4.3.2 Best Television Series Hugo Award
Moved, To Amend portions of Article III of the WSFS Constitution
to create a new Hugo Award Category "Best Television Series" and related
purposes, as follows:
3.2.4: Works appearing in a series are eligible as individual
works, but, except in the "Best Television Series" category, the
series as a whole is not eligible. However, a work appearing in a number of
parts shall be eligible for the year of the final part.
3.3.6: Best Dramatic Presentation. Any production in any medium of
dramatized science fiction, fantasy or related subjects which has been
publicly presented for the first time in its present dramatic form during
the previous calendar year. An individual episode of a television series
is eligible in this category but the series as a whole is not.
3.3.X: Best Television Series. A series of programs of
dramatized science fiction, fantasy or related subjects that have been
publicly presented on television for the first time in their present
dramatic form during the previous calendar year.
Moved by Richard S. Russell, Hope Kiefer.
Discussion: More people get their regular fix of SF from TV than from any
other source. Yet, when it comes to the Hugo Awards, we continue to suffer
from literary snobbishness -- 5 separate categories for written SF and only
1 for every other medium combined.
We make fans of televised SF jump through this incredible hoop to get
SOMETHING nominated from their favorite series: we force them to try to pick
out ONE episode from the previous year that they can rally behind. This
presumes that many of them even notice, let alone remember, the title of an
episode. It is a testament to the award-worthiness of "Babylon 5" that its
fans were actually able to overcome these obstacles on several
occasions.
The analog in literary terms would be to have an award for "Best
Paragraph" of a short story or "Best Chapter" of a novel -- something so
obviously ludicrous that we'd dismiss it out of hand. Yet we seem blind to
the same situation confronting TV series.
The Hugo Awards provide us with kind of a historical snapshot of SF.
"Best TV Series" is a category that we should have had for the last quarter
century. We can't fix the past, but we can start now to build the historical
record of the future.
