Like the failure to launch 5G in US air-space, even as Europeans have no problem with it, next week Wednesday, the second season of Resident Alien begins on the SyFy television channel. This season will be split for reasons related to its profitability based on its first season success, in what is becoming a more common practice.
Following the multi-season shows Eureka and Warehouse 13, we return to another example within the genre that is much like Alien Nation, where “the series offered social commentary by illustrating what it means to be human and the often bizarre rituals we observe.” Eventually, both of the former programs got to the thematic questions of extraterrestrial or extradimensional life, and like most US television, bring the questions back to dystopias. Because ultimately capitalist profit is about time-shifting the rent-seeking space of the media commodity landscape.
“On his new quest to protect the people of Earth, Harry struggles to hold on to his alien identity as his human emotions grow stronger by the day,” reads the official description for Season 2.
“In an adventure that takes Harry and Asta (Sara Tomko) all the way to New York City, Asta brings Harry into the arms of someone he can call family."
"Back in Patience, Sheriff Mike (Corey Reynolds) and Deputy Liv (Elizabeth Bowen) find themselves closer to unraveling the mystery of Sam Hodges’s murder.”
As previously reported, Resident Alien Season 2 is getting the split season treatment, airing the first half weekly from January 26 to March 16.
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The show is set to return later in the year for the second half of its season, which will wrap up the season-long arcs.
It's unclear if the season will be constructed with split seasons in mind, or if it is purely a decision brought on by the pandemic.
Resident Alien Season 1 was a huge success for Syfy, attracting an average of 9.3 million viewers.
It makes sense then that the series nabbed a speedy renewal.
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Ahead of the Season 1 finale, Syfy ... renewed its hit dramedy Resident Alien starring Alan Tudyk for a second season.
Resident Alien is about to wrap its first season as the most-watched new cable drama in the last year in total viewers and No. 2 in the adults 18-49 demographic. It’s also Syfy’s highest-rated new drama in more than six years in total viewers and earns the second-biggest time-shifting gain for any cable drama in the last year in total viewers, according to Nielsen.
The January 27 series premiere has drawn 9.3 million viewers across all platforms and NBCUniversal networks. The cross-platform launch strategy to leverage the power of NBCU’s entertainment portfolio was emphasized by Frances Berwick, Chairman, Entertainment Networks, when she first took the job last fall. In Live+3, the following week’s episode saw an increase of 581,000 viewers, the biggest jump for a cable drama launch since 2014, according to the network and Nielsen.
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For the first season, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported a "certified fresh" approval rating of 94% based on 31 critic reviews, with an average rating of 7.79/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Resident Alien takes a minute to settle into its skin, but once it does it finds fresh humor in a familiar framework and proves a perfect showcase for Alan Tudyk's singular comedic skills."[34] Metacritic gave the first season a weighted average score of 70 out of 100 based on 15 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[35]
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The splitting of broadcast schedules is not about “semantics”. If anything it’s pragmatics, or rather rent-seeking and the marginalist discourse of media commodities
So why are networks and streaming services now opting for shorter seasons, even splitting them into two shorter segments?
"There are probably at least a half-dozen factors," says Daniel Fienberg, television critic for The Hollywood Reporter and president of the Television Critics Association in an email. For the majority of viewers, though, it's about semantics, he says. "Technically the last two years of 'Breaking Bad' were a single season, but the closing run of 'Game of Thrones' is technically two shortened seasons."
"Breaking Bad," which wrapped in 2013, split its final run into two, eight-episode mini-seasons. AMC did the same thing for its critical darling "Mad Men," breaking its final seventh season into two seven-episode segments.
"A major part of it is contractual," Fienberg explains. "A split final season like 'Breaking Bad' and 'Mad Men' gets negotiated as a single season, presumably without pay bumps for stars between seasons, but also allows for more episodes either shot all at once or with a long hiatus between 'halves' of the season."
But while the final seasons of some shows, like "Lost," are ordered at the same time under a single contract, Fienberg says "Game of Thrones" was negotiated under slightly different, but significant, circumstances. "The seventh and eighth seasons of 'Game of Thrones' were technically ordered separately and the stars got big pay bumps for the eighth season," he says. "There ends up being some compromise in terms of episode count and episode length."
