Boy bands in space!

[somebuddyX]

I don't think "boy bands" would have worked for this show or really any musical guests. But I definitely think TNG or DS9 could have made a "weekly musical guest" mandate work. Just stick them in Quark's bar or Ten Forward or up in Vic's. Not that I think it's a good idea, just it could be done. B5 did it in the episode "Walkabout", kinda. But Enterprise is the complete wrong show for that. It's like having a musical guest on a submarine or on a space shuttle. But who knows, maybe NSYNC could have helped fight the Xindi or something

 

[SCE2Aux]

On the ISS there have been, and I believe, still are a numerous musical instruments on board. Makes sense to me since you're locked in a confined space and need some variation in your entertainment - just watching DVDs must get old very quickly! So I think you could integrate playing music in the mess hall very easily and plausibly.

The problem for me is the behind-the-scenes intention for adding the music. If a UPN exec cynically shoehorned NSync into the show, it would come off terribly, because no matter how organically the writers manage to integrate them into the show (eg, maybe some enlisted crewmembers putting on some much needed entertainment during The Catwalk episode), the audience will just see it as the incredibly tacky tie in that it is.

 

[Dukhat]

*NSYNC wouldn’t have done this. The idea was to have boy bands that nobody ever heard of in order to use the show to give them recognition. Boy bands that wouldn’t have cost UPN anything to hire.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

TNG has had both chamber music and jazz. And even a lounge singer who dabbles in Klingon opera (one who reminds me of a joke on a PDQ Bach album: ". . . the fugue for calliope four hands, . . . performed by the famous four-handed organist, Emanuel Pedal") Always well-integrated into the story.

As to obscure "boy-bands," I greatly prefer chamber music to chamber-pot music.

 

[Michael]

Yes it's mentioned in more than one of their interviews. The Shuttlepod show did a 2 part interview with Rick Berman and he talks about in great detail.

Ah, thanks, I forgot it got mentioned in there as well. Here’s the wording of how Berman is telling it on the podcast:

BERMAN: I think I got a note from one of the people at CBS, at glorious CBS, telling me “Let's make [the theme song] a little bit more rock and roll, a little bit more contemporary”.
KEATING: They were obsessed with getting a younger audience. I heard it was one of the notes, “Put a boy band in the mess hall scenes”, is that real?
BERMAN: Yes […] I won't mention any names, but two of the great meetings at CBS, when they took over, was … there was a person of rather high rank who said “What if we put a boy band into the mess hall? That way we could have songs written that we could license and we could sell the recordings and we could … it could earn money. And it would be hip … ”
KEATING: How do you react to that?
BERMAN: Well, the answer was no.

Well, hearing that I'm still not convinced they couldn't have made that suggestion work somehow. Of course it’s going to sound like a super crazy idea when you stress the “boy band” part. But who’s to say it would have to have been boy bands and not any other kind of performer? Bu then also, it’s a little funny to me that he reacts so high and mighty about the suggestion of something like a boy band, when at that point you already had a super cheesy title song (which I love) and famously used The Calling’s schmaltzy “Wherever You Will Go” for your first promos for the show.

I’m not saying I would have wanted for them to realize this boy band idea in the way they claim it was presented to them by “glorious” CBS. But I do think that including musical guest stars with songs even written for the show could have been something that might have worked.

As a sidenote, it’s interesting in the interview that there’s apparently a second part to that story that they cut out. Berman talks of “two great meetings at CBS”, but then tells about only one of them. And right when he’s starting to talk about the second meeting the interview cuts to audience questions. Felt that was a little odd.

 

[Dukhat]

Well, hearing that I'm still not convinced they couldn't have made that suggestion work somehow. Of course it’s going to sound like a super crazy idea when you stress the “boy band” part. But who’s to say it would have to have been boy bands and not any other kind of performer? Bu then also, it’s a little funny to me that he reacts so high and mighty about the suggestion of something like a boy band, when at that point you already had a super cheesy title song (which I love) and famously used The Calling’s schmaltzy “Wherever You Will Go” for your first promos for the show.

Yeah, but there's a huge difference between a theme song (which I liked as well, at least until they added that stupid rock beat to it), and having random boy bands in the mess hall every week. They're out in freaking deep space! Where the hell would these boy bands come from? Would they have been members of the crew? The ship only had like, what, 80 people? And 1/3 of those were female? That leaves like 50 guys. So if the typical boy band is 5 dudes, then ten boy bands would make up the entire crew of the ship.

I’m not saying I would have wanted for them to realize this boy band idea in the way they claim it was presented to them by “glorious” CBS. But I do think that including musical guest stars with songs even written for the show could have been something that might have worked.

Maybe if ENT was a variety show. But it was supposed to be about the formation of the Federation. Something that it pretty much failed at until the last few episodes.

 

[Tosk]

Product placement can be awful or it can be subtle, but it rarely contributes something worthwhile.

