Xortex's timeline would work in the JJ unverse except not during Kirk's tunure so it would be different enough in the future or the past and it is a character premise not the shows, hence somthing that may drive the action if they are trapped there. Hence it would be a reimagining. Hence, new designs.
Letter to Moonves
- Thread starter xortex
- Start date
The original premise of Star Trek is that the future is optimistic due to the inevitable triumph of the American way of secular liberal democracy, which is destined to take over the entire cosmos, despite bumps along the way caused by Klingons and Borg and the Dominion and internal threats such as Section 31.
That premise doesn't even require that Earth stick around. Humanity could all just settle on alien worlds. Any planet is expendable. Even the human race is expendable, if aliens adopt secular liberal democracy and continue to spread its influence.
The Federation and Starfleet are more of a requirement than any planet or species, since they are the organizations in which Star Trek's political philosophy is incubated, defended, and disseminated, but I could envision a Star Trek without even the Federation or Starfleet. The premise is very flexible as long as you hang onto the core political/social/cultural message, which accounts for the franchise' longevity across many media.
The correct fix is to make Nero not-bland, not to make him not-Romulan. To make him not-bland requires giving him a motive that would work only for a Romulan and tells us something about who Romulans are, and that requires the writers know what Romulans are all about, and although I have some theories about topic, it's never really been established on-screen and we're way past the point when it should have been. Oh well, maybe next movie.
American way? Seems more like European way, or else the Federation should have a death penalty (and not just some silly General Order that's never carried out) and an economy based on liberal capitalism.
I hate to chime in here because you've got a great discussion going on and as far as I'm concerned if I was producing Trek I'd put you guys on my writing staff but....
Xortex, you've got all this passion and you believe in your work so here's a suggestion. Write the script. If not the script at least a treatment. There are books that can show you how to do that.
Second, get the work copywrited somehow. Now I'm not sure if you can do that because CBS owns the license to everything Star Trek but try to get some kind of rights onto it because you would hate to make this pitch to Moonves and suddenly you see your idea as the next Trek movie and you have gotten no credit for it. That's my main concern here. If you have a good idea, you DESERVE the credit for it.
Third, get an agent. An agent is the only one who can bring the script to Moonves attention.
From what I understand, any script that does not have an agent will not even get looked at. And I'd like to see you succeed in your idea because you, unlike CBS, actually care about what happens to Trek and that is the person who deserves to head this franchise.
I'm behind you, Good Luck and keep us posted.
Xortex, you've got all this passion and you believe in your work so here's a suggestion. Write the script. If not the script at least a treatment. There are books that can show you how to do that.
Second, get the work copywrited somehow. Now I'm not sure if you can do that because CBS owns the license to everything Star Trek but try to get some kind of rights onto it because you would hate to make this pitch to Moonves and suddenly you see your idea as the next Trek movie and you have gotten no credit for it. That's my main concern here. If you have a good idea, you DESERVE the credit for it.
Third, get an agent. An agent is the only one who can bring the script to Moonves attention.
From what I understand, any script that does not have an agent will not even get looked at. And I'd like to see you succeed in your idea because you, unlike CBS, actually care about what happens to Trek and that is the person who deserves to head this franchise.
I'm behind you, Good Luck and keep us posted.
Nope. It was invented by American "Kennedy liberals" who simply imagined the future to be what they wanted the U.S. to be like - including militarily strong and dominant over everything and everyone they encountered. I doubt that they gave European politics more than a passing thought.
The next Star Trek will be based on what Abrams has done.
The most accurate way to describe trek in TOS is that is how Americans LIKE to see themselves. A force for all that is good, fair and just in an unjust universe.
Sadly, the Dominion in DS9 is a lot closer to how much of the world sees America, and sometimes it seems intentionally so.
Fair enough, but Vulcan still had to go. And frankly I wanted a "bland" villain. The movie's main mandate was to reintroduce Spock, Kirk, etc. It was not the time nor the venue to give us a Khan-like character that outshone everyone else.
What matters is the core characters and their reaction to the destruction of Vulcan. The villain could have been a talking turnip as far as I'm concerned.
Alex
That is a bit of an oversimplification of what's already a kind of simplistic milieu, and better describes TNG.
The original Trek has a lot to do with the myth of the American frontier - which itself often involves notions of justice, but not so much moral purity.
That is a bit of an oversimplification of what's already a kind of simplistic milieu, and better describes TNG.
Oh I concede it is an over-simplification, but certainly you can tell a lot about how Americans see themselves by watching how they portray themselves on TV.
Ironically the differences come through as well, successful US sci-fi is generally formal and military based, and when it tries to do a more British "rebels" style show, like Firefly, it bombs. That tells you a lot about attitudes to the establishment and authority as well.
Which is why I know TNG's simplistic morality would flop today. The American TV audience is flocking to cable - that's why networks are in sad shape - where the main characters are far more morally grey. The Sopranos started the trend, followed by Deadwood, but it's all over the place now. Mad Men, Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, Big Love, Breaking Bad, Entourage, Weeds, True Blood and Nurse Jackie are follow this template.
There are a few examples on network TV as well - Lost, 24 and House spring to mind.
So how do you explain that laundry list of popular American shows I just typed out, which feature sympathetic portraits of characters who are drug dealers, bikers, serial killers, social outcasts, more drug dealers, addicts, phonies, misfits, losers, yet more drug dealers and oh yeah, vampires - the ultimate outsiders!
Conversely, where are all the military themed shows on American TV? They're downright rare. What we do have are cop shows coming out of our ears, but the usual thing is for it to be about rebel or misfit cops, not the boring straight arrows.
I love it when foreigners try to discuss American TV. They don't seem to realize they only see a small fraction of American TV and get steamrollered by those of us who have a far more encyclopedic knowledge of that stuff.
