On an unassuming Friday evening on March 19, 1999, an integral piece of sci-fi history made its debut on the then-titled Sci-Fi Channel. While franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and even Stargate, typically dominate pop culture conversations, Farscape's impact on the genre can still be felt today, twenty-five years after it first premiered. In the lead-up to the 25th anniversary this year, Shout! TV has been treating Farscape fans to marathons, epic Blu-ray box sets, and in this fan's case: interviews with the cast and creator.
When Farscape hit the airwaves, I was at the perfect age to appreciate the incredible puppetry brought to the series by The Jim Henson Company, but entirely oblivious to the more mature themes and storylines that played out across the four seasons and the culminating miniseries, The Peacekeeper Wars. When the series began its reruns on the then-renamed SyFy Channel in my adolescence, I developed a newfound respect for Rockne O'Bannon's boundary-breaking series that holds up better than most of its contemporary peers.
For readers who might be a bit hazy about the particulars of Farscape, the series focuses on the occupants of the biomechanical ship Moya, which includes; John Crichton (Ben Browder), a modern-day American astronaut who flies into a wormhole and finds himself caught up in the Moya's escape from the Peacekeepers; Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black), a renegade Peacekeeper, who eventually falls in love with Crichton; Chiana (Gigi Edgley), an endearing mercurial thief and con artist; Ka D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe), a Luxan warrior; Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan (Virginia Hay), a former Delvian Priestess and empath; and the two impressive animatronic puppets, Dominar Rygel XVI (voiced by Jonathan Hardy) and Pilot (voiced by Lani Tupu).
Farscape
Thrown into a distant part of the universe, an Earth astronaut finds himself part of a fugitive alien starship crew.
Release DateMarch 19, 1999
CastDavid Franklin, Melissa Jaffer, Raelee Hill, Tammy MacIntosh, Lani Tupu, Paul Goddard, Virginia Hey, Rebecca Riggs, Wayne Pygram, Gigi Edgley, Anthony Simcoe, Jonathan Hardy, Ben Browder, Claudia Black
Main GenreSci-Fi
GenresSci-Fi, Action, Adventure
RatingTV-14
Seasons4
StudioSyFy
Creator(s)Rockne S. O'Bannon
WritersRichard Manning, David Kemper, Rockne S. O'Bannon, Justin Monjo
Streaming Service(s)Crackle , Plex, Amazon Freevee, Peacock
How 'Farscape's Fans Saved the Series
Given that I was quite young when the series originally aired, I was entirely unaware of the fact that fans fought to save the series after it was prematurely cancelled after Season 4. With this in mind, I was eager to ask the series' star, Ben Browder, about what it was like to be part of a series that mattered so much to fans that they came together to write letters, raise funds, and send their bras to the studio. Yes, you read that right—Browder revealed all the amusing details of the now-infamous "Brascape" fan movement that helped bring Farscape for one last season.
"So back in the day, they shut down the phone system at SyFy channel for two weeks. For two weeks, the SyFy channel could not get a phone call in and out because they were being inundated with calls. They sent funeral wreaths and flowers that completely filled up the lobby of the building in New York. They had a thing called Brascape where women mailed their brassieres to the SyFy channel. They had brassieres stacked up in a room from people complaining about the cancellation of Farscape. They picketed in front of the building. So, it was a real world with real impact, and I think some of the executives at the SyFy channel were probably in fear for their lives for a while, which is not good. I'm not endorsing that. But the company literally couldn't take a phone call for two weeks."
What's particularly impressive about Farscape's fan campaign is the fact that the internet was a very different place in 2003. This was before YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Fans would congregate on chat boards and fan pages fueled by dial-up internet, and concoct their plans for how they would prove to the studio that their favorite series deserved proper closure. As for the Star Trek fan campaigns that saved the franchise (and still exist today), and the less successful fan responses to the cancellations of The Vampire Academy or Our Flag Means Death, Browder had one major takeaway from Farscape fans' tenacity: "[A]ll I know is that you don't wanna piss off a fan base."
Will We Ever Get a 'Farscape' Reunion?
Reunions are all the rage in Hollywood these days, especially when it comes to series that still have active and passionate fanbases keeping them alive long after the final episodes have aired. Farscape's cast is still attending conventions across the world, where fans come together to listen to them talk about their time on the series and where their careers have taken them since. Naturally, I quizzed Browder about if he thought a reunion was in the cards for the series, whether that be a miniseries, movie, or audio drama, and he had a fairly positive response — but it was also one that brought Collider into the mix.
"I think that the next volume would be great. I'd love to see where the crew of Moya is 25 years later. I think it'd be a fascinating story. Stories of our life don't end at 25, at 35, at 45; it ends when we take our last breath. And there's a lot of interesting stories. There's a lot of stuff to tell, and then there's multigenerational stuff, as well. Farscape was always really a story about a family, about a group of people who are engaged in the epic process of trying to live and make a life that's worth living, so I don't see why it shouldn't continue. And hopefully, at some point, if someone wants it to continue, they'll write a big check. Talk to your people at Collider."
