sf/f TV development news - 2013

[Christopher]

Now I'm more uneasy than ever about Defiance. The trailer's focus on combat scenes against video-gamey-looking monsters turns me off. I guess I should've expected it, since most video games these days seem to be all about guns and carnage and ridiculous amounts of violence. If the show is consciously trying to feel like a video game, I probably won't care for it. Which is a shame. I hope the shoot-'em-up stuff is a smaller component of the show than the trailer suggested.

[Bob The Skutter]

Christopher wrote:

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Now I'm more uneasy than ever about Defiance. The trailer's focus on combat scenes against video-gamey-looking monsters turns me off. I guess I should've expected it, since most video games these days seem to be all about guns and carnage and ridiculous amounts of violence. If the show is consciously trying to feel like a video game, I probably won't care for it. Which is a shame. I hope the shoot-'em-up stuff is a smaller component of the show than the trailer suggested.

This isn't really true. The big "Triple A" titles like Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honour etc. might be but even from the big "blockbuster" stuff you have the FIFA, and NFL stuff, you have Need for Speed and F1, you have the games like Portal which despite being like an FPS are all about puzzle solving. There's still Super Mario and Zelda games which are still huge. That's not even going to mention indie games like the Bit.Trip games or Eurfloria and Flower, and Journey.

Blockbuster games are like Blockbuster films and popular TV shows. For the most part they are lowest common denominator with some gems that stand out from the pack. While there's wonderful stuff to be found out there if you look.

[RJDiogenes]

Defiance definitely looks tedious. It would have to be a lot different than what the trailer shows to interest me.

A Star Wars TV series is interesting mostly because, if successful, it could inspire Paramount to do a Star Trek series-- hopefully one that ignores the film and maintains the continuity of the original franchise.

[Kegg]

Christopher wrote:

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I guess I should've expected it, since most video games these days seem to be all about guns and carnage and ridiculous amounts of violence.

This is definitely a well informed and not at all unreasonable opinion.

Now if you excuse me, I have a game of Crusader Kings II to finish and then maybe I'll play some FTL and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and other carnage-heavy titles from this year.

[Christopher]

RJDemonicus wrote:

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A Star Wars TV series is interesting mostly because, if successful, it could inspire Paramount to do a Star Trek series-- hopefully one that ignores the film and maintains the continuity of the original franchise.

There's certainly no requirement for a new Trek TV series to be in the Abrams film continuity, but I don't think returning to the Prime continuity is necessarily the best idea at this point. That's what a lot of the old-school fanbase would prefer, but that's exactly the problem: that fanbase has shrunk considerably and is getting older. In order for ST to thrive again, it needs to win over a new audience, not just cater to the nostalgia of the old one.

I think the Abrams films have opened the door to diversifying Trek continuity, to break free of this obsession with having everything fit (sloppily) together and embrace the freedom of fiction to explore multiple different continuities and interpretations of an idea, the way franchises like Transformers and Godzilla do. It would be much more liberating and bring a lot of freshness and flexibility to it. Heck, Roddenberry himself approached TNG as a soft reboot of the Trek universe, choosing to avoid familiar aliens and quietly disregard those parts of the TOS and film continuity he was unhappy with. And in the preface to his TMP novelization, he pretended that TOS was an inaccurate and exaggerated dramatization of Kirk's "actual" adventures. So the notion that all of Trek has to fit together in a single invariant reality doesn't really reflect Roddenberry's own approach to it. It's more a product of the generation of fans like Ron Moore who grew up to become Trek producers and tied the new shows more strongly into TOS.

[Ian Keldon]

Christopher wrote:

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There's certainly no requirement for a new Trek TV series to be in the Abrams film continuity, but I don't think returning to the Prime continuity is necessarily the best idea at this point. That's what a lot of the old-school fanbase would prefer, but that's exactly the problem: that fanbase has shrunk considerably and is getting older. In order for ST to thrive again, it needs to win over a new audience, not just cater to the nostalgia of the old one.

You are assuming that those two things are mutually incompatible.

In a round about way, Defiance sounds like a "perfected" version of Captain Power, with the game and the show interdependent in terms of development and interactivity.

[Ian Keldon]

Enterprise is Great wrote:

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I'll need to see at the trailer at least for that Ron Moore show. He alone is not enough for me to watch the pilot.

If anything, Moore's name for me is a strike against a project. He went out of his way to make nuGalactica the "anti-Trek" to the point where it became extremely irritating, including such nonsense as "real life doesn't have "viewscreens". The only battlestar that had an internal security system was the Pegasus, and he went out of his way in the producers' notes to say that he only gave it one because he had no other way to do what he needed to do with certain scenes.

Apparently, Mr Moore hasn't heard of CCTV (which is monitored on screens), or webcams, or "virtual periscopes", etc.

