There’s been a lot of discussion and criticism recently - actually, there's been a lot of discussion and criticism throughout - about what the Save Daniel Jackson (SDJ) Campaign is and when it’s going to go away.  The Steering Group's answer to the latter question is simple: when fans no longer need us.  People are finding out every day about losing Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1.

MGM and the producers chose which fans they would listen to before Season Four aired.  Other fans have been protesting the consequent change of creative direction in Stargate since Small Victories first appeared on our screens, the premiere of Season Four.  Season Four shot solidly for the Seven Of Nine demographic and according to writer and director, Peter DeLuise, they only managed to score Six Of Eight.  Coincidentally, preparation for Season Four tallied with the arrival of Hank Cohen at MGM and the departure of Jonathan Glassner from Bridge.

"A bit of changing of the guard had happened on the production side of Stargate at the end of Season Three," Shanks explains, "and I saw early on in season four what was going to happen. They were trying to introduce this character of Anise, and all of a sudden this love relationship between Carter and O'Neill seemed to blossom, and I just went to the writers of the show and went 'What are you doing here? You're making it into a soap opera!' I knew that with all this going on, my character and Teal'c would be just left on the backseat, but they came back to me and said 'It's just something we're experimenting with." -- Michael Shanks. Starburst #286, May 02

<Brad> There are a lot of people who have a narrow vision of what Stargate is or should be.   I think we've gotten better and better.  Not everyone thinks so, but that's fine too.  -- Brad Wright, SCIFI.COM chat, 21-Jun-02

"It's clear from viewing this season [Five]that it's no wonder Michael Shanks wanted to move on; he barely has three lines to say in most of the episodes.  It's a miracle that Christopher Judge didn't bugger off years ago..." -- SFX #86 Season 5 review, Jan 02

Without looking at the full picture, without a presence on all lists, the producers have only ever seen one side of the story.  They don't look beyond the fans they favour and they don't see how they've killed so much of our community in online fandom.

How ironic

There is a supreme irony at work here, one of which Hank Cohen, Bonnie Hammer and Brad Wright may not be aware.

Stargate SG-1 Season Sixth Notice

There has been a considerable amount of speculation and rumor regarding the return of Stargate SG-1 for a sixth season.  It is important to let you, the fans, know that though we are hopeful, no decision has been made.

All of us at MGM are extremely grateful for your outpouring of support. While we are closer, the job is not yet done. But, please know that your cards and letters have definitely gone a long way toward making Season Six a  possibility.

"We hear you!"
Hank Cohen
President
MGM TV Entertainment

Pretty funny, isn’t it?

We’re the same darned fans Hank Cohen thanked for helping to save the show, the same fans who had so much less reason to fight for the continuation of the show which excluded us so much.  The same ones who love the show so much, who trusted Brad Wright and the producers, whose optimism that our efforts to support the show, the cast and crew wouldn’t go unnoticed or our pleas unheard.  The same fans who fought so hard for the continuation of the show in hope, in trust and optimism.

Brad Wright: Many fans will think their write in campaign was the key element in securing a sixth season. While Hank gives them credit in supporting us, I have to give the credit to Hank Cohen for selling Stargate to the SciFi Channel after Showtime had more or less cancelled the show. -- Brad Wright, Lycos Chat Transcript February 28, 2002

“Phoning MGM ad nauseam or attempting to deluge the production offices with letters may feel like a major achievement, but it’s done little in the way of winning any support for your cause. In fact, quite the opposite.” -- Joe Mallozzi, GateWorld Forum, message 2306.32,  Jun-3 4:26 pm

And to be fair, nothing we've done has won us support for our cause among the production staff.  Not last week, not last month, not last year.  Or the year before.

Voices of intelligent dissent or an out-there vocal minority?

We’re not teenage fangrrrls.  We’re mature, educated, articulate professionals, experienced in our careers and in life.  Our multi-lingual, multi-national Steering Group alone is replete with Bachelors degrees, masters, doctorates and professional qualifications. Try to grasp the difference between, say, a teen with a grudge and a NASA aerospace engineer, or the director of a multi-million pound foundation, or the General Manager of corporate ethics, or the professor of biology, or the software developer or technical writer, teacher or librarian, lawyer, psychologist, doctor, parent or grandparent, scriptwriter, editor, copywriter, couple, family, teachers and their students, who used Daniel Jackson to help teach and learn history and language.

