SyFy just announced a new reality TV show called Hackers. It’s about hacking, naturally, and the network promises it will be awesome and exciting. (Spoiler: Hacking is incredibly boring.)
The new, unscripted show does sound interesting. It’s unclear if the new SyFy series has anything to do with the 90’s classic film Hackers. SyFy will produce Hackers with Relativity Television (of Catfish fame) and promises to “take viewers deep inside the shadowy and dangerous world of high-tech hackers for the very first time.” While verbs like “shadowy” and “dangerous” certainly ring true of cyber security in the age of the Sony hack, that doesn’t mean that filming hacker-types staring at dark screens makes for entertaining television for the general population. It almost definitely doesn’t.
Don’t worry! SyFy has thought of this. The producers of Hackers say that they’ve developed “sophisticated, never-before-seen digital graphics to create an experiential ‘hacking’ scene that exposes what actually happens when a computer network is broken into—including what goes on inside the mind of the hacker.” Sounds ambitious. It also sounds a lot like what Hollywood’s been doing for decadeswhen it tries to make boring hacking look vaguely exciting. [io9]
