Aug 15 2008
Battlestar Galactica Season 4 in Australia (Rather Late)
So, Australia is finally getting Battlestar Galactica season four on television: TV Tonight reports that the season will kick off with the ‘Razor’ double ep-cum-telemovie on September 4th. Given my interest in the tyranny of digital distance, I find it noteworthy that Razor will arrive eight and a half months after it was screened in the US (and will, in fact, be released on DVD in Australia just over a fortnight before it’s televised down under)! Presuming that the entire season is played thereafter, the rest of BSG season four will be five months behind the US.
Ten will be playing BSG exclusively on their High Definition channel (great for those who get it, no doubt infuriating for those who don’t) but, really, the audience they’ll pull will be infinitesimal compared to the eyes they’d get if BSG was concurrent with the US schedule. Meanwhile, a few people might just have downloaded BSG via BitTorrent given the series is amongst the most downloaded TV shows of this year (and last).
August 15th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
It’s really quite strange that television stations outside of the US accept this slowness - I imagine part of it is they’re waiting to see whether a show will be successful or not before investing in it, but surely they see that the series’ pull is far less than if they were broadcast faster?
Do you know whether tv stations are actually considering these issues? I wonder whether it’s the US producers who are slow to get things to their international market, or the international companies that are slow to buy? Perhaps they CAN’T buy sooner?
August 15th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Hey Jill!
In Australia some US shows are ‘fast tracked’ now, like Heroes, which means they play either the same day or a couple of days after the US, so it’s certainly possible to arrange. I’m sure it costs a little more, so shows which can land in primetime - Heroes, Prison Break, Lost, etc - seem to be considered worth the effort while others, such as Battlestar, aren’t thought to be as big a drawcard for advertisers and thus get pushed later in the schedule. So, as you say, I imagine the decision to synchronise with US screening times is a strategic and financial one.
One other factor used to matter, which is unlike US shows which might have two blocks of 13 episodes, sometimes with fortnight breaks therein, Australia shows used to always play full seasons week by week without a break (something that could only be managed if you started playing the first episode a lot later). That said, most shows now get stopped and started at odd times, so I doubt that matters as much today.