And watch their facial expressions for change.
'Wagon Train to the Stars'? Really?
- Thread starter Michael
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And watch their facial expressions for change.
Rick Berman had an interesting take on the original pitch when DS9 was debuting.
He said that if the original series was "Wagon Train to the stars" then DS9 was "The Rifleman in space", since the emphasis was intended to be Sisko and his son.
I guess that'd make Voyager "Dusty's Trail in space"...
He said that if the original series was "Wagon Train to the stars" then DS9 was "The Rifleman in space", since the emphasis was intended to be Sisko and his son.
I guess that'd make Voyager "Dusty's Trail in space"...
As am I. But yeah, that's what happens when the phrase is churned out time and again, recited by rote, understanding the words but without the reference attached. Because of this, people don't get what he meant by it. "Star Trek wasn't a wagon train, that's more Battlestar Galactica." That's not wrong, but it's not right either.
Right, exactly.
^Specifically she thought it would be about USO tours in the South Pacific, I believe.
Is that documented because that sounds too much like a cute story to me. Lucy was a woman (in 1962) in charge of a television studio that put out some really top stuff, I find it hard to believe she wouldn't know what the show was supposed to be.
Yes.
That's what I've always been told as well. May be apocryphal, I'm not connected enough or knowledgeable enough to say for sure. I have heard that story from several people.
All the magic is related in Inside Star Trek; The Real Story by Justman and Solow. There they give you all sorts of facts about the making of the show as well as debunking many myths perpetuated over the years by Roddenberry and others. The Lucille Ball story is in there.
I tend to believe them more than, say, Shatner.
If there's one thing that annoys me about Star Trek in general, it's the show's episodic nature. It seems to me that one of the fundamental requirements in a really good story is characters that change over time.
I'm 28, so I suppose that I fit pretty neatly into the main target demographic for most prime-time television. I hardly watch any, but the dramatic shows that capture my interest in any way are all serial in nature—which is indeed the popular thing these days. Not to mention that I've made my own comic deeply serialized.
It makes me wonder what drives these cultural trends...from anthologies to reality shows to serials and back again.
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I'm completely the opposite. Serialized TV shows really turns me off. I enjoy getting a complete story in sixty minutes.
I like when a show has both elements really. It's nice not to always be left hanging, which is sometimes the case with serialized shows. Lost in particular comes to mind, but then again I do like the characters to develop. In terms of Trek, I'd say NG struck the right balance between the two.
That depends on what kind of story you're talking about. These days, we tend to think of a "story" as being what a series tells over the long haul -- perhaps because these days we have reruns and home video and episode guides everywhere we look and are more oriented toward seeing the big picture of a series. But back in the '50s and '60s, those things weren't as commonplace. Each episode would be seen once or twice and then pretty much disappear (or maybe show up in syndicated reruns if the show ran long enough). So the emphasis was more on making each individual episode a complete, satisfying story in its own right. What happened in an episode two seasons ago or what might happen in an episode two seasons ahead was irrelevant, because the viewing experience was focused on the here and now, on getting a whole story from beginning to end in the course of an hour -- and then getting another whole story from beginning to end when you watch it next week.
By that standard, the way we do things today -- telling only a fragment of a story in each single hour -- could be seen as kind of lazy. If your focus is on what you can get out of a single episode rather than the long haul of a series, then watching for an hour and getting only part of a story would feel disappointing.
And in the episodic model, there is character growth and change -- because, as in Wagon Train, the focus of the episode is usually on the guest stars, on characters who go through a process of change in the course of that episode. Or the focus is on the relationship between a regular and a guest star, with that relationship going through a change and reaching a resolution by the end of the hour. It's just that the scale of the change, like the scale of the overall storytelling focus, is on a particulate level rather than a holistic level.
Of course, today we live in a world where we do have constant reruns and DVD sets and episode guides and discussion boards, and that's brought about a climate where we do think of TV series more holistically, more in terms of the long-term progression. Which has helped create the current practice of making TV series that have overall arcs and continuous change, with only a few shows like Law & Order preserving the old approach of making each episode a complete story in itself. So maybe that approach isn't as feasible now. But it made sense for its time.
And I do think there's a lot to be said for making each hour a complete story, even if there are larger arcs throughout a series. My preferred approach is a mix of both. I want the characters to go through long-term growth, but I want each episode to tell a complete story and have a satisfying ending, rather than just being the next small step forward in a single decompressed narrative.
That may be what TV viewers expect today, but most people back in the 1950s and '60s didn't care about characters changing or "growing" over time. Quite the opposite; we preferred our TV heroes to be frozen in time, like most newspaper comic-strip characters. Gunsmoke ran for 634 episodes over 20 years, but every episode played as if it could have taken place in the year 1881. The actors just kept looking older and older!
Ah thanks, it just seems like the head of Fox programming thinking House is a home improvement show. OK, maybe Fox isn't the best example....
Keep in mind that this would have been around the time that they were initially pitching the show, not actually producing it.
Okay, to clarify the Lucille Ball story: It happened at a 1964 Desilu Board of Directors meeting where the programming execs were reporting on series development and the like. This was when Herb Solow was early in the development on ST with Roddenberry. Ball asked Solow about a "South Seas series" about USO entertainers visiting the troops in WWII, which she insisted he had mentioned at a previous meeting. Solow didn't know what she was talking about until she said the title was Star Trek. (The story is on pp. 21-22 of Inside Star Trek.)
Law & Order is (was?) purposefully episodic, with little about characters' personal lives and growth; modelled on Dragnet iirc. L&O did pretty well for itself. So, it seems there is room for both episodic and serial.
I know not which I prefer. I think I don't like long story arcs, but I like seeing characters develop friendships like Bashir and Garak, Bashir and O'Brien, etc. My two cents. Be well.
I know not which I prefer. I think I don't like long story arcs, but I like seeing characters develop friendships like Bashir and Garak, Bashir and O'Brien, etc. My two cents. Be well.
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