When Syfy cancelled Caprica on October 27, the fans didn’t take it lightly. And why should they? The announcement was made as a schedule change – the remaining 5 episodes would be pulled off the air to be shown “January 2011.” As if that wasn’t bad enough Syfy claimed this was due to a lack of viewers. Pair that statement with the botched tv release of the 1st season and it’s easy to see why fans are upset. The same day that Syfy cancelled Caprica, Rosemary Medrano began the Save Caprica apple campaign.
The plan was to gather donations and send a heeping pile of apples to the Syfy offices in New York and California as a gesture of disapproval for their decision. Together fans chipped in $2,350 to show their support for Caprica. Of that, an order of $1,100 was placed with BigAppleGrocer.net to send to NY. It amounted to 2,880 apples, an amount that when stacked are taller than the Great Pyramid of Egypt!
Apples were sent to Steve Burke, current COO of Comcast and soon to be CEO of NBC Universal. The NYC office for NBC Universal is located in Rockefeller Center.
When Jericho fans sent nuts to CBS they were accepted and CBS in turn decided to donate them to charity. NBC Universal would not let the delivery truck down into their loading dock. The driver did everything he could to get past – including having the NBC Chef come outside – but the guard refused the delivery. Left with no legal options to leave the apples at NBC Universal the apples would go to waste. With some effort The Caprica Times got in touch with Maureen Granados (Director of Communications at Syfy). We asked if the apples could be donated to City Harvest in name of Syfy & NBC Universal and she obliged. City Harvest is a food rescue organization, dedicated to feeding the city’s hungry men, women, and children.
Yesterday the apples were delivered through City Harvest to Cabrini Immigrant Services. Cabrini Immigrant Services provides immigrants like Joseph and Sam Adama of Caprica with a haven of support, empowerment, and service. They offer legal counseling, educational support and ESOL classes. The apples were donated to their food pantry.
Syfy has been avoiding discussion with fans since the cancellation of Caprica. Craig Engler, who runs the Syfy twitter account has been ignoring inquiries by Caprica fans and in some cases blocking them. Only two statements by Syfy have been released to the public. One was released as a notice of “schedule change” sent to select media outlets. The other was a Q&A released on facebook with carefully selected questions and defensive answers. The fans aren’t buying it. Syfy’s awkward manipulation of Caprica’s tv schedule left viewers confused and killed any chance of the show building an audience. Outrage is still erupting as fans who are just finding out about the cancellation angrily denounce Syfy on the Caprica facebook page. Sending apples was the first step in showing Syfy that as much as they may want to look the other way, Caprica’s audience does exist. We won’t be ignored and we want Caprica to return for a second season.
How do you like them apples, Syfy?
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12 comments
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Juanita says:
November 18, 2010 at 7:18 pm (UTC -5)
I’m so sad that nobody at NBC was able to just witness the truck and seeing how many apples were there. All we wanted was for them to look at it, they didnt have to unpack them and eat them. I applaud the organizers for taking so much time in arranging this. Thanks for the pictures, they will be with us forever. #savecaprica
Sandi A says:
November 18, 2010 at 7:57 pm (UTC -5)
This is truly sad news to hear NBC just turned their backs to their Caprica fans. I hope this makes the evening news! If someone or someone who knows anyone in this industry could give us a plug, we the fans, would be most appreciative!
Erica says:
November 18, 2010 at 7:59 pm (UTC -5)
As someone who manages a brand’s Twitter account (among other things) for my professional work, it’s ridiculous to pick on Craig. He’s probably following orders from someone higher up than him who’s actually pissed about “whiny” fans and apples. Many in the C-suite want to manage fans and their reactions, which is the exact wrong thing to do.
Is what Syfy’s doing a bad social media strategy in 2010? Yes. And should you be calling them out on that? Yes. But is calling Craig himself out silly and probably causing him personal grief? Yes.
The Cynic says:
November 18, 2010 at 10:48 pm (UTC -5)
They’re not going to do anything.
I suggest we walk away from these asshats. No more need to throw good energy after bad.
They’re running scared, not going to give us anything requiring thought, going for the lowest common denominator. Frak ‘em sideways.
Take heart, though: in another 10 years, Skiffy will be defunct and another phoenix will arise from the ashes. We had to trawl through the wasteland of the 70s to get to Blade Runner and all its visual and cerebral decendants. We can outwait these people again, keep our money to ourselves, and -=WE=- can imagine greater (since Skiffy is no longer capable of doing so.)
JediTray says:
November 19, 2010 at 1:25 am (UTC -5)
Lotta good that did. Those SyFy bastards.
angry_toastr says:
November 20, 2010 at 6:08 pm (UTC -5)
Unlike apples, they’ll have to deal with this…
SyFy viewer comments line: 212-664-3571
Kudos to the organizers. At least our apples went to a good cause.
SyFy’s future begins with a choice. They’ve made the wrong one. Many wallets closing to them and their advertisers should relay the message.
Transmission ended… by your command.
