Any Books You Like...

[Jetfire]

^ I was reading up on your suggestion Christopher...kinda seems fit for film first or maybe cable like AMC or HBO...interesting though...it might work on FOX since they don't seem to mind throwing large amounts of money at shows.

 

[DimesDan]

Discussing this with the other half, she did say Bird Song by Sebastian Fulkes, but the BBC has already done that and it starts on Sunday evening.

Although Quit Ugly One Morning was made into a mini series or a one off about ten years ago and was a bit shit, I think some of Christopher Brookmyres novels could be fun to watch on the small screen.

 

[Gothowitz]

Sure, I'll offer up a suggestion, one I gave in a different thread.
The Mote in God's Eye might make a good mini-series somewhere.

 

[SamuelPete]

My favorite is The Giver, this is one of my favorite books I read with full attention and also one of the best in my collection.

 

[Gov Kodos]

Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat would be a fun sci-fi tale of bank robbery and humor. For non sci-fi I'd love a faithful rendition of The Count of Monte Cristo. Is there a good French production, since I've yet to see one in English?

 

[OmahaStar]

Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat would be a fun sci-fi tale of bank robbery and humor. For non sci-fi I'd love a faithful rendition of The Count of Monte Cristo. Is there a good French production, since I've yet to see one in English?

Oh come now. You didn't love the one with the Titanic brat playing twins?

 

[Gov Kodos]

Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat would be a fun sci-fi tale of bank robbery and humor. For non sci-fi I'd love a faithful rendition of The Count of Monte Cristo. Is there a good French production, since I've yet to see one in English?

Oh come now. You didn't love the one with the Titanic brat playing twins?

I believe you're thinking of 'The Man in the Iron Mask' Louis the XIV and all, not 'The Count of Monte Cristo', Edmond Dantes and his quest for revenge after being imprisoned in the Chateau d'If.

 

[Christopher]

I once had an idea for a way of adapting Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea into a TV series, a different approach from the various movies and miniseries and such that have been attempted in the past. The book is actually very episodic; once Arronax, Conseil, and Land have been brought aboard and gotten the basic exposition, it's pretty much one adventure after another until the climax. So you could expand the book to cover an entire TV season, adapting the various adventures episodically and adding new ones to fill out the season to however many episodes you needed, and then have the climax of the book be the season finale. Not sure what you'd do for a second season, though (maybe adapt Mysterious Island, but then you'd get compared to Lost).

 

[Amaris]

Yes, there's a book I just finished reading called "Midnight in Never Land". It's a great book (I also hope it gets the movie treatment). There is a quite well thought out plot, and I think given the continuing popularity of darker, light fantasy ventures in television, that it would make for a solid TV series.

 

[barnaclelapse]

I just read "The Wind-up Bird Chronicles", and I think it could make for a really interesting mini-series.

 

[John Clark]

Well, I'd like to see the Honorverse series (as others have mentioned) but it would have to have a good cast and decent budget.

Other than that, the Amanda Garrett novels by James Cobb, some of the smaller books by Larry Bond (By smaller, I mean not the Big war ones)

There's also the Chase/Wilde series by Andy Mcdermott, but those would probably make a decent film series.

 

[Forbin]

^ I was reading up on your suggestion Christopher...kinda seems fit for film first or maybe cable like AMC or HBO...interesting though...it might work on FOX since they don't seem to mind throwing large amounts of money at shows.

... and then cancelling them.

 

[Christopher]

^Most shows get cancelled anyway. That's a fact of life. And it's particularly hard for genre shows to avoid cancellation because they tend to have high budgets and modest ratings, a lethal combination for commercial television. So the attrition rate for genre shows is going to be high on any network. The reason FOX has cancelled so many SF/fantasy shows is simply because it's bought so many more SF/fantasy shows than any other broadcast network. It's really gotten an unfair reputation.

 

[Forbin]

That's one way to look at it, but I still like to look at it as "Fox is an evil network run by evil bastards who cancelled Firefly, Space: AAB, Strange Luck, Alien Nation, Dark Angel, Sarah Conner, Dollhouse, Tru Calling, etc, etc, etc..."

They really do seem to have a strong record of buying a genre show only to ditch it like a hot potato within a season or, at most, two. God only knows how X-Files got 9 seasons.

 

[FPAlpha]

A lifelong pipedream of me would be a Shadowrun series based on the roleplaying game and the novels it has spawned.

