Terra Nova season one 09/26/11:
- Thread starter timothy
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I begin to get tired about "group of survivors" in serialized tv and boring settings format. Yes Lost was fantastic but it had a lot of twists and turns in the plot with A LOT of mysteries. It was not only some character drama on some Island like some people seems to think.
I'll watch the show for sure. But the premise of only having dinosaur as enemy seems pretty limited. I was already bored with the non-responsive Zombies in the Walking Dead. Now it's Dinosaurs? I can already hear one of them growls and bark while some people run in terror. Multiply that by 20 times for the whole season. BOOORING!
The premise is bad, but I guess it may turns out to be great.
I'll watch the show for sure. But the premise of only having dinosaur as enemy seems pretty limited. I was already bored with the non-responsive Zombies in the Walking Dead. Now it's Dinosaurs? I can already hear one of them growls and bark while some people run in terror. Multiply that by 20 times for the whole season. BOOORING!
The premise is bad, but I guess it may turns out to be great.
When I think about it, one of the solution to solve the unpopularity of those serialized sci-fi TV shows is to make them into a mini-series instead. I'm thinking of shows like Terra Nova, The Walking Dead, Flashforward, The Event, Surface, etc.
Making those boring and slow moving serialized Sci-fi shows into mini-series would provide more resolution (no threat of cancellation which ALWAYS happens unless incredibly popular ala Lost), and people would hang around to see how it ends. Knowing they would actually get a resolution and if it's a lame one like Lost at least they wouldn't' have watched 6 seasons for it.
I also assume the pace of those shows would be better if they were made into mini-series instead.
Making those boring and slow moving serialized Sci-fi shows into mini-series would provide more resolution (no threat of cancellation which ALWAYS happens unless incredibly popular ala Lost), and people would hang around to see how it ends. Knowing they would actually get a resolution and if it's a lame one like Lost at least they wouldn't' have watched 6 seasons for it.
I also assume the pace of those shows would be better if they were made into mini-series instead.
That won't work because a mini-series won't amortize the start-up costs as well as an ongoing series, and for a glitzy sci fi show, the start-up costs will be greater than average. There's a reason mini-series have vanished from TV except for HBO and PBS, which are soldiering on for their own reasons but don't seem to much care about sci fi.
And Lost got good enough ratings to survive on network TV for six seasons, so it's a bad example if you're trying to make the point that long-term sci fi shows can't hang onto an audience. A better example is something like The Event, but the solution there is to just not produce it because it's obvious the producers never had a good idea to begin with. Six episodes of that nonsense would have been six bad episodes.
Either the producers have a good idea, good writers and good cast, or they don't. If they have it together, they should be able to go on for a few seasons. If they don't have it together, the show shouldn't be greenlit.
I think the achilles heel of Terra Nova is going to be their huge budget/ratings expectations in combination with an unexciting cast. Other than Steven Lang, they strike me as snoozy. When the dino's start to bore the audience, the producers need to have a solid cast of characters to take over, and if they lack that, the ratings will slip below the stratospheric expectations and it'll be over.
Sure I will name Lost when I want to show the popularity of the serialized TV is waning. Lost is THE series than made the serialized sci-fi TV popular on broadcast network spanning many similar series like The Event, Flash forward,etc, and now Terra Nova.
My point is that Lost was an exception to the rules. I always say that Lost is the series than simultaneously created the enthusiasm for Sci-fi serialized series while at the same time killing it with its so-so finale. Why would people watch a long serialize series anymore if the ending *can* be as lame as Lost? Or if it can get cancel anytime without resolution. It's crazy to expect even most of the TV series to end on their own term like Lost. Most of the time, the ratings and rising cost of production cancel a series much before and in an unpredictable manner. So nobody anymore want to devote themselves to such serialized TV series which will get cancelled or end up in a bad way one way or another.
That's why I think a mini-series format would be a much better format such serialized TV series.
The reason the Lost imitators keep flopping is that imitating Lost is easier said than done.
There's a limited market on broadcast TV for sci fi, so you have to surmount that and somehow grab a reasonably sized audience anyway. Serialized storylines with a large number of characters to juggle is far harder to pull off well or even coherently, vs a procedural cop show or other episodic format. Can you assemble a writing team that is up to the challenge?
Here are the solutions:
1) Forget broadcast. Sf/f genre TV has had some solid successes on cable lately. Game of Thrones, Fallen Skies and The Walking Dead have done very well in ratings, as success is measured on cable: 6-7M on basic or 2-3M on premium.
Those levels will get you cancelled on broadcast, but if the audience for a specific sort of show (high fantasy, alien invasion or zombie apocalypse) is inherently limited to a certain sub-broadcast level, why not just put your show someplace where it can survive on those numbers rather than bang your head against the wall trying to get more people to care about your little slice of sf/f? The point is to get enough of an audience to keep going.