 

[Nerys Myk]

General Hospital is the worst/best at this. Anytime you see a child's bedroom there is a Mickey plush in it. When a character is going to a film it's the latest Disney/Marvel/Star Wars release. Corporate synergy!!!

 

[drt]

Well, hearing that I'm still not convinced they couldn't have made that suggestion work somehow. Of course it’s going to sound like a super crazy idea when you stress the “boy band” part.

I’m still not convinced that the higher-ups didn’t just suggest that they license more contemporary music and put it in the show (as you mentioned earlier), but noted tin-eared cheapskate Berman didn’t want to go through the trouble/expense since he could care less about music and came up with the “boy band” thing as his justification.

 

[somebuddyX]

*NSYNC wouldn’t have done this. The idea was to have boy bands that nobody ever heard of in order to use the show to give them recognition. Boy bands that wouldn’t have cost UPN anything to hire.

That's the one I know and that's the one I'm sticking by. NSYNC get turned into caveman. NSYNC go to cowboy planet. NSYNC join the MACOs in a rescue mission and all are gunned down in brutal fashion.

 

[Dukhat]

I’m still not convinced that the higher-ups didn’t just suggest that they license more contemporary music and put it in the show (as you mentioned earlier), but noted tin-eared cheapskate Berman didn’t want to go through the trouble/expense since he could care less about music and came up with the “boy band” thing as his justification.

Berman wasn't the one who came up with the idea. Ostroff was. There was no want to 'license contemporary music.' The want (from UPN) was to add anything to the show to bring in more young viewers, with the prevailing ideas being boy bands and sex. If they thought the audience they wanted loved to smoke marijuana, they'd have Archer and T'Pol toking joints.

 

[Orphalesion]

As @MerryXMen said, DS9 could have actually done it. And I don't think it would have been bad.
However I'm not talking about a "mandatory weekly" thing, but rather something like Charmed or Buffy did, frequent life music at Quark's with a variety of different guest artists. No big names or anything, but instead varied and unusual performers and types of music.
I would have *vastly* preferred that to the last seasons ceaselessly shoving that Vic guy down our throats (*puke*) , particularly if they had put the artists into alien make-up on occasion.
Babylon 5 did have Cailyn, so I think it could be done.

 

[somebuddyX]

TOS would have been wild if they'd done musical guests, especially if they'd roped in some big names. (I know they couldn't have but it's fun to think about). Chekov hanging out with The Monkees. Then the "The Way to Eden" would be a fun reveal when the musical guess isn't inconsequential but actually takes over the ship or kills people or whatever happens in that episode I haven't seen.

 

[Dukhat]

Yeah, because music worked so well in that space hippy episode.

 

[FederationHistorian]

There are several plausible ways to go about it.

A hologram built into the NX-01 mess hall, that's confined to the stage.

A hologram built into various restaurants on Earth and the rest of the Sol system, that confined to the stage.

They watch a live concert performance from the late 20th or early 21st century, a la movie night.

They discover a long lost Earth colony ship that has holograms of boy bands programmed in.

They are prolific on colony worlds like Vega, Deneva and Altair VI, and on space stations like Yosemite 3.

They are on tech installed on alien ships - Vulcans like V’tosh ka’tur , explorers like the Xyrillians, or various pirate syndicates – that are curious about humanity.

So, there are ways it could have happened. But I can't fathom this happening every single week. its far more likely that Enterprise would meet descendants of these boy bands, some of them already being in Starfleet.

 

[drt]

It's probably worth pointing out that the Berman quote said "boy band" in the singular and "we could have songs written that we could license and we could sell the recordings", so if true, the idea seems to be have been Enterprise just had one band composed of the same crewmembers playing their own songs.

 

[Michael]

I think whatever the exact wording of that UPN exec voicing her idea might have been originally, I don’t see a reason why the basic concept (that of musical acts – or a musical act – being featured on the show) couldn’t have been workshopped into something that would have worked for the show. Again, not because I think it’s a terribly good idea or something I would have loved to see happen, but because I think it’s weird for Berman and Braga to flat out refuse even thinking about it and shrug it off as too stupid.

 

[Dukhat]

ENT was not meant to be a vehicle to showcase unknown NSYNC wannabes. For all their faults, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga weren't interested in having ENT become some variety show where the focus went away from their characters and onto some irrelevant boy band that added nothing to the plot. At least that's what they were thinking at the time. Because when you take the focus away from your characters and onto some irrelevant other characters, you get the mess that was TATV.

 

[Sumire]

Anthony Montgomery literally has released an album plus several other CDs and singles. Travis was severely underutilized. If they had given him some side plot that involved him singing, with or without others, it could have more than doubled his screen time. Travis the singing pilot isn’t the most enthralling plot line but it is a plot line which is, sadly, more than he honestly had.

 

[DonIago]

If I want to watch a band performing during a sci-fi TV show in a way that has little relevance to the rest of the episode, I'll check out some Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space.