Actually a bunch of them survive in each Titanic movie. And a movie is over in 2-3 hours. It is not week after week an episode about people, who will practically die out two generations later.
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"Krypton" coming to SyFy from David Goyer
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
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Actually a bunch of them survive in each Titanic movie. And a movie is over in 2-3 hours. It is not week after week an episode about people, who will practically die out two generations later.
No, it's an original version of the tale that draws elements from various different prior takes and creates its own synthesis of them. I'm surprised anyone would expect a novel to be set in the Reeve movie timeline. Even the Elliot S! Maggin tie-in novels to the Reeve movies weren't set in the Reeve timeline.
Caprica was that, though. And there was the BBC's Atlantis, which ran for two seasons telling stories about a civilization that was prophesied to be headed for a much more imminent doom.
Anyway, if this were just a straight-up story of Kryptonian history, then the future fate of the planet would be irrelevant to the stories it told; it would just be a story about an alien world and the people who lived there, and its interest would lie in how well it drew the characters, the setting, and the situations. What matters in judging the value of a story is what happens during it, regardless of what comes later. Orson Welles said that the difference between a happy ending and a tragic one is simply a matter of where you stop the story.
And since it is, instead, a time-travel story involving characters trying to change history, then there are stakes that are relevant to us, because the villains are trying to prevent Superman from ever existing and the heroes are trying to make sure he does. And there could be all sorts of ethical dilemmas about whether the good guys should try to avert Krypton's doom, at the risk of undoing all the good Superman will do.
So a lot like Krypton,then? I've lost count of the number of Krypton survivors
I have heard of those series, but didn't watch them. Aren't they a warning example though? Caprica got such bad ratings that they stopped showing the last few episodes at first and burned them later off in a marathon. And Atlantis was a replacement for Merlin and didn't even get close to its popularity.
Maybe the time travel story will help a bit there, but I am not sure. The reason why they added it though is that even the Krypton producers don't think the series would be otherwise appealing to enough viewers:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/li...adam-strange-hawkwoman-comic-con-2017-1023589
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There is no such thing as a "warning example" for an entire category. For any category of story, you can find both good and bad examples. You can even find good and bad adaptations of the same individual story. So it bewilders me that people still try to attribute quality or lack thereof to entire categories instead of to specific instances thereof. It doesn't matter what the broad topic is -- all it takes is for someone to find a good way of handling it. It doesn't matter if there have been some bad previous examples; that's just Sturgeon's Law. It doesn't preclude someone else from doing it well. (For instance -- Johnny Mnemonic was a dark cyberpunk thriller starring Keanu Reeves, it bombed, but then came The Matrix.)
Also, it is deeply invalid to equate ratings with quality. Plenty of awful shows get terrific ratings, and plenty of brilliant shows have been flops. I thought Caprica was rather good, actually.
The article never says they "added" it; there's nothing in their words to preclude it having been part of the premise from the start, just not a part they revealed until they were ready.
Personally, I think it's disappointing that they felt that way, just as I think it's disappointing that Gotham ended up cramming in a ton of future Batman villains rather than doing the grounded crime drama about Jim Gordon's early career that I thought we were going to see. Producers have too little faith in audiences. I mean, we're perfectly capable of falling in love with a brand new show, something that has no connection to anything we've seen before. So why is it that when anything is based on an existing premise, there's this belief that audiences won't "connect" unless you cram in a ton of stuff they recognize? Why can't it just be a distinct, earlier story in the same universe, something that earns the audience's interest through the strength of its own characters and storytelling rather than using familiarity as a crutch?
It wasn't always this way. The makers of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, for instance, made very little effort to connect it to the future events or characters of the film series. Indy's father appeared periodically, but they never introduced a young Marcus Brody or Rene Belloq, or had Indy go on an adventure with Short Round's future father, or something like that. There was an unmade episode that would've introduced Indy to Abner Ravenwood, but it was just one late script out of an entire series. They didn't feel they had to cram every episode with references to familiar things in order for audiences to "connect." The connection to the films through Indy himself was just the hook to attract our attention -- at which point it was up to the actual stories themselves to earn our continued interest, not just continuity porn as an end in itself. (Heck, even young Indy was barely recognizable as the character from the films, and the TV show had none of the supernatural elements of the movies. I think producer Rick McCallum once suggested that the movies were fictionalized adventures of the archaeologist whose real formative years were chronicled in the show.)
People say they find the idea of a story about Krypton boring because it's never been that interesting in the Superman stories they've seen, but I think that's looking at it the wrong way. The Krypton we've seen isn't that interesting because we've seen so little of it. Its past is mostly a blank slate. (It was explored plenty in the Silver Age comics, but I'm talking about the experience of the typical modern-day fan.) And that means an imaginative storyteller would have free rein to create anything, to build something new and rich and fascinating in that untouched territory. As a science fiction worldbuilder myself, I see that as a great opportunity for creating a whole new, complex, fascinating alien culture.