But semantics and contracts are just part of why shows get split seasons. Fienberg says dividing seasons also allows networks to retain brand-making shows as long as possible, spreading its stars across as many Emmy Awards seasons as possible.
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The paradigm example of a “semantic” failure happened in 1969, where prior to the creation of basic cable networks, a more conservative brand of standards and practices existed in broadcast media.
Turn-On began as the next project from Ed Friendly and George Schlatter, the producers of the hit series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Like Laugh-In, Turn-On was a sketch comedy series. However, the skits were performed without any sets and there was no laugh track. The jokes focused mostly on risque sexual innuendos and it was supposed to be "produced" by a computer. The legendary Tim Conway was recruited as the first celebrity guest. The writing staff also included Albert Brooks, and the main cast included Teresa Graves, who would join Laugh-In the following season.
As Vulture pointed out in a 2019 exhaustive history of the Turn-On debacle, there is only one way to legally see the two episodes of Turn-On that were made. You have to go to New York's Paley Center for Media, where they can be found within its vast media library. The sketches contain many jokes that could still shock audiences. There is a sight gag where a camera pans across bleachers, only to reveal the audience is wearing KKK uniforms. One sketch is an infomercial for a foot fetishes' fan club. There was one sketch with blackface and another sketch that could be considered anti-Semitic. Still, some other jokes might be right at home in a sitcom airing today.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Turn-On disaster is that it happened at all. Today, getting on broadcast television is one of the more difficult feats in Hollywood, especially with networks still going through the pilot stage, test screenings, and series orders. How did Turn-On get through so many stages before airing? At least ABC can take solace in knowing Turn-On wasn't the only series to get canceled quickly.
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Today, in a kind of unconscious acknowledgement of these developments, the hypercommodified nature of mass culture has even found its way into common parlance. As writing and media have become “content,” movies and shows are now “franchises,” and cultural artifacts of every kind are “IP” (intellectual property) — not just to bureaucrats, investors, and corporate executives but also to audiences (or rather “consumers”) themselves.
Entire narrative universes, meanwhile, are now conceptualized in modular form such that their parent companies can produce an indefinite number of reboots, sequels, and prequels, wringing as much value from the original product as possible. The same monopolism has yielded an astonishing boom in crossover content, as conglomerates seek to extract further rents by combining and reassembling their properties.
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The shifting financial context for investment as well as platforms for exhibition and display have always been integral to film and media production, but the nature of this transformation leads us back to questions of geopolitical aesthetics, along with the attendant fragmentation and reshaping of a shared subjectivity.
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An emerging sphere has been established beyond the temporality of cinema and theatrical projection. The space of cinema-going publics was transformed into privatized sites for media consumption. The status of what might be termed a transnational new media dispositif cannot be easily aligned with stable identity formations, but relies on an increasingly concentrated context for infrastructure development that facilitates transmission and reception (Casetti 2015). The manner in which the circulation of media increasingly addresses a new kind of subjectivity may be understood within an emerging biopolitical basis for media reception as integral to a conceptual mapping of the body. This is different from asserting that it infiltrates or structures human consciousness. We might use microscopic cameras to perform delicate surgical operations, drones to survey distant landscapes, or acoustical devices as a form of surveillance. However, the utility of these media instruments remains within a scientific modality of measurement and performance of particular actions. The indispensable utility of media from this perspective may be contrasted with its function within the terms of spectacle, such as news or entertainment, among other more specific cinematic and cultural genres.
Transformation in the uses of media relies on the terms of infrastructure, and the question of how it is managed and structured around particular kinds of vital interests involves longstanding political alliances. From this perspective, the underlying arrangements of political power that mobilize these projects seek their own gain, perhaps in the form of “discharge” as Béatrice Hibou (Hibou and Derrick 2004) has acutely described, but it most certainly relies upon converting public assets into private ones. This implies that the study of how control of this infrastructure is exercised in defining media as a type of commodity is at once external while also in the process of becoming internalized. We might say that the consolidation of media is based on the dynamic relationship between ownership and sovereignty.
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