Outcasts - Why do TV programmes Fail?

It's February 2011. The BBC have started screening a new drama called Outcasts on their prime channel at peak time. It's a drama (which the authors claim is not science fiction) about a group of settlers who colonise another planet. The story is set out in 8, 1 hour (for the BBC, with no advertising, that really is 8 hours of TV) episodes that are shown on two consecutive nights each week, for 4 weeks.

The show has been promoted with trailers, "stars" and writers appearing in various BBC chat shows and online. The premise sounds good, the cast have a lot of successful TV drama productions between them. The guy who wrote it (Ben Richards has a few other prime-time shows to his name. What could possibly go wrong?

After the first episode (screened on a Monday evening) the TV forums contained a lot of negative sentiment. The programme was described in various ways, but the consensus was that it was poorly scripted, the acting was wooden, the plot didn't stack up and viewers couldn't connect with the characters. It wasn't all bad and a small minority of viewers said they'd enjoyed it and a larger proportion wanted to watch the second episode, the next evening, "to give it another chance". After episode #2, the view was much the same - it simply wasn't working.

I watched the first hour-long episode and found it quite dull. The actors (for the main part) appeared to be simply reading their lines, without emotion or understanding. It was difficult to see why a lot of them were there and the back-story didn't help much as it was only spottily revealed. Although a lot of drama and SF in particular, requires suspension of belief from the audience, this one needed a great deal more help and sympathy from the audience. Although the pace of the show was reasonable, it did feel that things were being rushed just to get them out of the way. For example, while we were told early on that a new spaceship was expected at some point. Sure enough, a few minutes later it duly became close enough to make radio contact. After a minute or two it was orbiting the planet. A minute after that it had repaired all the damage from a 5 year journey and a minute after that it was coming down to the colony. All very fast, superficial and from the way it was dealt with, apparently an unimportant detail - the first "ship" from home since the colony was established, packed full of new people, supplies, stories and maybe even some luxuries and the colonists didn't even organise a party!

However,those are details. Once an audience has decided that a show isn't worthy, then they start picking at the plot-holes. If the show is accepted, even the most blatant errors can be forgiven. Most viewers weren't in a forgiving frame of mind. So, what did go wrong?

For me, I just didn't like the characters. While I was prepared to accept the rather daft setting, the hurried progress and the lack of a credible raison d'etre for the colony, the people in it came across as the sort whom I would go to great lengths to avoid. We had the aggressive, shouty, cops waving guns around. There was a crazed anti-authority figure (with a peculiar, creepy child), an uninspiring president and some rebels - though what they were rebelling against, or how they had come to be excluded, either I missed, or it was not explained. Basically quite a formulaic collection of sour, joyless, "my job is my life" types you find in most cop-shows and medical-emergency dramas that I long ago realised I simply didn't want to spend my evenings watching. I also got the impression that they simply didn't gel, as people. Each actor was playing their part in isolation, but there was no feeling that these people had been part of the same small, community for the 10 years that the show claimed they had been there. The only humans on the entire planet, and they acted like almost complete strangers towards one-another. As if the only prior contact they'd had was traveling to the (South African) location on the same plane - each plugged into their MP3 players and avoiding eye-contact so that they didn't have to interact with anyone else on the journey.

So, after one episode I gave up. I wasn't prepared to spend more time watching this show. I didn't feel the need to see if it improved in subsequent episodes. If you've only got 8 episodes in total, either it'll come together in the first half-hour or it never will. I'm planning to keep an eye on comments posted in TV forums and if a miracle happens, I can pick it up again. However, I'm not expecting anything more than this show running it's course and then being forgotten: both by the remaining audience and possibly by a much-relieved cast and broadcaster.