David says:
November 22, 2010 at 9:00 am (UTC -5)
Why do science fiction fans constantly waste their time with pointless campaigns like this one? We see this over and over and over, and it NEVER works. And on those rare occasionas, when it does work, the show ends up being a failure and getting cancelled anyways.
Yes, I enjoyed Caprica, though not as much as BSG. Yes, I wish it was still in production. Yes, I agree that SyFy badly botched the show. But ultimately there’s only ONE factor that decides the fate of the show: it had bad ratings. It’s an expensive show that is NOT making them money. That is the ONLY thing they care about. No amount of letters or tweets or apples is going to change that.
THE SHOW WAS CANCELLED. End of story. They didn’t say, “Oh wait, we’re just going to announce that it’s cancelled to try to get you all upset enough to try to bring it back” They announced that it was cancelled. They don’t make these decisions willy nilly. They don’t actually announce that a show is cancelled until it is actually cancelled.
The time to save a show is BEFORE it’s cancelled. And that’s not done by buying apples or nuts or other stunts. It’s by getting people to watch the show. If we can’t do that while the show is actually airing, we’re never going to actually get people to watch a show that has already been cancelled. Anything else we do now is utterly pointless. Maybe it will make you fell a little less impotent, but that’s all you’re accomplishing.
What did you actually expect would happen? They’d get a bunch of apples and decide, “Oh, now we understand. There’s a bunch of loonies on the net who want to watch this. So, we’ll drop tens of millions of our shareholders’ dollars to make them happy, only to have the show fail again next year and start this whole process again”? Did anyone actually expect that? Really?
If you were a programming executive for a television network, woudl you risk your job for a show that has already shown itself to be a failure? Would you really ask your stockholders to risk millions of dollars of their money because you hope that a cool show will eventually pick up a fan base? How would you explain that to your family, when you get fired for making bad business decisions and costing your company a fortune?
And why exactly would any television exec decide to save any failed science fiction show because of an internet campaign anyways? What exactly is our track record? Can anyone here name even ONE single solitary genre show that was saved by a campign that actually went on to be a ratings-drawing, money-making success? Even one? (Star Trek was brought back long before the internet was in most households. And The Motion Picture And Next Gen were over 30 and 20 years ago! They’re not exactly good examples.)
Yeah, fans sucessfully campained to bring back Jericho, after outcry from the net, and a ton of nuts. Which was quickly cancelled, due to low ratings — AGAIN.
And fans got Dollhouse a second season, although the network had actually already decided to give Joss Whedon a second chance to build an audience. (The show was NOT actually cancelled during the first season.) And it got worse ratings than the first season’s dismal ratings. They only aired the rest of the episodes because they’d paid so much for them!
And speaking of Joss, there’s proably the fan community’s biggest success story. Somehow, fans convinced the studio to take the failed Firefly TV show and make a movie out of it, spending 39 million dollars on it, and more for promotion! What’s truly amazing about this is that anyone was actually surprised when it flopped. (It actually managed to make slightly LESS than it cost to make when domestic AND foreign box office is totalled!) Did anyone actually think that people would pay to see a movie based on a television show that they refused to watch for free?!?
The only television show that even comes close to being in the “genre” that was successfully saved from cancellation AND went on to becoming a hit is Family Guy. But that would REALLY be stretching the limits of the term “genre”. And it had already found a proven viewer base on cable tv at that point anyways, on which Fox based its decision to go back into production.
With a track record like this, why on Earth would we be surprised when tv studios and networks ignore us?!? Do we actually expect them to spend tens of millions of dollars on us just because we obsess over these shows?
Any why would anyone expect any better from a network like SiFy, which went out of its way to remove BOTH the “science” and the “fiction” from its name?
Give it up, people. The show is over. Nothing you can do will ever change that.
I’m tempted to save this and post it evey time I see one of these pointells “Save ____” campaigns.
Wayne Hurlburt says:
November 23, 2010 at 12:31 am (UTC -5)
http://www.thoughts.com/CapricaNeedsSeason2/syfys-plan-of-not-airing-two-bsg-prequels-may-have-caused-capricas-demise
I’m just a Syfy fan as well as BSG & Caprica, and I see Syfy going down the tubes, unless you can start gaining more popularity with your (Sci-Fi) genre. Canceling Caprica is definitely a step backwards. Caprica was an experiment, so I hear from people of your team, trying to defend low ratings etc. Well even an experiment deserves more than you have given Caprica.
Caprica needed to take more time than most series to gather a following. You tried too hard to set it apart from BSG. It is part of BSG. You were trying to reach another genre as well, that won’t work when you are a Syfy channel. If you wanted to do it that way, you should have aired on NBC (your parent channel), they have a wider spread audience. Inadvertently, by trying to separate Caprica from BSG, you did just that and most of the BSG genre, bought into the hype and wouldn’t sit long enough (or not at all) to give it a chance, because all they expected, was some half-baked show that didn’t have much to do with BSG.
You should have started out just releasing the series, based on BSG and once it caught on, try to gain other genre’s into the fold. If you look at the episodes from season 1.5, they have really gathered the BSG genre back into the fold. I am still clueless as to why you didn’t play all your cards with Caprica, since you had made all the episodes up ahead of time, and let them unfold, then make your decision, after that.
