needs to have a major reveal every 2 or 3 eps.

[–] dt123 (704) 6 years ago

Exactly.

[–] exatera (3953) 6 years ago

The writers not knowing what to do next seems to be the hallmark of anything produced by Carlton Cuse.

And yes, not enough aliens, but also the completely dragged out story - if this war with some other alien race was the reason for the colony in the first place, how come they only got to it by the end of friggin' season 3?

[–] dt123 (704) 6 years ago

I totally blame Cuse as well. If you look back at six years plus of Lost discussions, NO ONE was saying, "Poor Kate. She's SO screwed up, she really ought to come to grips with her failures. How will she ever move on?" Nope - it was ALWAYS "What do YOU think is in the hatch?" "There's time travel going on here," "Eko is same name as the writer Umberto Eco, who wrote Foucault's Pendulum - look how it all ties in!" SciFi fans care about relationships, but they're the LEAST interesting thing about the genre. You don't even have to SHOW aliens, but you definitely have to have it be what permeated everyone's lives. We all get how the IGA is like Nazi Germany and one guy's a collaborator and another's a resistance fighter. But we needed to know more about what they were collaborating with and fighting against.

If you look at the successful scifi shows, they have a much better balance of what it's like in their world and how it affects the people who live in it. I'm not sure the list of what the aliens brought to Earth was long enough. A big wall, yes. Killer drones, yes. In the long run, they really didn't show us much of this world. I agree NO ONE would be collecting ART fer F's sake. People aren't that shallow.

[–] chrisjdel (2714) 6 years ago

Oh big corporate douche bags absolutely ARE that shallow. And the IGA leadership knows neither side in the alien war cares about humanity. It doesn't matter to them how many of us die, but they're not actually out to exterminate us, and they don't want our planet, so whichever side wins the victors will be leaving. The occupation elite plan on ruling the new world without all that pesky democracy and the peasant class thinking they have rights and stuff. The type of people who would gladly sell out the entire human race to benefit themselves would undoubtedly be plundering museums and private collections to amass cultural masterpieces for their own lavish homes. There are actually a lot of parallels between Colony and the current direction of American society, they've just put it all in a different context.

They've been trying to tell a big story on a relative shoestring budget. The two biggest problems that I think led to the show being cancelled (because similarly rated shows were renewed) were: (a) Season 4 would have pretty much required a substantially higher budget now that the alien armada is at our doorstep and (b) Both seasons 2 and 3 had a significant drop in viewership and they expected the trend to continue. Combining 'this show is getting expensive' with 'this show is bleeding viewers' leads to one obvious conclusion. I hear Cuse is pitching the show to Netflix, who have been showing the first two seasons. It may be true that their business model is less fickle in its dependence on ratings but I can't see that overcoming the same calculus USA was looking at. Higher costs for a series with declining viewership. Too bad. I enjoyed this neat little show and was looking forward to seeing how it all came together (there was clearly a plan from the beginning). And who knows? Netflix may surprise us. I wouldn't hold my breath though. :(

[–] dt123 (704) 6 years ago

Well maybe they should have explored the art collection thing more. As it was, it just looked like the rich people were still living like they had been. It even felt like they felt SAFER in the Green Zone bc of all the security. Which is fine I guess.

I agree about the expensive argument. But it's pretty easy to hint at alien technology without going all CGI on us. You might have more tell than show, but at least they'd be giving us more than they did. Star Trek, Doctor Who, Battlestar Gallactica, etc. all managed to do it for years.

Fingers crossed for the Netflix possibility!

[–] chrisjdel (2714) 6 years ago

They'd probably get their budget increase if Netflix decided to back them. I wouldn't get my hopes up, but that would be nice!

[–] [deleted] 6 years ago

I agree it became a soap opera. Three seasons and no aliens and little info on them.

[–] MadamShogun (240) 6 years ago

Dissenting opinion here, i don't think the show failed at all. Most people who watched it liked it. I think with serialized TV it gets tricky balancing long form storytelling, and action (why do you think Law & Order lasted so long? it was episodic and simplistic, as opposed to a show like The Wire). Thus people get short patient, but for what it was Colony wasn't a failure. And i don't think the show ever promised a show about aliens specifically. Where did that idea come from? Also their has to be stakes, charlies death was tragic but was understandable.

[–] mobocracy (891) 6 years ago

It made the mistake of trying to be a political drama about occupation and tyranny using a science fiction pretext, but without ever really delivering on the science fiction.

Worse, it seemed to deliberately obfuscate the science fiction element of it. If Earth had been taken over by aliens, all anyone would ever talk about is the aliens, their technology, etc. Yet here, the main characters never seemed to talk about it and were as ignorant as the viewers. And this included people in positions of power. Sure, you're collaborator and you've living the Green Zone good life, but are you really just going to collect art, drink good wine and not wonder what the hell is going on?

