There would no longer be one place to see every Star Trek show and movie.
Oh wait...
Oh wait...
VARIETY: Paramount-Skydance merger collapsed in the final moments, and will lead to layoffs and austerity measures
- Thread starter Citiprime
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Unfortunately, with the whole keeping up with the Jones's attitude in Hollywood it was inevitable if sadly predictable.
What's worse is that many companies jumped on the streaming bandwagon without considering why streaming was so popular in the first place. They focused on the content, ignoring that Netflix and Hulu were popular because they gave people easy access to classic shows (and later new programs) from a single source. Once shows were pulled out of those services and pay-walled behind companies proprietary streaming services, the writing was on the wall. Nobody's going to have 4-5+ subscriptions to watch a handful of new shows and reruns of Columbo.
When Kurtzman said he wanted Trek on all year long, my first thought was it was not sustainable. That one year was pretty nice, if a little overwhelming. Leave the audience wanting more.
From 1993 to 2000 we had about 45-50 episodes a year, as well as 3 films.
From 1993-99, rather. But those were twice a week, so it wasn't "all year long," just 26 or fewer weeks spread out over about 3/4 of the year.
And even then, people complained about the roughly 6-week holiday break in Nov/Dec, or the occasional week off here and there to spread things out. The 13 or so weeks of the summer break seemed like an intolerable wait.
They took the summer off. It was basically a September to May/June schedule with a Christmas/Thanksgiving break and reruns sprinkled in between. What Kurtzman wanted was Star Trek on 52 weeks straight.
Sure, but that's just scheduling. if you make 52 episodes a year (which was pretty close to in the 90s) then instead of scheduling two a week and having time off, you schedule them one per week, job done.
To do that though you'd need a far lower budget-per-episode. Streaming as a whole is suffering from ridiculously high production values which used to be the realm of $100m blockbuster films. Get back to basics and invest in the story and use your standing sets.
To do that though you'd need a far lower budget-per-episode. Streaming as a whole is suffering from ridiculously high production values which used to be the realm of $100m blockbuster films. Get back to basics and invest in the story and use your standing sets.
Compare the budget of Measure of a Man, or Conundrum, or Explorers, or The Visitor, with a typical modern episode
No, that's exact. With a few exceptions (TNG 2, DS9 1, VGR 1, ENT 3 & 4), Trek seasons were normally 26 episodes, even after most other commercial TV shows had dropped to 22. So the '93-'94 season and the '95-'96 through '98-'99 seasons inclusive all had a combined 52 episodes exactly, if you count double-length episodes as two each (as they were usually counted in production terms, since they were designed to be rerun in two parts).
Part of the reason they stretched out the releases of 26 episodes over 39 weeks was that it took more than one week to film an episode, so they couldn't maintain an unbroken one-per-week schedule. They needed to spread it out to an average of 1.5 weeks per episode to give themselves a safety cushion.
Now, if you had two separate, parallel production crews each putting out an episode roughly every 2 weeks, and if you alternated between them, you could manage 52 episodes per year. Or you could have, say, four different series with 13-episode seasons, giving all their separate production teams enough lead time to have the whole thing done before release, and you could manage it. That's pretty close to how the Marvel and Star Wars shows do things now. It's doable, but it's not as easy as you suggest, because you need at least two entire productions working in parallel to pull it off.
It seems more reasonable to aim for a middle ground between commercial TV's high output at lower quality and streaming's low output at higher quality. Both approaches have their drawbacks.
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At peak time the arrowverse was pushing out even more than that just 10 years ago, with arrow, flash, Supergirl and legends, not to mention the other ones.
Didnt they all have their own separate crews. It was extraordinary they managed the crossovers as well as they did.
Yes, of course. They were from the same production company (which also made a bunch of non-DC shows like Riverdale, Everwood, Blindspot, and Kung Fu), but each show was a separate production with its own staff and crew. In the crossovers, the individual staffs each took one episode, and the episodes were officially counted as parts of the respective shows whose staffs made them, even if the casts and storylines were totally blended. The only way they could manage such big events was to have multiple crews working simultaneously. Although the individual shows had to do episodes before or after the crossovers where their lead actors' presence was reduced, to give them time to shoot their scenes for the crossovers (since a lot was shot out of sequence to accommodate the complex scheduling).
The arrowverse crossovers were very impressive and far more than we even got in Trek.
Then there's the "same universe" mentions, where you have a news story or headline in the background referencing a major even in another series, those are fairly easy to work with as long as you have communication between the groups. Doesn't need to be massive, in flash you'd sometimes get Cisco saying "I got some ideas from Felicity and then built this" for example.
You could have 3 ongoing series generating 18 episodes a year (with a lower per-episode budget, relying more on the writers to write compelling TV rather than special/visual effects. How much would say Tuvix cost to produce, and how many decades have we discussed it? How much money would Discovery save if it didn't have flamethrowers installed on the bridge?)
Then there's the "same universe" mentions, where you have a news story or headline in the background referencing a major even in another series, those are fairly easy to work with as long as you have communication between the groups. Doesn't need to be massive, in flash you'd sometimes get Cisco saying "I got some ideas from Felicity and then built this" for example.
You could have 3 ongoing series generating 18 episodes a year (with a lower per-episode budget, relying more on the writers to write compelling TV rather than special/visual effects. How much would say Tuvix cost to produce, and how many decades have we discussed it? How much money would Discovery save if it didn't have flamethrowers installed on the bridge?)
One has to remember, though, The CW and the Arrowverse were aiming for advertisers by drawing in a specific demo for ad rates. Produce cheap content using younger talent that would appeal to a specific demographic for advertising sales. For example, part of the reason ABC keeps Grey’s Anatomy on the air is that, even in its 20th season, I believe it still gets the highest ratings of any program for the network in the 18-49 demo.
With a streaming service like Paramount+, I’m not sure how much of those same dynamics apply. It’s part of the reason why I don’t get the rationale for Starfleet Academy.
It strikes me as something CW would do to bring in younger viewers and cut costs. However, they’re bringing in bigger name talent, like Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti, that might cost more, and I’m not sure that it’s something that draws in subscriptions the same way young people would be casual viewers for The CW.
With a streaming service like Paramount+, I’m not sure how much of those same dynamics apply. It’s part of the reason why I don’t get the rationale for Starfleet Academy.
It strikes me as something CW would do to bring in younger viewers and cut costs. However, they’re bringing in bigger name talent, like Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti, that might cost more, and I’m not sure that it’s something that draws in subscriptions the same way young people would be casual viewers for The CW.
You’d think a monthly streaming service would want people to subscribe all year round - one trek every week or maybe one every 2 weeks would do that far more than 8 episodes a year.