will STAR WARS do better?

[RobertScorpio]

We all know that after season 4 of TNG, the number of people watching TREK started to taper off. I think at it's peak TNG was at 19 millioin, or something like that...Enterprise ended with 1.7 million. Something seriously went wrong. And as I said elsewhere, the failure of modern scifi shows to really generate pure numbers, BSG-FIREFLY among them, means to me that something is wrong with the ship-in-space concept. And you can't blame it all on lack of story, because BSG-FIREFLY fans brag about their story content and yet no one outside of 3 million people watch...

STAR WARS is going to be putting out a live action TV show in the next couple years. It will also have a new cartoon, but the live action show, to me, will be the last chance for a SCIFI show to get respectable ratings..

But maybe TV has so many selections, 5 million will be considered a hit now (SMALLVILLE's numbers on a good week).

So, what are your guesses as to how big of an audience a live action Star Wars TV show will get..

And...what are your box-office predictions of the next TREK movie...

Rob
Scorpio

 

[RyanKCR]

I think the real problem with some to most genre shows, especially Sci-Fi is that instead of stories about being in the future or being in space, etc., we get generic character stories that just happen to be in the future or in space. For me, shows like CSI work but ER doesn't. Let me give you an example. ER advertised about a story comming up about a little boy being brought in from another country for treatment for tetralogy of Fallot (a defect I have) but the actualy story on the show was the same old who's sleeping with who and who is moving away etc. The bit about the boy took up less the 2-3 mins of the entire show. That's what I see as the major problems with genre shows today.

 

[Saxman1]

Are you kidding me? If the proposed live action Star Wars show really happens, it will be though the roof. I say this as a fan, but if they slapped the words STAR WARS on the screen and it was an hour of C3P0 slapping R2D2 on the top of his "head", it would have boffo numbers. Chewbacca could shoot his laser crossbow at targets for an hour and it would be huge. Why? Because Star Wars is still seen as cool while Star Trek is for nerds. Like us.

 

[JNG]

Are you kidding me? If the proposed live action Star Wars show really happens, it will be though the roof. I say this as a fan, but if they slapped the words STAR WARS on the screen and it was an hour of C3P0 slapping R2D2 on the top of his "head", it would have boffo numbers. Chewbacca could shoot his laser crossbow at targets for an hour and it would be huge. Why? Because Star Wars is still seen as cool while Star Trek is for nerds. Like us.

More or less. Whatever one thinks of the "for nerds" idea, Star Wars is just a much bigger thing than Trek, with a lot more money and hype involved. The possibility that Star Wars TV series ratings will be disappointing enough for anyone to say so is pretty low. It also would really have to tank to make Lucas not want to do it any more; Young Indy was not much of a hit after a while, and he kept heavy support behind that as it bled money.

 

[-Brett-]

A Star Wars TV series will start out strong, but it'll lose the audience very quickly.

Wars is less considered less nerdy because there's so relatively little of it. It's a couple hours every few years. Yeah, there's an extensive "expanded universe", but mainstream America isn't even aware of it's existance, so it doesn't count.

Weekly Star Wars would almost immediately become every bit as nerdy as Trek.

 

[TrekkieJeff2000]

Weekly Star Wars would almost immediately become every bit as nerdy as Trek.

I agree. I have met maybe 2 people that have read any of the Star Wars novels, but nearly everyone I know has seen the movies.

It would seem that the more you get "into" science fiction, the more nerdy you are considered.

Not that it's all that bad to be considered nerdy, haha.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I'm not gonna guess about the live action Star Wars show. I know it will get a huge initial audience, but if it sucks, it will fall off a cliff. Like anything else.

Lucas can count on big-budget SFX on the big screen to mask his serious problems with writing characters, dialogue and plot. On the small screen, there's nowhere to hide.

Maybe he'll be smart and turn writing duties over to others. Oh, and he needs to turn casting duties over to others, too. He ain't too hot with that, either.

 

[DanTheGrey]

I think part of the appeal of a SW show is that there hasn't been one before. If they do it right it could be a success, they do it badly it will go down in flames same as any other show, including Trek.

I think that a lot of people in the media and the boardrooms assume that because something has a certain label, that the fanbase will slavishly deliver them a "sure thing".

Would I watch a new Trek show? Yes.
Would I continue to watch if it was bad? No (and that's happened twice now)
Will I watch SW? Yes, I'm quite looking forward to it.
Will I watch it if it's horrible? No

 

[alicelouise]

TV shows are now aimed at niche markets. 3 million viewers in a coveted niche is more valued than 50 million viewers in an uncool demographic. The flops of long ago, think "Hello Larry" or "Supertrain" had more viewers than "Friends". The Original Battlestar Galactica had more viewers than nuBSG. So numbers don't mean that much. This is why "Smallville" can command more advertising dollars than the CBS Evening News.

I'm glad that ST:TOS came along when it did. The Nielsen Ratings mad 1970s would have killed it forever.

 

[cardinal biggles]

I think the real problem with some to most genre shows, especially Sci-Fi is that instead of stories about being in the future or being in space, etc., we get generic character stories that just happen to be in the future or in space.