If you don’t like us holding you responsible for the way you’ve developed the show you're responsible for writing and producing, say so.  Fine.  Your choice.  If you don’t want to answer questions about the show you are responsible for from the NASA aerospace engineer or the software developer or indeed any of us, just say so.  Also fine.  Also your choice.  You haven’t made those choices, though.

Ignoring us and our concerns for over two years is not fine.  Dismissing us for caring about an inspirational character (ask all the kids who improved their grades and weren’t frightened to read because Daniel made it cool), about what was important to us in the show is not fine.  Indiscriminately characterising as hate mail those thousands and thousands of letters, many telling you that MGM and by extension you were wrong in the creative direction you took and here’s why and how you fix it, is not fine.  Criticism, the expression of anger, frustration and loss, in holding the producers accountable for what they produce is not hate.

We understand that this volume of criticism must be hard to take, but you made a choice to listen to a minority of fans and to give them what they wanted from the show.  Fine.  You set the precedent, and you continue to listen to those fans to this day.  The fans who mourn the loss of Daniel Jackson, the character, his friendship with Jack O’Neill, the team and the mythology, the exploration they loved so much, the fans you’ve been ignoring, have an equal right to be heard.

Remember that you made your choices and now we’re all living with them.  We didn’t choose what Stargate has become, and unhappy as we were, we still fought to save the show for you and for all of us.  We choose now to protest what was taken from us so abruptly, retooled, packaged and sold as an evolution, a natural growth, a better than ever improvement.

Only in a land called every producer’s fantasy does a TV audience have to placidly accept whatever you choose to dish out.  The majority of viewers your choices have cost the show are people you’ll never hear from.  They just switched off.  Those of us protesting really love the show, never doubt that.  We want to go on watching, or we wouldn’t be fighting.  We’ll still be here, in fandom, enjoying the show long after all the producers and writers have moved on.

And?  So?  But?  Therefore?

There are fans who’ve been a part of online fandom for years, others who’ve never been near fandom.  Those of us in online fandom should be very familiar to TPTB.  You’ve been ignoring our comments and concerns since Small Victories aired in Season Four and we wondered where the team went.  There was a shocking coldness to Small Victories, a disconnection in our family we didn’t see coming.  Season Four was the season of separation, of isolation and alienation.  Instead of equality of writing of four characters in a team, a family, there was favouritism of two characters and showcase episodes.   This doesn’t mean all the episodes were uniformly bad; nothing could be further from the truth.

What was lost was balance; an Earth-bound story was no longer balanced by the exploration of a new world.  Those new aliens and ancient cultures were few and far between in Season Four and almost entirely absent from Season Five.  From what I hear in post-episode discussions, Season Six has deviated even further from what those of us with Brad Wright’s ‘narrow vision’ expected or wanted.

Brad Wright: I don't believe we've left the original premise. I believe the series has evolved. I'm as proud of season 5 as I am of any of the first three seasons. -- Brad Wright, Lycos Chat Transcript February 28, 2002

Gee.  I wonder why?  Could it be that rather a lot of people share the narrow vision of what Stargate should be, the narrow vision that once encompassed an equal role for all the team members and room for all of them to shine, that had exploration, mythology, off-world and Earth-bound plots, archaeology, linguistics, battles, technology, races old and new, conspiracies and disasters.  It is not the fans who’ve narrowed their vision, but the producers and the writers.

"The show was moving in a direction that seemed to hold less and less a place for my character,” explains Shanks. “There were a number of conspiracy plots developing and other Earth-based scenarios that were being done in order to flesh out the different aspects of dealing with the Stargate."

“Stargate had become a programme about a military group in a military institution surrounded by all the various aspects and organizations that people in the military might have to deal with. As the sole civilian of the team, other than Teal’c, there wasn’t much for Daniel to do. For example, in the fifth season we seemed to revisit many of the same planets we had been to in the fourth year. Being an anthropologist/archaeologist, Daniel goes to other worlds to meet new races and study new cultures. Instead, we were dealing with old situations and becoming further entrenched in past conflicts. As a result, the archaeological and cultural interests of my character had to take a backseat."

