And you think every single person who went to see a Star Trek film in theatres is/was a Star Trek fan? Again, the point is - there's observably a larger audience for properties based on comic books/graphic novels then Star Trek.
News More on Fuller’s Departure From Discovery
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First of all, like Christopher has said (about 10 times already), American Gods is not a comic book or graphic novel, but a novel.
Secondly more people have watched a Star Trek movie or episode in the last 50 years, than those who have read Gaiman's novel in the last 15 years.
Star Trek is a bigger brand name than American Gods period.
You're over egging the Gaiman pudding a tad (some of those facts aren't...he's done two Who's, and he didn't do the screenplay on Monoke, he assisted with localisation for instance.) and the metric you use is favourable to him because his reputation growth coincides with the growth of the Internet. Michelle Yeoh is also, I suspect, more well known in say Hong Kong than Neil. American Gods is an adaptation of a book, so what happens if you strip it down to hits for just the TV show?
I get your point, but I suspect any Trek series will be a bigger thing than any given contemporary novel TV adaptation that isn't the accidental success that is GoT.
Which still has nothing to do with American Gods, since it's a prose novel. Although there will be a comics adaptation from Dark Horse next year, possibly around the same time as the TV series (the comic begins in March, the show debuts "early 2017").
Another factor to consider, by the way, is that Bryan Fuller has been working to bring American Gods to television since sometime before July 2014, while he only came on board Discovery in February 2016. So he's been working on the Gaiman project considerably longer than he's been on DSC. Given that, it's no surprise that he decided AG took priority.
You are comparing apples and oranges. Or more accurately, you are comparing a Granny Smith with the entire Vegetable genus. Is Star Trek a bigger niche than comic book movies? No. Is Star Trek a bigger niche than many individual franchises within that? Historically...yes.
But American Gods is a novel, and shocking though this may be, it is also one of only about three wholly original adult novels Neil Gaiman has written. I like the man, but his popularity owes more to a form of celebrity than just his actual work as a writer. (Neverwhere has had three slightly different editions, and is based on the script he wrote for a BBC TV series only partly originated by him, American Gods was his first novel, two versions, one sequel in Anansi boys. Sundry short story collections, a co-written novel with Terry Pratchett, and a few children's books that have various versions. Then there's Ocean at the End of the Lane, nominally adult...but quite depressing. That is it for his prose work over about 25 years. His comic work is basically Sandman and sundries...other bits, notably 1602 for marvel, but nothing coming close to Sandman in twenty odd years. He is good and has a finger in many pies, but he is not as prolific as his reputation suggests. This is not to be...mean about him...he's certainly better than many big names. But he's more celebrity writer than jobbing writer. )
The thing is, though, if American Gods is well executed, it's going to greatly expand the book's popularity. A Song of Fire and Ice was barely a thing 8 years ago, but the show propelled the series and Martin into the stratosphere and people are still reading or re-reading A Game of Thrones 20 years after it was first published. Do more people remember First Contact or Game of Thrones? I'm definitely not qualified to say, and the public's memory is fickle, but they're both remembered fondly, regardless. We can't let a fandom bubble cloud us.
Not everything has to be a competition. If Fuller wants to work on American Gods, that's his prerogative. Hell, there might be fewer cooks in the kitchen, which could be tempting for any creative.
Totally. I make no judgement on Fuller for his choice...there really isn't one to be made. I only comment on the American Gods thing for a variety of reasons not to do with that...one of which is that it really won't be anything like the success of an entry in the Trek canon. GoT will not be, once it is done. (Comparing GoT to First Contact is also a bit disparate. 8 years of TV vs a film in theatres for a few months. That's before you throw in the current media consumption model versus the old. You are better off comparing it to TNG itself...and then I know which one still has novels and spin offs and sold more merch and toys.) Speaking as someone who really likes the book...American Gods will either have to take massive liberties with the source material, and be politicised, if it is going to be successful as a TV series. A straight adaptation would be fun but inferior to the source. GoT (and I don't particularly care for the novels or the TV series, and do not rate Martin at all, his one talent is filling the pages, he's yet to finish them, and they are full of questionable things for the sake of being full of questionable things. Including his menu choices.) is an unusual success, and is the current darling. Just as Ally McBeal was, or NYPD Blue was or...you get the picture. To take it even closer to its genre....Robin Of Sherwood anyone? Beauty and The Beast? Yeah. Say what you like about Voyager or Ds9, but I can buy a book based on them many many years later. Even the mighty X Files and Buffy died. (With miraculous rebirths in comics and even TV, I grant you.) Today's News is tomorrow's fish and chips paper, and today's TV darling is tomorrow's cheap box set for grandad, or a clip on a 'remember the insert decade here' talking heads show padding out the airwaves in ten years. Trek will give you a New York Time bestseller and rumours of another entry in the canon in ten years. And let's be clear...some of these things that are gone I may even love more than Trek in some ways. But I know which one has staying power in the mainstream.
X files is the rarest of rare beasts...it made a comeback. Doctor Who is about the only other thing I know that managed that, and it wasn't half as dead as X Files was. B&B was a reboot/remake wasn't it? And was totally dead. No novels, films, áudios, not a branded sausage.
