Have you ever flipped over to the Sci Fi Channel and wondered why it was showing wrestling, or a series about superheroes' naughty wives, or a movie like Field of Dreams or Indiana Jones? It's because this sort of brand dilution is the only way to reach women and thus grow ratings, Sci Fi President Dave Howe believes. He told the Times, "It’s not just aliens, spaceships and the future... It’s about asking that simple question, 'What if?'" His NBC cylon overlord Bonnie Hammer found a more menacing way to say the same thing:

"We had to broaden the channel to change the misconceptions of the genre... that it was for geeky young men."

Amazing, then, that I know two women once far more into Sci Fi Channel mainstay Battlestar Gallactica than I, at least until the plot took a turn for the sappy, despite the fact that it features both spaceships and the future. And my favorite Sci Fi blog is even edited by a woman.

But of course the channel can always count on those sorts of hard-core fans tuning in, even if the name is disastrously changed to "the Imagination Channel" as once discussed, according to the Times article. In the meantime network executives are trying to build a global mega-brand, and to them the "Sci Fi" in "Sci Fi Channel" is best viewed, as Howe puts it, as merely an advantageous "signpost" amid "the fragmentation of media," albeit one with a "downside" — the downside being that the channel taken at face value, and believed to be sci fi in nature, when in fact it wants to be So Much More, and thus so much less.

[Times]