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Juliet Blake - The Jim Henson Company's US President of Television tells us about the cancellation, Farscape's future, and what the show meant to them.
How the Muppets met Moya
Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your involvement with Farscape?
I’m the President of Jim Henson Television here in America, and I was also one of the many executive producers on Farscape. I’m head of TV here, but also had responsibility for Farscape for the whole of the Henson company.
Could you explain how Henson became involved with Farscape?
Actually, I sort of inherited Farscape. I have been with the company almost three years and when I arrived we were about to do the third season of Farscape. My predecessor Rod Perth, who was a huge Farscape fan, had started life as Head of Studios USA, the USA network, and had commissioned Farscape from Brian Henson when he was more involved with the company.
He then ended up coming to run Henson so he changed from being the executive that commissioned the show to then being the person responsible for it at Henson.
New worlds and new life
Has Farscape opened up any opportunities for Henson that weren’t there before?
I think so. I think one of the great things about Farscape is that it really does showcase the work of our Creature Shop. So where before we’d been known mainly for The Muppets and children’s programming, what Farscape did was to show people the great quality of our work as a company. The fact that we did a show that was so out there was great for this company.
Thanks for sharing
Could you explain how all the companies which have a hand in Farscape interact to finance and make it?
Farscape was a co-production between Hallmark, which obviously you know make many TV movies and mini-series, and the Henson Company. It was co-financed by the two companies with a substantial licence fee from the Sci Fi Channel and very useful - but a bit of a dribble - money from the Â鶹ԼÅÄ.
Overseas sales for the show were okay but not as good as they could have been, so when you added up all of those things with a show that every year got slightly more complicated, and more wonderful, the budget did increase, not astronomically, but enough for it to be of concern to everybody.
Were Henson quite hands-on over controlling the show?
We were very hands-on. We would read several drafts of every script. We were hands-on financially, controlling the purse strings, and we were hands-on creatively, very much so.
We have a Creature Shop here in Burbank in Los Angeles and another one in London, but when the show started we took some of our best Creature Shop technicians, builders, and designers, and started a shop in Australia, in Sydney, on one of the sound stages.
We had seven big sound stages to do the show in Australia. It was a huge undertaking and so we were very hands on.
Season of death
Can you tell us a bit about how the cancellation of the show came about?
It was pretty devastating, because everybody really felt that we’d do another season, or even if not a whole season then half a season, and the economics just didn’t work.
I think that the show had not been as supported by the sort of new higher ups at Studios USA because it was a very complicated, dense show.
As a newcomer to it myself in Season three I felt that I’d inherited something that was pretty incredible and wonderful but a little bit impenetrable if you weren’t part of the whole Farscape phenomenon.
I think that when Michael Jackson, fellow Brit, came in and was overseeing the whole of the Sci Fi network with Bonnie Hammer underneath him, even though Bonnie and all her team were huge fans of the show, I think he wanted to broaden the show out to be something that you just couldn’t do that with it. In a sense we all felt, ‘Let’s keep it pure’ and that’s what we did. And by so doing probably saw the end of it on the Sci Fi network.
Fans and the future
Had Henson’s expected the strength of fan reaction to the cancellation?
It was expected. Farscape fans are like no others, they are so loyal and did everything they could to keep the show on the air.
Yet I think, and I was always very honest about this, once the show had been cancelled it would be very difficult to bring it back. Once a network makes its mind up that it’s going to move forward in a different direction, it’s very hard to bring that show back to life because the actors have moved on, a lot of the writers have moved on. I think we as a company in some ways have moved on.
That’s not to say that Farscape is entirely dead, we’re planning to continue the franchise but in different ways. So what we’d like to do is a movie, either a TV movie [or a cinema release] at some point. We get calls all the time from – I can’t go into any of the names – but from billionaires and some large corporations who are saying ‘You can’t let it die, what are you doing? What can we do to help?’ which is great.
So it’s a bit like Doctor Who. I don’t feel Doctor Who has ever really died. I mean, it continues in different guises and I think that that will happen with Farscape too.
So a movie is planned?
I wouldn’t say it’s planned, but we are thinking about it and looking at how we could do it and what the economics would be, and thinking about whether we will do that.
What was lost
I know the sets have been struck but do they still exist?
Some of them exist and some of them don’t. I think that’s less of a problem because I think that they could all be rebuilt.
Certainly a lot of the creatures are still there and are being shipped back to London at the moment. But you can’t kill a series just because the sets aren’t there. There are ways of doing it.
The ugly truth
If it had been generally realised what the fan reaction would be, do you think Farscape would have been cancelled?
Probably yes, unfortunately, because I think the reality is that even though the Sci Fi Channel were horrified at the reaction of the fans, and people were picketing the building, and taking out full page ads in the trades here, I think that sometimes things come to an end and there’s very little we can do about it.
It’s a great shame. I’m not saying the fans were powerless because I think that they were very much heard by the network, certainly by the Henson Company and I just hope that they’ll be there when we do our next big sci fi show.
Revenging anime
Is a future as an animated series a possibility for Farscape?
Anime [not animation]. That is a real possibility, but I can’t talk about that at the moment. It is something that we’re actively working on.
Would that not be a bit of a departure for Henson because you’re so associated with the live action animatronics?
Yes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think that we as a company like to do anything that is really creative, and we don’t like to pigeon ourselves or put ourselves into a box. We are always meeting with interesting artists, designers, creators, animators, live action puppeteers, we like to keep our door very much open.
Twice brave
Would Hensons' ever consider making another science fiction show like Farscape?
Absolutely. I would love us to do another sci fi show. We don’t, at the moment, have anything that showcases the work of our Creature Shop in the way that I would like, and we’re certainly always looking at material to find the next thing that would be good for us to do as a company.
One of the joys of Farscape was producing it in Australia. When you see the show, you can see that it’s well produced and that the money’s on the screen, but it’s not until I went a couple of years ago to Australia [that I] saw the sets and the extraordinary way the show was put together.
[With] the collaboration of the cast and the crew and Ben Browder crossing between lead actor to writing episodes to wanting to direct episodes, it was like a family living in Sydney making this show. There were hundreds of people involved in it and I think that [in] Sydney, [although] of course there are lots of features filming there, a lot of people are hurting because [Farscape’s] no longer in production. It was a huge huge piece of the Australian TV business.
So are Hensons' planning something else in the same line as Farscape then?
We’re in the process of acquiring some interesting books and we will be developing from those books. There are two or three writers that I’ve always been passionate about, not authors but screen writers, that we are talking to about developing new things with.
The last word
Finally, what has Farscape meant for Hensons'?
Creativity, being on the map with a prime time show, wining huge numbers of awards, we’ve won Saturn awards galore, working with an incredibly talented group of writers, actors, performers and really doing a show that was just out there, was Farscape. It was different to anything else on television.
There are no other shows that look like it. I think a lot of sci fi on television reminds me of kid’s nativity costumes with fruit gums on them and I think that Farscape had this extraordinary look for a reasonably low budget TV show. So we’re very proud of it.