"It was getting to a point where Daniel was in scenes just to he there, you know, and, frankly, I didn’t want to do that any more." -- Michael Shanks, TV Zone #146, Dec 01.

Forced out?  Not!  Michael Shanks chose to leave Stargate SG-1.  We grasped this key concept the first time he said it in an interview.  It wasn’t difficult.  We agreed with Shanks’ reasons and respected him for taking the stand.

Dispirited by the show's new direction, Shanks says he quit:  "I found that I was dramatically changing my character to keep him in the more military plots." --Michael Shanks, TV Guide Full Size 13-19 July 2002

With a Steering Group composed of twenty-eight mature, educated professionals, experts in their different fields, of differing nationalities, ages and backgrounds, discussing and reaching consensus decisions, ensured we were damned sure about what we were doing and why.  This is a campaign not just of protest, but of empowerment.  While those who’ve been catcalling us since day one seem unable to grasp what we’re about, those who support us seem not to have the slightest difficulty.

We’re into the third year of protesting the abrupt change in creative direction of the show in Season Four and the deterioration in the quality of writing, the complexity of characterisation and the depth of interpersonal interaction we enjoyed in the first three seasons.  This protest is not new nor is it retrospective.  We have been arguing these points for years, on Yahoo mailing lists, on the Usenet newsgroup, on various public forums.  We're not looking back and fitting facts to explain Michael Shanks leaving; he left as a direct result of sharing the concerns of so many, many fans about his character and the direction of the show.

"My eyes have been opened during this tour around the UK and other places.  Doing the show for so long you become insulated in your own little world.  You get information from the outside world as it's given to you from the corporation, so you get a sense of things.  But until you actually get the chance to meet the people, you don't really get how strongly they feel about you".  -- Michael Shanks, Starlog #024, Mar 02

We’re protesting that the retooling of the show to more military plotlines left one of our two favourite characters, one of the two original characters, and to a helluva lot of fans, the main character, little to do.  We did not appreciate the sidelining of Daniel Jackson any more than Michael Shanks did.  He’s said so.  It’s the reason he left the show.

Shanks explains his unhappiness with the writers’ treatment of the character, which to his mind had become more and more  two-dimensional as the seasons progressed.  “I think me leaving is a kind of indicator of how satisfied I was [with Season Five]. I found last two years of the show to be a winding down lack of the character's usefulness and the lack of desire of the producers to incorporate that character and use him properly was at times very frustrating for me. There were certainly moments when that came to the fore. It just seemed that there was a painting into a corner of the character which was done early in the Fourth Season. There was a gradual decline, in the sense that there wasn’t a big effort to include him in the big scene.

"As an actor, that’s frustrating: when you are there all the time but you are not contributing in any way. I guess it’s like playing with a sports team where you are sitting on the bench. You know, you’re happy to be there but at the same time you also want to get your name in, and so it became frustrating. I wasn’t content with the way it was going. My early enthusiasm for the show may have propelled me through the rougher points, but then after such a long length of time doing a similar thing each week, that enthusiasm wore down to a point where it couldn’t even get me through the days any more.”

Going on to outline what would have made him happy to continue portraying Daniel Jackson, Shanks describes how it would have made a difference if the writers had been more enthusiastic on behalf of the character. “It didn’t really seem to be important, if that character didn’t fit in [to a particular scene], to give him a reason to fit in, to make a point of saying that he has this conditional skill that is required, something like that. But again, the more I seemed to be vocal about it, the less I saw happening, and the more my frustration built up. So that led to the eventual decision.”  -- Michael Shanks, Xpose #66, Mar 2002

Until now, "I haven't reacted to any of the articles that have come out quoting him as being embittered," Anderson says. "If he's lashing out and thinking that we fired him, that's unfortunate. Michael asked to get off the show." -- Richard Dean Anderson, Chicago Tribune, June 7, 2002

We don't think Michael Shanks was fired.  We do think Daniel Jackson was written into a corner we didn't want him in, Michael Shanks wasn't being challenged as an actor and he didn't want to compromise the character he portrayed.  We do wonder why there wasn't more loyalty to Michael Shanks, why more of an effort wasn't made to address his concerns in order to keep him.

