For some reason, science fiction rarely manages to stick it out on television. Think back to the original Star Trek, which literally defined a genre but couldn’t stay on the air for more than three seasons. Even though sci-fi permeates just about every aspect of modern fiction, there’s something about continuing series that seems to be the kiss of death. Every so often, creators have the force of will to bring their story to the finish line, like Battlestar Galactica, but the road there is paved with dozens of other shows that got cut down in their prime.
For a while, it looked like The Expanse was going to be one of them. After three seasons, SyFy announced that it was pulling the plug on the show. Despite two straight seasons of 100% Rotten Tomatoes rankings and plenty more of the source material to adapt, the show was no longer for the world. That is, until geeks did what they do best and found it a new home on streaming TV. Let’s dive deep to see how it happened.
Infinite Space
The Expanse was a tough sell in a number of ways. It’s a TV maxim that the “harder” the science fiction, the more difficult it is to secure a mainstream audience big enough to pay for the show. But SyFy needed to make big moves in the middle of the decade as the network struggled to pivot back to its roots. Around their 2009 rebranding, the station’s programming started to venture pretty far afield from science fiction, airing programs like WWE Smackdown and Law & Order: SVU along with a bunch of reality television. As ratings dropped, the network knew a change had to be made and re-invested in original, high-quality prestige programming to try and recapture the buzz of past hits like Battlestar Galactica.
That brought them to launch successful series like The Magicians and 12 Monkeys, but The Expanse was probably closest to the Galactica formula. Based on a series of eight novels by James S. A. Corey (a pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), the show follows the crew of a ship called the Rocinante as they delve into the origins of a conspiracy to embroil the colonized solar system in a pointless war spurred on by a new technology called the protomolecule. As the show’s progressed, the applications of that science have become increasingly terrifying.
The third season easily took the throne for some of the best sci-fi on the airwaves, ramping up the stakes while continuing to delve into the rich veins of politics that the futuristic setting creates. A major draw to the show is how it addresses eternally relevant themes like labor rights, with the Earth dependent on the dangerous resource extraction of the Outer Belt but looking down on the people who make their survival possible. And it also delivers on the action front, with impressive setpiece battles that definitely seem to have cost some coin to produce.
That said, ratings for the show weren’t the best they could be. Although the first season pulled in more than half a million viewers on average, a gentle slide followed – as is pretty common. The show’s third season landed in fourth place for the network with the 18-49-year-old demographic, which is highly valued by advertisers.
In The Gears
Ratings doomed The Expanse, but not in the way you’d think. SyFy’s deal with producers Alcon Entertainment was only for what’s called “first-run linear rights,” which essentially means that, if you were the kind of person who tunes in at the same time every week to watch a TV show, you’d do it on SyFy. And the current season was always available on their app. But that’s just not the way people watch TV for the most part these days, and Alcon sold streaming rights to Amazon and international rights to other networks. That last one was extra important, as The Expanse has a very diverse fan base abroad.
Many of SyFy’s most popular recent shows like Happy are produced entirely in-house, meaning the network controls and profits off of streaming distribution. Without that vital income stream, The Expanse would always seem like a less valuable investment. Owning just a piece of a pie isn’t as delicious as having the whole thing. Looking at the success of networks like AMC, which has squeezed The Walking Dead into a franchise that continues to pay out year after year, SyFy naturally decided to cut back on a show that they’d never be able to fully exploit.
The third season, though, ended on a hell of a cliffhanger – self-assembling protomolecules did something very new and opened up what appeared to be a gateway to far-flung space and habitable, exploitable worlds. With the show barely a third of the way through the novels, viewers didn’t want to be left hanging. So they stepped up.
Life After Death
It’s par for the course now that fans will be at their loudest after their beloved series gets cancelled, and The Expanse is no exception. After SyFy announced that they wouldn’t be renewing the show for a fourth season, the usual change.org petitions and hashtag activism exploded. Normal folks were joined by celebs like George R. R. Martin, who called it “best space show on television, far and away” even as SyFy was airing his own Nightflyers, to lobby Netflix and Amazon to pick the show up for at least another season.
They went even farther than most campaigns of the like do, at one point hiring an airplane to fly a banner around Amazon’s studios in Santa Monica. With Amazon head Jeff Bezos’s interest in space exploration well documented, fans figured that they could leverage that to their favor. Couple that with the fact that the company already had streaming rights and could see viewership and they had a solid business case. And it worked. Bezos announced that season 4 would come to the streaming service at the 2018 International Space Development Conference, and fans rejoiced.
This wasn’t an unprecedented move. It’s easy to forget that Netflix’s venture into original content came with a revival of Fox’s cult comedy Arrested Development. Hulu brought The Mindy Project from Fox for three seasons. And Amazon has already continued a few (mostly German) series that aired on other networks. But The Expanse represents a pretty big gamble for the streaming service, which is feeling the pinch from an increasingly crowded field.
The Expanse isn’t out of the woods yet, though. One negative consequence of moving to streaming is that many of these services don’t seem especially married to long runs for their shows. Netflix has already come under fire for cancelling several shows like The OA and Sense8 in their prime, and although it seems like Amazon is more willing to let shows breathe, it’s much harder to evaluate how well or poorly a program is doing without publicly available data like TV ratings. Amazon has already committed to a fifth season, so that’s a very positive sign.
The struggle to keep a show on the air, especially something as complex and challenging as The Expanse, is a difficult one. But at least in this case, we’ve seen the power of both celebrity fans and the man on the street to make a case for something they thought deserved to stay alive, and we’ve already blocked off time on the calendar to binge season 4.
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