The format of the Greatest Science Fiction Film Tournament has been chosen by you guys, the readers. The results can be seen in detail here. We will not break the tournament down by season or episode, looking only at whole series. As before, Bureau 42 authors will come up with a starter list of shows, and wildcards can be submitted by the voters. The tournament will still be 42 weeks. The only real difference between this and the movie tournaments are in scale (half as many titles to start with, so that “round one” will have 8 movies per week instead of 16) and the use of mandatory unique identifiers to provide more statistical analysis. (Those identifiers can be anything provided it won’t be duplicated, and they won’t be seen publicly. They’ll be used solely to correlate votes from a single voter across multiple weeks. With sufficient statistics, we may turn it into a recommendations engine, so that we’ll have a sidebar that lets you say “I like A, B and C, what else should I check out?” and get useful answers.) Once we assemble the starting list of titles, we’ll post a start date for the tournament and get the ball rolling.
Seems to me the unique identifier is a good idea for something like this. It should illuminate a lot of cases where someone is choosing randomly. Say, for instance, one voter marks two series as “haven’t seen” and then later prefers one over the other, you know that something is probably going on with that voter. I don’t know how that could work into the results at all but an analysis of that sort of thing could be interesting.
Conceivably someone could have marathonned the entire series on Netflix or similar between rounds in that sort of case. Especially easy to do with short shows like Firefly (13 episodes). Not so easy with something like Stargate SG-1 (> 210).
At least for me, the starting list of such a tournament makes a good “recommendation” list at least after the first round gets rid of some that may not be up to par.
So what sort of series will be welcome in this tournament?
Just Sci-Fi, or Fantasy as well?
Some series would be obvious to include, but others could be debatable. Better off Ted was a workplace comedy but it includes many elements of Sci-Fi in just about any episode given what they did in the lab. Todd and the Book of Pure Evil is more fantasy but does have some Sci-Fi elements at times. And if that one gets in, then perhaps some like Reaper and Dead Like Me should come in, which are great, but don’t fit neatly into the genre.
With some looser definitions we should have no trouble populating a large tournament. :-)
I’m planning on tight definitions, and then separate fantasy tournaments, followed by combined tournaments for the winners, etc.