Shanks mentions how the producers reacted to his artistic concerns. “I was told that it was ‘just a phase we’re going through, and it’s not deliberate’. After two years I thought that this was bullshit. It’s either a massive conspiracy or you just don’t care, one way or the other.” And the producers’ reaction when he handed in his notice? “It wasn’t like they did everything they could to keep me. They just acted like they didn’t really care at the end of the day.” -- Michael Shanks, SFX #90, April 2002

Stargate Troopers

The show must evolve!  Yep.  That’s the nature of the beast.  All shows evolve, for good or for ill.  Stargate was evolving beautifully in seasons one and two, and for most of season three also.  In Season Four, what we got wasn’t evolution, but an abrupt retooling of the premise and the characters.  The producers insist this was evolution, that the old planet of the week routine was getting stale.  They’re certainly entitled to their opinion but they did not in fact establish that the majority of their audience felt the old planet of the week routine was getting stale.

The show was retooled to focus on more military plotlines when what made it truly original was the focus on exploration, on ancient mythology and cultures.  The dissatisfaction with plotlines and quality of writing expressed by the off-line fans mirrors that expressed in online fandom for over two years.  What kept many fans hanging in were characters and relationships we loved.  Equality was replaced by inexplicable favouritism and the sidelining of two character, Daniel and Teal’c, to make room for an increased, unnecessary and to many fans frankly unwanted focus on Jack and Sam.

Stargate is not better than ever; it has declined from what it was, a beautiful, engaging human drama with a sci-fi setting, to a common-or-garden sci-fi shoot ‘em up show.  Depth and complexity were sacrificed for kewl explosions and Playstation-style running battles a la Stargate Troopers.  Characterisation suffered, as did writing, with movie after movie and X Files episodes ‘homaged’, which is producer-speak for ripped off.

"Put simply, the charge from Shanks and others is a series that to begin with was mainly focused on Daniel and the relationship between him and Jack O'Neill (played by Richard Dean Anderson) has rather lost its way. The focus of this year's (fifth) season has been less on the exploration and cultural discovery to which Jackson (a linguistic expert and anthropologist) could contribute, and more on the conspiracies and machinations of the military characters, in which he could have little or no significant role.  There really is no denying that this has been a trend in Stargate lately." -- John Binns, "Times past" editorial, Cult Times #78, February 2002

Taking the responsibility for his departure firmly on his own shoulders, Shanks declares: “I think my naivety on the whole issue when I first started on the show was that I’d watched the original Stargate movie and saw where Daniel Jackson went in that. Then, when I was offered the character, especially after reading the pilot. where Daniel has a heavy part, I assumed that it was going to be more a type of ‘buddy’ show, I knew the other characters would be involved as well, but I thought that the Daniel/Jack relationship would be the central focus. That's why I signed on to do it. Plus I liked the character and only saw his development based on the original blueprint. I couldn’t and still don't see it from any other point of view.”  -- Michael Shanks, Dreamwatch #88, Dec 2001

Nielsen May Sweeps 2002: Season 4 in syndication: 2.6
Nielsen May Sweeps 2001: Season 3 in syndication: 2.8
Nielsen May Sweeps 2000: Season 2 in syndication: 3.3 (an 18% rise on Season 1 May 1999)
Nielsen May Sweeps 2000: Season 1 in syndication: 2.7

The B.A.R.B ratings data for Sky One for the period Season Five aired shows how often the repeats of episodes from the earlier seasons equalled or exceeded the ratings for the new Stargate Season Five episodes in their prime time slot.  According to the B.A.R.B website, in 12 weeks out of 21 during which Season Five was aired, the repeats made it into Sky One’s top ten and the new episodes didn’t.  With a regular timeslot on SciFi, if this same pattern is repeated, there's every reason to believe reruns of the early season episodes will at least equal the ratings garnered by the new Season Six episodes.

