I'm kind of glad to see Stentz & Miller getting a second crack at Terminator.
...And that Friedman is not.
Interesting. Why the distinction?
Terminator tv series in the works
- Thread starter Enterprise is Great
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Interesting. Why the distinction?
Whoa! Awesome news that we could get a new Terminator show, but it goes straight from single awesome directly to triple awesome if it's from the same people who did Sarah Connor Chronicles!
Summer Glau was cool, but Lena Headey just elevated that show to an incredible level.
Summer Glau was cool, but Lena Headey just elevated that show to an incredible level.
I have enjoyed Stentz/Miller's writing, but I was not a huge fan of Friedman as showrunner in terms of overall plotting. Whether my perception is accurate is another story.I'm kind of glad to see Stentz & Miller getting a second crack at Terminator.
...And that Friedman is not.
Interesting. Why the distinction?
Also, from my (very brief) interactions with Stentz, he seemed to genuinely care about not pissing on the legacy of The Terminator. (In terms of not ignoring established facts that should have remained so even in SCC.)
I was also not enamored of Friedman's answer when asked if he might finish his SCC arc in another format. Not a direct quote: If I can't do it on TV, I'm not doing it at all.
Short answer, nerd bias.
Wasn't Sarah Connor Chronicles, like, cancelled?
You mean you wish Cameron would do stuff that you like.
You mean you wish Cameron would do stuff that you like.
Lena Headey was brilliant too.
No, he wishes that Cameron would do stuff that he hates. It's so much more fun to bash a movie on the Internet than enjoy one.
Of course he wishes that Cameron would make movies that he likes. That's kinda obvious.
It's just so funny to demand that someone gets "his head out of his ass", and saying that the success went to his head, just because he makes movies that you don't happen to like. Maybe the one who should get the head out of his ass is not Cameron.
Because maybe his success had been in his ass all along?
Yeah, I guess most people didn't really care about it. It's just one of several blockbusters to TV that just didn't translate very well. People probably wanted a lot of action, but instead got John Connor with his hand inside the Cameron terminator's wound talking about feelings.
I also think the show required too much suspension of disbelief at times. Not that there aren't several other shows with convoluted plot logic out there that do well, but at some point it becomes a hindrance. That, and the Lost type of carrot dangling with mysteries, which they probably had no intention of satisfactorily solving.
I'm excited there will be a new show and that it actually ties in with the movie, but it is kinda strange that it involves two of the canceled show's writers.
In fact, the first season of TSCC was the highest-rated new scripted show of its season. But the second season was delayed by the writers' strike and moved to a new night, so a lot of its first-season audience lost track of it and never came back. The second season didn't do too badly in the ratings, but it was expensive to make, and it wasn't quite as well-received as the first.
Not at all. For one thing, those two writers hit it big with X-Men: First Class and Thor, so nobody's going to think of them as failures now.
For another thing, cancellation isn't a scarlet letter. Most shows get cancelled; it's just a fact of life, because the field is very competitive. If cancellation kept you from working again, Hollywood would quickly run out of creators. A network may be quite pleased with a show and think highly of its creators, but if the show is expensive to make and they think they can get comparable or better ratings with a cheaper show, then they'll cancel it. And then they'll be perfectly willing to work with those creators on a new project. That's just the business.
Look at it this way: Every baseball or football team loses some games. Sometimes they lose a lot of games. But you don't fire the team after a single loss. Losing doesn't mean they're bad, it just means the other team did better or got luckier that day. So you give them a chance to try again.
I'm not saying they didn't deserve another chance at something new, but that it's just kinda weird that they're coming back to the same thing. It's as if a TV show about Terminator couldn't be written without them. It would be like if Star Trek returned with a new series, but Braga was a writer.
Why is it weird to seek out people who have experience with the property? Is it weird that, say, Alan Burnett has been involved with most of the animated Batman TV and home-video productions since the 1980s?
Plug in "D.C. Fontana" and you'll have exactly what happened twice, first with the animated series and then with TNG. In both cases, when the franchise was revived after years off the air, it brought back veterans of the original staff.
And technically that did actually happen with Braga, since he started as a junior staff writer on TNG and then was hired by Voyager. It's just that the interval between the shows was very brief there.
It's common for shows to hire staffers who worked on similar shows. For instance, the '70s Wonder Woman was developed by Stanley Ralph Ross, who was the most acclaimed writer for the '60s Batman -- and who'd written a failed 1967 Wonder Woman comedy pilot from Batman's producers. Grimm, a supernatural detective show, was co-created by David Greenwalt, who was a producer on an earlier supernatural detective show, Angel. And so on. You want staffers that you know are able to handle the material. So if they have actual experience with the very franchise you're adapting, how can that be a bad thing?
Besides, the distinction to remember is that on TSCC, Josh Friedman was the developer/showrunner and Stentz & Miller worked under him. This time, they're the ones running the show.
Experience doesn't translate to quality. Why don't they hire Ferris and Brancato to write T5? Oh, yeah, it's because T3 & 4 kinda sucked. I'm not saying that Stentz & Miller do though. From what I recall, theirs were some of my favorite episodes of SCC. But the point stands that if someone was associated with the failure of a property, it is somewhat strange that they're called back to work on that property again.
