Favourite 'season one' aspects that get dropped early on
- Thread starter Candlelight
- Start date
Actually, the Sam Malone episode answered that.
When Sam told Martin that Frasier said he was dead, Frasier said it was during a period while they were fighting. Then Sam found out that Martin was a cop and said Frasier told him he was a scientist, and Frasier responded that since Martin was "dead," what difference did it make what his profession was.
Then Niles asked Sam what Frasier said about him, and Sam said he never mentioned him.
Of course, considering that Frasier on Cheers was into sports, got into fights and drank beer, he was basically a different character on his own show.
I assumed she was to replace Charlie when Kirk Acevado left the show that after Olivia came back, she disappeared without a mention.
Absolutely. I meant to go find images to compare, but did something else and dropped it.
Yeah I've been rewatching QL lately and there's a definite difference. Don't know if I ever had a preference between the two though.
Curiously enough, after the first season of the series, the producers put serious thought into a couple of different dramatic departures in the format. In the first, they would have followed a completely different set of characters in a completely different situation. In the second, they'd continue to follow Jack, but each episode would cover 24 hours rather than an hour. A script for the first episode of the second concept was actually completed before they decided to stick to the same characters and format.
I liked the very early black-and-white episodes of Lost In Space, when Dr. Smith was a genuine villain. If you've never seen the first season, you'll be surprised how menacing he was. Later in that season he started acting more the way he did in the final two seasons, and, of course, the whole show went over the cliff in terms of silliness when it switched to color.
Yup. He was basically Iago -- a self-serving liar and manipulator who presented himself as a kind, benevolent figure. Though I didn't object to them making him somewhat less malevolent than he appeared at first. Somewhere around episodes 3-6 or so, he reached a perfect sweet spot as a character who was villainous but not devoid of redeemable traits: willing to jeopardize or sacrifice lives at a distance if it brought him profit, but not comfortable doing it up close or to people he actually knew, and with a soft spot for people whose intelligence he respected, such as Will Robinson. The best moment, perhaps, being in episode 5 where he saved the Robinsons' lives purely because he didn't want to be stranded alone with only a mindless robot for company and no one to stimulate his mind (since the Robot didn't have any real personality yet). So he could be a totally selfish and devious character yet still have incentives to do the "right" thing when it suited him, as well as having some redeeming traits like affinity for the children and respect for the Robinsons' intelligence. That would've made him a sustainable character, a continuing source of tension and threat yet not so extreme in his villainy that he couldn't credibly be allowed to remain part of the group.
Unfortunately, that quickly gave way to a Dr. Smith defined by cowardice and greed above all, and Jonathan Harris was allowed to indulge his clownish tendencies too much. Although it didn't become really unbearable until season 2, when the show was revamped into a full-on campfest to compete with Batman (which, ironically, was from the same studio and had some of the same production staffers, particularly the 20th Century Fox effects department).
There was a great show on tv recently that included much talk about LIS and Dr. Smith. Basically that Jonathan Harris really took over the show (not in a bad way) and really enjoyed hamming it up. None of the cast being interviewed seemed to mind Harris at all; they liked him. They weren’t fond of the overall cheesiness of the writing, the “talking carrot” being the main example. (Side note: wasn’t the original “The Thing” described as a giant carrot?)
And that Irwin Allen (who also did Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) was an unbelievable cheapskate who nonetheless knew how to bring in an audience.
And that Irwin Allen (who also did Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) was an unbelievable cheapskate who nonetheless knew how to bring in an audience.
That was the PIONEERS OF TELEVISION episode on early science fiction tv. I actually found the segment on Irwin Allen the most interesting since I had pretty much heard all the anecdotes about Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry before.
According to the show, Allen would put lots of time and money into the pilots for his shows, then start cutting corners once they went to series.