Seeing both sides.  Or, the SDJ tradition of hot-tubbing

We’ve seen not just other fans but also fandom and campaign commentators speak of us only listening to Michael Shanks and not believing what the producers tell us.

Um...these would be the same producers who haven’t heard a word we’ve said to them for over two years?  Who’ve complained about us finally getting our message out where they can’t ignore it?  Who’ve accused us somewhat indiscriminately of hate mail and death threats?  Of – gasp! – holding them responsible for being careless enough to lose Daniel Jackson, our everyman, our touchstone character, whom so many of us – not all, but many – can’t watch without.  Who've accused us of rumour-mongering and misinformation.  We’ve been slapped down in chats, on the Newsgroup, on GateWorld Forum, on Yahoo mailing lists and in print, with the catcallers leaping gleefully on the bandwagon.

I’m sure it’s all very thrilling and vindicating for the catcallers, but it’s really aggravated quite a few fans who started out agreeing with the producers and wound up supporting the campaign.  We’ve gained more supporters every single time someone from Bridge Studios has opened their mouth long enough to put a foot in it.  Most entertaining of the lists frequented by one producer in particular is SG1Fans.  After a negative review appeared from the TV critic in the Boston Herald, the moderator made a gloriously nutty post about members of the SDJ campaign influencing the review via a little consensual hot-tubbing.

When the producers refrain from interacting with and defending fans who enjoy a reputation for loathing the character of Daniel Jackson, some of whom were witnessed expressing an equal loathing for Michael Shanks in a number of libellous allegations against the actor in chat,  when the producers choose to post to lists and forums (with the exception of the Usenet newsgroup) which aren't so obviously anti-Daniel in sentiment, I'm sure they'll get a more receptive hearing.  As it is, outside of those forums, the tactics of the producers in baiting fans of Daniel Jackson, in playing one group of fans against another have not inspired trust or confidence.

As it is, two long, oftentimes disappointing, seasons for Jack and Daniel friendship fans, for team as family fans, for Daniel Jackson fans, even for some Jack O'Neill fans, have exhausted a lot of us.  Every time we start to lose our way, we remember what Stargate was, we know what Brad Wright, Robert C. Cooper and Peter DeLuise can give us, how good it has been and how good it could be again.  Optimism triumphs over experience time and again and we choose to fight to be able to watch the show again instead of quitting and walking away.

Every time energy and commitment waver, we get a boost from Bridge Studios, some tactless pronouncement someplace that lights the fire in our bellies all over again.

Filthy lucre

Fans and commentators alike have condemned the money we’ve raised, the adverts we’ve placed.  Are we supposed to apologise for that?  This is a campaign.  None of us in the steering group are the only adored child of millionaire parents, unfortunately, which required fund raising if we wanted to get our message out in such a way it really couldn't be ignored any longer.

We can accept the very existence of those adverts pisses some fans off, because it shakes their comfortable world view that we’re a teeny, tiny, powerless, yet annoyingly vocal minority.  We raised $12,000, give or take a dollar or two.  We didn’t have a few super-rich fans who gave massive amounts.  We had a LOT of fans who gave a little, some as little as one dollar, commonly five or ten or twenty-five.  A LOT of fans love Daniel Jackson and wanted to thank Michael Shanks for all he’s given us in his performance.  They too wanted to protest the change of direction in the show which sidelined Daniel Jackson.  Some fans couldn’t support the campaign monetarily or chose not to donate, but still lent their support with the written word in letters and emails.  We value everyone’s contribution and their commitment.  The recent fun phase of the campaign, the Cartouche Crusade, resulted in an ancient fonts website we linked to continually exceeding its bandwidth.

It’s not like it was the first time Brad Wright or anyone else at Bridge was hearing this message.  They chose to ignore what we were saying to them, what we asked of them, for two years before the first advert appeared, though they clearly heard a minority of fans delivering a perhaps more palatable message.

