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time travel and dinosaurs, but it's not sci fi

Time travel and dinosaurs, but not science fiction? Okay, that makes about as much sense as saying you're a vegetarian who loves eating meat.

RoJoHen said:
I also like how the article says that Braga worked on "all three" Star Trek shows, then in the next sentence goes on to list a fourth, while completely ignoring the fact that there are actually 5 (6 if you count TAS). Dumb.
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The best part is that they say Rene Echevarria worked with Braga on DS9. Despite the fact that Braga never worked on DS9. Seriously, did they just consult Trek BBS for Braga's involvement with Star Trek. Because this place is the only place on the internet I find people who think Braga was behind everything Trek-related.

Don't get me wrong, I fully intend to check this show out, and my problems with this article are hardly any indication of what the show will be like. After all, there aren't many other sci-fi shows out there, so I might as well check out the one airing on one of the big networks.
 
they should advertise it as a romantic comedy and/or reality show then BAM! when they tune in hit them with dinosaurs!
 
Spielberg? Braga? Time travel? Dinosaurs? Uh huh. Must also mean Primeval isn't SF either.

There's a regular section in the Ansible newsletter where authors and producers stress their product "isn't sci-fi", this is where the "talking squids in space" trope comes from. I'm sure this'll be in the next one.

I suppose what they really mean is that it can't be SF because their characters are 2D cardboard cutouts. While there are a lot of terrible characters like that, they aren't all in SF. And they haven't observed The Australis Observation of Good SFTV: if good drama is ordinary people in extraordinary situations, then good SF drama is extraordinary people in really extraordinary situations, which will inherently deliver something better in terms of stories, morality and messages.

Oh, and if they want a show that'll bring in the"mundanes", as someone else here said (it's a good word), then it should have...

NASCAR AND DINOSAURS!!
 
Australis said:
Spielberg? Braga? Time travel? Dinosaurs? Uh huh. Must also mean Primeval isn't SF either.

There's a regular section in the Ansible newsletter where authors and producers stress their product "isn't sci-fi", this is where the "talking squids in space" trope comes from. I'm sure this'll be in the next one.

I suppose what they really mean is that it can't be SF because their characters are 2D cardboard cutouts. While there are a lot of terrible characters like that, they aren't all in SF. And they haven't observed The Australis Observation of Good SFTV: if good drama is ordinary people in extraordinary situations, then good SF drama is extraordinary people in really extraordinary situations, which will inherently deliver something better in terms of stories, morality and messages.

Oh, and if they want a show that'll bring in the"mundanes", as someone else here said (it's a good word), then it should have...

NASCAR AND DINOSAURS!!
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It's been done. In comics- Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.
 
In talking about this very trend with a friend yesterday, we came to a few ideas. Now, this isn't meant to offend sci-fi fans of the older generation - I am one, nearly 40 years old! - but we think that perhaps the sci-fi revival happening in cinema right now simply hasn't had time to filter down to television. For the moment, TV is stuck in an uncomfortable generational shift; most of the older sci-fi fans are of the Star Trek era... and too many of them are only willing to accept Star Trek as their sci-fi. (Or equivalents to Trek.) These folks like their science fiction, but their tastes are very set and may actually be out of date at this point.

New attempts at sci-fi series that don't cross audience barriers - like NuBSG - aren't getting ratings and viewers because the current sci-fi fanbase won't accept them. The rejection of Stargate Universe is something we pondered; it seemed the typical TV sci-fi fan wouldn't go near it and/or hated it after trying a couple episodes because it smelled "newjack". Despite the fact that SGU wasn't truly a copy of NuBSG - for one, it actually respected science, and was about real science fictional concepts - merely the visual style and the fact that the characters weren't Trek/Classic Stargate era boilerplate resulted in not just disinterest, but literal hatred.

Other attempts at sci-fi shows that did have potential have been dismissed and labeled as "horrible" by the average sci-fi television viewer. I wonder if a generation of sci-fi fans are holding out for a time that will never come again; especially if they are too locked into nostalgia by this point.

