Still Alive

Yes, I've not gone underground, just been busy with house hunting, work, convention stuff and way too many things to have much time to actually blog.

I am now on Facebook, but tend to ignore any requests that come my way. I use it primarily to keep an eye on friends, associates, and family.

Thus, a few short bits to tide you over:

SFTV Schedules are almost updated. A mostly updated Season to Date list is up at www.sftv.org.

I bought a Subway sandwhich today to help save Chuck (and it really should not end!)

I saw the Star Trek movie last week and really enjoyed it and plan to see it again.

The last weekend of Star Trek: The Exhibition in Phoenix is this weekend. Make sure to catch it if you haven't yet.

This coming Saturday, May 2nd, is Free Comic Book Day. I've put up a list of comic shops in Arizona (Phoenix and Tucson) over at the AZSF Blog. As far as I've been able to tell, there are no comic shops in Flagstaff (unless there's a new one).

Lee

Misc SF TV Stuff

We're most of the way into the new fall season with a couple of things left to debut. Here's a few notes about the season so far....

Heroes - NBC is hoping the ratings will return to former heights. Not sure if the time travel and jumping around is doing much for casual viewers.

Chuck - Still good, but not drawing in the numbers. However, NBC is hurting all over the place and already gave the show a full season order.

Knight Rider - About as expected. Ratings have been soft but NBC appears to be sticking with it for now.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has not done very well opposite the Dancing with the Stars juggernaut (which also hasn't helped Chuck or Heroes) and if things don't pick up after the baseball pre-emptions, it may get terminated.

Life on Mars versus Eleventh Hour - In the battle of the Brit adaptations, both did about the same overall in the ratings with their debuts but Life on Mars held on to much more of its lead-in ratings (77% vs 49%) than Eleventh Hour.

Star Wars Clone Wars did very well for Cartoon Network and Sanctuary debuted very well for SciFi. Lets see how they hold up on a week to week basis.

Returning show The Ghost Whisperer has held up with ratings similar to what it did in the past however ABC's Pushing Daisies is definitely down from its first season (but ABC's entire Wednesday is down across the board).

Fringe has done well for FOX and is holding on to most of the House audience (although House is down without American Idol as a lead-in) and The Mentalist has drawn big numbers of viewers for CBS (but Fringe is still beating it in the demos). Also doing well for HBO (and getting a second season order) is True Blood, which has helped to bring all of Charlaine Harris's novels onto the top 20 besteller paperback lists.

Over in the UK, the debut of Merlin has done well for the BBC, with the ratings having gone up despite some really tough competition from ITV. Sarah Jane has also returned to Children's BBC and is doing comparable to what it did in the first series.

Still to come (as I type this) is My Own Worst Enemy on NBC, the Return of Eli Stone on ABC, and Crusoe on NBC. Crusoe actually looks like it might turn out pretty good. It is being show run by Stephen Gallagher, who created Eleventh Hour, and also has James Moran (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Law and Order: London) contributing an episode.

At the start of November is the debut of Legend of The Seeker, based on the Terry Goodkind series of novels starting with Wizard's First Rule.

I've limited the number of links here since the last time I put a bunch of links into a post, Google blocked my acces so they could determine if it was a spam blog or not, but you can get to official show pages and schedule links via the SFTV Schedules page.

Lee

New Schedule Lists Updated, TV BIg Shot

The latest schedules have been updated at sftv.org. I've also got a good bit of news in the Upcoming Schedule update as well. Things have been a bit busy as I get ready for a busy month of conventioning with World Fantasy Convention, TusCon 34 (still a maybe) and LosCon 34. I did make it out to the Horror/SciFi Film Festival and got to see Claudia Christian.

As for TV Big Shot, after some problems getting things working properly, things have settled down a bit. My SFTVPlus network is in the top 60 and moving up fast. I missed out on some of the initial ratings gains that garnered bonus points for those that caught on in time for the first week of ratings, but I've managed to keep pace to some extent. The main issue is that one of the users did make the right choices in the first couple of weeks and has several networks heading up the top of the heap. I think its still possible to catch him by making the best use of your budget during the heavy repeat weeks and if there's a writer's strike, trying to guess what will do well in the filler shows will not be a simple task. If anything, I've picked some shows this week that may garner significant bonus points if they do as I expect them to while the leader appears to be playing things safe this week.

Lee

I'm a TV Big Shot!

TV Big Shot!

Television Without Pity and Bravo have launched a new Fantasy TV competition called TV Big Shot which allows users to buy and sell current TV shows, gaining points on how well they do in the ratings and other factors. It launched early this week and appears to be having some growing pains (as well as some confusion about how it all will work, especially with shows going on hiatus or in limbo). Since they do have a grand prize of $100,000, there will be a lot of people trying to win and right now it isn't clear what is the best strategy. You are limited to a budget of $300 million and the way shows are priced, that will get you two hit shows and one or two other lower priced shows. My network, SFTVPlus will likely not win overall, but I figured I'd try a mostly genre strategy. No one will actually get
any points until after next weeks ratings are in, so it's currently a list of 6000+ networks all hoping to do better than the others. With the limited budget for each network, it may make it difficult to have one single one break ahead of the pack.

SFTV Schedules Updated

The SFTV Schedules have been updated and the upcoming schedule file will be emailed out this weekend. In the meantime, you can check things out to the right of the page.