Why do you always hate on cop shows? Many have compelling characters and story arcs.
NBC still clueless what was wrong with Heroes
- Thread starter Temis the Vorta
- Start date
There are too many cop shows hogging up all the time slots. Where are the space operas? Where are the historical dramas? TV is so damn limited and I hate seeing one genre shoving everything else aside.
However, I do plan to give L&O: LA a shot this fall.
However, I do plan to give L&O: LA a shot this fall.
Everything else fails because Nielsens system is !@#%ed up.
Something I've long suspected to be true, just by looking at what they produce. How else could you end up with the nonsense that's coming at us this season - half of the shows are cop shows!Nobody with half a brain cell can possibly think that's a good idea - they'll divide the market and most will go down in flames. But they're terrified not to trot out a slate of cop shows.
Check out a BBC show called Screenwipe, the host Charlie Brooker does an entire segment on the process of selling and producing a show and how changed it becomes from start to finish, and why it happens. He does it in a very entertaining way.
The problem with Arthur was that they didn't explain his plot, they just made him nigh-invulnerable while all he really did was sit around doing nothing, and they had him kill off another villain everyone liked in a lame way just to get rid of the other villain.
If there were multiple villains all co-existing in the first season, then they could pick and choose who to use and what to have them do without having to make a new villain every season. Or they could still do that and see how the other villains would react to this new guy (not just Sylar).
Like how the X-Men would have the Sentinels, Magneto, Mr Sinister, Apocalypse, the Friends of Humanity, etc all co-existing instead of one at a time. You don't HAVE to make each one some Season Big Bad, you don't even need to have a single real Big Bad that's behind the entire season's evil.
And Hell, don't give any of the characters in the present time-travel powers. Future Hiro can go into the past, but present Hiro can't do anything but control time in his own present (he can speed himself up, or slow things down, but not real time-travel that can go years into the past or future).
And instead of having the government just create a Supers-hunting team, have one already exist that's been in semi-retirement/hiatus/underground until some folks are convinced to re-active their program. Then they can be recurring "Wild Cards" who are either good or bad. They can be a UN thing and not a US thing, like how Weapon X was really Canadian and not American.
Making "X-Men in reality" gives the writers tons of pre-existing material from comic books to use if they have the skill to make the audience accept the stuff in a more "real" environment.
Yeah, pretty much. What I've seen of the third season (first 8 or so episodes) didn't make much sense, was completely random and looked like a S1 all over again.
If you want to check out Heroes, watch the first season and stop. Season two has huge pacing problems and most of the new characters really sucked. It's best to pretend the show got cancelled at the end of season one.
Yeah, he was way underwritten. I was all psyched to meet this superpowered criminal mastermind who had started a mutant empire with Malcolm McDowell, that pulled the strings and was the power behind industry and government (or was trying to be) until he got blindsided by his wife who didn't have the stomach for his nefarious plans and/or was just pissed off when he found out he was going around having kids by other women with interesting DNA profiles in the hopes of creating a suitable heir to his empire (which is why Gabriel would have made perfectly good sense if they'd left Virginia as his natural mother - I'd expect Arthur to have dozens of "experiments" scattered around the world).
Arthur has the power-glomming ability and has had years to perfect control of it. He should have been mind-bogglingly dangerous and his arc should have been fascinating. He, not Sylar, should have been the central villain of the story.
Sadly, I'm not so sure about that. Cop shows attract viewers who don't use DVRs, and because they don't zap ads, they are more valuable. Sci fi fans are the most likely to use DVRs and are therefore the least valuable audience.
Why would the Nielsens system just happen to favor cop shows, sitcoms and reality shows, if it's broken in some random way?
Indeed. And it goes beyond that - I think it actually damages our national psyche to be so fixated on lurid and fantastical tales of murder. The vast majority of killings are, AFAIK, gang-related and really pretty mundane, but cop shows are filled with cases to match the flair and complexity of the Zodiac case on a weekly basis. I think it makes the more credulous amongst us more fearful, more narcissistic, less respectful of cities and their populations and altogether more Republican.
That, and the gore and emotional trauma depicted often skirt a thin edge between mere exploitation and all-out pornography. I'm no fan of doctor or lawyer shows either (Scrubs and Boston Legal being rare, once-a-decade exemptions), but the cop show industry is a particularly sordid business of which both producers and audiences should be ashamed.
