Or you can try what Fox did to Firefly: wildly mischaracterize it in order to Trojan-horse it into people's homes. The network promoted the space western as a wacky comedy, calling it "the most twisted show on television." It gets worse, Browncoats; Fox jokingly refered to escort Inara Serra as "a cosmic hooker" and super-genius River as "a girl in a box," alienating many of those who would end up being fans.

What happened to Sense8 was a distinctly more 2010s variety of marketing mess: Throw everything at the wall and hope watchers will hop aboard the nonsense. For a slippery show like Sense8, that's tantamount to death. Describing the show efficiently—say, "a group of eight people from around the world suddenly find themselves psychically linked and pursued by the agents of a shadowy corporation bent on destroying them"—captures only what makes the show flashy, and none of what makes it lovable. It’s really a show about the power of radical empathy, but the impossibility of conveying that in less than 90 seconds meant that Sense8’s trailer made it seem like a confusing action show with good-looking characters and nice sets.

[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/iKpKAlbJ7BQ

Due in part to the lack of widespread public interest, the show got few reviews, with most offering wan praise at best. (Even with a huge banner ad auto-playing it at the top of my Netflix queue, I took a long time to finally click in and take a chance on it.) So despite the Wachowskis' high profile—which is likely the reason the show was greenlit in the first place—the show stayed completely under most people’s radar.

Yet, of all the struggles that weird sci-fi shows can have, this is the easiest to fix. Before the rise of streaming services, speculatis unconventionalis was almost always relegated to some little-watched "death slot," where there were no expectations of selling ads like a four-quadrant hit. (Firefly not only aired on Friday nights, it aired out of order.) But the internet has no death slots, and it makes them irrelevant. Being on YouTube is as good (if not better) than prime-time TV.

Unshackling scripted shows from the tyranny of linear programming has also given fans more power than network marketers who don't speak the language. Your friends' hashtag campaigns and GIF obsessions—and fan trailers—are more likely to end up touching your life anyway. That's how viewers rescued Sense8 in the first place. "It's easy to believe that when ... a government or an institution or a corporation makes a decision, there is something irrevocable about that decision; that love is always less important than the bottom line," Lana Wachowski wrote on Facebook. "Improbably, unforeseeably your love has brought Sense8 back to life."

My inner optimist thinks that this wasn't unforeseeable, that it was the culmination of a generation of fans who had fought for shows and who had learned to use the internet the way one of your sensates uses their connections to their cluster, to act collectively and to be stronger for it. But my inner realist isn't so hopeful. Sense8 hasn't been fully revived, and a story that probably would have taken seasons to unfold now has to be crammed into two hours. (Which is why Lana Wachowski was so resistant to that fix in the first place.)

What's more, the love of fans—a pretty significant chunk of Netflix's bottom line—still wasn't enough. Because weird, high-concept science fiction TV has certain problems. And those problems need to be addressed.

Sci-Fi's Many Albatrosses

Problem one: mumbo-jumbo syndrome. Worldbuilding is hard; unique worldbuilding is even harder. That's why so many sci-fi shows, including Sense8, improve over their run. (It's also why sequels and remakes, are so prevalent in genre TV shows and movies. They’re easier, more profitable, and don't need as much hamfisted exposition.)