Went woke, went broke

The SyFy channel just cancelled the show “Vagrant Queen.” The only really surprising things about that are either:

1) “What took so long?”

or

2) “Vagrant what? Never heard of it.”

I watched the first episode when it first aired and it was… half-assed. *Everything* about it was half-assed, from acting to makeup to dialogue to plot to especially production design and VFX, which made it look like a stablemate of “Andromeda.” The first episode was in the end utterly forgettable, and so I removed it from my watch list and promptly put the series out of my mind.

Now, the history of sci-fi TV in general, and SyFy in particular, is replete with crappy shows that last half a season or a full season, then quietly slip into the abyss. That’s just the way it goes: most shows are at best “meh.” You roll the dice and take your chances. But sometimes, some shows seem to be pre-doomed to incompetence and fail. Some shows, the suits should be able to determine to *not* go with before spending a dime. And “Vagrant Queen” is one such. How should they have known to pass on this? Simple… it was based on a comic book. More specifically, it was based on a comic book that failed spectacularly. It began as a six-issue miniseries. The first issue sold only 2,000 issues (“sold” meaning “sold to comic book shops,” not “sold to actual customers,” so the actual number of people who bought that issue is of course lower) in June, 2018. The second issue sold only 1,200 in July 2018. Issue 3 dropped to 993, and issue 4 fell to 769. Issues five and six? Apparently never actually printed, because in the comic book industry anything that sells below 5,000 or so is on the chopping block. Selling in the *hundreds* is laughably low. But the issues got reprinted as a bound “graphic novel” in February 2019… which sold only 200. And *then* SyFy decided “hey, lets spend buckets of cash on THIS property.”

Guh.

I cannot mock the creators of the comic book for their low sales… their lowest sales figures would make me giddy if *I* could reach those numbers. Their high numbers,  failures by comic book industry standards? Inconceivable for my piddly ass. Selling two thousand issues of, say, US Fighter Projects #4 would make me thrilled beyond the capacity for rational thought. Might even go out and buy a pizza or something. My issue here is with SyFy, spending money on something that has *already* demonstrated a stunning lack of audience. It’s not just dumb, it’s insane. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. The only thing that seems to justify the decision is the creator: a woke intersectional SJW who seems to have made a career out of that, and little else. Did SyFY think that the SJWs of the world would actually watch the show? Seems they didn’t watch… something that SyFy should have seen coming. SJWs scream for properties created by others to include quotas of inclusion… but when those properties bend the knee, the SJWs still don’t watch or buy. They care about the details of things they don’t care for.

If SyFy wants to spend a lot of money on a property with a very small existing audience, I’d recommend they go after “War With The Deep Ones,” “Pax Orionis” and the Zaneverse stories. I can guarantee these would be better received than “Vagrant Queen.”

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