Revisiting '90s SFTV

In North America the '90s saw a boom in first-run syndicated drama, new broadcast networks, and the burgeoning of made-for-cable programming--all of which were more daring with regard to genre material than the Big Three networks--resulting in a then-unprecedented volume of production of original live-action science fiction and fantasy television. This was not only the case with the number of shows produced at once. It was also the case with the readiness to keep them in production from season to season--certainly as compared with the notorious haste of the networks to cancel the few ventures they made in this area--which permitted a fair number of shows to give us something we really hadn't seen before. (If television had done "story arcs" before, none gave us the kind of tightly constructed multi-season narrative that Babylon 5 did, for example, while in the decades later that fact still stands out given how "story arcs" since then have mostly amounted to head games and soap opera and insufferable postmodernist flippancy toward the audience on the way to the underwhelming finales audiences now ritualistically lament after the last episode.) And in the process a fair number of these shows managed to make some impression on pop culture, broadly speaking (such that it was not just the sci-fi TV addict who knew who Jean-Luc Picard, Mulder and Scully, Buffy, Xena, all were).

All of this has made many see the '90s as a "golden age" for the form, an opinion I have certainly held in the past, and still hold now. Still, revisiting the subject today I find myself thinking about what I didn't write about then--or even see as meriting much discussion when summing up the period. Those years saw a great boom in space opera (Star Trek, Stargate, the aforementioned Babylon 5, etc.), fantasy of the contemporary urban (Highlander, the Buffyverse) and historical (the Hercules/Xenaverse) types, and of course, paranormal investigation (The X-Files). But in the '90s, the decade of the Internet, when cyberpunk's splash was still making ripples through pop culture (after cyberpunk we had "post-cyberpunk"), where was that genre in all this? One might also wonder where the superheroes were in that as well--certainly in the sense of secret identity-having, code-named, costumed personages.

In fairness there was a fair number of shows in both those genres. For cyberpunk we had TekWar, Robocop, Total Recall 2070, and of course, Dark Angel. And where superheroes were concerned we had M.A.N.T.I.S., and Malibu Comics' Nightman, and even Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Still, none of these shows was very long-lived, or made much of a splash by comparison with the bigger hits of the era. Cyberpunk on the small screen proved as tough a sell as it was on the big (apart from the at best partial exception of The Matrix, just how many of those '90s computer-themed films really got much of an audience?), while there was still less success for superheroes here than at the cineplex (when, even if the '90s was a far cry from the 21st century, we still had, besides the obvious case of Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Men in Black and assorted lesser successes).

One can argue over the strengths and failings of particular shows, and whether or not these shows deserved to find a bigger audience than they did, but all the same this was where the lot ended up, without the compensation of very much of a cult audience so far as I can tell. (Dark Angel certainly has its following--but the show itself seems to have been all but buried, with all that means for its impact.) The result is that it actually seems to me that these genres actually fared better in animation. I think a case can actually be made for Phantom 2040 as the most striking piece of cyberpunk North American television produced in these years--and a noteworthy superhero show as well--in these same years which also gave us Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, Batman: The Animated Series, HBO's well-received Spawn, and the FOX X-Men (whose lasting impression is confirmed by the new X-Men '97 follow-up series), as well as parodies like The Tick. One might see that as a matter of these themes simply lending themselves better to half-hour animated fare than hour-long live-action shows given producer expectations and the technical state of the art at the time, but one can also see it as a matter of the creators, in a period in which American animation displayed more than the usual ambition, the creators and showrunners and their staffs, in spite of such constraints as (in most of these cases) having to produce their shows for a younger audience with all the censorship that entailed, simply managed to outdo their better-positioned counterparts--with the result that the principal '90s screen legacy of these genres is to be found there.