Extant premieres tonight - are you going to watch?

I'm gonna give this a try. Are you?

Time

 

I fancy watching it, but for here, it seems to be Amazon (Either only or for now, I'm not sure).

At some point, I'll get it arranged

 

I'll have to see if I can pry the remote out of Mrs.Q2's hand this evening...

Q2

 

Based on the review I posted there appears to be many similarities to Spielberg's AI. Cyber-boi etc.

I pulled up Berry's film/TV career and it's interesting that she hasn't done a TV series since 1991 - Knots Landing. Either she is taking a huge pay cut to do this show or they're are spending a lot of money to get her on this show.

The premise seems interesting.

 

Or, much more likely, she isn't getting the type of work she wants, so figures she'd try television again. Like several other "movie stars" have in recent years.

 

Could be. But no doubt she got a shit load of money for X-Men - even though she didn't have a big role. So perhaps it isn't about the money but about the screen time and being the central character on the show.

Edited to add. I didn't post the end of the article in case people didn't go to the link it seems to get a thumbs up at least from this critic.

 

I have mixed feelings about this. On the plus side, it has Halle Berry in it. Also, it's so rare for CBS to do science fiction shows that I feel I should support its efforts, though I'm not a Nielsen household so I doubt it'd make much difference. (I'm very annoyed at that article for failing to mention Person of Interest as one of CBS's genre efforts. PoI is probably the best, richest science fiction show on network television today, but a lot of people don't even realize how complex its SF content is because they just see it as an action/procedural show.)

But a lot of what I'm hearing about the show sounds pretty dumb. As stated, the premise seems like a rehash of things we've seen before. The idea that Berry's character was on a 13-month solo space mission is insanely stupid; NASA would never send anyone on a solo mission in the first place, given the urgency for redundancy in space, and sentencing someone to effective solitary confinement for over a year would be psychologically sadistic. Even if she started out with crewmates and they died or something, leaving her stranded and alone wouldn't make sense unless she were on some interplanetary mission or something, rather than in Earth orbit, which is the impression I get from the trailers.

And this morning, I read a particularly ridiculous quote from Berry on io9:

This is staggeringly ignorant. The human species is a mere 200,000 years old, which is quite young on an evolutionary time scale. Gray wolves are twice that age as a species, tigers are ten times that age, bottlenose dolphins are ten to twenty-five times that age, and so on. There are species of shark that are over 100 million years old, and jellyfish are half a billion years old. We haven't even come close to proving that we have what it takes for long-term survival as a species, particularly not when so many of us today embrace habits that could lead to our extinction.

Of course, this was just Berry talking, but if what she's saying here reflects themes that actually figure into the show rather than just coming from her own lack of a basic science education, then this may turn out to be a really stupid show.

 

I've never been that much of a Halle Berry fan, but the premise does sound fairly intriguing, so I might check it out.

 

Definite maybe

 

Looks like it could be interesting. I'll be watching.

 

Well, it has Halle Berry in it. I watched Catwoman, despite all the poor reviews, because Halle Berry was in it. So yes, I'll be watching this, because Halle Berry is in it.

 

That's true too. She was the only two reasons I bothered to watch Swordfish.

 

Eventually, we'll get to the episode where somebody says god did it, and then the show will be about whether god is actually an ancient alien. Let me know when that happens if you watch this, cause i won't be.

 

Yep.

The trailer makes it look like a mash-up of The Astronaut's Wife with Freedomland with Small Wonder with every horror movie to ever feature a creepy little ki-zzzzzzzzzzz, oops, sorry, fell asleep. Looks like some TV exec saw the opening weekend numbers from Gravity and demanded "quick, something like that, except let's bring her back to Earth five minutes in and put her in a bunch of sterile houses and offices, and maybe some spooky woods! You have three weeks to write the first five episodes", and then went off to play croquet. As for Berry... well, Hollywood's pretty notoriously terrible at making star vehicles for women over 35, especially those who haven't headlined a hit in years.

In short: someone wake me when all the shots of her floating around in zero-g (totaling maybe a minute or two) have been cut together and put to some tasteful New Age-y music. Until then, if you'll excuse me, I'm still only on the third season of Glee.

 

Unlikely. The series order was announced on August 8, 2013, whereas Gravity didn't make its debut at the 70th Venice International Film Festival until 20 days later, and didn't have its wide theatrical release until October. It's possible that CBS was gambling on the advance buzz for Gravity; but since this series is from Amblin, it's possible that the network approved it purely on the basis of Spielberg's name and Halle Berry's name.

 

Ha. You guys are critics. What else to watch in July. GoT reruns, Under the Dome? Only other good shit this summer IMO so far was Last Ship

 

There's this thing called Netflix Instant...

Well, shit.

 

<wonders how many people will get screwed over by their DVR's due to the way the two part pilot is listed on brighthouse>

 

Don't trust Dr. Hatake!