The big problem is that the older generation of sci-fi fan appears to reject human drama that becomes too dark, and also rejects "action" that focuses too much on people and not enough on technology (again, a legacy of Star Trek, Star Wars, etc, etc).
 
The split between movies and TV sci fi has existed for a while now. You can't compare them directly because movies and TV are good at very different things.

Movies are good at action and visual spectacle, which fits well with sci fi. Just throw spaceships and Pandora planets at people and they love it.

But TV is about characters, premises, and plotlines. Without action and visuals to keep people happy, you have to sell them on the characters and the premise, and if that's weird or offputting, it's going to be a hard sell. They'd rather watch familiar characters and premises - the cops, the doctors, the lawyers, the sitcom family, the regular people becoming famous on reality TV.

It's not so strange that sci fi struggles on TV when you consider that there are few movies about doctors, not that many about lawyers, or that the "reality TV" analogue in the movie world are documentaries, and that's a very different thing than on TV, where "reality" means game shows.
 
RoJoHen said:
If the premise of a show requires that a family through time, then yes, I'm sorry, but you just made a scifi show. How is NOT a scifi show?! Do they know what science fiction is? :wtf:
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If they used magic to travel through time it wouldn't be sci fi.
 
Doctor Who doesn't have much of an audience in America, well under 1 million viewers for the most recent episode that I could find figures for. That's not all that great even by cable standards, where the top shows get 6M viewers, but since production costs are already paid for, it's a different calculation.

As I've already mentioned several times, sci fi survives best on cable, where expectations for audience numbers are not high, and a niche show can survive comfortably. Even at 6M, we're still talking niche - that's less than two percent of the entire population. Network TV numbers are hard for a niche show to achieve.

And Stargate is dead now, haven't you heard?
 
The show is set in the year 2149 when all life on the planet Earth is being threatened with extinction. Scientists have opened a door allowing people to travel back to prehistoric times. The Shannon family (father Jim, his wife Elisabeth, and their three children Josh, Maddy and Zoe) join the tenth pilgrimage of settlers to Terra Nova, the first human colony on the other side of the temporal doorway. However, they did not realize that they placed it in the middle of a group of carnivores.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_%28TV_series%29


They're not only time-travellers, those people are coming from the friggin future.

The premise sounds a bit like "Earth 2 meets Jurassic Park", actually.
 
RoJoHen said:
If the premise of a show requires that a family through time, then yes, I'm sorry, but you just made a scifi show. How is NOT a scifi show?! Do they know what science fiction is? :wtf:
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Obviously, the writer thinks science-fiction only means spaceships in space.:shrug:

Terra Nova is science-fiction, it makes me think of the time safari of Ray Bradbury's A Sound Of Thunder, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and even Land Of The Lost.:cool:


RoJoHen said:
I also like how the article says that Braga worked on "all three" Star Trek shows, then in the next sentence goes on to list a fourth, while completely ignoring the fact that there are actually 5 (6 if you count TAS). Dumb.
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Sadly, TAS is usually ignored when articles are written.:vulcan:
 
Ensign_Redshirt said:
The show is set in the year 2149 when all life on the planet Earth is being threatened with extinction. Scientists have opened a door allowing people to travel back to prehistoric times. The Shannon family (father Jim, his wife Elisabeth, and their three children Josh, Maddy and Zoe) join the tenth pilgrimage of settlers to Terra Nova, the first human colony on the other side of the temporal doorway. However, they did not realize that they placed it in the middle of a group of carnivores.
Click to expand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_%28TV_series%29


They're not only time-travellers, those people are coming from the friggin future.

The premise sounds a bit like "Earth 2 meets Jurassic Park", actually.
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The premise of the show blows my mind. They are headed to the past to avoid extinction. They're not going to develop a long lasting civilization in the age of the dinosaurs. The dinos themselves were wiped out by an extinction level event.
 
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