[RJDiogenes]

Christopher wrote:

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There's certainly no requirement for a new Trek TV series to be in the Abrams film continuity, but I don't think returning to the Prime continuity is necessarily the best idea at this point. That's what a lot of the old-school fanbase would prefer, but that's exactly the problem: that fanbase has shrunk considerably and is getting older. In order for ST to thrive again, it needs to win over a new audience, not just cater to the nostalgia of the old one.

I think the Abrams films have opened the door to diversifying Trek continuity, to break free of this obsession with having everything fit (sloppily) together and embrace the freedom of fiction to explore multiple different continuities and interpretations of an idea, the way franchises like Transformers and Godzilla do. It would be much more liberating and bring a lot of freshness and flexibility to it. Heck, Roddenberry himself approached TNG as a soft reboot of the Trek universe, choosing to avoid familiar aliens and quietly disregard those parts of the TOS and film continuity he was unhappy with. And in the preface to his TMP novelization, he pretended that TOS was an inaccurate and exaggerated dramatization of Kirk's "actual" adventures. So the notion that all of Trek has to fit together in a single invariant reality doesn't really reflect Roddenberry's own approach to it. It's more a product of the generation of fans like Ron Moore who grew up to become Trek producers and tied the new shows more strongly into TOS.

Well, as you know, I much prefer the approach of building on something rather than replacing, rebooting, re-imagining or otherwise regurgitating it. Not that reboots are necessarily evil-- there are a few examples that work (e.g. Mystery Incorporated)-- but my preference is to either expand on something or just go ahead and do something new. As you said, TNG was a sequel that was (sufficiently) consistent with TOS that succeeded in growing the Star Trek Universe, while both pleasing old fans and bringing in new ones. There's no reason that can't be done again. All I hope for is that it be artistically and thematically consistent with the original.

[Christopher]

RJDemonicus wrote:

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Well, as you know, I much prefer the approach of building on something rather than replacing, rebooting, re-imagining or otherwise regurgitating it.

And I don't see why it has to be a choice between one or the other. Both can be worth doing. There's value in developing a rich, ongoing continuity, but there's also value in exploring variations on a theme. It's better to have both than be restricted to only one. Yet until 2009, we've been stuck with only one Trek continuity. The continuous approach has been thoroughly mined, but the alternate-realities approach has barely been attempted. I think that's a missed opportunity. I'd love to see a range of different reinventions of the Trek universe. It could be fascinating to see the fresh takes different creators could bring.

As you said, TNG was a sequel that was (sufficiently) consistent with TOS that succeeded in growing the Star Trek Universe, while both pleasing old fans and bringing in new ones.

That's not what I said at all. What I said was that Gene Roddenberry himself didn't want TNG to be particularly consistent with TOS. There was a lot about TOS that he was unhappy with or embarrassed by -- compromises he had to make for budgetary or practical reasons, scientific or cultural assumptions that had come to seem dated and silly by the '80s, story decisions made by other writers and producers that he didn't approve of -- and he saw TNG as his opportunity to make a new start, to reinvent the universe. Yes, it was superficially passed off as a continuation, but fans today have gotten so fixated on the minutiae of continuity that they've forgotten how common it's always been for creators of fiction to do what we'd now call a soft reboot, to offer a pretense of continuity while actually reinventing a lot about the universe (like the way Batman's origin story in the comics kept changing over the decades, or the way Superboy comics radically rewrote Superman's backstory).

Also, you're simplifying the history considerably. These days TNG pleases old and new fans alike, but it was a long journey to get there. For the first couple of seasons, plenty of TOS purists were as vehemently opposed to accepting TNG as "true" ST as a lot of fans are today about the Abrams movie. Heck, the original TOS cast themselves were a lot slower to accept TNG as the real deal than they were to accept Abrams Trek. It was years before Shatner and Nimoy came around. (Although at the time, they were still appearing in Trek movies and would've seen the new cast as replacements who could threaten their future livelihood.)

Look, the simple fact is, fans who are resistant to change are going to be hostile toward a new Trek series whether it's in the same continuity or not. They always have been. If something is in a new continuity, they denounce it for not being in the old one; and if it's in the old continuity, they denounce it for failing to get it right. So setting another series in the old continuity wouldn't help it. If anything, it seemed to hurt Enterprise. Maybe something that made a completely clean break, that wouldn't be judged by a litmus test of how many continuity minutiae it honored or broke, would be freer to get judged on its own merits. I know I liked Enterprise better once I set aside my initial "Oh, that's not what I would've expected" reactions and took it on its own terms. Too much concern for continuity with other stuff outside a work can get in the way of enjoying the work itself.

[JD]

Christopher wrote:

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Now I'm more uneasy than ever about Defiance. The trailer's focus on combat scenes against video-gamey-looking monsters turns me off. I guess I should've expected it, since most video games these days seem to be all about guns and carnage and ridiculous amounts of violence. If the show is consciously trying to feel like a video game, I probably won't care for it. Which is a shame. I hope the shoot-'em-up stuff is a smaller component of the show than the trailer suggested.

