Pen-Elayne on the Web

Bastard Stepchildren

The thing that bugs me personally about the Emmys is that they rarely award anything to what they consider "genre programming." Somehow, cop shows and lawyer shows and political suspense shows don't count as genre. Only science fiction and fantasy. The exception seems to be made-for-TV movies - Dinotopia and The Mists of Avalon were good enough to garner nominations, and of course Gulliver's Travels earned a couple awards a few years back. But all the Star Trek shows, Buffy, Charmed, etc., are usually hard-pressed to win any sort of mainstream respect. Does sf/fantasy/occult automatically have to be relegated to cult status, the sort of shows all the critics will acknowledge are well done but which nobody ever really wants to vote for? Or is stuff like The West Wing really that much better?