Thanks, would have been interesting if A:E had been made how it may have paralleled Doctor Who. Older man, younger companion, fixing problems through time and possibly space with sonic pen/screwdriver. Were there plans for Gary 7 and Roberta to ever leave the budget friendly confines of earth?
Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggling.
- Thread starter ConRefit79
- Start date
Thanks, would have been interesting if A:E had been made how it may have paralleled Doctor Who. Older man, younger companion, fixing problems through time and possibly space with sonic pen/screwdriver. Were there plans for Gary 7 and Roberta to ever leave the budget friendly confines of earth?
Most pilots of the era were one-offs. Very little thought was given to "after" other than establishing the format. If the show doesn't sell any time spent on stories and ideas for episodes that won't be made was wasted. It's actually why a lot of shows get into trouble after the first 10 episodes: if the pilot doesn't sell then all that extra work on future segments is wasted, so you do as little as possible, but if it DOES sell now you have to figure out a bunch of stories and you didn't lay the groundwork. It's almost a Catch-22.
Last edited:
As unimaginative as it is to do, I'm going to repeat a post on this subject from 2014, that at least one member thought had a certain jejune charm. Keep in mind I was a mere stripling here at the time, if that seems to make any difference or the comment is worth remarking on at all.
"Being a bit punchy I suppose, but I just flashed on repurposing the show as an update of Rumpole of the Bailey. Gary still gets to fight the good fights, though in a rather more idiosyncratic way. How annoying might Roberta be as "She who must be obeyed"????"
Well, well?
"Being a bit punchy I suppose, but I just flashed on repurposing the show as an update of Rumpole of the Bailey. Gary still gets to fight the good fights, though in a rather more idiosyncratic way. How annoying might Roberta be as "She who must be obeyed"????"
Well, well?
If Assignment:Earth had been picked up by a network as a series I believe that it barely would have made 1 season before it would have been canceled.
The show was probably going to be Earth bound with a spy rather than SF orientation. So no space or time travel.
IIRC, Gary wasn't a time traveler, just a human raised by aliens who job was to secretly guide humanity towards a positive future.
Well, it would've been SF-oriented, just Earthbound SF. The series prospectus which was written for the Trek-spinoff version (as opposed to the earlier half-hour pseudo-sitcom version that was about time travelers) puts it this way on p. 10:
I gather that its approach would've been in the same vein as something like the bionic shows -- the main character having sci-fi attributes and abilities that he applied to dealing with the full gamut of standard action-adventure crises, some of which could be science-fictional themselves but others of which would be more conventional intrigue, crime, and drama plots. But with an overall eye toward the concept that Gary was here to save us from ourselves, to help us protect and build the future of humanity and avert inventions and choices that could doom it. So it would be science-fictional in that respect, its focus on the future of humanity, though that would probably have been a background element most of the time.
Vaguely. There was some talk about helping us to advance our technology and unite our nations so we could stand against the Cylons, but it wasn't really addressed much.
But if you mean doing a format where the plots were general action/drama-type plots that the heroes resolved using sci-fi means, it's hard to say, since G80 only had six distinct storylines. But a couple did have more earthbound focuses, like the one about getting an industrialist to clean up toxic waste or the one about the Super Scouts saving a children's camp by using their alien powers to win a baseball game. It was about half that sort of thing and half more sci-fi plots like the one where they time-travelled to Nazi Germany (an odd hourlong digression within the 3-hour pilot) and the one where the Cylons landed on Halloween and forced Wolfman Jack to help them signal their fleet.
By the way, kids, if you're wondering why we of that era flocked to Manimal and Automan, that was why.
Except that both of those were created by Glen A. Larson, who also created Galactica. So they were all part of the same axis of schlock. Although even Larson didn't want to do Galactica 1980. The network insisted that it be made to amortize the cost of the sets, props, costumes, and stock effects footage from Battlestar Galactica, over the objections of Larson and Universal.
I'd think you were shitting me if I hadn't seen it myself when it originally aired....
Oh, yeah, I'm not saying they were any better. Well, OK, they were better, but not by much. I'm just saying why we'd grab at some majestically dopey TV shows.
(I wonder now if part of why we could put up with the problems of the first two years of Next Generation is that its genial ineptness was such a relief compared to the spectrum of cheesy or awful like Voyagers! or Small Wonder that had to be enough for a science fiction fix before it.)