I'm a big fan of Rockne O'Bannon, and pretty much the whole cast, and it definitely sounds like there will be more to this than just non-stop actions scenes. They've done a making of series with the writers and other crew members who talk a fair amount about what to expect. These have done more to get me excited for it than anything.

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Rockne O'Bannon is the only reason I might give it a try.

Christopher wrote:

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And I don't see why it has to be a choice between one or the other. Both can be worth doing. There's value in developing a rich, ongoing continuity, but there's also value in exploring variations on a theme. It's better to have both than be restricted to only one. Yet until 2009, we've been stuck with only one Trek continuity. The continuous approach has been thoroughly mined, but the alternate-realities approach has barely been attempted. I think that's a missed opportunity. I'd love to see a range of different reinventions of the Trek universe. It could be fascinating to see the fresh takes different creators could bring.

How can you thoroughly mine a universe? There's an infinite amount of opportunities in the concept; Trek novelists have been proving that for decades. Now the audience has the flash-bang "alternate approach" of Abrams' reboot in the theater, so why not continue enriching the more adult universe of the original on TV? There's your variety of approaches.

That's not what I said at all. What I said was that Gene Roddenberry himself didn't want TNG to be particularly consistent with TOS. There was a lot about TOS that he was unhappy with or embarrassed by -- compromises he had to make for budgetary or practical reasons, scientific or cultural assumptions that had come to seem dated and silly by the '80s, story decisions made by other writers and producers that he didn't approve of -- and he saw TNG as his opportunity to make a new start, to reinvent the universe.

Okay, fine. It's a challenge to write within the context of a shared universe; obviously you know that, since you do it. A good writer can take the inconsistencies or the errors and so forth and build something from them, the way writers like Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart and Kurt Busiek did for the Marvel Universe. They didn't need no stinkin' reboots. They had the Right Stuff.

Yes, it was superficially passed off as a continuation, but fans today have gotten so fixated on the minutiae of continuity that they've forgotten how common it's always been for creators of fiction to do what we'd now call a soft reboot, to offer a pretense of continuity while actually reinventing a lot about the universe (like the way Batman's origin story in the comics kept changing over the decades, or the way Superboy comics radically rewrote Superman's backstory).

Yeah, fine. Like I said, sometimes it works, sometimes it's necessary for business reasons and a lot of times it's just plain bad. I'm advocating the approach I think is best.

Also, you're simplifying the history considerably. These days TNG pleases old and new fans alike, but it was a long journey to get there. For the first couple of seasons, plenty of TOS purists were as vehemently opposed to accepting TNG as "true" ST as a lot of fans are today about the Abrams movie. Heck, the original TOS cast themselves were a lot slower to accept TNG as the real deal than they were to accept Abrams Trek. It was years before Shatner and Nimoy came around. (Although at the time, they were still appearing in Trek movies and would've seen the new cast as replacements who could threaten their future livelihood.)

Look, the simple fact is, fans who are resistant to change are going to be hostile toward a new Trek series whether it's in the same continuity or not. They always have been. If something is in a new continuity, they denounce it for not being in the old one; and if it's in the old continuity, they denounce it for failing to get it right. So setting another series in the old continuity wouldn't help it. If anything, it seemed to hurt Enterprise.

I'm not simplifying anything. I remember the history. There were a few malcontents all along the way, but TNG was accepted pretty quickly by most. DS9, VOY and ENT had increasingly more detractors because they strayed farther and farther from the core concept (though I happened to enjoy them all).

Maybe something that made a completely clean break, that wouldn't be judged by a litmus test of how many continuity minutiae it honored or broke, would be freer to get judged on its own merits. I know I liked Enterprise better once I set aside my initial "Oh, that's not what I would've expected" reactions and took it on its own terms. Too much concern for continuity with other stuff outside a work can get in the way of enjoying the work itself.

So, again, if you're going to do that, why not just create something completely new, rather than just recycle names and terminology? Would RHW's Defender be improved by calling it Star Trek and naming the captain Kirk?

[Christopher]

"Stinkin' reboots?" Your prejudice closes your mind to the possibilities. Star Trek is supposed to be about embracing the new and different, not condemning and fearing it.

[RJDiogenes]

It also embraces humor, a concept you've always had trouble with.

[Christopher]

Of course I get the reference, but your choice to use that reference is symptomatic of your trouble opening your mind to new takes on a fictional franchise. And because your mind is so completely closed, I see no reason to waste my time trying to have a conversation about this with you.

[stj]

Christopher wrote:

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"Stinkin' reboots?" Your prejudice closes your mind to the possibilities. Star Trek is supposed to be about embracing the new and different, not condemning and fearing it.

Something entirely new, not a reboot or remake or reimagining, is about "embracing the new and different." Most reboots and remakes and reimaginings fail because they kept something old that doesn't fit with the new, instead of "embracing the new and different."