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Andromeda To Become Less Complex?
Prehensile Plant writes "After 7 years of Voyager and now the godawful Enterprise, the guy responsible for everything good about Deep Space Nine has just been sacked from the show he developed. Robert Hewitt Wolfe has parted company with the last bastion of scifi for people with half a brain - Andromeda. Wolfe said: "Basically, they want the show to be more action driven, more Dylan-centric, and more episodic. They also want more aliens, more space battles, and less internal conflict among the principal characters. Also, they want a lot less continuity so as not to confuse the casual or new viewer with too much backstory." Slipstream has the full scoop.
About the only thing objectionable about Enterprise thus far has been the contrivance of the distrust between Vulcans and Humans. It's as if the writers simply wanted to invert tradition for the pure hell of it.
Other than that it has been somewhat entertaining.
...of wanting less continuity. Too much continuity does make it hard for new viewers to get into. I have never watched Babylon 5, for the sole reason that I would like to watch it from start to finish in the correct order, which is virtually impossible now that I missed its heyday (no one runs it any more and it's far to large to rent, even if it was available). Having less (not no) continuity would allow people to pay close attention to every episode if they wanted to , but not get totally confused by missing a show or two. The X-files actually did this pretty well (for a while).
Translation:
"Despite the fact that the average Sci Fi viewer is ten times more intelligent than the average soap opera viewer, we didn't think they'd be smart enough to follow a complex story line. Also, it doesn't make a difference if the episodes are bad, just as long as more people watch them. Only Star Trek geeks have pride in their work."
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
All the strange new worlds have been discovered. They should concentrate the show on the wars with the Klingons, Romulans and conflicts with other species. After more than 10 seasons of strange new worlds what else is left? How many more humanoid type races can the make up artists think up? All the alien races on star trek are very simplistic and concentrate on one quality of humanity. By now I think they are out of qualities and should have the human race covered.
I liked the pilot, but all the other episodes are hardly original and even kind of boring. Perfect example is a few weeks ago when they went to the planet colonized 80 years ago that got irradiated and the humans now live underground. They should fire the writers. It sounded so stupid trying to invent a new dialect for those people and making it sound like bad Shakespeare.
Sci-Fi (http://www.scifi.com/babylon5/) has been running Babylon 5 episodes (and the movies, and the 13 episodes of the follow up series Crusade on occasion) in order for over a year now. I missed it during the original run, but have since seen the vast majority of the show during this new run.
Moreover, they funded a new B5 movie which will air in January, B5: Legend of the Rangers (http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers).
:wq
It's sad that producers have such a low opinion of viewers these days, that they choose to dumb down otherwise intentionally texdured and compled material. Gene Rodenbury would be rolling over in his grave if his ashes weren't floating in space.
The scary thing is the producers might be right. The steps probably will improve ratings for the show, which is a pathetic comentary on television audiances.
Also, I periodically watched 'Earth: Final Conflict' but this season the producers decided to trash the plot arc and introduce an episodic action driven cookie-cutter plot strategy. There really isn't any good Sci-Fi out there, except perhaps Stargate-SG1 and The Outer Limits.
On the other hand, since none of us are actively producing television series, we don't really have much of a right to complain. Some may say that producers should listen to us because we, the audience, are the 'customers' and are always right, but certainly the changes being made to these shows are based of viewer feedback and focus groups, with the intent to improve ovarall ratings and thus proffit.
Perhaps the programming via subscription model that as tried several times a few years back, needs to be applied to Sci-Fi series. I havn't heard much about this model ($19.95 per season per viewer) recently which leads me to believe the original attempts ere spectacular failures, but perhaps with the more dedicated audiences of Sci-Fi, it would work better.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I can see the next two Sci-Fi series now:
- StarFleet's Most Exciting Chases
- When Klingons Go Wild
Oh yeah, and several stupid "reality TV" dating/elimination shows. (But with aliens)
Maybe they'll turn TROOPS into a series...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.