Joss Whedon's S.H.I.E.L.D to ABC!
- Thread starter Admiral_Young
- Start date
I read somewhere that the budget for the pilot was $12 million!
Since we're a week away...if anyone one wants to do weekly threads, it's fine by me 
Joss cast Ming-Na so that's good enough for me
^Me too. And as I keep saying, dear god, but she looks fantastic for her age!
Yeah Ming Na is definitely going to give the show a bit of "cred" and she does look amazing for a woman her age - although in some ways it really depends on how she's shot. A bad angle or the wrong lighting and she looks like she could be playing the "Grandmother" character and another angle and she looks younger than she was during her ER days. Although she always did have that kind of face, even during Joy Luck Club - she was supposed to be so young and yet sometimes when they shot her, she looked a lot older and it wasn't due to any makeup change. Good angles and bad.
But anyway - I think it IS cool that they cast someone "out of the demo" to be the ass kicker of the show. They didn't make the young blonde one the super duper martial artist - as per most of Joss Whedon's shows - so it was a nice change to the plan. Plus one upshot is - it's been quite a while since ABC had a prime time spy show on the network and I think really SHIELD could fit in very well next to Castle as the procedural cop show with quirky characters but they're spies. I still expect next week's Castle to reference SHIELD in some way.
MARK MY WORDS. THERE WILL BE A SHIELD REFERENCE ON CASTLE!
But anyway - I think it IS cool that they cast someone "out of the demo" to be the ass kicker of the show. They didn't make the young blonde one the super duper martial artist - as per most of Joss Whedon's shows - so it was a nice change to the plan. Plus one upshot is - it's been quite a while since ABC had a prime time spy show on the network and I think really SHIELD could fit in very well next to Castle as the procedural cop show with quirky characters but they're spies. I still expect next week's Castle to reference SHIELD in some way.
MARK MY WORDS. THERE WILL BE A SHIELD REFERENCE ON CASTLE!
Umm... Joss Whedon's shows:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Lead was young blonde martial artist.
Angel: No blondes in regular cast, except Mercedes McNab in secretarial role in final season. Only female regular specializing in fighting was blue/black-haired Illyria.
Firefly: Only blond was Alan Tudyk; young martial artist was brunette.
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Female lead was redhead, non-fighter.
Dollhouse: Included blonde Dichen Lachman, occasionally portrayed as fighter, but no more often than brunette Eliza Dushku.
Whedon's shows are a lot less uniform than people perceive them to be.
Except most of them seem to involve apocalypses of some kind. Dr. Horrible is too short to go there, but all the others do in some way.....although in Firefly's case it's in the distant past.
Which is hardly unique these days -- apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is all over the place, and has been popular on and off since, well, Biblical times, but especially since the dawn of the nuclear age.
And I think it's a reach to call Firefly's abandonment of Earth-That-Was and the migration of humanity to the stars an "apocalypse." Sure, life on Earth ended, but only because it spread and flourished elsewhere.
And the other Whedon shows have all handled the idea of "apocalypse" differently. Buffy was about preventing the end of the world on an ongoing basis; it was basically a superhero show, and saving the world from destruction is what superheroes do. Angel took the more existential notion that the apocalypse isn't a single event but an ongoing process, the continual progression of entropy and decay, the apathy and cruelty and greed that we have to fight every day in order to make life worthwhile. Dollhouse -- which is the most mature and well-thought-out work of science fiction in Whedon's ouevre -- started out with a technological premise that had the potential to change the world and, unlike most SFTV shows that are dedicated to preserving the status quo, had the boldness to take that premise to its logical conclusion.
So while they're not simplistically identical, I'll grant that there is a progression, a growing cynicism or nihilism. Buffy prevented apocalypses and kept the status quo intact, like most TV heroes; Angel realized that the status quo was already pretty apocalyptic and there was no final victory; Mal Reynolds fought against the status quo and lost, and now resists it in small ways; and Echo and the Dollhouse staff were actively victimized by the status quo and unable to prevent it from spiraling into chaos. Each show has gotten more and more subversive and philosophically daring. Whedon started out with a conventional good-vs.-evil narrative in BTVS, then blurred the lines between good and evil in Angel, then explored how the greater good came into conflict with the good of the individual in Firefly/Serenity, then inverted the roles of villain and hero in Dr. Horrible, and in Dollhouse pretty much threw out the concept of good and evil altogether and just told stories about screwed-up people trying to make good choices that usually ended up doing terrible harm -- although I'd say there was a final triumph for good at the end, but at a terrible cost. Most of his protagonists in his past few shows have been criminals or villains. Many of his Buffyverse protagonists were reformed monsters, or good people who then became monsters.
