That doesn't make me feel any better about it to be honest. Especially as the end result is the same: the fans get screwed over.
Art and creativity are not about "need," they're about whether you can do something interesting with an idea. A lot of the biggest successes are ideas that nobody felt were "needed" or wanted, but that proved the skeptics wrong by how well they pulled it off. (Consider how hard it was for George Lucas to get studios interested in his Saturday-matinee space opera idea in the 1970s, when cinematic science fiction was mostly serious and dystopian.)
I think there's a lot of potential in rebooting Star Trek. In its day, it was intended to be a cutting-edge work of science fiction TV grounded in character realism and informed, well-researched science (within the limits required by budgetary restrictions and dramatic license). It outshone all its contemporaries because it offered 1960s audiences things they hadn't seen on TV before. But by today's standards, it doesn't stand out as much from the pack of SFTV series, its worldbuilding is conceptually backward, and its version of history gets harder and harder to reconcile with reality as time passes. It's no longer on the vanguard of SFTV but is seen more as a piece of nostalgia, which is losing what it was originally meant to be. So there could be a lot of potential in starting over from scratch, trying to create a Star Trek that's as groundbreaking to today's audiences as the original was to 1960s audiences.
Do you "need" to do it? No, of course not, but that's a meaningless question. We don't seek out entertainment because we need it, but because we enjoy it, or because we're curious to try new things. Anything can be worth trying, if the creators have a fresh idea and the passion to pull it off.
I don't think The Orville really counts as starting from scratch, since it started as Seth McFarlane's rejected pitch for a Trek series with the serial numbers filed off (though it's grown into more than that).
You say that like it's a bad thing. There's no point to doing a new version of something if it's just a copy of the old version. That's true whether it's a reboot or an in-universe sequel/spinoff.
There were many people in the '80s who said Star Trek could never work if it wasn't about Kirk and Spock, and many people in the '90s who said Star Trek could never work if it was set on a space station instead of a starship. But the new shows succeeded because they didn't do the same thing as the original, not in spite of that.
It feels like an unforced error to involve the fandom this early without a solid commitment, but Stargate is also in a sweet spot where it was even possible. Gateworld/Dial the Gate is pretty much the sole hub of Stargate fandom on-line. If you wanted to go direct to the fans to announce a new Star Trek or Star Wars project, I can think of a half-dozen sites you'd have to hit for Trek, and Star Wars is so big I don't think it's possible for there to be any central dedicated fan-run Star Wars news site (I'm not as into Star Wars, but I can't think of any equivalents to TrekCore, TrekMovie, or Trek Collective as the place to check to know what's going on). On the flip side, fandoms like Babylon 5, Firefly, and Farscape are so dormant that there are fan enclaves here and there, but, like, the main fandom news source for Babylon 5 is the series creator's social media, which isn't exactly a grassroots entity.
Well, that was true pretty quickly even in the Showtime era. It was basically the case halfway through the pilot when they formalized and regularized missions through the stargate with multiple teams. I remember seeing random scenes in syndication before I got into the show, and things like a guy making a fairly casual to a council of gray aliens certainly seemed inexplicable.
There are plenty of stories that have asks that are as big as "It's 2027, and people have been walking to other planets through a magic door for thirty years." I've read a couple of sci-fi novels with exactly that ask. The trick is crafting the story so that the specifics don't overwhelm the narrative to the degree that the plot and character arcs aren't comprehensible if you don't already know everything that's going on, and every story has to do that to one degree or another.
Yes. Like I said in another thread yesterday, even a brand-new story is dependent on a history and worldbuilding that the audience learns about through exposition. If Star Wars could begin with what pretended to be the fourth episode in the series, a story that depended on an unseen history of an Old Republic and a destroyed order of Jedi Knights and a decades-old rivalry between Kenobi and Vader and a whole exotic universe that we had to learn about as we went, then it's certainly just as possible to bring new audiences up to speed on the history and continuity of a franchise with hundreds of episodes.
I feel like at this point they'd have as much luck with that as they would trying to make a groundbreaking original cop show. Don't get me wrong, I would love Star Trek to be a bit more grounded in character realism and make an effort to take its science seriously etc. But a series about going to new worlds on a spaceship or a Stargate has been thoroughly done, in fact Stargate SG-1 was just doing what we'd already seen in a movie. I don't think it's possible to make the premise seem fresh, without just doing a different premise.
The advantage they have is that the concept they share at their core is an infinite story generator, and people are starved for those kinds of stories right now.
So? There are only so many formats. What matters is what you do with them. There were hundreds of cop shows before Hill Street Blues and Homicide came along, but they still broke new ground. You're mistaking the most superficial element for the most important one.
Maybe studios are finally getting the hint that viewers don't want to simply wallow in nostalgia for all eternity.
That's major suckage.
Fuller left the show. Rod Roddenberry and Nicholas Meyer were there in name only and didn't contribute because the show went in a different direction. John Eaves did work on it though.
Indeed. If there is such a focus on keeping existing fans interested, how do you bring in new fans? I enjoyed Stargate, not my favorite series ever, but it was enjoyable. I’ll be honest. Wasn’t that interested in a continuation. When I read that they canceled it, the thought it might be too insular was the first one that came into my brain.
