Modern sci-fi vs classic sci-fi shows

As much as I like long story arcs, it can get annoying when they start dragging them out forever just to fill out an episode count.

 

I like the occasional story arc-- Babylon 5 is indeed a classic-- but it gets really tedious when every single show feels compelled to do arcs. It's like they've forgotten how to tell an actual story with a beginning, middle, and end. I'd love to see more shows with continuing characters but a good, solid short story in every episode.

I'm definitely not a fan of these tiny seasons of two episodes that come out every seven years. Okay, not quite that bad, but getting there.

The biggest problem with contemporary genre shows is the visual blandness. They all look the same and they all seem to be filmed in a factory basement. It's amazing to watch Sci-Fi shows about hyper-advanced civilizations with ray guns and FTL spaceships who don't know how to build a decent light bulb.

One thing that's not a problem, at least on shows that I watch, is the characters. But then it's the characters (and cast) that will mostly appeal to me on a show, so if the characters don't interest me I probably won't watch it. On Westworld, there were a number of interesting characters in the first season, but not in the second season-- but I'm hanging in there to see how it goes.

 

These shows live and die by their characters for me. I couldn't tell you one character's name from The Expanse. It's obviously got the bigger budget and the better fan support, but I'm much more partial towards The Colony.

 

That's funny, I think the characters on The Expanse are pretty well-drawn and easy to differentiate, except for some of the Earth government types in the first couple of seasons. But their distinct personalities and agendas have been limned more clearly this year.

 

Agreed. It seems to be bucking the trend of dark and gritty sci-fi.

Oh god yes. I agree. And then I think of how people refer to peak TV. Well, if that's peak TV, then it's a low bar. A lot of modern sci-fi doesn't have heart. Discovery had great ambitions, but in the end, seems to ascribe to an entirely different line of thought compared to its predecessors, and frankly I found it hard to watch. It's just so visceral when it doesn't need to be, like it's out to try to prove a point.

Another thing I've noticed is how shows are generally bolder with what they're showing now. In the past, things would be alluded to and happen off-screen, whereas now, they're more likely to be shown. I was watching an episode of a WWII historical drama that airs on basic cable, and they showed a character being tortured. That kind of thing would have only been alluded to in the past. Realizing what they can do now, it actually makes me less likely to watch it often, as I have to be in the right mindset as those kind of scenes can be affecting. They're hard to watch and best in small doses

 

I've felt like this for years now. Ever since the Nolan Batman films everything is presented as dark and gritty. As if somehow that makes the content more mature. It really turns me off a lot of stuff. Every premise doesn't have to be taken super seriously, a lighthearted joke or a wink at the camera really helps with my suspension of disbelief.
It's just not realistic, even during wars people crack a joke or a smile every now and then, but so many new shows, regardless of how preposterous their narratives may be, are entirely populated by stern people mumbling through their dialogue and frowning at everything.

 

I've never had a problem either, and it honestly kind of surprises to hear that people are.
Just out of curiosity, are you guys who are having trouble keeping the characters straight paying complete attention to The Expanse while you're watching it? It's definitely a show you need to give your full attention too.

 

Yeah, heaven forbid entertainment actually be entertaining.

Sometimes I do appreciate a dark, heavy story, but often times I just want to be transported to a fantasy world and experience two hours of rip-roaring fun and excitement. Enough with all this heavy, depressing, pretentious, joyless, self-important grimdark!

Kor

 

Have you ever watched Once Upon A Time? It's fantasy rather than sci-fi but if you're looking for lighter, more fun stuff I'd highly recommend it.

 

Oh, the trend has been around much longer than that, since at least the days of shows like NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire. For that matter, there was a fair amount of gritty stuff in movies in the '70s, and then there was the whole film noir era in the '30s and '40s. Entertainment trends tend to go in cycles, as creators pay homage to the things that shaped their tastes in their youth.

 

The modern trend toward pretentiously dark & gritty began with the Reagan Era. There was some good stuff, like Watchmen and Dark Knight, but then everybody tried to copy their success by imitating the form but not the substance. This has been dragging on tediously for more than 35 years now.

If something is labeled for adults, you can be pretty confident that it's aimed at adolescents.

 

Just to clarify, (but also, I'm sure you're correct, there will be things you can cite prior to Batman Beings) I meant this in terms of sci-fi, fantasy and superhero stuff. Homicide was dark and gritty because the subject itself is dark and gritty (and it really wasn't especially gritty compared to the source material), and there were also moments of brevity in that show, it had a definite harsh sense of humour. But I feel like with more fantastical stuff in the last 10/15, they've started presenting it as way more serious than it needs to be, especially when compared to how everything in the 90s was as camp as Christmas.

