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sf/f TV development news - 2015

Christopher said:
Deckard said:
Then I read that he'd be a consultant for the LAPD helping a Homicide Detective solve crimes and punish criminals and my interest suddenly evaporated.
...
Though I suppose time will tell, and truth be told I didn't have high hopes for Constantine but that (after a rough start) started moving in the right direction.
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Here's the thing, though... There are a lot of series that start out looking like conventional case-of-the-week procedurals, but then evolve into something much more complex and challenging (e.g. Dollhouse or Constantine). So I've formulated this theory that the first few episodes of a show are about selling it to the network suits, camouflaging it as something safe and conventional to reassure them, and that it's only afterward, once it's established itself, that the show starts to ease toward becoming what the creators intended it to be.

I suppose it's as much about the general audience as the network execs, though. Although many of us are drawn to more challenging or offbeat ideas, huge numbers of viewers do prefer more conventional procedurals, cop shows, and the like. That's why such shows are so successful and ubiquitous. So a show often has to start out in a more conventional mold in order to attract that general audience, and then, once the audience is invested in the characters and the world, the writers start easing the audience in to the more complex or daring stuff. So, say, Orphan Black started out with its lead character impersonating a cop so that it would look like a police procedural for the first few weeks, but it soon blew that status quo out the window and never looked back. Or Agents of SHIELD started out as a more "grounded" procedural show about government agents investigating weird phenomena, but now is embracing its comic/superhero roots more openly. And The CW started out with the more "grounded" Arrow, about protagonists without superpowers fighting gangsters and corrupt businessmen, but now has expanded the universe and brought in superpowers and sci-fi concepts with a vengeance in The Flash.

So it's all about starting off safe to avoid scaring off the norms, and then gradually easing them into the fun stuff once they're hooked. Genre shows use that pattern over and over. So when I see a description of a new show that says it's going to be a case-of-the-week procedural, I don't take it too seriously. I expect the showrunners to have deeper plans for it once they've established themselves.
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I don't disagree with what your saying, of course Constantine in particular went through this same process when it first started (remember all those statement that we won't get to see him smoking on on the show? And by the end of the season he was puffing away like a chimney!)

The thing is I know shows have to start out safe like this because they have to walk a fine line of network expectations before they establish themselves and then after a few episodes when the network aren't looking so closely any more they can start to gradually tell the stories they really want to tell and take the series in the direction they want it to go.

But as you can probably see from my avatar and sig I'm a pretty big fan of the comic and certain elements like the LAPD thing and the therapist angle just don't sit right with me. I really do hope they have some long term plans for these parts of the story.

When I think of Lucifer (from the comic) he's a character that is just 100% sure of himself and maintains a complete disregard for all but a handful of other characters throughout and it's fun to see a character who doesn't need to be humanized or brought down to "our level" of emotional frailty and whose motivations are little more than to further his own ends for his own purpose at the expense of whoever gets in his way.

He almost reminds me of Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" as an embodiment not of pure evil but of free will. This is something I hope the series would really focus on and is large part of the comic which is the idea of free will versus the tyranny of predestination and the need to define oneself outside the influence of their parents/creators (in Lucifer's case this is his father, God)

Though maybe these topics aren't something that would flourish on TV (network TV especially) so shows have to play it safe with the procedural angle which is probably a more populist approach compared to an intangible struggle between free will and predestination

Like said I'm willing to give the show a chance and see how it turns out, all I'm saying is the information we've been given so far has only served to dull my enthusiasm.

But of course nothing is set in stone yet, and indeed nothing would please me more than to be proved wrong
 
It would be nice to explore the irony that Houdini, the master of magic, was the supernatural skeptic, while Doyle, the creator of the Great Detective, was a believer. Of course, magicians are usually skeptics, because they can see through the tricks used by fraudulent (meaning all) psychics and spiritualists.

And that's going to be the problem if the supernatural phenomena in the show are real. In that kind of fiction, the skeptics are usually portrayed as closed-minded and stubbornly blind to the evidence, and that wouldn't fit with a magician's ability to see through illusions and deceptions. Personally, I'd happily see a series where Houdini exposes psychic frauds on a weekly basis, but I'm probably one of the few. ("And I would've gotten away with it, too, if not for those meddling middle-aged men!")
 
Hmm, so apparently CW is going for the supernatural detective thing again. I wonder if they'll pair this up with I, Zombie?
 
Could be interesting. I wonder if there's any chance of getting a show within a show kind of thing?
 
Yeah, sounds like somebody trying to do [i}Star Trek[/i] twenty years early. I'd rather see the show itself.
 
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