J.J. Abrams Almost Human
- Thread starter yenny
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Gonna have to be in the execution, because the premise is well-worn.
It is the second televison series that features a android as a cop. The first one was Future Cop. Whice was a short live series, that only eight episodes were made.
Will Almost Human be a hit show? Only four television series that has a android as a main character in it, had stay on for four or more season.
They are.
Small Wonder: 4 seasons
Star Trek The Next Generation: 7 seasons
Andromeda: 5 seasons
New Battlestar Galactica: Think it was 5 seasons?
Will Almost Human be a hit show? Only four television series that has a android as a main character in it, had stay on for four or more season.
They are.
Small Wonder: 4 seasons
Star Trek The Next Generation: 7 seasons
Andromeda: 5 seasons
New Battlestar Galactica: Think it was 5 seasons?
Other shows with android main or recurring characters include My Living Doll, Get Smart, Red Dwarf, Space Cases, Eureka, Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Maybe one could make a case for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, if one defined "android" broadly enough. Although, granted, none of those with android main characters lasted four seasons or more, so yenny's right there.
It was 4.
Anyhoo, isn't Almost Human the show everyone describes as Alien Nation with robots?
The mismatched partner trope didn't begin with Alien Nation.
Didn't say it did. Just repeating what others have already said.
I can see how it could be described that way, but I've never heard anyone call it that until now.
It's quite a stretch to call Bender an android. He's a bipedal robot, but the term "android" in its science-fiction usage traditionally refers to something more human-looking, particularly something that can pass for human or nearly so.
It means manlike. He looks like a man to me. I tend to see androids as robots which recognizably ape human design - two arms, two legs, etc.
In short C-3PO is an android, but R2-D2 is not.
You know, I'm leery of the buddy cop, procedural premise, but this looks like it has a plethora of sf trappings that might make it worth seeing. Getting Karl Urban to star has my attention, too; he's not exactly a major star, but for the past twelve years he's mainly been a movie actor.
Might have been Gilgamesh and Enkidu for that one, though the writer might have cribbed someone, I suppose.
It's depressing that people continue to debate about what shows or movies have been financially successful.
Until relatively recently, it wasn't the duty of fans to worry about financial matters except insofar as it directly impinged upon the likelihood of a sequel or another season. But today, scifi and other genre fans act like financial portfolio managers and scrutinize the profits of entertainment properties less like consumers and more like speculators.
In any event, regarding this series the trailer looks quite good. Someone mentioned iRobot, but it also reminds me of Minority Report. Frankly, this looks more fresh than Fringe originally did. Maybe it won't succeed since most sci-fi series don't, but I will likely enjoy it while it's airing.
Until relatively recently, it wasn't the duty of fans to worry about financial matters except insofar as it directly impinged upon the likelihood of a sequel or another season. But today, scifi and other genre fans act like financial portfolio managers and scrutinize the profits of entertainment properties less like consumers and more like speculators.
In any event, regarding this series the trailer looks quite good. Someone mentioned iRobot, but it also reminds me of Minority Report. Frankly, this looks more fresh than Fringe originally did. Maybe it won't succeed since most sci-fi series don't, but I will likely enjoy it while it's airing.
CSI: Uruk.
A andriod is an automation that resembles a human. Both C-3PO and Bender don't resemble a human, they are only bipedal robots.
Vicki, Daryl, Data and Rommie are Andriods.
Well, that definition may work for you, but you'll find very few others, particularly science fiction writers, who agree with you. Brave New Worlds: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction defines it as "an artificial being that resembles a human in form, especially one made from a flesh-like material (as opposed to metal or plastic)." It's often been used in SF to refer to synthetic humans who were organic in origin.
The distinction between metallic-looking robots and human-looking androids dates back to the Captain Future pulp adventures of Edmond Hamilton. Captain Future's sidekicks included Grag, a 7-foot-tall "metal man" who was humanoid in shape (like C3PO), and Otho, an "android or artificial man" who looked just like a human being. Otho referred to Grag as a "robot" to drive home that he was not an android like Otho, because despite his manlike body plan he had a metallic, mechanical appearance. Most SF has followed that precedent ever since: that a generally hominid-shaped robot doesn't qualify as an android unless it has a fleshy appearance and humanlike features. C3PO is not an android any more than Grag was; he's just a bipedal robot. Data is an android. A Terminator (with fleshy disguise) is an android. Even a Blade Runner replicant can be called an android, since the term can encompass organic artificial humans. And Rommie, as mentioned above, is a good example. Andromeda had hundreds of hard-shelled humanoid drones called "Marias" (due to their resemblance to the character from Metropolis), but they were called robots, or Maria-bots. Only the one that was modified to look like Lexa Doig, the one who adopted the name Rommie, was referred to as an android. (Although strictly speaking she was a gynoid.)
But Bender is not even as human-shaped as C3PO. Sure, he's got an upright body with two arms, two legs, and a head on top, but his body is a metal cylinder, his head is a domed cylinder with an antenna on top and a protruding attachment on the front for his eyes, his limbs are thin flexible tubes, his feet are round cups, and his hands are blunt metallic pincers. That's not looking like a man. Gunther the chimp looks more like a man than Bender does.
(Of course, one notable exception to the rule is Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who's very much mechanical in appearance. But then, that epithet seems to have been chosen more for alliteration than anything else. And let's not even get into George Lucas's sloppy coinage of "droid.")
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