For me Batman is where I first was really irritated by it. There is no need for Batman to be so overly gritty, I find it ruins my suspension of disbelief, I'm happy to swallow the ridiculous premise as long as it's allowed to be entertaining. The content in those films is ludicrous. Shot differently it could be an old school campy bit of nonsense. (Batman buying a hotel to swim in the pool. Gun getting into the courtroom "If you wanna kill a public servant, I suggest you buy American.) Come on, it's so, so stupid and OTT, crack a smile for God's sake.

Haha deffo true.

 

Except that the reason the Nolan films took that gritty tone is because they were reflecting the Batman comics of the late '80s and '90s. The age of gritty comics began with The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen in 1986. Both those books were hugely influential, and even though they were both meant to be alternate, deconstructionist takes that elevated everything to an extreme, even the mainstream DC comics began striving to imitate them as closely as possible. Batman comics immediately became dark and gritty, and the rest of DC eventually followed. Even the Tim Burton Batman movies were lauded at the time for their gritty, dark tone, though we can see in retrospect that they're still hugely campy and absurd. But Nolan was trying to capture the style of late-'80s and early-'90s Batman comics stories like Year One and The Long Halloween.

In fact, it's pretty common for screen adaptations to lag a decade or two behind the current style of their source material, because they tend to draw on influences that have stood the test of time, or just because it takes time for new ideas and approaches to osmose out into popular awareness. The 1966 Batman sitcom basically replicated the tone and format that had settled in place in the Batman comics by 1943 or so, and was actually quite sedate compared to the fantasy craziness of the 1950s-60s Batman comics, with their frequent time travel and alien invaders and weird transformations and Bat-Mite and Ace the Bat-Hound and the like. The Superman and Supergirl movies from 1978 to the mid-'80s pretty closely emulated the style of Silver Age Superman comics of the '60s, while only the first movie or two approached the relatively more serious style of contemporary Superman comics of the day. And Batman: The Animated Series in the '90s, while drawing on some plot elements and characters from more recent comics, was done largely in the vein of the Batman comics of the '70s and early '80s, in terms of the characterizations, the tone, and the specific stories that were adapted.

You attributed RJ Diogenes' comment to me by mistake.

 

DW had season long arcs most notable around the 4th and 5th Doctor eras, such as The Key to Time, E-space, Black Guardian not to mention the 6th's The Trial of a Time Lord. B7 when they were looking for Star One. Sure shows like B5 brought it back when Sci-Fi became big again in the 1990's.

 

First off, I'm talking about doing it as a routine pattern with every season of a show, rather than an intermittent thing. Second, only "The Key to Time" and "Trial of a Time Lord" were season-long. The other two you mention were just trilogies, no more than half a season each.

 

Babylon 5 didn't have any season long arcs, either. It was one complete story told over five seasons. A five year dramatic reenactment of the historical events around the founding of the Interstellar Alliance, which was still in existence at least a thousand years later.

 

Not quite in the modern sense, no. But Straczynski made a point of approaching each season as a unified "chapter" in what he called a "novel for television," a distinct phase of the larger story that came to a climax in the finale and ushered in a different status quo in the following season. This is obvious from the fact that each season has a different title sequence and narration to fit its distinct status quo. As I said, it was a forerunner to the modern "big bad of the year" formula. I never said it was exactly the same as the mature form; forerunners rarely are. Things don't just instantly pop into existence; they evolve. And B5 was one step in that evolutionary process. I know, because I was there at the dawn of the Third Age of -- err, I was there when the show debuted in first run. I watched this evolution as it happened. And people back then (especially JMS) made a big deal out of the fact that each season of the show was more unified than the seasons of other shows at the time, that each one had a distinct, pre-planned arc that was part of the larger 5-year saga, rather than just being a bunch of separate episodes like a season of, say, Star Trek: TNG or Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

 

Over the few years I've started watching a lot of old shows on Cozi and Me and I was amazed just how dark some of the cop shows from the '70s got at times. Some of the stories on the shows from that era would easily rival today's shows for dark and grittyness.

 

I was just talking to someone on Facebook about the recency illusion. We always imagine that Thing X is more common today than it was in the past, that it's some relatively novel trend that only started in recent memory, but in actuality it's usually just our memory of Thing X that doesn't go back that far. The thing was always there in roughly the same quantity, but we don't remember as many of its older iterations as we do of the newer ones, so it seems like the newer ones are more common. Sure, there are trends that oscillate back and forth, but it's never true that the recent one is the first or only one of its kind. There have been some real lasting changes in TV, to be sure, but not as many as we think.

 

Did you watch any pre-Star Wars 70's sci fi movies? They aren't exactly full of unicorns and roses.