Maybe. Pre-TNG in the '80s, we also had things like V, which started out strong in the original miniseries but got increasingly silly after that. As well as ALF, Knight Rider, The Powers of Matthew Star (which I don't think I watched much), Misfits of Science (another one I think I largely missed), and Tales from the Darkside. Probably the most prestigious thing in SFTV in that period was Amazing Stories from Spielberg, but that was a show driven by directors rather than writers, so the episodes tended to have great production values and style and execution, but the stories ranged from mediocre to mindbogglingly stupid.
So, yeah, early TNG wasn't really that bad compared to its competition at the time. I know I liked it just fine when it first aired. Although I was very much predisposed to see the best in it, and I think a lot of us were.
It's interesting to note, though, that 1989 not only brought a substantial improvement in TNG's quality, but also saw the advent of Alien Nation and Quantum Leap, both of which represented a much smarter and more sophisticated style of SF/fantasy storytelling. And maybe it was TNG that paved the way for those. Even with all its early flaws, it was at least trying to be intelligent and thought-provoking, to be more than just schlocky action.
HAW! I had exactly the same thought before I read your post.
Did we flock? How long did those shows last?
Me too. But I always thought the microwave gag was a classic.
It is an interesting coincidence, yes. Another possible trailblazer series would be Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future, which ran 1987 to 1988. I remember at the time thinking it was much better-made than Next Generation (and feeling guilty for that thought).
I haven't seen it since it ran on Some Channel You'd Think Would Be Sci-Fi But Wasn't, around 1999-2000, so I don't know if it has held up. But my recollection is that it had that smarter-and-more-sophisticated (and often wickedly cynical) style.
Oh, a year, year-and-a-half. Same as everything else genre in that day.
Sorry, not quite that long.
My point is that it may not be coincidence. It's popular to rag on TNG seasons 1-2 today, but that's only because we have the higher quality of the later seasons to compare it to. At the time, it was a major improvement on what had come before and was really extremely popular, from what I recall. So it probably opened the door for other smart, high-quality SFTV shows, including its own later seasons.
Even if there wasn't a direct causal relationship between TNG and those '89 shows, the fact that they came out so close together suggests that there may have been some other external factor around that time that was responsible for the increase in SFTV quality that they represented. Sometimes things only look coincidental because we haven't considered all the factors influencing them. Still, TNG was pretty revolutionary for its time. It pioneered the first-run syndication market for hourlong dramas, which exploded in the '90s in response to TNG's massive success. So we know it was influential in that regard. It stands to reason that it was influential in others.
That was critically acclaimed, but did poorly in the ratings. It was never more than a cult show. So I don't think it would've been too influential in the short term. Probably its biggest impact was launching Matt Frewer's career as a major genre actor. But that was probably as much from Max Headroom's appearances as a cola pitchman and MTV host as from the show itself.
Here's my review from my rewatch of the series in 2011. My verdict was that it was daringly subversive for its day but often sloppily written, and most of the time it barely did anything with its title character beyond having him occasionally pop up and make quips about a story that had nothing to do with him. And Frewer was miscast as a macho action hero like Edison Carter. It wasn't a role that played to his strengths. Still, as I said in the review, "It was prophetic in predicting broadcasting trends like a proliferation of hundreds of channels, the 24-hour news cycle, the existence of a global computer/entertainment network dominating people’s lives, and the manipulation of the news by corporations."
It was possible to watch the entirety of The Powers of Matthew Star and not watch it much. Network interference ruined it about eight episodes in. That same network, NBC, is infamous for ruining genre programming. With V they decided it cost too much, and cut the cast in half arbitrarily, ending several storylines without finishing them. They also cancelled The Phoenix right when it hit its stride. And we all know what they did to TOS.
As far as TNG's first season, I remember being frustrated with every episode prior to "Justice" because of unfinished storylines. The one that most often comes to mind was the infighting between the Anticans and the Selae, with the last lines in the episode devoted to one of them offering up a member of the other's delegation to the galley for their evening feast. No resolution, and no later commentary on how the situation resolved either.
Only because? No. Some of us were less than impressed with TNG seasons 1-2 at the time they aired, even before watching later seasons.
Similar threads
