The Brilliant Hard Sci-Fi Series Which Never Had A Chance
Did a failed release decision kill it, or was it something else?
L5 was a low-budget sci-fi series that didn’t look low-budget at all. Created through a crowdfunding campaign, the show’s first series was released online for free in 2012 to rave reviews. And then, nothing happened.
L5 begins at what in any other story might be the end. The crew of a deep space exploration vessel returns home after what was supposed to be a 20-year mission and finds planet Earth apparently deserted.
L5 was a premise filled with potential being executed by people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Or at least knew what they were doing when it came to creating good stories. Maybe they didn’t know what they were doing when it came to marketing their work.
So what went wrong? There are a lot of reasons for speculation, but in my mind, they killed themselves by refusing to release the show in an easily accessible format.
This first L5 episode was initially only made available as a torrent, a format that is and always has been largely inaccessible to the average, far less tech-savvy internet user. Later, perhaps realizing their mistake, they went on to make it available on YouTube, but by then, it was too late.
Here’s the episode they released on YouTube…
The L5 series was funded entirely by donations from supporters on Kickstarter. The first episode cost only $15,000, and while not all of the special effects were perfect, they were pretty good, at least as good as some of the more terrible CGI on network television at the time, as exemplified by contemporary in misfires like Terra Nova.
Terra Nova, by the way, cost millions of dollars to produce, and all they had to pull off was a few dinosaurs and some foliage. This does far more with far, far less.
More important than the special effects is the story, which was top-notch in this first episode. The acting, usually the big Achilles heel in these web-produced series, is mostly good. When it’s not, they don’t spend a lot of time on those inferior actors.
What might have happened if it continued? Where would the story have gone? We’ll never know. All we’ll ever have is the L5 pilot episode, a tantalizing look at a great sci-fi series that almost was.