A Cyberpunk future where small groups of people undertake industrial espionage, sabotage, extraction of key personell (sometimes against their will) and up to assassinations on behalf of anyone who can pay which most of the time are huge megacorporations who use these "Shadowrunners" as deniable assets in their covert actions against each other.

There's a "little" twist though.. end of 2012 (the setting begins 2050) magic has returned to the world including many fantasy races.. imagine Orcs wielding heavy machineguns as if it were a hunting rifle, Elves hacking into computer systems while the Dwarf is connected to his helicopter via a direct neural interface waiting to extract the whole team after the job is done.

Would be hugely expensive, weird and nobody would be willing to risk it in a million years but one can dream

 

[Christopher]

That's one way to look at it, but I still like to look at it as "Fox is an evil network run by evil bastards who cancelled Firefly, Space: AAB, Strange Luck, Alien Nation, Dark Angel, Sarah Conner, Dollhouse, Tru Calling, etc, etc, etc..."

Every show gets cancelled sooner or later. FOX deserves credit for buying that many genre shows in the first place. A while back I tried to work out the numbers and I found that of all the broadcast networks, FOX had the highest percentage of shows that were SF/fantasy, edging slightly ahead of the WB. NBC and ABC were roughly tied for third, and CBS a distant fifth (I didn't count the CW since it was too young for useful statistics).

Not to mention that corporations are made up of people, and the people who canned those earlier shows, notably Firefly, were long gone before Dollhouse came along. Really, the current FOX regime deserves great credit for giving Dollhouse two full seasons, when normally it would've been pulled due to poor ratings after less than one. They really went above and beyond in supporting Dollhouse, and it's grossly unfair and wrong to condemn them for its cancellation. Ultimately shows get cancelled because people don't watch them. If the audience doesn't come, there's nothing the network can do. It's very expensive to make shows and they can't be made unless they can be paid for.

They really do seem to have a strong record of buying a genre show only to ditch it like a hot potato within a season or, at most, two.

The same goes for just about any other network -- and any other genre. It is the nature of the industry that the majority of shows get cancelled quickly. It's not about FOX and it's not about genre. It's just how television works. I mean, hell, why do you think we keep getting new shows every year? Because the old ones get cancelled. The current season's only a few months old and we've already seen a bunch of brand-new shows get canned, including Allen Gregory, Charlie's Angels, Free Agents, Friends With Benefits, How to Be a Gentleman, Love Bites, Man Up!, and The Playboy Club (which was pulled after only 3 episodes). So it's silly to attack FOX for doing something that all networks do.

 

[Forbin]

Point taken on Dollhouse - I threw it in for padding.
I'd be interested in seeing actual numbers; I admit my rant is based on pure perception, not hard facts.

As an aside, I'd also love to see real numbers on how many new genre shows were run by networks OTHER than SciFi/SyFy, as compared to new genre shows run by Skiffy itself - that's another rant altogether (wrestling, bad C movies, reruns, and, what, 3 or 4 original scripted shows?)

 

[Davros]

The Elric Saga

 

[sojourner]

A lifelong pipedream of me would be a Shadowrun series based on the roleplaying game and the novels it has spawned...

Shadowrun is my dream MMORPG. The setting is just perfect for an online roleplaying game.

 

[Christopher]

As an aside, I'd also love to see real numbers on how many new genre shows were run by networks OTHER than SciFi/SyFy, as compared to new genre shows run by Skiffy itself - that's another rant altogether (wrestling, bad C movies, reruns, and, what, 3 or 4 original scripted shows?)

The wrestling and the C movies are what pay for the original scripted shows. People forget that making TV isn't free. No matter how much the people in charge of a network may want to make good, smart shows and keep them on the air, they can't do so unless they can afford to. And genre shows, by their very nature, tend to have niche audiences and thus don't make a huge amount of money from advertising -- and yet they tend to cost quite a lot to make. It's not some evil, capricious whim that keeps TV networks from filling the airwaves with quality genre shows -- they just can't afford to.

And that's because of what the mass audience wants to see. The number of American TV viewers who want to watch wrestling, cheesy B movies, and cheesy reality shows is much, much larger than the number of American TV viewers who want to watch original scripted SF dramas. And since Syfy gets its funding from advertisers, and advertisers' willingness to sponsor shows is proportional to their ratings, that means that if Syfy wants to stay in business, it has to go where the ratings are.