But a story about good time travelers trying to stop evil time travelers from altering history... That's a lot more constrained, and a lot more familiar. it sounds a lot like Enterprise's Temporal Cold War, and like Timeless, and like a bunch of other things we've seen before. Hopefully there will still be room for some engaging worldbuilding of historical Krypton, but going for time travel as the main hook is rather hackneyed. I mean, heck, how many different time travel shows have been on the air in just the past year? Timeless, Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash to a degree, 12 Monkeys, Travelers, Frequency, the short-lived Time After Time, that dreadful sitcom Making History, Hulu's 11.22.63, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency to an extent, Outlander in its own way, and of course Doctor Who as an import. Wow, that's double digits, and over 3/4 of them are still in production. Time travel is an incredibly overused trope. Heck, it always has been, but we've been especially overloaded with it this past year. Not to mention that two of the current DC-based shows already have time travel themes.
This is quite easy to explain. A series named Krypton or Gotham naturally will attract fans of the existing premise. People who don't like Superman or Batman, won't even check those series out. It is not a normal brand new series. It is set in a universe, even if it might be in the past of that universe, people are familiar with and people have already made up their mind about that universe.
So when the ratings go down like it happened with Gotham, they try all they can to keep the viewers they have entertained to prevent even more losses. Who are their viewers? Batman fans, because everyone else didn't bother to watch in the first place. So they added more and more Batman content and it seems to have worked, if the IMDb ratings are accurate. Season 1 was the lowest rated:
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt3749900
The Krypton makers are aware of this. They count on enough Superman fans watching to make the series a success and what do Superman fans have in common? They care about that superhero so throwing his future existence into the balance is a hook to keep those viewers emotionally invested in the series. Adding two actual superheroes to the series is also a way to hook superhero fans in general. It is just that a show about Krypton's past alone with no superheroes and no close connection to Superman has a very narrow appeal.
Yes, but as I said, that's just to get their eyes on you in the first place. Once they're watching, it's lazy to rely on "Hey, here's some familiar thing you recognize!" to hold their interest rather than giving them something new and interesting in its own right. Provoking recognition is an easy way to get a reaction from an audience, but it's the least worthwhile way.
Of course they will! No new series can ever, ever succeed by appealing exclusively to a pre-existing fanbase -- no fanbase is anywhere near large enough for that. Success depends on attracting casual viewers, people who aren't already familiar with the franchise or who are only passingly familiar with it. That's the whole reason these shows are made different from the source, why they're changed to be more like standard TV or movie formats. That's why Smallville was done like Dawson's Creek with an alien -- specifically to draw in the members of the network's target audience who would never have even looked at it if it had been blatantly a Superboy series. There were fans of Smallville back then who didn't even realize it had any connection to Superman and were startled when they were told it did. They knew next to nothing about Superman and came to the show because of its teen-drama elements, or because they liked to look at the pretty people starring in it.
No show succeeds by narrowly targeting a single audience. No single audience is large enough. The goal is to appeal to multiple audiences. You use enough from the source material to draw in its fans, and add enough that's new and more general in appeal to draw in the more general audience. Franchises thrive by attracting new fans, because the existing fanbase is always going to be limited in size and prone to attrition over time as fans lose interest or die off. That's the whole reason for doing TV shows and movies based on comics instead of just putting out comics -- because it exposes the characters and concepts to a much, much huger audience. A successful comic will have an audience in the tens of thousands, a successful TV show in the tens of millions, a successful movie in the hundreds of millions. Drawing in people who aren't already fans is the entire point of doing this in the first place.
Yeah, but Gotham sucks. It's a stupid, badly written show. So it resorts to the laziness of pandering to familiarity because its writers aren't talented enough to create something that's worthwhile on its own. (Well, Ben Edlund was, but he only contributed two credited scripts and left after season 1.) Just because it works doesn't mean it's good. It just means that you can rarely go wrong by appealing to the lowest common denominator. But that doesn't mean that nobody should ever try to do better.
So now the bad guys are trying to destroy Krypton to prevent Superman's existence? Wouldn't it actually make more sense for them to prevent Superman's existence by saving Krypton? If the planet hadn't blown up, then Kal-El would've grown up to be an ordinary, non-superpowered Kryptonian.
But then, maybe Adam Strange is lying to Seyg-El to get his cooperation. Telling him that the future actually depended on Krypton dying would not go over well.
But then, maybe Adam Strange is lying to Seyg-El to get his cooperation. Telling him that the future actually depended on Krypton dying would not go over well.
We get it, it's about Superman's family. You don't have to keep showing that crest 
We get it, it's about Superman's family. You don't have to keep showing that crest
The idea that Kryptonian houses display their sigils constantly on their wardrobe and other possessions has been a pretty standard idea ever since Marlon Brando sported the S shield on his robes made of front-projection material. Heck, on Supergirl, young Kara even had the House of El sigil on her jammies.
I really dislike the time-travel idea. I was hoping that it was a rumour. I’ll probably tune in out of curiousity but given the number of superhero-related shows currently airing (and the number of good tv shows, full stop), it’ll have to be very good to keep me coming back.
I think this is going to bomb.
Hard.
Hard.
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