2) Forget about imitating Lost. That show is just an outlier, and I'm still amazed they pulled it off as well as they did (and consequently not miffed about the ending; I knew that a tie-it-all-up-in-a-neat-little-bow ending was impossible, oh, as of about S4)
Cable knows how to do a successful genre TV show, because they have Fallen Skies, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones as models now. (I'm waiting for someone to wake up and realize that there's a decent audience for space opera out there, too.)
Broadcast doesn't have a model to follow, so Terra Nova is an experiment to see if it can become a new model - throw movie-style eye candy onto the small screen and see if it can attract a large enough audience to justify the budget that the eye candy requires.
Even if the Terra Nova experiment flops - maybe there is no reliable sf/f formula for broadcast - we'll still have plenty of genre stuff on cable, and that's even assuming SyFy never gets its act together, ever again.
But if broadcast can't sustain an sf/f series, then it can't sustain a mini-series either, which is more expensive per episode because the costs can't be amortized over a long run. FOX would never have put up the up-front costs for Terra Nova for example if it didn't anticipate having a nice multi-season run to help it turn a profit in the long run.
Only HBO is doing mini-series (PBS is too short on funds, so they co-finance) and since sf/f stuff survives just fine on premium cable, there's no reason to come up with solutions for them. If HBO did a space opera series with the style, quality and excitement level of Game of Thrones, it would be a much more likely success vs. Terra Nova, which is a huge risk for FOX.
But HBO could just make it a regular ongoing series. Why limit it to a mini-series? They've demonstrated that they can lock in 2-3M viewership required for hit status on HBO, even with a genre series. I wouldn't bet much on the survival of a space opera on broadcast, but on HBO or Showtime, I'd be much more hopeful.
There's a limited market on broadcast TV for sci fi, so you have to surmount that and somehow grab a reasonably sized audience anyway. Serialized storylines with a large number of characters to juggle is far harder to pull off well or even coherently, vs a procedural cop show or other episodic format. Can you assemble a writing team that is up to the challenge?
Here are the solutions:
1) Forget broadcast. Sf/f genre TV has had some solid successes on cable lately. Game of Thrones, Fallen Skies and The Walking Dead have done very well in ratings, as success is measured on cable: 6-7M on basic or 2-3M on premium.
Those levels will get you cancelled on broadcast, but if the audience for a specific sort of show (high fantasy, alien invasion or zombie apocalypse) is inherently limited to a certain sub-broadcast level, why not just put your show someplace where it can survive on those numbers rather than bang your head against the wall trying to get more people to care about your little slice of sf/f? The point is to get enough of an audience to keep going.
2) Forget about imitating Lost. That show is just an outlier, and I'm still amazed they pulled it off as well as they did (and consequently not miffed about the ending; I knew that a tie-it-all-up-in-a-neat-little-bow ending was impossible, oh, as of about S4)
Cable knows how to do a successful genre TV show, because they have Fallen Skies, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones as models now. (I'm waiting for someone to wake up and realize that there's a decent audience for space opera out there, too.)
Broadcast doesn't have a model to follow, so Terra Nova is an experiment to see if it can become a new model - throw movie-style eye candy onto the small screen and see if it can attract a large enough audience to justify the budget that the eye candy requires.
Even if the Terra Nova experiment flops - maybe there is no reliable sf/f formula for broadcast - we'll still have plenty of genre stuff on cable, and that's even assuming SyFy never gets its act together, ever again.
But if broadcast can't sustain an sf/f series, then it can't sustain a mini-series either, which is more expensive per episode because the costs can't be amortized over a long run. FOX would never have put up the up-front costs for Terra Nova for example if it didn't anticipate having a nice multi-season run to help it turn a profit in the long run.
Only HBO is doing mini-series (PBS is too short on funds, so they co-finance) and since sf/f stuff survives just fine on premium cable, there's no reason to come up with solutions for them. If HBO did a space opera series with the style, quality and excitement level of Game of Thrones, it would be a much more likely success vs. Terra Nova, which is a huge risk for FOX.
But HBO could just make it a regular ongoing series. Why limit it to a mini-series? They've demonstrated that they can lock in 2-3M viewership required for hit status on HBO, even with a genre series. I wouldn't bet much on the survival of a space opera on broadcast, but on HBO or Showtime, I'd be much more hopeful.
This is the best advice. The others are just about giving up on high ratings for Sci-fi TV series by placing them on cable. Which is strange considering the extreme popularity of Sci-fi movies at the theater. If Sci-fi series move off the character drama bandwagon and concentrate on creating more imaginative plot every week maybe people will watch it more like they do for crime drama or movies.
I don't think the producers of sf/f cable shows are giving up a thing. They're getting their babies placed where they can thrive for years, and showing them to an audience that appreciates quality.
