I've noticed that Syffy's commercial breaks usually begin with a short spot that begins "This Syffy experience...". That's the clue: They understand that they're operating a virtual theme park, and their mission is to reliably provide small variations on the same formulaic experience, over and over and over. It ain't literature, it ain't science fiction, and rarely rises even to the level of "sci-fi", so I actually have to applaud their honesty in renaming their network. Their genre is "syffy", and they're proud of it.

And maybe they should be. I find shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13 and Sanctuary to be pleasant passtimes, and that's by design: Each one creates an escapist paradise where the geeky really do inherit the Earth (you gotta love a character like Micah [W13] who wistfully laments "I'm not a red shirt...am I?"). They found the formula, and it seems to be working.

It's telling that they don't do so well when they get ambitious. "SGU" has pretensions to be more than a "syffy experience", and here we're panning it. And don't get me started on "BSG"...nowadays I watch the credits on Syffy dreading the words "Ronald D. Moore" signalling a work with breathtaking pretensions that's doomed to disappoint for its shallowness....syffy dressed in silk and a tophat.

That's my pair o'pennies.