h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

See there I have to disagree - Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter both have credible fantasy creatures, as does hercules and xena to some extent (although as much as an extent as the floating jellyfish of the TNG pilot) so that doesnt really stand up. And as for popularity - niether series would have gone for 7 seasons, at what, 24 episodes a season... Farscape was bigger and got killed in four seasons with 22 episodes a pop, so there must be another reason...

Yes, but LotR and Harry Potter are movies. The problem is that back when sci-fi TV was becoming salable fantasy was way to expensive to produce well. In fact one of the main things that got B5 made was the reduced budget the CGI enabled. Sure you can do fantasy now, but it's really too late as it has already flopped and TV execs won't risk the money on what is percieved as a failier, namely TV fantasy

See I dunno its not really been a failure per se.
Xena and Hercules were gimmicky shows, but certainly not failures if there still pulling in the money. See as technology moves, the semi decent technology becomes cheaper, so the stuff that babylon 5 et al use becomes pretty cheap - the budget of xena/hercules would likely be half if made now.

I dunno I think we might see one within a decade because people like weta who have the resources to whack out that amount of decent prostectics will want to try another flagship project or two.

Yes, but Hercules and Xena weren't american products per se. They were New Zeland made. A lot of fantasy and lower budget sci-fi is UK, Australia, New Zeland or Canada made. It's also quite popular in Japan, where Anime is used and Europe where it's more engrained in the culture. The movie Die Nibelungen, the story of Siegfried Dragonslayer, for instance, would most probably not have been made in the US, especially so soon after LotR was made.

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See I'm not too sure that product origin makes that much difference with these kinds of things because of the sheer scale of them. I'm not all too sure that Farscape was american (australlia I think).

Seven days was axed after 3 successful seasons
Enterprise didnt get its seventh (although I'm not suprised)
Battlestar is flagging

Theres no rear in the american series market, partly due to fatigue (lets face it, there was Whedon, and then there was everyone else at his table) and partly due to Lost being immensely domminant.

In principle, theres no reason why a good quality fantasy couldnt be made. I'm not talking the kind of fantasy we see in the aforementioned, but more akin to say grecian myths. I've been toying with doing a spartan story with a hercules style too it, and I've dismissed it several times as being beyond my resources and time but having thought more about it I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to do.

Maybe its the necessity of monsters that puts people off do you think? The design department on something like trek wouldnt necessarily need to be that big, because its been built up over several years. Nor does something like seven days, buffy, angel etc because they already have real life grounding. Now a fantasy series; that requires all sorts of creative talent that simply doesnt come cheap...

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