Syfy is doubling down on escapist entertainment this spring and summer with a warped slate of sci-fi series and movies, including bizarro fairy-tale upgrades and more cheesy creature features than you can shake a remote at.
The goal? To spin viewers into a disorienting entertainment netherzone to help them escape disturbing reality.
Part of Syfy’s plan is to assault viewers with 24 pop-corny movies a year. The channel’s 21st-century upgrade of the drive-in flick breaks its cheesy eggshell Saturday night in the form of Mega Piranha, an original monster movie starring Brady Bunch vet Barry Williams (pictured above) and ’80s pop star Tiffany.
“You can’t give the viewer the same package every day,” Tom Vitale, Syfy’s senior vice president of programming, told Wired.com by phone. “You have to vary it, but it all has to have the same vibe and feeling, which is escapist entertainment.”
Further freakish experiments in April and May include Mothman, Mongolian Death Worm and Witchville, each starring actors still vibrating with pop-culture appeal. Mothman features Firefly sweetheart Jewel Staite and Mongolian Death Worm stars last century’s young Indiana Jones, Sean Patrick Flannery.
Future geek-fests are similarly built for fandom: Lake Placid 3 stars Eureka lead Colin Ferguson, The Lost Future stars Lord of the Rings standout Sean Bean, and Scream of the Banshee brings always-reliable genre hotshot Lance Henriksen back to action. Most of the blatantly derivative strangeness will land on Saturday nights, a slot conventionally abandoned by networks happy to loop up lame reruns.
“We’ve decided to go after that audience,” Vitale said. “Sunday through Thursday are the highest-rated nights, but Saturday night still has more than 50 percent of viewing households. And there is something out there in the culture now that is hungry for escapist entertainment. Our movies aren’t comedies, but they are campy fun.”
Sci-Fi and Fairy Tales
Even the channel’s serious sci-fi works possess campy elements, accidentally or otherwise. Take Syfy’s adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld , airing April 18 and starring Alan Cumming and Battlestar Galactica ‘s magnetic Tahmoh Penikett. Farmer’s sprawling, terraformed afterlife has been upgraded with suicide bombers, a hornier Mark Twain and a Japanese samurai clumsily played by Jeananne Goossen. The result is a violent sci-fi drama that is nevertheless hard to take seriously.
“I always try to make any retelling as contemporary as possible, update it so it is relatable to today’s world and resonates more effectively,” Robert Haimi Sr., executive producer of Riverworld and co-founder of RHI Entertainment, told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. Let us say, however, that the inserted suicide bombers take up way too much screen time, whether they are relatable or not.
When high-end Syfy series Eureka and Warehouse 13 return in July, they will be enhanced by extra stardust. Eureka ‘s latest addition is James Callis, who played self-serving narcissist Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Galactica. Warehouse 13 recently recruited three Firefly standouts, including Jewel Staite, Sean Maher and the statuesque Gina Torres.
Syfy also has its pop-culture eye on fractured fairy tales. Coming in 2011: a riff on Little Red Riding Hood called Red, starring fanboy favorite Felicia Day from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Horrible.
The plan? Skew it strange.
“The idea is to take the known mythology and give it our own unique spin, speculating on the truth behind the fairy tale,” Vitale said. “It’s a game of imagination.”
Syfy’s hellride into escapist entertainment is just part of a pop-culture cycle of war and peace, said Vitale.
“A few years ago, when the war in Iraq was starting and everyone was getting shocked by the news, that’s when the hard-core horror movies started in again,” he said. “Just like during the Vietnam war, which kicked off films like Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave.”