I think it's better to pretend the show got canceled right before they started filming the season finale. The Season 1 finale is the very definition of anti-climactic.
Less respectful of the cities' populations means in practice confirming prejudices about black on white crime and the anarchy amongst the lower races. It is a problem. The fact that some shows, like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue (a huge offender, with Saint Sipowicz making racist cops cuddly,) and by all but internet reports, The Shield, are highly praised and officially rewarded doesn't make it any easier to deal with.
Personally, I think of the plots in most crime shows as more far fetched than most science fiction. I'm not kidding. It never ceases to amaze me that some people, even some posters, can cavil at scientific speculation while never recognizing how ridiculous the stories really are. The best shot at a realistic cop show, The Wire, fell into the same trap.
However, the blanket dismissal of all crime shows as cop or procedural shows is at the least imperceptive. Cops as authority figures matter, and not all "cop" shows have actual cops as the heroes. Thinking that doesn't make a difference is just wrongheaded. The CSI shows and The Mentalist just aren't the same as the others, for that reason alone. It is noteworthy that the current leading exemplar of the cop show, The Closer, has such a flawed heroine that the show cannot win awards. The rule of thumb is that if it gets critical approval, you have to think carefully about what's really on screen. (If the show becomes a big enough hit, like the original CSI or The Closer, the critics discover they liked it all along. Which they didn't.)
I think some people dislike all "cop" shows because the bad guys don't win.
Kring should have known this wouldn't work. I heard there was some thinking in the beginning that 24 would do something similar. Same premise, same actors, but each season there would be new characters, with the actors playing different roles. That obviously got dropped early.
Face it, a successful TV show has characters the audience cares about. Long term. Bringing in new characters every season means taking a huge risk. A smash hit one year could turn into a dismal failure the next just because the characters don't click with the audience or each other.
No show will ever do that. It's either a standard cast of characters that changes little over time, or it's an anthology with new characters in every episode (where it's about the plot rather than the people). It's highly unlikely you'll get something else.
I remember Fox attempted a show called Tribeca. There were two regular actors (Joe Morton was one of them), but there were new guest stars every week and the episode would be about them. I think it got canceled after a handful of episodes.
As for Tim Kring, after Heroes and the things he's said about the show, I'm convinced he's just an idiot.
As for Tim Kring, after Heroes and the things he's said about the show, I'm convinced he's just an idiot.
British and American TV are two different animals.
Brits are used to a show lasting only long enough to tell its story and no longer. Art matters. In the US it's about making as much money as possible for as long as possible.
If the US started doing TV like the UK you'd see more quality and more risk. Shorter runs, fewer eps per season, etc. Look at HBO.
Heroes failed because it had one season-worth of story in it, from the perspective of the showrunners, and NBC forced them to keep the same cast. From that moment, the show was basically doomed from a creative standpoint.
You force writers to do a show they don't want to do, you end up with shit.
I'm not saying the "new cast every volume" idea was brilliant--I have no idea how it would have played out. But clearly, the people working on Heroes had no idea what to do with their characters beyond the first season.
There was enough setup in the first volume that they could've gone in a lot of different directions. I enjoyed "Generations" up until we got Adam Munroe's paper-thin motivation. I never did figure out why he wanted to wipe out the rest of humanity except to be a raging asshole. Great villain, there.
The show also tried to alternately redeem/condemn Sylar, seemingly from one volume to the next. After a while, his motivation was so murky nothing he did made any sense--how could it?
While the show ostensibly had a plan for each volume, it's obvious there was no long-term plan to link each volume's arc, and the planning within each arc made very little sense and never felt cohesive--except for that first volume.
You force writers to do a show they don't want to do, you end up with shit.
I'm not saying the "new cast every volume" idea was brilliant--I have no idea how it would have played out. But clearly, the people working on Heroes had no idea what to do with their characters beyond the first season.
There was enough setup in the first volume that they could've gone in a lot of different directions. I enjoyed "Generations" up until we got Adam Munroe's paper-thin motivation. I never did figure out why he wanted to wipe out the rest of humanity except to be a raging asshole. Great villain, there.
The show also tried to alternately redeem/condemn Sylar, seemingly from one volume to the next. After a while, his motivation was so murky nothing he did made any sense--how could it?
While the show ostensibly had a plan for each volume, it's obvious there was no long-term plan to link each volume's arc, and the planning within each arc made very little sense and never felt cohesive--except for that first volume.
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