If I were producing an sf/f show, I'd be scrambling to get it on HBO, Showtime, FX or AMC as first choice, maybe TNT or (ugh) SyFy as second choice, and praying that I won't be consigned to the wasteland of broadcast where I'll have to dumb everything down and probably still get cancelled.
I think it's possible that broadcast is just a hostile environment now for any sf/f series, because survival-level ratings on broadcast can't be achieved by a genre series that is inherently off-putting to such a large percentage of viewers.
But because cable gets some revenue from subscriptions and not just ad viewing, cable can afford to cater to smaller audiences where specialized tastes like zombies or high fantasy are economically viable.
And theatrical releases are a whole other ball game, because audiences pay directly to see specific movies, and pay quite a bit. $12 to see one movie is a lot more than $20/month to see everything that HBO has for that whole month vs basic cable, where $80 or so gets you dozens of cable outlets, vs broadcast where your cost is $0, except for whatever the value of you watching the ads is, which ain't much.
So the difference is in how much the audience is worth. When one audience member is worth more, they can expect to get their tastes catered to better. On broadcast, they're worth the least; next step up is basic cable; next step up after that is premium cable; and there's a big jump to theatrical release, where audiences are so valuable that it's worth spending insane amounts of money on the eye candy needed to attract them.
Of course movies are pretty much just gimmickry and sensationalism now, but to do that right, you need huge budgets that TV cannot support unless you go to a pay-per-view format, like boxing. That would be an intriguing experiment to try - can you get people to just pay $12 per two-hour episode for an eye-candy-rich TV series, like they'd pay $12 for a two hour movie in a theater?
If I were producing an sf/f show, I'd be scrambling to get it on HBO, Showtime, FX or AMC as first choice, maybe TNT or (ugh) SyFy as second choice, and praying that I won't be consigned to the wasteland of broadcast where I'll have to dumb everything down and probably still get cancelled.
I think it's possible that broadcast is just a hostile environment now for any sf/f series, because survival-level ratings on broadcast can't be achieved by a genre series that is inherently off-putting to such a large percentage of viewers.
But because cable gets some revenue from subscriptions and not just ad viewing, cable can afford to cater to smaller audiences where specialized tastes like zombies or high fantasy are economically viable.
And theatrical releases are a whole other ball game, because audiences pay directly to see specific movies, and pay quite a bit. $12 to see one movie is a lot more than $20/month to see everything that HBO has for that whole month vs basic cable, where $80 or so gets you dozens of cable outlets, vs broadcast where your cost is $0, except for whatever the value of you watching the ads is, which ain't much.
So the difference is in how much the audience is worth. When one audience member is worth more, they can expect to get their tastes catered to better. On broadcast, they're worth the least; next step up is basic cable; next step up after that is premium cable; and there's a big jump to theatrical release, where audiences are so valuable that it's worth spending insane amounts of money on the eye candy needed to attract them.
Character drama is what works on cable, where sf/f shows can survive because each person who watches is more valuable. On broadcast, yeah, you might have to throw gimmicks at the audience to keep their attention, but you'll still be working against the tide because sf/f shows are always going to have more of a limited audience than something predictable like a cop show, and are going to be more expensive than reality TV. Smaller audience + larger budget, that formula will never work.
Of course movies are pretty much just gimmickry and sensationalism now, but to do that right, you need huge budgets that TV cannot support unless you go to a pay-per-view format, like boxing. That would be an intriguing experiment to try - can you get people to just pay $12 per two-hour episode for an eye-candy-rich TV series, like they'd pay $12 for a two hour movie in a theater?
It's strange that you consider good plots or anything not one of those boring serialized character drama a gimmickry. Mystery, adventure, suspense, political drama, comedy, action, Sci-fi, etc, are all gimmicry to you?
It looks like everyone's lost interest in this one. I'm not really surprised. Who takes a big-budget, high-concept show and turns it into a generic family show?
Anyhow, Josh's favor to the Sixers finally comes due and it's the easiest, least morally compromising job you could ever hope for. So of course Josh wusses out. After he did it.
If I was his dad I'd be less disappointed in a simple smash-and-grab to get some medicine and more disappointed in the complete lack of follow-through. It's amazing Josh didn't go turncoat when they were breaking his dad out of prison.
Anyhow, Josh's favor to the Sixers finally comes due and it's the easiest, least morally compromising job you could ever hope for. So of course Josh wusses out. After he did it.
If I was his dad I'd be less disappointed in a simple smash-and-grab to get some medicine and more disappointed in the complete lack of follow-through. It's amazing Josh didn't go turncoat when they were breaking his dad out of prison.
I think we stopped discussing it around here because the discussion threads were becoming as formulaic as the show itself. Basically, Stephen Lang is awesome and everything else sucks.