Well, all the shows you mentioned have been on in the UK I think, didn't like Weeds much personally but I'm a big fan of shows like Six Feet Under and the other HBO stuff.
I was generalising also about when trek was actually ON TV, which is has not been now for years. While there were of course many other things on which did not fit any template there were also the big deal shows like Trek, Babylon 5 and Stargate that were military, X-Files and its ilk were FBI, albeit rebellious FBI. I'm hardly the first person to make that comparison between British and US attitudes to science fiction.
As with music, the two countries feed off each other a bit for TV, and we have never had a real trek-style British show, the US has taken on the Prisoner, Life On Mars etc, any comment about the general attitude or the norm is obviously going to have exceptions (I doubt EVERY program on Iranian TV is called "Fuck America" but I bet a few might as well be), and I was also only trying to spark a bit of discussion.
In terms of sci-fi they were. They did not do x-files business but for space operas they did pretty well.
Also, seriously you can all fuck off with this "you don't know about American TV" stuff, we are supposed to be having a fucking discussion here, so discuss, don't just drive by the thread and post a stupid comment.
Bingo. Firefly got many more viewers than Stargate ever did. The reason the former was canned while the latter has thrived is because of the placement of the show (network vs. basic cable) and nothing to do with the content. No space opera series can meet the ratings demands of networks anymore. Networks are for mass-appeal police procedurals and cable is for niche tastes. There are no space operas about rebels because there are barely any space opera shows at all anymore. It's a niche of a niche, and the expense is hard to justify.
Trek needs to go to cable. Yeah, the budget would be slashed, but that would force them to rely on good storytelling rather than special FX. I wish they'd just let Bryan Fuller do his thing on a new Trek TV show.
If the fan films can do what they do with nothing and Roddenberry did what he did on a shoestring.. I wouldn't mind Braga being aboard as long as he has someone there to develop his ideas and make them ring true as well as my idea for a Spock like character to comment from the outside in a metaphysical twist.
Not at all, because attributing the commercial failure of Firefly to the subject matter conflates a couple of different issues. In fact that show's ratings were pretty much in line with those of almost any space show in this country that doesn't have "Star Trek" in the title; this is why basic cable is the last refuge of such material. It would be more direct and accurate to say that Firefly bombed because it was a broadcast network series set in the future on a spaceship.
B5 struggled along with marginal ratings in first-run syndication in a very different market back in the mid-1990s; Stargate and nuBSG survive on very limited ratings on because they're on basic cable. The couple of experiments with running nuBSG on broadcast (NBC) were dismal ratings failures. The suggestion that they were or could have been big commercial successes in the same arena that killed Firefly is pretty much unsupported; their reach was similar.
Nor is there anything particularly British about dramas - sf or otherwise - built around the notion of an individual or group of individuals as rebels. We like that kind of thing a lot; we specialize in it. It's not coincidental that the milieu of Firefly was largely that of an old Western - an American genre which Whedon himself noted was set in a largely mythical land and era.
If anything, American ideas about naval imperialism and colonialism are largely inherited from the English and embraced because of our cultural undercurrent of anglophilia - we know a lot about military adverturism through our own aggressive success, but colonial expansion and naval-based military hegemony is something that we ourselves are a product of and occasionally on the short end of. We're one of the first notably successful rebellions against British colonial policy, after all.
ARGH!
...I am being forced to agree with Dennis.
Here's a handy-dandy chart that explains what is going on and by extension, why Firefly failed. Americans are watching more TV than ever, as it turns out. But the proliferation of cable channels is stealing away far more eyeballs than there are eyeballs to go around.
Basic and - especially - premium cable outlets get part of their revenues from subscriptions, which means funky shows with small audiences like Mad Men and Breaking Bad can survive in that environment. Dexter is Showtime's big hit show with 2M viewers, numbers that would probably get it cancelled even on a joke network like the CW or NBC.
But networks, which are solely ad-supported (with maybe a few other trivial revenue streams) are being forced to make bland shows in mass-appeal genres in the desperate hope of grabbing widespread appeal because niche numbers just don't work for them. And lo and behold, the upcoming pilot season is about 50% cop shows. That's not because there's really that much demand for cop shows, but because networks are scared to take any risks, and would prefer to duke it out in a grossly overcrowded market that they at least understand.
Which means, Firefly would have had a better chance of survival on FX than on FOX. And FX has no problem with shows about rebels - its audience really goes for that stuff. A lot of audiences do, and shows about cops who are rebels, doctors who are rebels, lawyers who are rebels, etc., are all over the place. The bigger hurdle would be getting them to accept a show about rebels in outer space rather than the real-world shows about corrupt cops or psycho bikers that they're used to seeing and can relate to.
LOST was originally billed as a mystery/action series with a paranormal feel, the more blatant sci-fi elements like time travel came later. And it's still a far cry from space opera with starships and laser guns, there is still a stigma attached to that stuff on TV and it's very expensive to produce.
The new movie was a success because it was good, not because Trek fans were starved and would accept anything shoved down our throats, which is what you're suggesting. It's the "I'm right and everyone else is an idiot" opinion and you're not going to find many people receptive to it.
You're one of a small minority, and most of us disagree with you. What make things that happen in the 24th century "creative" and things that happen in the 23rd century "bad". All you've done this entire thread is whine that everything Trek made since season 4 of Voyager is an absolute waste of time, movies, books, everything, so perhaps you should find another hobby and be content with your VHS copies of TNG, because nothing TPTB make from here on out is going to satisfy you. Nothing.
Would I mind a return to the post-Nemesis universe in a future series? No, not as long as it was written well. But by the same token they can set it in the 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 25th, or 1297th century and as long as it's written well I will watch. You seem to be hung up on specifics few others find important.
Similar threads
