Jun
30
One of Ronald D Moore’s two science-fiction projects this year, Virtuality, failed to garner any significant viewing figures on its airing last Friday in the United States, further reducing its chances for a green light to series.
The show pulled in a mere 1.8 million viewers, and, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s Live Feed, a 0.5 adult demographic rating. The figures put it as the lowest-rated drama for that evening along with ABC’s The Goode Family, and pushed Fox into fourth place that night.
The ratings, while not a surprise given its relatively fatalistic scheduling on a Friday night, while being marketed as a TV movie rather than a potential pilot, are still murkily low whatever way you look at it. Critical opinion was, in most cases, particularly positive, with the genre reviewers loving the show and publications such as The New York Times giving it a restrained recommendation. Although all of the cast are signed up to appear in the show should it get the order to continue production, fans of the Phaeton likely shouldn’t get their hopes up.
Virtuality aired on 26 June 2009 on Fox. The feature-length pilot was directed by Peter Berg, and starred Sienna Guillory, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Richie Coster and Jimmi Simpson. SciFiNow’s review of the pilot will be up over the course of this week, on this website.
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provides all the latest Sci-Fi news, reviews, previews, interviews and spoilers, while our fan page is the best place to communicate with other fans of the SciFiNow magazine.5 Comments »
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Given a chance, “Virtuality” may turn out to be the best show ever to hit TV, but for the average TV viewer, it’s seemingly yawnsome premise of “Big Brother meets Trek’s Holosuite” has little allure.
Virtuality TV movie was embarrassingly bad, there’s no two ways about it. This bastard child of reality tv and space opera melding should never have seen the light of day. Terrible lighting and photography, unrealistic sets and a couple of totally unbelievable scenes around the dinner table where tempers flare without little or no provocation (to emulate Big Brother tensions, I’m sure).
Story also falls into the ‘idiot’ trap, i.e. it couldn’t work without idiot characters. Unexpected and weird things happen in VR and nobody seems to give the problem much thought. Seeing as VR is the one thing supposed to keep them sane, one would think they’d look into the problem right away and fix it. Of course, if they had, it would have been a very short-lived show.
Worst of all, the basic premise simply reeked of Joe Haldeman’s SF novel ‘Old Twentieth’. They’d better not have ripped off the ending as well. Worryingly enough, a couple of short scenes gave the impression they might have.
Ron Moore has done great things in the past but that won’t make me fall automatically head over heels on love with any new projects.