I still watch it, primarily because it's a dviersion from quiet Monday nights. But the show isn't that good. Most episodes are Star Trek plots we've seen done dozens of times but with dinosaurs thrown in. There are some interesting story ideas, but they're basically going nowhere and doing nothing.
I still watch it, primarily because it's a dviersion from quiet Monday nights. But the show isn't that good. Most episodes are Star Trek plots we've seen done dozens of times but with dinosaurs thrown in. There are some interesting story ideas, but they're basically going nowhere and doing nothing.
Gimmicks are stuff like a mystery virus attacking Our Heroes. It's easy to identify gimmicks. If it's something you've already seen on another show - VOY, ENT, one of the Stargates...
Here's a sci fi show not based on gimmicks: The Walking Dead. Compare that one with, say, VOY and you should quickly get the idea.
That's a good summary. Terra Nova is headed towards cancellation, not because it's bad or stale, which it is, but because they made the bizarre decision to turn it into a family-friendly show. That format doesn't work anymore because families no longer watch shows together. The parents watch what they want on their TV and the kids have their own TVs or they watch via the internet. NBC was trying to resurrect a defunct format. They should have known better.
Instead, I'd have used the show to try to build the young male audience back up for FOX, and made it a kick-ass, all-action extravaganza with the Sixers having a lot of scantily-clad babes fighting dinosaurs. No family drama, no boring-ass angst. Steven Lang would have been the star. I wouldn't have bothered to make it intelligent or good, just attractive to a focused demographic. I certainly wouldn't have gone for the scattershot demographic approach.
One of the main problems with Terra Nova is that the producers picked the most boring part of their fictional timeline to set the show in.
Imagine the options.
1) Discovery of the time portal, Stephen Lang goes through and has to survive on his own, eventually a few more people come through to look for him and they have to survive in a harsh wilderness. And eventually start Terra Nova.
That could have been a cracking good show and pilot.
2) Set the show after all the formative conflicts of Terra Nova is over, and nothing is really happening except growing food, keeping the perimeter secure and the occasional spate with the Sixers which all involve a lot of verbal threats and not much else.
This is the show we got. And it is almost entirely bland. Made more so by characters who face no tough decisions or conflicts at all.
3) The conflict between various forces for control of Terra Nova starts(or is already underway) and our family of heroes has to actively pick sides and participate in the first war mankind will ever fight.
If Terra Nova survives a couple seasons(doubtful) we might reach that point, but you could have started the show at this point and have it been much more entertaining right out of the gate.
And this is part of the problem with TV serialization I think. More and more writers and producers are designing story-arcs that are four or five seasons long in the hopes of emulating Lost/BSG etc. but they make the mistake of starting many of their stories at boring stagnant points so they can play around with their characters and the setting and set up padded meandering mysteries.
Imagine the options.
1) Discovery of the time portal, Stephen Lang goes through and has to survive on his own, eventually a few more people come through to look for him and they have to survive in a harsh wilderness. And eventually start Terra Nova.
That could have been a cracking good show and pilot.
2) Set the show after all the formative conflicts of Terra Nova is over, and nothing is really happening except growing food, keeping the perimeter secure and the occasional spate with the Sixers which all involve a lot of verbal threats and not much else.
This is the show we got. And it is almost entirely bland. Made more so by characters who face no tough decisions or conflicts at all.
3) The conflict between various forces for control of Terra Nova starts(or is already underway) and our family of heroes has to actively pick sides and participate in the first war mankind will ever fight.
If Terra Nova survives a couple seasons(doubtful) we might reach that point, but you could have started the show at this point and have it been much more entertaining right out of the gate.
And this is part of the problem with TV serialization I think. More and more writers and producers are designing story-arcs that are four or five seasons long in the hopes of emulating Lost/BSG etc. but they make the mistake of starting many of their stories at boring stagnant points so they can play around with their characters and the setting and set up padded meandering mysteries.
Yup. Stargate:SGU is another example. Also V and Caprica, all of them were very Good to at least intriguing when they ended. All could've been great.
Falling Skies was smart, starting it's arc after the invasion, and of Course Walking Dead started in the thick of it.
Sometimes, yea, it's good to have the opening scene/Pilot be a life changing event, that you start in the middle of, and catch the viewers up as you go along (Makes for good rewatchability too, that way, generally).
Haven't had a chance to watch it yet, looked for it on Ch12 (CW) instead of the FOX Channel Ch8 and thought it didn't air this week.
Falling Skies was smart, starting it's arc after the invasion, and of Course Walking Dead started in the thick of it.
Sometimes, yea, it's good to have the opening scene/Pilot be a life changing event, that you start in the middle of, and catch the viewers up as you go along (Makes for good rewatchability too, that way, generally).
Haven't had a chance to watch it yet, looked for it on Ch12 (CW) instead of the FOX Channel Ch8 and thought it didn't air this week.
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