Except that TOS wasn't really about being in the future or being in space, it was about using the futuristic outer-space setting as a clever way to dress up the same stories you could tell elsewhere. Want to comment on the imperialist practices of the Soviet Union? Introduce the Klingons. Instead of doing a man-vs-machine story about some filing clerk losing his job to a computer, have Kirk's command threatened by the M-5. Take a classic of American literature like Moby-Dick, and turn the White Whale into an ice cream cone of enormous destructive force, and replace Captain Ahab with this week's "Crazy/Evil Guest Admiral."

For me, shows like CSI work but ER doesn't. Let me give you an example. ER advertised about a story comming up about a little boy being brought in from another country for treatment for tetralogy of Fallot (a defect I have) but the actualy story on the show was the same old who's sleeping with who and who is moving away etc. The bit about the boy took up less the 2-3 mins of the entire show. That's what I see as the major problems with genre shows today.

It's a problem only because you're expecting one thing from the show, when it's delivering something else (and has been since Day One). ER has rarely been about actual diseases and injuries, and has always been more focused on the lives of its characters. If you don't like character drama, that's fine, but it's not a "problem" with today's TV shows except insofar as you prefer a different focus to the stories.

 

[RyanKCR]

I think the real problem with some to most genre shows, especially Sci-Fi is that instead of stories about being in the future or being in space, etc., we get generic character stories that just happen to be in the future or in space.

Except that TOS wasn't really about being in the future or being in space, it was about using the futuristic outer-space setting as a clever way to dress up the same stories you could tell elsewhere. Want to comment on the imperialist practices of the Soviet Union? Introduce the Klingons. Instead of doing a man-vs-machine story about some filing clerk losing his job to a computer, have Kirk's command threatened by the M-5. Take a classic of American literature like Moby-Dick, and turn the White Whale into an ice cream cone of enormous destructive force, and replace Captain Ahab with this week's "Crazy/Evil Guest Admiral."

For me, shows like CSI work but ER doesn't. Let me give you an example. ER advertised about a story comming up about a little boy being brought in from another country for treatment for tetralogy of Fallot (a defect I have) but the actualy story on the show was the same old who's sleeping with who and who is moving away etc. The bit about the boy took up less the 2-3 mins of the entire show. That's what I see as the major problems with genre shows today.

It's a problem only because you're expecting one thing from the show, when it's delivering something else (and has been since Day One). ER has rarely been about actual diseases and injuries, and has always been more focused on the lives of its characters. If you don't like character drama, that's fine, but it's not a "problem" with today's TV shows except insofar as you prefer a different focus to the stories.

Actually in TOS a lot of the stories relied on some sort of Sc-Fi element to tell the story and that is why it worked. Shows today have stories that could be told in any setting with no changes due to the setting. That is my issue.

 

[Sean Aaron]

Could start out strong, but after watching the six films back-to-back (along with the Clone Wars animated shorts) over a three day period, I have to say that I found it largely without depth; I imagine that the Star Wars of an ongoing TV series will be quite different from the Star Wars of the films and I might not be surprised if it's a success, but I will be surprised if it's any good...

 

[RAMA]

We all know that after season 4 of TNG, the number of people watching TREK started to taper off. I think at it's peak TNG was at 19 millioin, or something like that...Enterprise ended with 1.7 million. Something seriously went wrong. And as I said elsewhere, the failure of modern scifi shows to really generate pure numbers, BSG-FIREFLY among them, means to me that something is wrong with the ship-in-space concept. And you can't blame it all on lack of story, because BSG-FIREFLY fans brag about their story content and yet no one outside of 3 million people watch...

STAR WARS is going to be putting out a live action TV show in the next couple years. It will also have a new cartoon, but the live action show, to me, will be the last chance for a SCIFI show to get respectable ratings..

But maybe TV has so many selections, 5 million will be considered a hit now (SMALLVILLE's numbers on a good week).

So, what are your guesses as to how big of an audience a live action Star Wars TV show will get..

And...what are your box-office predictions of the next TREK movie...

Rob
Scorpio

Ahem , let me mention a third time today that STNG's ratings did in fact, NOT go down....

I would like to point out to the many legions of fans I have encountered online that think the ratings are solely related to quality, that shows in syndication are almost non-existent today, and the market is totally different than it was when STNG was around. TV is becoming more like the internet in that its a niche market instead of a MASS market. Normally a show like Enteprise could be considered a good success with 4-5 million viewers in this day and age, whereas even in 1995 it wouldn't have been. Perhaps in 10 years we will all look back and say "yeah, a lot of the ST perceived decline had to do with the changing shape of technology and tastes rather than poor quality".

As a quick example, my stepdaughter is enamored with the internet. She rarely watches tv, but she DOES watch video online. Instead of sitting down on t he couch, she actively searches for what she wants, and its out there on demand. Eventually as TV and PCs become interchangable, this will be common and the ratings as we now know them will be meaningless, its already begun!

RAMA