B5 cost just under a million an episode and it went out of production five years ago. The Trek shows that overlapped with B5 cost from 2 to nearly 3 million per. I'm not sure what Farscape cost, or how much of the cost Sci-Fi itself picked up. With a Galactica series Universal, which owns Sci-Fi, will be the producing studio, and the network will probably be part-owner of the show, which was not the case with Farscape. Any way you slice it that means the NBC-Universal gets all of the ancillary revenue generated by the show - overseas sales, home video, syndication, etc., which, again, was not the case with Farscape. Depending on which pocket they want to take what money from, they could have Sci-Fi pay a relatively modest license fee to air the series (which keeps it budget under control and makes money available for other projects) while Universal takes a loss during production and makes its money on the back-end with all the other revenue. This is essentially what Paramount did with Voyager and Enterprise, and before that it syndicated TNG and DS9 for their first run on attractive terms and ate the deficit while the shows were shooting, then went into the black with the reruns, foreign sales, VHS, laserdisc and DVD releases.
So it isn't simply the per episode budget that drives these things, it is the network's actual return on its investment. With Farscape (or a Rangers series, since WB turned down Sci-Fi's bid to own a piece of the project) the network pays "X" dollars per episode to air the show, and makes its money selling advertising time. That's it. It makes no other money off the series. If the per episode fee the producers or studio charges is too high, the network can't make a profit keeping the show on the air. I'm not sure how things stand now, but I do know that after September 11th 2001 an already growing "advertising recession" became much worse and the rates stations and publications could charge for ads dropped sharply. There were simply too few dollars chasing too much advertising capacity. A number of magazines and even newspapers went out of business because they couldn't sell enough ad pages, or couldn't sell them for enough money. If Sci-Fi were still in that kind of position last year, it becomes understandable that they'd drop Farscape if it were costing them more than they expected to make in ads. If the producers weren't willing to bear more of the cost by lowering their license fee (which would have been an option) then the show would have to be cancelled.
Regards,
Joe
