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James Duff joins Discovery Season 2 as co-showrunner.

Christopher said:
I don't think ITDUDE meant "reboot" in the sense of altering the continuity, just in the sense of ending one story arc and starting a different one midseason, which The Expanse did in both its second and third seasons. The break between the stories of the first and second novels took place midway through season 2, and the break between the second and third novels fell midway through season 3, with a time jump between one episode and the next.
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Ah, okay. Even without having read the novels, I noticed that, but I thought they pulled it off pretty seamlessly. Just moving forward to a new stage of the larger story arc...

Christopher said:
I believe that the term came to be more broadly popularized by the Battlestar Galactica remake in 2004ff, and since that particular "reboot" was a complete reinvention of the premise with no continuity with the original, laypeople got the mistaken impression that the term applied exclusively to a continuity reinvention, and that's the meaning that subsequently came to dominate in fan vernacular...
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Without haggling over the distinction between what it means to affect "fan vernacular" versus what it means to be "broadly popularized," I'd say the usage goes way back before nuBSG. Perhaps that's because I'm a comics fan, and major comics publishers have been doing "reboots" in this sense since at least the 1980s. Insofar as TV franchises got into the habit later, they merely borrowed the usage, they didn't invent it.
 
lawman said:
Perhaps that's because I'm a comics fan, and major comics publishers have been doing "reboots" in this sense since at least the 1980s. Insofar as TV franchises got into the habit later, they merely borrowed the usage, they didn't invent it.
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Well, of course. As I said, the term has long used in the industry for any revival of a dormant property, which included both revivals of the same continuity and reinventions as different continuities. It's only since BSG that the language prescriptivists in fandom got the rigid notion that the word had to be used exclusively for continuity reboots and that any other usage was "wrong." My whole point is that the term has always had a flexible usage -- it is slang, after all -- but it's only since BSG that the notion of it having "right" and "wrong" meanings has come about.
 
I looked James Duff up. He's a billionaire. An openly gay billionaire.

That's interesting. Between him, Berlanti and a few others, the power dynamics in the TV industry are definitely shifting.
 
Christopher said:
It's only since BSG that the language prescriptivists in fandom got the rigid notion that the word had to be used exclusively for continuity reboots...
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I really don't think that's the case. My point is that I remember the term being used in that sense much further back, long before nuBSG. There are examples in film, like the 1994's The Fugitive or the 1998 Godzilla or the 2001 Planet of the Apes. There are certainly examples in comics, at the grandest scale including the entire DC Universe in Crisis on Infinite Earths, as well as (of course) individual characters and series (e.g., Superman). All of these were explicitly continuity reboots, and not necessarily of dormant properties (certainly not in DC's case).

It only makes sense, for the sake of clarity, for a reboot to be something distinct from a retcon (which all kinds of properties have been doing for ages, and which usually happens at the scale of a specific story), and also from a relaunch or revival (as with, e.g., Doctor Who). All of these terms are much more useful if they're kept distinct from one another. (The TV Tropes site does a great job of sorting out a lot of the nuances.)
 
lawman said:
My point is that I remember the term being used in that sense much further back, long before nuBSG.
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Yes, for the third time, my point is that it was used in that sense, but it wasn't used exclusively in that sense. It was used for any revival of a dormant property, including that kind. I don't know how I can make that any clearer. What changed is that people started thinking it was "wrong" to use it in any other way.
 
Christopher said:
Yes, for the third time, my point is that it was used in that sense, but it wasn't used exclusively in that sense. It was used for any revival of a dormant property, including that kind. I don't know how I can make that any clearer. What changed is that people started thinking it was "wrong" to use it in any other way.
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Language and terminology evolve. My mother-in-law still "tapes" things on her DVR. Reboot has evolved to mean a narrative clean slate for a long term property. :shrug:
 
@Christopher, I disagree with you that the understanding of the term "reboot" as pertaining only to a complete restarting of a series both narratively and in terms of internal story continuity is a recent phenomenon, and would argue that it's actually the opposite view (that the term can be applied to any restarting or restructuring of a fictional work even if said work maintains adherence to an already-existing narrative thrust and internal continuity) that is more recent (not to mention wrong, IMO).
 
DigificWriter said:
(not to mention wrong, IMO).
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That's ridiculous. How can there be a "wrong" way to use a word that's figurative to begin with? The only "right" definition for "reboot" is "to restart a computer program." Using it for a work of fiction is a metaphor. It's slang. Good grief, even its computing use is technically a metaphor derived from the figurative term "bootstrapping," as I already mentioned. This word is the end result of layer upon layer of metaphor and vernacular, so it's preposterous to claim it has a rigid definition.
 
Christopher said:
That's ridiculous. How can there be a "wrong" way to use a word that's figurative to begin with? The only "right" definition for "reboot" is "to restart a computer program." Using it for a work of fiction is a metaphor. It's slang. Good grief, even its computing use is technically a metaphor derived from the figurative term "bootstrapping," as I already mentioned. This word is the end result of layer upon layer of metaphor and vernacular, so it's preposterous to claim it has a rigid definition.
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I don't agree with this assessment.

The reason I believe that using the term "reboot" to describe any restarting or reimagining of a given fictional work is wrong is that it muddies what I believe ought to be a straightforward concept when applied in a fictional context. If the term can be applied as broadly as some want it to be, I believe that it loses much of its meaning and significance.
 
Christopher said:
That's ridiculous. How can there be a "wrong" way to use a word that's figurative to begin with? The only "right" definition for "reboot" is "to restart a computer program." Using it for a work of fiction is a metaphor. It's slang. Good grief, even its computing use is technically a metaphor derived from the figurative term "bootstrapping," as I already mentioned. This word is the end result of layer upon layer of metaphor and vernacular, so it's preposterous to claim it has a rigid definition.
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Yep. The attempts to pull the "words mean something" argument on these neologisms is utter nonsense. They already don't mean what they're supposed to as a consequence of their adoption as this kind of slang.

"Reboot," "reimaging" etc are the work of marketers.
 
The word didn't exist in the English language before 1972 and didn't become a part of the common lexicon until the 1990s, and even then its use was somewhat ambiguous. To suggest there's some specific meaning to the word when used as a metaphor in the context of a completely different medium is pretty ridiculous.
 
I guess my problem is everything is called a reboot now. Remaking a film: reboot. Restarting a franchise: reboot. Making a new film in a long running series: reboot.
 
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