Which makes it interesting that Whedon is now responsible for overseeing the more conventional heroic narrative of the Marvel Universe onscreen. Will Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. revert to the more conventional good-vs.-evil dynamic we expect from a superhero universe? Will Whedon (and the other Whedon and Tancharoen) revert to the simpler, more black-and-white morality that he's spent most of his producing career drifting away from and deconstructing? Or will they find a way to bring that same moral ambiguity/inversion to the Marvel Universe? Come to think of it, this could be more of the same, in a way. SHIELD is basically the sinister government conspiracy. We've seen in the clips that, from Skye's initial point of view, they are the bad guys who need to be stopped. And we saw in The Avengers that they play fast and loose with personal privacy and answer to a shadowy World Council that can't be trusted. So there arguably is room for a lot of Whedon's beloved gray areas in this show. And yet it's overtly a show about heroes in a way that most of his work hasn't been; at least, it's set in a world where heroes exist and inspire the characters, even if the lead characters themselves are in a grayer area. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
No in the opening credits for Firefly they say that earth was used up, so it was sort of an environmental apocalypse.
My point has been missed. It's not in dispute that Firefly/Serenity's backstory entails Earth being rendered uninhabitable and abandoned. This is made quite clear in the beginning of Serenity. My point is that I don't think this qualifies as an apocalypse because only the planet was lost, not the human species.
Here are the opening lines of Whedon's pre-production memo "A Brief History of the Universe circa 2507 A. D.," reproduced in Serenity: The Official Visual Companion:
I would call that the exact opposite of an apocalyptic narrative. It's about humanity averting its own destruction through ingenuity and hard work. Not only is the human race not devastated, but it expands and thrives and spreads not only itself, but every other form of Earthly life across hundreds of worlds, essentially guaranteeing the species' immortality. (A disaster could wipe out one world, but hundreds?) It's not a tale of a few straggling refugees escaping a disaster and starting over; it's a tale of the whole of humanity (or most of it, anyway) getting ahead of disaster, avoiding a Malthusian collapse by spreading out and finding new territories and resources. That right there is an anti-apocalypse.
Here are the opening lines of Whedon's pre-production memo "A Brief History of the Universe circa 2507 A. D.," reproduced in Serenity: The Official Visual Companion:
I would call that the exact opposite of an apocalyptic narrative. It's about humanity averting its own destruction through ingenuity and hard work. Not only is the human race not devastated, but it expands and thrives and spreads not only itself, but every other form of Earthly life across hundreds of worlds, essentially guaranteeing the species' immortality. (A disaster could wipe out one world, but hundreds?) It's not a tale of a few straggling refugees escaping a disaster and starting over; it's a tale of the whole of humanity (or most of it, anyway) getting ahead of disaster, avoiding a Malthusian collapse by spreading out and finding new territories and resources. That right there is an anti-apocalypse.
I don't get the reference. The only spaceship named Valley Forge I know of, aside from an Excelsior-class ship in a DS9 episode, was a troop transport in Starship Troopers that got destroyed. Are you just saying that the rescued Earth species survived the trip?
EDIT: Just after I posted, I remembered -- you mean the Valley Forge from Silent Running. I missed that in my web search because I googled "Valley Forge starship," and SR took place within the solar system. Fortunately my brain's internal search engine, rusty though it's becoming now that I've outsourced much of my memory to the Internet, finally kicked in.
One! More! Week!
I can't recall the last time I intentionally tuned in to watch a scripted show AS IT AIRED, but I intend to do so next Tuesday.
Life is too busy to park oneself in front of a TV anymore, what with TIVO/DVR's etc.
Life is too busy to park oneself in front of a TV anymore, what with TIVO/DVR's etc.