To top it off, the "drama" aspect of this show often wasn't very good. Holloway, Calles and especially Jacobson gave great performances but the writing was tepid, spinning family conflicts over and over, repeating the same tedious conflicts and dominating too much of the show's running time.

I think if after season 1 they had cut back most of the family drama and advanced the alien invasion portion of the story, revealing the origins, motivations and nature of the aliens it would have been much better. But the writers were convinced that they were drama writers first, and science fiction "was just a setting", so we mostly ended up with a mess. A series of incoherent and unconnected plot reveals that never went anywhere (and were often dropped completely) which ultimately alienated the audience.

[–] dt123 (704) 6 years ago

OMG yes. Right on the money.

[–] EmperorOfDragons (297) 6 years ago

trying to be a political drama about occupation and tyranny using a science fiction pretext, but without ever really delivering on the science fiction.

That's the set up, and always was. It was always intended to be about the occupation, the politics and war. It was never going to be Star Wars. And i actually thought it handled the family drama very well. especially refreshing was when the Bowmen's ADMITTED that they failed their kids.

[–] mobocracy (891) 6 years ago

The problem is the science fiction angle was always going to be a distraction. They would have been better off telling the occupation story without the crutch of "alien invasion". They could have run the same exact story as some kind of internal coup d'etat or sell-out to a foreign power, the only thing missing would be the drones and the impossible walls around LA.

I think it's really a failure of imagination by the writers that they needed science fiction at all. Wherever they used it (the walls, the drones, etc) seemed to be deus ex machina devices to "explain" the perfect imprisonment of the population and the futility of resistance. All of that could have been accomplished without science fiction and the concomitant "where's the aliens???" complaints that came with it.

[–] BrunoAntony (1198) 6 years ago

Sci-fi fans are incredibly fickle and crave treats. They thought they were overdue for some "Falling Skies"-style alien action (which "Colony" has never been particularly interested in) so they tuned out.

IMO, The CW is currently the best network at doing sci-fi - despite doing typical stuff like writing story-lines without much thought to long-term arcs, they know how to hook viewers on dumb stuff like good-looking actors, relationship shipping, action sequences and so on.

[–] filmtenk (765) 6 years ago

That might make CW the most successful but doesn't mean it’s the best. That’s subjective anyway. To me personally, those things you mentioned that CW does right, cater to low brow viewers.

[–] BrunoAntony (1198) 6 years ago

Which is why I describe those things as "dumb". Regardless, the fans support The 100. Whereas viewers of "high brow" sci-fi shows on other networks don't seem to support anything for more than a season or two.

[–] MadamShogun (240) 6 years ago

Exactly, I think The 100 is a surprisingly good show, but it's wrapped in a YA type facade. It's dark themes are kinda hidden. The Colony (and The Expanse) is pretty much straight faced hardcore science fiction. The former being more so a political thriller in a sci-fi alien occupation backdrop. I felt that people missed the point of the show.

[–] filmtenk (765) 6 years ago

Maybe I should give the 100 a try. I’m glad to hear support for both Colony and The Expanse. I’m glad one was saved, might be too much to expect both to be saved.

[–] mobocracy (891) 6 years ago

The problem with Colony is that mixing genres is hard to do. If you have a political thriller, it's a lot easier to tell the dramatic side of that story when the political background uses backstory elements the audience is already familiar with -- the Chinese, the Russians, conventional political corruption, whatever. You don't have to "explain" those elements to the audience, they are already shared knowledge.

With a science fiction backdrop, it's both a distraction to the audience (they want to know what its about) and unless it gets spelled out well, the motivations and actions of the political drama make much less sense.

Saying people "don't get the point" isn't a defense of the show, it's actually a criticism. When you have to criticize your audience for not understanding what you're trying to accomplish, it's a sign you haven't accomplished it. It's pretty arrogant to assume the mantle of a great work of art misunderstood by ignorant commoners. This isn't Shakespeare or Joyce, this is mass entertainment. If your audience "doesn't get it" in this context, maybe it's not the audience, it's your concept.

[–] EmperorOfDragons (297) 6 years ago

But what the Colony did isn't unusual, plenty of thrillers are made with Sci-Fi/Fantasy as a backdrop. Hell, Game of Thrones is a medieval political thriller with a fantasy backdrop. The fantasy didn't come to the forefront till arguably the ass end of season 5!

[–] mobocracy (891) 6 years ago

Colony’s problem though is that it’s character drama was pretty much soap opera grade and it’s politics was a cardboard cutout versio of Nazism with some ambiguous science fiction thrown in. It didn’t really do any of it that well.

At least Game of Thrones did Swords, Sex and Palace Intrigue well when it wasn’t doing fantasy.