The only way I would've been interested in it is as a reboot. I really enjoyed the movie way back when, but the TV shows never interested me no matter how often I tried to watch them.
You're probably already aware of it, but there was yet another (recent) attempt to reboot Battlestar that is -- you guessed it -- dead.
‘Battlestar Galactica’ Reboot No Longer In Development At Peacock, Will Be Shopped
The long-gestating reboot of the popular sci-fi franchise Battlestar Galactica, from Sam Esmail's Esmail Corp., is no longer set up at Peacock.
deadline.com
That was basically the first couple of episodes. Even COTG had two teams going through. The First Commandment had a missing team.
10-20 4-man teams feels like it could be kept secret, especially if you didn't look too closely and made certain assumptions about military intelligence/cia/nid (as shown in Secrets).
The small team concept meant that in season 2 Hammond put a lot of teams together to try to rescue SG1 (and they got captured). He'd used his cards, he was out of options.
By the time season 4 and 5 came around with Earth making alliances with the Tokra, Russia knowing about the gate, etc it was a bit ropier as to the original concept. But for me, the bit where it left reality behind was the launch of the Prometheus. It was no longer something that could be actually happening in the real world.
That's not to say it still wasn't greatly entertaining. But it had changed from the original concept, and the continuity doesn't allow any going back.
I'd love to see what the 2027 alternative of a world with trivial space colonization capability, with advanced medical research techniques, perhaps we saw a glimpse of this in the episode 2010. Or perhaps the world went to the dogs as the Tolan predicted.
But it wouldn't be the same as the first steps of a secret program of explorers in "today", and if it was that really suspends dsbelief far more than the last few years of SG1 (technically the gate could have been public knowledge on Earth just after the Ori were defeated)
That's how I see this plug pulling, a way to interpret what I said earlier about them realizing that it wasn't going to be worth it.
Any reboot that tosses everything out would start either from the movie or from Square One.
How do you tell a stargate story that completely ignores SG1, SGA and SGU and still be considered to be Stargate?
I think SNW suffered in its last season with too many callbacks to TOS. That said, it was an excellent take on classic Star Trek, it worked well in themes and production values and had a decent story.
Orville, for all intents and purposes started as a Star Trek reboot before growing into its own thing. Its visual design draws heavily from TNG-VOY.
The new Stargate show was supposed to start from a distance, be it's own thing but still respect the lore of the original while being more or less free to do what was needed. There were many talented writers on Gero's team.
The writers would have to be creative, which doesn't seem to happen much in the current world. Stargate, as a franchise, has the issue of being late to the nostalgia party that has been in full swing the last decade. It decides to show up when people are about full of nostalgia.
A decade ago, this probably gets made. Now? People are moving on from "See! See! Look it is just like what you remembered!"
I've never seen the appeal of pretending a fantasy/SF show is happening in secret in the real world. Secrecy just limits the storytelling possibilities, whether it's aliens or magic being kept secret from the world or a superhero keeping their identity secret from their loved ones. The stories are limited to being about keeping the secret over and over, and that gets boring compared to the possibilities for storytelling when the situation is not a secret. I feel that characters in superhero stories always get more interesting when they're brought into the loop and can serve more of a story purpose than just "person to hide the truth from," and I feel that series about fantasy or SF things going on in the world are more interesting when their existence is public and changes the world's status quo, rather than being hidden to preserve it. For instance, X-Men Evolution was rather dull in its first two seasons when mutants were a secret, but much richer in its latter two seasons after the secret was revealed to the world.
How do you tell a Sherlock Holmes story set in the present day? How do you tell a Batman story that isn't based on the comics or the Adam West series or the Tim Burton movies? Any story can be reinvented. It happens all the time.
That said, I certainly think it could be possible to do a series set in the SG-1/SGA/SGU continuity but that begins a brand new story accessible to new viewers. After all, it's been long enough that you could easily focus on a new generation of characters in a world that's evolved from the previous series' status quo and offers new challenges, kind of like ST:TNG did. After all, the elements of drama include plot, character, setting, and theme. It's just a matter of using the old continuity as the basis for the setting rather than the plot or characters.
The trick is to get them to not fold at the first sign of trouble and quickly overuse nostalgia to get somebody to watch. Then you're back to simply selling nostalgia to a mostly geriatric fanbase who aren't going to be kind if it isn't exactly like they remembered. Then you're simply back to a dwindling fan base.
Nostalgia is a very sharp double-edged sword.
Sure, but it's not the same show.
I think SG1 could have had something around "Disclosure" coming clean with the entire world. Perhaps a little earlier. Would have been interesting to see a secret project being released and have several episodes covering the fall out. Certainly more interesting than the "Trust" storylines which then played out.
It can be. X-Men Evolution was the same show once the secret came out, but it was a better version of itself, no longer holding itself back with the arbitrary secrecy angle. Lois & Clark was still basically the same show (aside from changes in showrunners and approach) once Lois found out Clark's identity as Superman, but it was able to move the characters forward in ways it couldn't have if it had prioritized the secret over everything else.
Besides, if we're talking about a new series in the same universe, then not being the same show is obviously a feature, not a bug.
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