The Defiance Thread - News about the Show and Game
- Thread starter PlainSimpleJoel
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$40M for the show, $50M for the game, interesting world we live in these days.
wrong thread. sorry.
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Babylon 5 had a shoestring budget too, and barely managed to eke out its planned five year run despite PTEN's withdrawl. Andromeda was unfortunately saddled with a studio that has a history of dumping the showrunners for cheaper, more controllable producers(Beastmaster, Earth Final Conflict, etc.) and IMO that was the real cause of its failure despite some really promising premises.
Yeah, if Defiance the game doesn't work out, financing for the show will dry up pretty quickly IMO - or else it would face some pretty heavy cuts in budget that could doom it anyway. This is a pretty big experiment in new media and I hope it works out, since all this stuff we've seen so far is pretty promising. If it works, I further hope that it could become a formula for success that could lead to some more classic sci-fi coming back in some form.
Anyone remember when we used to watch shows involving people flying around in a spaceship and exploring new worlds, and not just trying to survive in one post-apocalyptic version of Earth or another?
Mark
Yeah, if Defiance the game doesn't work out, financing for the show will dry up pretty quickly IMO - or else it would face some pretty heavy cuts in budget that could doom it anyway. This is a pretty big experiment in new media and I hope it works out, since all this stuff we've seen so far is pretty promising. If it works, I further hope that it could become a formula for success that could lead to some more classic sci-fi coming back in some form.
Anyone remember when we used to watch shows involving people flying around in a spaceship and exploring new worlds, and not just trying to survive in one post-apocalyptic version of Earth or another?
Mark
Syfy has posted the first 14 minutes of the first episode on their website. I watched it earlier today and I loved it.
Yeah, I saw the 14-minute preview On Demand yesterday and was hooked from the start.
Impressive. A good job of starting a story in medias res while giving efficient and subtle exposition about the backstory. I was expecting more flashbacks to the Pale Wars, but I guess those will come later in the pilot. And I like the relationship between Nolan and Irisa. It's nice to start off with two such sympathetic characters, and it'll be nice to have a good father-daughter relationship on Syfy again now that Eureka's gone. Stephanie Leonidas in particular is excellent. I regretted that she didn't use her lovely English accent here, but she still manages to be captivating without it.
Interesting monster designs, though they just make me regret that the sentient alien characters are all so humanoid. Also I find it hard to believe that so many creatures of such size could've been hiding among those skinny trees without being seen.
With the interesting creature design, the attempt at making it look big and expansive, and the alien-language swear words... Yup, this is O'Bannon playing in the same sandbox as Farscape.
Now, just get David Kemper on board and watch that coaster roll! Will he ever do TV again? Please...?
The 14 minutes didn't shake my world too much, but then not much does. The CGI didn't work in all places and I can't quite get past the fact that Grant Bowler (the lead male) looks uncannily like Richard Roxburgh from an Aussie TV show I'm currently delving into (Rake - watch it!), yet still this show is clearly TRYING.
And I'll take a bit of ambition, failures and all, over the typically safe TV fair. Flawed as they were, the fact that BSG and Farscape threw caution to the wind and just went for it helped hold my interest when they occasionally fell apart. Let's hope Defiance does the same!
Hugo - Up for the season
Now, just get David Kemper on board and watch that coaster roll! Will he ever do TV again? Please...?
The 14 minutes didn't shake my world too much, but then not much does. The CGI didn't work in all places and I can't quite get past the fact that Grant Bowler (the lead male) looks uncannily like Richard Roxburgh from an Aussie TV show I'm currently delving into (Rake - watch it!), yet still this show is clearly TRYING.
And I'll take a bit of ambition, failures and all, over the typically safe TV fair. Flawed as they were, the fact that BSG and Farscape threw caution to the wind and just went for it helped hold my interest when they occasionally fell apart. Let's hope Defiance does the same!
Hugo - Up for the season
As I mentioned back in January, this isn't really an O'Bannon show. He was one of its three developers along with Caprica veterans Kevin Murphy and Michael Taylor (the latter of whom also worked on BSG and before that Voyager), but he left after the pilot to become the showrunner of the CW's Cult -- which may have been a bad decision, given how poorly that show is doing. Defiance is Murphy and Taylor's show now, so it probably has more BSG/Caprica in its genes than Farscape. (BSG had alien swear words too.)
Kemper is a consulting producer on Cult. So he is working with O'Bannon again, just not on this show. And Cult is frankly a mess. I gave up after the pilot.
Honestly, I think O'Bannon is overrated. Sure, Farscape was impressive, but most of the rest of his work has been less so. He wrote the original Alien Nation film, which had a good concept but didn't use it nearly as well as the subsequent TV series. He created SeaQuest DSV, which was basically just an underwater ST:TNG knockoff and only had a couple of really good episodes (the best of which was by Kemper). And he created Cult, which is a dud. Granted, he did write one of the only decent episodes of the awful 2009 V reboot, but that's damning with faint praise. He's not a bad writer, but overall his resume is not overflowing with greatness. Farscape is pretty much the only thing he's done that counts as a great creative success. And honestly I've always figured Kemper had more to do with FS's success than O'Bannon did.
