"ATTACK OF THE SABRETOOTH." "Bloodsuckers." "The Man With the Screaming Brain." And, most indelible of all, "Mansquito."
A combination of outrageous genre concepts, low-budget filmmaking and sensationalized titles like the roll call above are all part of the Sci Fi Channel's attempt to establish a presence on Saturday nights, when a good number of potential viewers are out, asleep or watching reruns. The programming strategy has been a major success, with numbers that far exceed anyone's expectations.
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Nearly half of Sci Fi's audience is female, and in the highly sought-after 25-to-54-year-old demographic category, Sci Fi is the No. 4 basic cable network on Saturdays, behind TNT, USA and TBS.
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But, Mr. Vitale added, Sci Fi is also "trying to reach a mainstream TV audience."
[from The New York Times]
I feel like everything that’s interesting about this piece from Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section goes unspoken... and that the writer didn’t even realize the implications of everything he was conveying.
The entire tenor of the article is one of bringing some secret, arcane ritual from deepest Africa or the remote mountains of the Himalayas to the great sophisticated masses of Manhattan, as if the possibility that someone might be both a reader of the Times and a watcher of Sci-Fi’s grade-B movies is so absurd that it needn’t bear thinking. And yet at the same time, the article itself states that the audience for these movies is mainstream... and also that Sci-Fi channel is seeking a mainstream audience as if it doesn’t already have it.
The underlying assumption is a great example of the cognitive dissonance associated with all things geeky: it’s everywhere and it’s immensely popular, but it’s weird and niche and not something that "normal" people are into.
