Re: ENT Forum Mediation Thread--Please Participate
Posted by Dennis Bailey:
Posted by Robotrix_Zero:
But the end result is the same if you find you have no return customers for what you're currently serving up.
The processes and the end results are not nearly the same thing.
Too many fans like this pasta or fast food or pizza analogy and give it too much weight. They seem to imagine that Paramount is like, oh, some folks running a Pizza Hut. My pizza comes to my table cold -- or I ordered pepperoni and got a plain with extra cheese. So I send it back and they send me a new pizza more to my liking, right?
I'd be shocked if what they did instead was close the doors to the Pizza Hut permanently, raze the building and erect a Home Depot on the property. OTOH, if this show fails it makes perfect sense for Viacom to start spending their money on something profitable that has a future -- and cease spending it on "Star Trek" altogether. There's no reason they should do otherwise.
I'm sorry if this was already put to bed elsewhere. I just started wading through this thread earlier this week, and I'm only a quarter of the way through.
Actually, Dennis, IMO you are supporting the analogy. If I go to a restaurant, try to send the food back because it isn't what I ordered and the server says "Too bad. That's what you're getting." You can bet I'm not going back to that restaurant. Heck, if I go to a place a couple times and find that they screw up my order more often than not I'm likely to stop going there even if they DO take it back and fix it-that is what MOST people will do. And once enough people stop coming to our hypothetical restaurant, they need to start laying off cooks and servers. If they don't get off their ass and try to please the customers, eventually, the restaurant will go out of business, and a different business will probably rent the place out and try their hand at making a product that will draw customers.
For that matter, apart from the Bizarro World that is Paramount, most companies make an attempt to PROTECT their franchises. If our hypothetical crappy restaurant happens to be a Pizza Hut, you can bet that eventually the Pizza Hut suits will get word about this particular restaurant and yank their franchise--they want to protect the name "Pizza Hut" and make sure people get what they expect when they go to a Pizza Hut. It doesn't seem to me that they get this at Paramount. They seem to figure that any 'Trek is good 'Trek, and ignore the fact that many of us are now embarassed to mention 'Trek in conversation.
I mean, it's not like I used to say, "Hi, I'm Joe. I like Star Trek." but in the early 1990s, it wasn't a big deal. If it came up, it came up. Nowadays, I'll go to great lengths to not call attention to the fact that I'm a 'Trekkie, because I worry that the person I'm talking to will have seen ENT and will wonder how I could LIKE anything so badly written. At least 10 years ago, while 'Trekkies were by no stretch of the imagination "cool," they were usually viewed as somewhat educated. Nowadays, they don't even have that.
OK, I don't know exactly how any of this has to do with making the ENT forum a more pleasant place

. I guess coming back to the restaurant analogy, it's gotta be a bit annoying for the 4 or 5 patrons that actually ENJOY the food to have as many people sitting there bitching about how terrible it is. I guess I can see why they wish the unhappy diners would just go eat somewhere else. I guess it isn't the only restaurant in town--I quite like what they're serving over at Stargate, and I hear that we might be getting a Battlestar Galactica in a few months. At any rate, there's always Starbucks.