Dallas, The Evil Dead, The Transformers, Degrassi, Primeval, The Twilight Zone, Futurama, Beverly Hills 90210, GI Joe, Red Dwarf, Twin Peaks, Galactica 1980, TNG...
Fucking Knight Rider. Twice.
Fittingly for genre television, coming back from the dead isn't near as rare as you'd think. They just have to have 'something' that makes people think they'll sell.
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I think jaime meant that X-Files is a rare beast because it made a successful comeback (and without a reboot). I hardly think Knight Rider qualifies.
Well, twice as ongoing TV series, but also twice as pilot movies (one sequel, one totally reimagined reboot), and I think there's a feature film in development now.
They were both direct continuations, and at the moment they're equally 'successful' - they both got one season of revival.
Keeping in mind that I actually do think X-Files will get another season. I'm just not counting chickens before they hatch. Like with many things discussed in this thread, we'll have to wait and see.
Those are very rarely continuations (Red Dwarf is. And better than it was.) All of the others are reboots. Twin Peaks isn't back yet. Animated series are a special case, and again Futurama is a rare case. And of those that resurrect...how many stay alive?
Seems to me Fuller doesn't stay around long on shows he has a hand in developing. Heroes, Hannibal, Discovery.
Maybe there's more money to be made by setting things up with your name on it and moving on to something new. I'd like to see him stick with something to show us his creative talent from start to end.
Maybe there's more money to be made by setting things up with your name on it and moving on to something new. I'd like to see him stick with something to show us his creative talent from start to end.
Family Guy (brought back each time by Fox) has been cancelled twice, and American Dad (now on TBS) once.
It isn't really rare for cancelled TV series to come back in one form or another.
They all were direct follow-ups, using the same name, which continued the stories of the cancelled series characters.
If refocusing it's plot/characters was enough to constitute a reboot, then all of them (including X-Files) had done that long before the revivals started.
I also forgot to include 24, Round the Twist (its a national treasure, dammit!), and Young Dracula. In the latter case, there was a cliff-hanger I'd never thought to see concluded.
Extreme GhostBusters, Star Trek again, Scooby-Doo, most of the
*Starts flipping through DVDs*
Ghost in the Shell, Cutie Honey, Hell Girl, Death Note, Slayers, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, etc. Anime is very fond of raiding its back-catalogue.
Anime is a special case. They run multiple continuities concurrently, and GiTS is exempt due to being an adaptation in the first place ( as is....pretty much every title you mention. Death note has never been rebooted or continued, it has three separate continuities, four including the original manga)
You raise an interesting point about this being a time when shows come back from the dead in continuity more often though. Young Dracula was more of a long hiatus and a radical old-style reboot part way through. I didn't think much of it TBH...it was too much 'we don't like this show any more, but want to bring the viewers with us while we do the new show instead' and they ditch the comedy aspect and the Little Vampire aspect stone dead (I remember the dubbed one from the eighties, never sat through the film. I think I was all of 6 and crushed on the vampire sister) 24 is definitely a long hiatus and change of producer set up, but it was barely gone, less dead and more in the back of an ambulance. Scooby Doo is an animation and has been running different continuities such as it has practically it's entire existence (The Simpsons has essentially had an actual reboot with zero change except in origin story...it's like comics.) The refocusing is an old style reboot (not the modern useage) like Doctor Who with Troughton and especially Pertwee. Yes X files dead this after Duchovny got bored, but that's less jarring to an extent, and more to do with keeping the fires burning....NYPD Blue did the same thing in early season 2, but it's not readily apparent from an uninformed standpoint.
And in all these cases, the properties were not living off screen, as Trek does (and Who did) which is part of what makes it a special case. Again, I would still question which actually succeeded, especially before this current trend for cash in nostalgia reboots. I did not know they had rehashed Round The Twist, and Extreme Ghostbusters is also an interesting case in that it is very much a continuation, with a gap, with no life support, but again, it's animation...it's more unusual in that they didn't make it a separate continuity, as that's way more common in animation. (Scooby Doo doesn't really have an actual continuity until the Mystery Inc series. It's justa neverending serial of sorts until then.)
Trek has hundreds of hours of story across a forty year period, more or less, all in continuity with each other, the biggest gap thus far being between the animated series and TMP...which was what...6 years? Then Trek 09 and Enterprise is ..5 or 6 years? With sundry high profile works in other media. Trek, like Who, never died. These others were dead and buried. Their resurrection now is to do with the current media trends and styles, and it's going to get more commonplace.
Animated series. Different rules and extra easy to bring back from the dead. And I am not talking about dodging cancellation bullets. Show ends. Is dead. For a long enough period for it to actually be dead, and then comes back, possibly from hibernation in other media, as an actual continuation. Star Wars, Who, and Trek. Pretty much it. Not a modern zombie show or reboot. X files is a line straddled because of the feature film and sort of the comic series. On TV it's just Who and Trek, and I think (including Star Wars) it's the fan base and the media tie ins that are the big signifiers, ones that start before death and continue.
And it's the form that is important...full reboot/redux/reimagining is not the same show, as it's not the same story/world
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