There are some races we haven't seen much of yet, the Sensoth, who look Orangutans, the Gulanee, who are energy beings, and we've seen the characters fighting Volge, a robotic race, in a couple of the trailers. Most of the promotional stuff has focused on the Iratheients, Catithans, and Indogene, but there are actually seven different sentient races making up the Votan.
Yeah, but the ones we'll see the most of are the most humanlike, and with only fairly minor variations from the human form, like pale skin and eyes, hairlessness, or the subtly feline brow of the Irathient. Other shows have at least had more creative prosthetic designs for humanoid aliens. The Irathient makeup is a good design as far as it goes, but I just don't like aliens to look too human.
I'm not crazy about some of the names either. The Castithans are caste-based, and the Irathients are aggressive (as in wrathful)? Isn't that a little too on-the-nose?
I'm not crazy about some of the names either. The Castithans are caste-based, and the Irathients are aggressive (as in wrathful)? Isn't that a little too on-the-nose?
Ah, see there was me hoping that Kemper was going to be ripe and available for THIS show and is in fact treading sludge in a bog on CULT.
I have no doubt that Kemper and Ricky Manning were the real drivers of 'Scape and I always got the impression (from TV and magazine interviews) that Kemper kinda burned out over the 4 years on the show. Not creatively, but rather poured so much into it that he just ran out of steam. I have been desperately waiting to see more work from him and I had no real intention of catching Cult as it didn't quite float my boat from a premise-POV, so it's a pity he's landed there. The size of the idea of Defiance suits Kempers' style and ambition (at least seen on 'Scape) so we'll have to see what Taylor and Murphy can do.
Taylor has always been a bit of an unknown quantity, given the two shows he has worked on that I have watched (DS9 and Battlestar) both had Showrunners that not only were renowned for re-writing and reworking a lot of the material, but also demanded a consistent style which meant that if it didn't fit their mold it got thrown out (or at least that is what I have gleaned from podcasts, commentaries and books I've read of/about Moore and Behr). So it'll be interesting to see him as co-showrunner.
One of the biggest surprises (and one I always use to never pigeon-hole a TV writer until you see a self-generated piece of their work) was Brian Fuller, who wrote pretty decent Voyager episodes during Seasons 4-7 but whose work could never be fully judged given the committee "writers room" ethic that the modern ST shows kept to, plus (if you believe RDM's comments about Braga/Berman) the background interference in script/stroy generation. When Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies all appeared it allowed a signature writing style to come forward which would have never fit in the ST mold, so I look forward to seeing if Taylor has in fact a real style of his own.
That's always the excitement (and trepidation) of Supervising Producers, Staff Writers, Story Editors etc moving up and generating their own work. Seeing if their voice was lost in the wash, or, well, there never was one.
There is hope in Defiance. Let's just hope it has some balls too.
Hugo - done now
I have no doubt that Kemper and Ricky Manning were the real drivers of 'Scape and I always got the impression (from TV and magazine interviews) that Kemper kinda burned out over the 4 years on the show. Not creatively, but rather poured so much into it that he just ran out of steam. I have been desperately waiting to see more work from him and I had no real intention of catching Cult as it didn't quite float my boat from a premise-POV, so it's a pity he's landed there. The size of the idea of Defiance suits Kempers' style and ambition (at least seen on 'Scape) so we'll have to see what Taylor and Murphy can do.
Taylor has always been a bit of an unknown quantity, given the two shows he has worked on that I have watched (DS9 and Battlestar) both had Showrunners that not only were renowned for re-writing and reworking a lot of the material, but also demanded a consistent style which meant that if it didn't fit their mold it got thrown out (or at least that is what I have gleaned from podcasts, commentaries and books I've read of/about Moore and Behr). So it'll be interesting to see him as co-showrunner.
One of the biggest surprises (and one I always use to never pigeon-hole a TV writer until you see a self-generated piece of their work) was Brian Fuller, who wrote pretty decent Voyager episodes during Seasons 4-7 but whose work could never be fully judged given the committee "writers room" ethic that the modern ST shows kept to, plus (if you believe RDM's comments about Braga/Berman) the background interference in script/stroy generation. When Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies all appeared it allowed a signature writing style to come forward which would have never fit in the ST mold, so I look forward to seeing if Taylor has in fact a real style of his own.
That's always the excitement (and trepidation) of Supervising Producers, Staff Writers, Story Editors etc moving up and generating their own work. Seeing if their voice was lost in the wash, or, well, there never was one.
There is hope in Defiance. Let's just hope it has some balls too.
Hugo - done now
Taylor made a big splash early on with two really impressive DS9 episodes, "The Visitor" and "In the Pale Moonlight," but it turns out that both of those were rewritten by staffers. His Voyager scripts were a mixed bag, and his BSG-verse work didn't really impress me much.
Reviews for the show appear to be fairly positive.
It's also available streaming on the US Syfy site. I haven't watched it yet, but I probably will tomorrow.
I think the 30-minute special was just a compilation of the various featurettes that have been around for a while, though I'm not sure.
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