Syfy’s epic space show The Expanse is a smash hit among science fiction fans, drawing praise from websites like io9 and Ars Technica and from celebrities like Adam Savage. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley also loves the show.

“This is my favorite show on TV,” Kirtley says in Episode 248 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “This is the most serious science fiction TV show—in terms of what hardcore science fiction fans would want in a TV show—that I’ve seen in a long time, possibly ever.”

But while the show is widely praised in many corners, it has yet to attract a wider audience. John J. Joex, who tracks the ratings of various shows over at Cancelled Sci Fi, says that The Expanse looks like a show headed for cancellation.

“The ratings started out decent and then really dropped off,” he says. “And I know this is an expensive series to produce, so I was really getting kind of nervous about it.”

Syfy recently renewed The Expanse for a third season, but a fourth season seems unlikely if the ratings don’t improve. Science fiction editor John Joseph Adams watches every episode of The Expanse, and he’s annoyed that he isn’t being counted by the Nielsen ratings.

“It’s pretty frustrating to hear that all of the viewing that I’ve done, none of that counts for anything as far as the networks are concerned,” he says.

Joex says that one way to make sure that your support for a show does get counted is to pay money for it. He says that’s more likely to save a show than letter-writing campaigns or billboards. “I think the best thing to do is to start buying episodes on iTunes, Amazon, that sort of thing,” he says. “If they see a lot of people spending money on it, that might convince them.”

Listen to our complete interview with John Joseph Adams and John J. Joex in Episode 248 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy above. And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

John J. Joex on franchise potential:

“Star Trek never had a huge audience, but look at the franchise that it became. It’s gone on for all these decades and spun off several television series and movies, with a new series on the way. Science fiction tends not to have a huge audience when it first airs, but it makes much more of a lasting impression. People will continue to watch it and buy merchandise for years and years to come, and so if they stick with a show, even if the ratings aren’t great right away, chances are that down the road it’s going to pay off. Firefly only had 14 episodes, and yet today it’s still a greatly celebrated show, and I’m sure they’re making plenty of money off of selling the DVDs and all the other merchandise from it. And yet they killed it just because the ratings weren’t great.”

John Joseph Adams on promoting The Expanse:

“I watched that special they did with Adam Savage, where he was going behind the scenes of The Expanse, and at the end of that they had a little snippet of Season 2—this was before Season 2 started airing—and it was that scene with Bobbi and the Martians doing their training, and it’s this really intense action sequence with people in power armor. If you could take that sequence, or one of the big space battles, and advertise it in a movie theater—I mean, with all the movies that are out there right now that are all science fiction and fantasy oriented, even the superhero stuff, if you aired that kind of thing in front of one of those movies, it seems like that would drive a lot of people to go watch the show that haven’t tried it.”

David Barr Kirtley on paying for content:

“I understand if your finances are tight and you can’t pay for shows, but people will spend $5 on a coffee or something like that, and just considering how important I think shows like this are, I wish people were willing to spend more money on them compared to other things that they spend money on. … And I think it would really be helpful if the networks themselves would say very clearly, ‘If you buy this from iTunes or whatever, it’s going to help you get another season of this show,’ and have some sort of feedback mechanism to make that clear to people, so it’s not just this black box where you’re throwing your dollars into it and you don’t know if anything’s going to come out of that. Just something where you could see somehow that spending money to support the show was actually helping that show get another season.”

John Joseph Adams on cliffhangers:

“I kind of feel like networks at least owe fans some kind of wrap-up, even if it’s not on the air. If you have a show and you produce it, and you get all these people hooked on something, the least you could do is do something to wrap it up in some way—maybe publish some scripts online or something. You’d have to pay somebody to write the scripts, but then you don’t actually have to spend the money to produce them. At least then maybe some diligent fans will get some closure, whereas leaving you high and dry when you end the season on a cliffhanger, that’s the worst feeling as a fan.”