We chose at last to deliver our message in a way MGM and the producers couldn’t ignore it, and the message was shared by far more people than we were remotely prepared for.   So pervasive is this myth in fandom that we are a teeny, tiny minority, we almost believed it.  Seven months later and every day, new fans find us who share our beliefs, who share our appreciation for the character of Daniel Jackson as portrayed by Michael Shanks, who wish to join our protest at losing him.

We’re not going to apologise for raising funds.  People tend to decide for themselves what the truth of a matter is, and what is important to them.  While we're sorry that Michael Shanks was overwhelmed by a ton of unexpected validation and we do accept his view that the money could have been spent on more important causes, we'd have to reiterate that every one of the individuals who donated made their own choice to do so because Michael Shanks is important to them.  Michael Shanks is in fact important to far more people than he knew, the character he portrayed is important to more people than even they - or we - knew.

Every donation was generous, no matter the dollar amount, every individual made their own choice to donate, every individual knew exactly what we were going to do with the money, they agreed, they earned the money they donated and they made their own choice to do so, because it was important for them to do so, just as it is important for them that their voices be heard.

Onwards and upwards

This is a strong, assertive campaign, a global campaign, led by a team of disciplined, committed individuals, aggressively and innovatively marketed, using every advantage the Internet and a cell phone have to offer.  Fan directed.  Fan funded.  Fans have made their voices heard in letters, calls, posts, articles, reviews and editorials.  It really would not have been necessary if the producers had heard us in the first place.

It’s the fans who determine the success of a show, the fans who decide what works and what doesn’t, which characters they love, which they want to see centre-stage.  The core characters, the core friendship which was at the heart of Stargate SG-1, was that of Jack and Daniel.  Yet there was room to enjoy Daniel’s friendship with Sam, Jack’s with Teal’c.  The characters were written equally and each was as important as the other.  Military and conspiracy plotlines had their place when they were not the focus of the show, when there was balance.  Stargate lost its way in Season Four.  The fans who protested were ignored, with no attempt on the part of the producers to either address their concerns or to establish how widespread was the discontent.  As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

We wanted to thank Michael Shanks for all he gave us in his portrayal of Daniel Jackson.  We achieved that in our advert in TV Zone.  We wanted to assure him that he was not alone in what he believed the premise and strength of Stargate to be or mistaken in his belief of the character's importance to the show and to the fans.  We did that in each of our subsequent adverts and in the messages of support that fill the Guestbooks.

We wanted to take the message the producers had been so assiduously not hearing, out of fandom and into the real world.  We wanted to speak directly to other fans and to make ourselves heard by the producers at last because they not only wouldn't hear us, they told us we were surplus to requirements.  We did that in our Guestbooks and Discussion Board, in letters, calls, postcards, emails, faxes.  A deluge of them, a deluge which has gone on for seven months.  We did that in our adverts in Hollywood Reporter, Variety and Dreamwatch.

We wanted to tell Hank Cohen how important the team of Jack, Daniel, Sam and Teal'c was to us, how the four of them together as a family were the show to us.  We wanted to thank all the actors for their portrayals and to compliment the strength of their characterisation by the writers.  We did that in our second advert in Variety.

We wanted the producers to negotiate with Michael Shanks for as many appearances in Season Six as were possible.  One of the producers emphatically told us we played no part in that.  We're just happy it's happening, because Michael Shanks said in his interviews for months after he left the show that he felt nothing was going to be offered.  We've had Abyss and there is the possibility of two or three more episodes towards the end of the season.  If they're of the quality of Abyss, then we have a lot to look forward to.

There are twenty-eight of us in the Steering Group, four hundred and sixty one members in the SG1 Team campaign mailing list.  We have a core of posters on the Discussion Board and our webhosting is assured.

We've created a safe, welcoming community and as long as fans need us, we're staying right here, helping them to make their voices heard. Intelligent dissent should never be stifled.

SDJ Steering Group
6th August 2002

Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Stargate (II) Productions, SCI FI Channel, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. All blog entries represent the opinion of the poster. All editorials represent the opinion of the author. All linked content represents the opinion of the linked site's webmaster. Copyright on all articles/editorials/blog entries belongs to the original author. Offer void where prohibited. Please remain seated while the aircraft is in motion. Warning: Coffee will be hot. A moose once bit my sister.