After a playful jest about getting another "Brascape" going, Browder added, "[I]t's an amazing thing that something that you were engaged in, so wholeheartedly a quarter of a century ago, is still available and there's still new people coming to it and seeing it. It's humbling." At the very end of my conversation with Browder, he circled back on the idea of Collider paving the way for Farscape's return — and no, it had nothing to do with a few cleverly positioned articles or galvanizing the fanbase. As Browder put it, "It's the first Collider production." Jokes aside, having my hand in puppetry certainly made for a memorable send-off to my conversation with him.
Rockne O'Bannon Reveals How 'Farscape' Was Able to Be So Groundbreaking
Browder wasn't the only Farscape legend I had the pleasure of conversing with for the 25th anniversary of the series. I caught up with Rockne O'Bannon, the creator of not only Farscape, but also seaQuest DSV, Defiance, Cult, and Alien Nation, to reflect on the legacy of the series and discuss its recently announced return to comic book form.
"Comics were great. We did a series a while back and now they're re-releasing those and then we have some very high end comic writers who were Farscape fans and are writing the new stories. So yeah, in its way, as you probably would expect, it's freeing because it's an opportunity to tell stories in uncharted territories that we couldn't have done in the television series. Just too big of scale. In the very first comics a while back, the first thing I did in the very first comic was go to Hyneria, which is Rygel, one of the characters in the show, his home world. In the TV show, you could never do a world of Hynerians, of people of Rygel’s size, but in the comic, obviously, you can kind of do anything you want. So, that was the first place I went. Then I was also able, in the comics, to introduce a bigger bad that I'd hoped to introduce into the TV series but then the series went away. So this was an opportunity to bring this kind of ultimate bad guy, bad force into the Farscape world."
What Makes 'Farscape' Better Than Any Other Sci-Fi Series
It's time to revisit why this show is such a beloved and enduring favorite.While the Hynerians may have posed a challenge for Farscape's live-action medium, the series succeeded in exploring surprisingly progressive storylines and visual feats that were well ahead of the industry at the time. I was eager to question O'Bannon about how the series was able to achieve so much, and I was surprised to learn that puppetry was essentially the gateway to allowing its gritty storytelling to be on the air. "It kind of began, obviously, working with the Henson Company and Brian [Henson], whose original brief to me was, 'We just want to show lots of aliens because we want to use a lot of animatronics and all that sort of thing.' So I went off, and I thought, 'Okay, Brian, I’ll hold you to that.' So I created a world where there was one human, essentially the guy from Earth, and everybody else was an alien. He embraced it and off we went." He went on to say:
"The other big factor was very early on we sold the show to the SyFy channel, and we got an order for a full season, and then the president of the SciFi Channel at the time, who bought the show, he moved on. So, we were still developing the series. We had the order and someone else came in. He wasn't there for very long, but he came in as president, and he looked at the Henson Company and kind of what we talked about and all that, and he thought it was a kids’ show. He thought it was gonna be a kids’ show."
After I noted that it was the puppets that clearly gave them that impression, O'Bannon continued on to explain, "He called me in, and just kind of with his feet up on his desk, he just goes, kind of dismissively, 'Just make it as weird as you can.' So I walked away going, 'Okay,' you know, 'I'm not the one to tell that to.' So that just became the watchword. Just be as bold as you possibly can."
"I think there's a big advantage that we were in Australia, and Australians obviously have an incredible, unique sensibility in terms of just the look of things and their boldness in personality and all that. So most of our cast, all except for Ben [Browder], were all Australian, and then obviously all the artists behind the scenes. So all of that contributed to, “We can make it as strange as we can.” And I'm very proud to say, I mean, here we are talking about it 25 years later. There's not a lot of shows that necessarily would be talked about in the way that Farscape is a full two-and-a-half decades later. I just don't think so."
Like Browder, O'Bannon seems genuinely surprised by the fact that the series still resonates with fans — new and old — today. He went on to note how gratifying it is that Shout!TV is running a marathon for the series on its anniversary and commemorating the occasion with the DVD set, saying:
"All those things, to me, are incredibly gratifying, and an opportunity for new fans to discover it. And new fans are discovering it. I was at a science fiction convention this last December and we filled a room. I can't tell you how many people came up to me at varying ages. Many of them said, 'I watched it back in the day,' and then others were like, 'I discovered it 10 years ago,' or, 'I just discovered it a little while ago,' or something like that. It suggested that for a segment of the audience, hopefully a large segment of the audience, it holds up."
O'Bannon circled back on those watchwords that guided the series, explaining, "And because it was so, if I may, so bold, I mean, our watchwords were 'bold' and 'unpredictable.' Characters would run a gamut from the most wild humor that was grounded in something real, but it was still wild, wild humor. And then at the other side, the danger of where they were and the fact that nobody was safe, and that we were willing to kill off characters sometimes in the most unpleasant ways, or whatever is necessary. We're so used to things that are based on titles or things that we've known from the past, and people just continue to be very, very cautious. There's a lot of shows on that I love and that I, that I really, really enjoy, but I can say with pride that Farscape, to this day, is certainly among the most bold series that I'm aware of."
You can marathon Farscape on its 25th anniversary only on Shout! TV. Be sure to watch my full interview with Rockne O'Bannon in the player above, and my humorous conversation with Ben Browder—which included a sojourn into his time on Stargate: SG-1 — in the player at the top.
