So The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine are piss-poor?
Remake of Babylon 5 ?
- Thread starter Lighthammer
- Start date
Compared to other TV dramas? Absolutely.
I realize that may not be a popular opinion here, as sci-fi fans tend to be pretty insular.
For what it's worth I agree with RobMax. SciFi has traditionally been very plot-driven and has in turn ignored character development.
That's why Firefly looked so good in 2002. All of a sudden you had decent characters in SciFi. That was new. Firefly wouldn't look nearly as impressive today because now we're used to good character-driven shows.
I really enjoyed B5 back when it first ran but I can't rewatch it. The acting is so mediocre, the characters shallow with only few exceptions. Typical SciFi.
That's why Firefly looked so good in 2002. All of a sudden you had decent characters in SciFi. That was new. Firefly wouldn't look nearly as impressive today because now we're used to good character-driven shows.
I really enjoyed B5 back when it first ran but I can't rewatch it. The acting is so mediocre, the characters shallow with only few exceptions. Typical SciFi.
Right, but this is a Star Trek board, with the assumption the posters are, probably, fans of Star Trek, which would lead to the follow up question: What Star Trek isn't terrible? The original?
To be honest I don't think it was the first sci-fi show with decent characters - and I don't think great characterisation is something we've come to regularly expect from genre programming in the last ten years, either. Firefly's initial buzz - and I remember it because I argued against it - was largely because it was a show by the guy behind Buffy.
You misunderstand. TNG is awesome for what it is. But it's not a great character-driven drama show. It's a great SciFi show with great SciFi plots and some memorable characters that still aren't very deep. Most of them are blank pages, really.
It's not terrible. I love TNG.
But Voyager? B5? They were so bad in the acting and character development aspect that I can't watch them no matter how good the plot is.
I'm not saying I didn't enjoy them, just that they used some pretty archaic storytelling methods and hadn't really caught up to where TV dramas had advanced at the time.
TOS was pretty edgy for its time, although I think The Twilight Zone was better-written on the whole (even though its anthology format is even more outdated than Trek's episodic format.)
TNG was a well-produced and often well-written show, but its episodic nature and largely static characterization really date it.
DS9 made some baby steps toward more modern storytelling, but they still cheated quite a bit to keep things in the familiar Trek mold. For instance, "In the Pale Moonlight," which is often regarded as one of the best of the series, has Sisko avoiding direct responsibility for the bad things that "had" to be done to save the Federation. He got to pawn the dirty work off on someone else. Trekkies thought this was hard-hitting stuff. In any other contemporary drama, the audience would've rightly called it a copout.
Just drawing the comparison here that sci-fi on TV is often very "conservative" in its storytelling methods, despite fans playing up how "progressive" sci-fi shows are. Yes, they are often politically progressive (especially Trek), but in terms of actual production they have been quite conservative and lagged behind.
This description (which yeah is fair) does seem to put it leagues above 'piss-poor', though.
I get the brunt of what you're saying, obviously. It's sometimes difficult to believe that Enterprise premiered years after the Sopranos. More recently Falling Skies is one heck of a dopey series with its mawkish sentimentalism. And so on.
But just because I consider The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad great TV drama (also: Deadwood Sopranos Rome Justified etc.) doesn't mean I consider TNG a terrible show. Been binging on some of my favourite episodes, and they really hold up to me - and, frankly, after dining with so many morally complex and ambiguous antihero leads it's weirdly refreshing to see Picard's eloquent and ironclad ethics. There are very few things I loved at eight I still love at twenty-five, and Picard's powerhouse speech at the end of "The Measure of a Man" is one of those things.
But hey, that's just me.
More to the point, regarding a Babylon 5 remake?
Babylon 5 boiled down to its essentials is a genre TV series with an intentionally novelistic structure, dealing with massive wars, political upheavals, and the return of ancient, fantastical, barely-believed in powers. A hypothetical remake could hypothetically be more fairly compared to Game of Thrones than a TV series about advertising in the 1960s.
To be fair, plenty of Trekkies called it a copout when it originally aired.