If Season 1.5 was actually aired and implemented in the right way, you would, most likely already have the fan base you were looking for at the beginning, even with the sloppy airing of the first set of episodes. You really out did that with airing the Season 1.5 (tenfold), placing it in the schedule you did and you cannot tell me that you didn’t know about the Sports Events/TV Specials(of the highest rated shows of that date/time slot) appearing along side of Caprica for those (4) days of airing. All the shows fell in the ratings for that month, even Teen Mom fell 1 million on its 2 hour special (from its norm).
You have a great show with as much potential as BSG (if not more), if you play it right. You still have time to save this gold mine. Look around at the free publicity Caprica has already gotten, since that, one and only statement on October 27, 2010. I’m not just talking International. I’m talking ‘World Wide’. I’d like to think you have some smart people running Syfy, you must realize all the attention Caprica is gaining. Imagine what this could do for your company if in 2011, you make a statement of a second season for Caprica, can you imagine what the ratings would be like on the air date (if aired properly). Caprica is already all over the Internet, now.
Caprica is a new type of science fiction, that is compelling, in depth in the story line, great actor/character base and can be a much better prequel to BSG than Blood and Chrome will ever be (given the era of its setting). Time is something you should have realized as a component to introducing a show with this magnitude. It’s what people are looking for, whether it takes them a while to realize it or not, and they have.
You also would have succeeded in gaining the other genre’s into the fold as well. As another bonus, all the frustrated Syfy fans, your science fiction fans, may have some faith brought back to them, in your programming. Not many of them are happy with the schedule you seem to be acquiring lately, with wrestling, reality shows etc. Grant it, you are trying to expand our audience, but in trying to expand other areas, you are losing a whole other genre.
Who am I to tell you how to run your business, I’m just a fan that knows what the people want and its mostly science fiction from their science fiction channel.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2010/11/capricas-final-episodes-to-get-a-five-hour-sendoff.html#comments
Muldfeld says:
November 24, 2010 at 11:36 pm (UTC -5)
I just wanted to remark at how amazing you are for making sure the apples went to feed the homeless and poor. Even when you faced disappointment with your apples being turned away by Syfy, you still had the quality of character to create a success out of that failure and care about those less fortunate.
You’re a really wonderful person.
Regarding Caprica, it would have succeeded if Ron Moore had stuck with the show and believed in the experiment of sci fi drama to rewrite scripts heavily and be head writer. I’ve seen one episode after the cancellation, written by Kevin Murphy, and it was thoroughly predictable.
I still wish Syfy hadn’t cancelled “Caprica” because Ron Moore at least carefully planned out Season 2 and I fully agree that they screwed up. The ratings didn’t need to be much higher — only a few hundred thousand or so — and they didn’t give the show a fair fight by promoting it so poorly. If the show had such little chance of proving itself, Syfy should have ensured much higher quality scripts after the pilot. This is a massive disappointment to fans and waste of resources that could have been directed to a 5th season of BSG.
Daniel Allan says:
November 25, 2010 at 7:06 pm (UTC -5)
Keep the Faith people, in 1978 Fans of the Original Battlestar Galactica went through the same thing. only then they listened and gave us Galactica 1980 (yuck) after that it was another 23 years before Battlestar Galactica Returned.
Whether your a fan of Caprica, The ORiginal BSG or the more recent BSG we are the Battlestar Galactica Family and we can get Caprica Back. We just have to believe, and we need to start an old fashioned Write in Campaign. I suggest that if the powers that be will not listen electronically then we create a Standard Form letter that people can download and send one letter per week to syfy and Universal. the powers that be might not see these letters but make no mistake they cannot turn away the US Mail.
Goose says:
November 29, 2010 at 9:01 pm (UTC -5)
I am really impressed that there are so many fans of Caprica and wish it was back as do I. It will be hard to fill that void in my heart with Caprica no longer on the air. Unfortunately, there is only one way Syfy would bring Caprica back and we all know the answer is MONEY. You could only really do 2 things to show them how much money they would be losing. 1) Which seems to already be taking place is a petition by millions and millions of viewers to show its fanbase. Yes, millions.
2) The other way would be to boycott the network. Syfy has become extremely disappointing in recent events with their choice of shows and unexpected release dates such as with Caprica. The network doesn’t even deserve to be called Syfy. They show wrestling for pete’s sake! And honestly, I think a boycott of the network would be the most compelling. I am a fan of SG and BSG. Next thing we know is SGU will be cancelled. So, I truly believe everyone should boycott the station! Make your voice known as a dreamer, believer, and a fan of science fiction! Boycott the station until they bring back true science fiction!
John says:
December 8, 2010 at 8:33 pm (UTC -5)
Moore’s reworking of Larson’s BSG sucked… CRAPICA sucks and SG-POO sucks! Stop changing pre-existing franchises to something almost unrecognizable and upsetting the fans and IMAGINE A NEW FRANCHISE! Why do you think the ratings for all the shows suck so bad?
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