Is there going to be a second series of Paradox?

The decision making process about renewing a series is probably very complex.

As a viewer, I can understand that a recurring series will undoubtedly mean the cast get a bigger salary this time around - this was certainly responsible for the death of many relatively long running series in the U.S.

I can also grasp that purely commercial stations depend highly on a stable demographic of audiences to appeal to their advertisers. I would imagine there are many companies who would prefer knowing that the viewers are mostly 20s, or whatever. A show which appeals to a broad public is probably of less use to advertisers, and therefore unlikely to renewed.

But sometimes (as the quote from the BBC above shows) the decision making process itself seems oddly flawed.

Even if you ignore that the BBC is paid for via what is effectively a mandatory tax on every TV set owner in the UK, and therefore they can probably just show whatever they want as long as it gets a reasonable audience, the powers that commission shows still behave in an apparently irrational fashion.

Take, for example, Channel 4's Big Brother. Not too long ago the then head of the Channel said he'd dearly love to get rid of it, but what else could he replace it with, which cost the same, and had a regular, predictable audience for literally months? It's a fair argument, and one which probably sustains any soap opera, but it's clearly not the only point involved in the process.

This obviously isn't just something which occurs here; in America Pushing Daisies won accolade after accolade, and was firmly praised by critics and enjoyed decent audiences, but for some reason it went from hot fave to dead in the course of two seasons.

But even they still revive things; Stargate SG-1 was saved....but by syfy, who are now commissioning cookery shows for their sci-fi only channel. There's no predictable behaviour in TV land.

I find the BBC's attitude to sci-fi in general very inconsistent - Paradox had its faults, but it was a decent drama, and certainly from a viewer's perspective no more or less incoherent than Lost or FlashForward, but still it goes.

Sometimes there are clues that shows are being poked at by the channels involved; look at how The Bill lost most of its cast and was giving incidental music to somehow spruce up an entirely unbroken format.

You could see this was going to happen with Survivors, too - they introduced a major plotline (the couple using children as supply gathering slaves) in the first season and then never referred to it again in the second one - this would seem to me to indicate someone above the writers and production team trying to steer the series. If only someone had given the show a chance to explain how they never ran out of toiletries, but frequently managed to run out of water. Now we'll never know.

We can, of course, hope that the second series of Paradox does occur after all - the BBC weirdly obsesses over certain sci-fi traits (look how they've gone from killing Dr Who to giving it new life plus two spin-offs), and of course there is their all time favourite, Day of the Triffids.

You probably know the story quite well, as we all should - so far the BBC have made 7 (yes, SEVEN) radio versions, and 2 TV versions, despite it effectively only being Survivors + killer plants.

So, don't hold your breath, but don't give up hope either. Series can come back....

wish i'd read your review before i watched it and got sucked in. sigh