And that's why I used Braga as an analogy, because Enterprise failed. Pointing out that he moved to Voyager makes absolutely no sense.
And yeah, there are always exceptions that work out, but that doesn't really change my perception of it.
I think that no matter how you sugarcoat it, people just weren't fond enough of SCC. Yeah, it had good ratings in the first season on average, but only because it premiered after the Superbowl. Take that away and it was no better than several of the shows at the time. Plus, comparing Nielsen ratings is pretty futile considering some of the shows that premiered on cable in that year were far superior without a doubt. It quickly went downhill not because of strikes or moving time slots, but because people generally weren't interested and there was better TV on.
And I've explained the problem with that assumption. Cancellation does not equal failure. Cancellation is the most likely fate of any show. Every successful creator has many cancellations in their history, because it's impossible to avoid -- just as even the greatest baseball or basketball star has many losses as well as wins on their record.
And many shows get cancelled through no fault of their creators, simply because circumstances were against them or because the competition was too tough. Often the choice a network makes is not between a good show and a bad show, but between two good shows, with the key distinction between survival and cancellation being which one costs less to make or can get more advertisers. Cancellation isn't just about the show itself or the people making it. It's about where the show fits in the entire scheme, whether it contributes enough to the network's overall strategy to justify the expense of producing it. Lots of very good shows get cancelled for reasons that aren't about the shows themselves.
So there is no reason why Skydance Productions would blame the failure of TSCC on Stentz & Miller -- especially not after they've gone on to become one of the hottest screenwriting teams in Hollywood.
The problem with your analogy is that Brannon Braga was the co-creator and co-showrunner of Enterprise along with Rick Berman. As I've already pointed out to you, Stenz & Miller were not the developers or showrunners of TSCC. Josh Friedman was. So Braga on ENT just doesn't fit the scenario. Braga on TNG is a slightly closer analogy, because he was a lower-ranked staff member at that time rather than the showrunner. But there's really no workable analogy between Braga's career trajectory and what's going on here, because he went from junior staffer on TNG to junior staffer on VGR, and later from showrunner on VGR to co-creator/co-showrunner on ENT. What we're looking for is a case of a midlevel writer-producer of one show moving upward to a creator/showrunner position on a subsequent show in the same franchise.
A better analogy would be, say, Bryan Fuller. He was a producer on Voyager, and he's pitched a Star Trek revival proposal to CBS. If they went ahead and produced that series with Fuller as the showrunner, that would be an appropriate analogy to Stentz & Miller's situation here. Ditto if, say, ENT staffer Mike Sussman or Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens were to create a Trek series.
Or here's a real example: Glen Murakami. He was a member of the staff on The New Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond, and he co-created the current Beware the Batman series. Similarly for James Tucker, who went from a staffer on Justice League to the showrunner of Legion of Super Heroes and Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and is now the producer of the DC Universe DVD movies.
I don't know why you think that. And I'm not "sugarcoating" a thing as far as I know. In my experience the show had (and still has) a strong and loyal fan community and got considerable critical acclaim. Maybe we're experiencing it from different perspectives and that shapes our perceptions of it.
I'm not talking about blame though. The Skydance approach so far has been about refreshing everything. Actors, directors, and writers of the movie will be different (with maybe the exception of Schwarzenegger). They're not looking back, so when this happens, that's what piques my curiosity.
I thought about him, but the problem is that Voyager wasn't a failure.
Not everything in an analogy has to be perfect. Replace him with any other writer of the show that was there from season one on and I'd still think it was weird.
And honestly, I'm not sure how I even feel about a Bryan Fuller series either. I don't think he even pitched one anyways.
Once again, cancellation does not equal "failure" in the judgmental sense you insist upon. It's simply an inevitable part of any television producer's experience. Hell, how do you think producers gain experience in the first place? Often they work on a string of short-lived, "failed" shows as they build up experience. Like I said before, if cancellation were a career death sentence, Hollywood would very quickly run out of creative talent.
For instance, look at Michael Piller, the producer who elevated TNG to its creative peak and co-created DS9 and VGR. He got his start on the successful shows Simon & Simon and Miami Vice, but in the two years before he joined the TNG staff, he was a producer on two very short-lived, unsuccessful SF shows, Probe (a series co-created with Isaac Asimov, about a reclusive genius who solved scientific mysteries) and Hard Time on Planet Earth (with Martin Kove as an alien criminal sentenced to Earth and doing good deeds as rehabilitation). His prior SF experience was exclusively in shows that could well be considered "failures," but that didn't keep him from getting the biggest SF job in the industry at the time and succeeding magnificently in it.
Failure is part of how we learn, part of gaining experience. So yes, of course anyone who's experienced and successful is going to have some failures on the resume.
Voyagers ratings. The Pilot got a 13. The next episode was below 10, and the ratings continued to drop till the last season when it hovered around 3. Scorpion part two got a bump, but then it started falling back to the old levels the following week.
Enterprise was scoring under 2 when it was finally cancelled despite being creatively superior after a management/leadership shuffle suggesting that it was an entirely different series suddenly, even though it was too late.
(graphs below)
http://www.trekcc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9355
Enterprise was scoring under 2 when it was finally cancelled despite being creatively superior after a management/leadership shuffle suggesting that it was an entirely different series suddenly, even though it was too late.
(graphs below)
http://www.trekcc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9355
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