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Certainly seems to be the case. Just look at The Time Tunnel. In the pilot, there are all these elaborate miniatures and matte paintings representing the vast, secret underground base where the time-travel project is operating (ludicrously vast, in fact, like 8000 stories deep or something). In particular, there's one matte shot that reveals the larger context of the main set, showing that it's a freestanding platform within a much larger, deeper chamber. And yet for some reason, unless my memory fails me, we never saw any of that footage again, even though it would've been easy just to reuse the shots from the pilot as stock footage. You'd think it would've been more economical to spread out the cost of creating those shots throughout the season rather than blowing it all on shots that were only used in the pilot.
Here's the later season device Al used in "Quantum Leap", the ugly boxy multi-colored thingy I described earlier:
So, you have no problem with them because it's their job to tackle crisis situations on an ongoing basis, but you do have an issue with 24, which is a show about a man whose job it is to tackle crisis situations on an ongoing basis?
Looking at the chronology of the series (mild spoilers for those who haven't seen the whole series)...
So, in a time period extending over 13 years, you have an issue with a government operative (for the most part) dealing with a total of 8 crisis situations?
One show that always bothered me by doing that was Alien Nation (which unfortunately only lasted one season). Early on they had the teenage son, a younger daughter and a few episodes in, a baby. Later in the season (and in the subsequent movies) some of the children just disappeared like Jimmy Hoffa. No explanations, no "he went off to college" nothing. Like, HELLO? Where are the kids??
The legendary overall general awesomeness that would have been:
CHUCK CUNNINGHAM!!!
Ah, yeah. Poor Chuck. Went off to college and was never mentioned again.
In a reversal of this syndrome, in the first episode of the Cosby Show, an exasperated Mrs. Huxtable groans "why did we have four children," to which her husband quips "because we didn't want five."
Later, a previously-unmentioned fifth child, Sondra, was show coming home from college
If it had just been that, tackling crisis situations on an ongoing basis, that would be fine. But having every single one of those crisis situations unfold and resolve in a single 24-hour period is what makes it implausibly contrived. Not to mention going through, what, eight or nine distinct Presidents of the United States in seven seasons, or whatever it was? My point is, the first season depicted what should've been an exceptional, once-in-a-lifetime event even for people in that line of work, so that repeating the same formula over and over with the same characters requires an implausible level of coincidence.
The only child who disappeared was Baby Vessna, and that was only in the revival movies. Vessna was born in episode 17 and was seen and referenced for the rest of the season as well as in the first revival movie. In subsequent movies, there was a brief allusion to her going into some sort of cocoon, and then she was never seen or mentioned again. But Buck and Emily remained as regular characters throughout the series and the TV movies.
There were some discontinuities between the weekly series' finale and the first revival movie, since four years elapsed between them. Basically the movie retold the events leading up to the series' cliffhanger finale in a new way and completely ignored several of the subplots of the finale; I've found it's simplest to assume the finale ("Green Eyes") was rendered apocryphal, which is fine with me, because I never liked it (it was an extreme example of the tendency to force every character into a gratuitous crisis at the same time so that every storyline gets a cliffhanger).
There are also some discontinuities in the final movie, The Udara Legacy. Some of the characters' backstories are retconned in a way that might be reconcilable but still feels off. A more blatant error, though, is that TUL treats Newcomers in their 70s and 80s as elderly, even though the series established that George himself was in his 70s and that that was the prime of life for a Newcomer.
But we weren't seeing the beginning, middle, and end of a particular crisis. Often the terrorist plots featured in the series had been in motion for months, or even years, before the events of the actual "day". So what we were effectively seeing was the endgame of a particular plot, which is what Jack was often dealing with, and why the situation was often desperate.
Six Presidents over a 13 year period. Two of those were Vice Presidents who had to be sworn in after the actual President had been incapacitated or, as in the case of Logan, removed from office.
It's odd for people to be in the same line of work for 13 years? How does it take an implausible level of coincidence to believe that people who work for a counter terrorist unit have to deal with terrorist situations?
Besides, this isn't a documentary, it's escapist television. If I wanted to be bored to death by the reality or plausibility of a situation I'd watch the news.
