Giant Freakin Robot

We may only be part of the way through the inaugural season of Syfy’s new series Defiance, but that didn’t stop the network from reupping for a second season.

The order for a 13-episode second season follows on the heels of the second-highest-rated premiere in the network’s history. Defiance debuted to an audience of more than four million viewers. In the weeks following the unveiling, the numbers have remained strong, averaging in excess of two million viewers per week, and winning its Monday night timeslot for the show’s key demographic.

Set in a future world, Defiance tells the story of a world where aliens have landed on Earth, looking for a new home. After a long, destructive war with the human race, they have begun to integrate into human society. You can imagine that this might be a bumpy ride, as different species attempt to learn to get along with each other in post-apocalyptic frontier. The bulk of the series takes place in the ruins of St. Louis, renamed Defiance, and follows Jeb Nolan (Grant Bowler) and his adopted alien daughter, Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas).

Is anybody out there playing Defiance the game? I’ve been cautiously enjoying the Syfy TV series, but in spite of being a gamer, I haven’t had any spare time to check out its transmedia sibling, an MMO third-person shooter intertwined narratively with the show. It’s been unclear exactly to what degree the two entities would actually crossover, but now game developer Trion Worlds has announced a contest to win your in-game character an appearance on the show.

The Defiance Most Wanted contest launched today, and is set to run through 11:59 PDT on Sunday, May 12th. If you’re a Defiance player, you can register for the contest, then you will have to compete two “Most Wanted” activities within the game. Not having played it myself, it sounds like “Most Wanted” is just a subset of the game’s questing system.

The first is called Rogue’s Gallery, and involves the player ”eliminating various mutants, raiders, 99ers, and more.” So, killing stuff, basically. Pretty straightforward. The second, Competitor, “pits you against other ark hunters in team-based PvP and Shadow War modes.” The winner of that one will be the hunter earning the most ark salvage per hour.

To stream, or not to stream? It’s not even a question. Here’s this week’s limited round-up of what hit the Internet this week.

Defiance (Hulu)
We’ve talked about it in the past, and it recently debuted to pretty solid ratings. This Syfy series from Rockne S. O’Bannon, Kevin Murphy, and Michael Taylor, which also has its own online FPS video game, tells the futuristic story of a badass and his charge who arrive in the border town Defiance 30 years after an war with aliens left Earth a very different place. You’ll be able to follow along with this one weekly if you miss the live viewing and your DVR is clogged.

When a company pours $100 million into a project, it’s a fair assumption that they want that money back, and to eventually make a profit. I’m certain everyone behind the new Syfy series/game tie-in Defiance was waiting with baited breaths as the show premiered Monday night, waiting and hoping for huge rating numbers.

While they aren’t huge, Defiance‘s ratings are a definite step up for Syfy, and the two-hour premiere’s total number of viewers — 2.7 million people — is the best the network has seen since the mystery drama Warehouse 13 debuted to a 3.5 million strong audience. For the coveted demographic of adults 18-49, Defiance was watched by 1.3 million, the highest since Eureka‘s 2006 numbers. So these are good numbers, but not quite great numbers, though word-of-mouth and the gaming population — which has logged over six million hours of play time so far — could slowly build this show a dedicated audience to compete with other high-profile cable shows. I’m not saying it’ll get to The Walking Dead levels, but if Defiance avoids Walking Dead‘s haphazard storytelling and character development, it might even rope in some non-genre fans.

“(NBC Universal CEO) Steve Burke is a big cheerleader of this,” says Syfy president Dave Howe, who told The Hollywood Reporter that Defiance will be given time to succeed. “This project makes sense in the marriage of content and distribution. The game is obviously broadband-hungry, which from Comcast’s perspective makes total sense for their broadband business.”