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Paramount Says Enterprise Cancellation Is Final
Kethinov writes "The Save Enterprise campaigns appear to have been for naught. Paramount has declared that they will not be accepting any amount of money from fans to continue to produce Star Trek Enterprise. With the decision final, Star Trek Enterprise will be the first Star Trek show since the original series not to run a full seven seasons." From the letter: "Paramount Network Television and the producers of Star Trek: Enterprise are very flattered and impressed by the fans' passionate outpouring of attention for the show and their efforts to raise funds to continue the show's production." Commentary also available from TrekToday.
... would perhaps be to try to redirect the money to The Internet Movie Project ...
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or a similar instance
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CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Disclaimer: Not a flame, just an observation that a previous version of ST was saved by fans.
How come the legions of fans didn't save Enterprise from the same fate of Star Trek?
Are the fans just less hard core? Or is all that money they sink into merchandice not affecting the bottom line enough?
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
B5 isn't really a good example. B5 ran it's full story arc. The sequel series was cancelled, but it really wasn't very good.
... now there's a great show struck down before it could get going. As much as I'm enjoying Battlestar Galactica I'd trade it for a new Firefly tv series in a heartbeat.
Firefly
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
"Paramount has declared that they will not be accepting *any amount of money* from fans to continue to produce Star Trek Enterprise."
This should tell you something important.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
They would like 60 minutes of viewing a fish bowl with one fish in it if it sold advertising. This was not the result of anyone's personal grudge. The show did not draw advertisers because the show had low ratings. That is all there is to it.
If you don't like it then why don't you produce your own show that has all of the qualities you loved about Voyager?
B5 was a reasonably entertaining show, but IMO it was critically flawed because of the extreme "cringe factor" that worked its way in, especially in the later episodes.
C'mon, we're talking about a series where two advanced races spend thousands of years and unimaginable amounts of effort to influence the evolution of the galaxy only to suddenly pack up and leave because, at the denoumont of the entire serious, Bruce Boxleitner yells "Get the hell out of our galaxy!". The cheese was too thick to get past. "As my grandfather used to say, 'cool!'"...
B5 was better than Enterprise and Voyager and, IMO, it was the reason that DS9 was forced to become watchible in its last couple of seasons. But overall (and still, obviously, in my opinion), it was still a flawed show in a way that BSG is not (at least, not yet).
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
the one surprise about this is that they didn't let the series go for a full five seasons. common wisdom has it that in order to successfully syndicate a series you have to have at least five seasons (about 130 episodes) of a series for it to be really profitable.
syndicated series are typically stripped - one episode a day five days a week. one season, 26 episodes is enough for just over five weeks. 2 seasons is ten weeks (two and a half months). 4 seasons is five or six months of programming. maybe a little more. it's kind of iffy for a 3 or 4 season series to be successful in syndication. classic trek was exceptionally successful with only 3 seasons. other series aren't always so successful.
perhaps the dynamics of syndication on cable, sales of dvd box sets, and the reduced profitablity of conventional teevee and cable broadcasts are changing how expensive series like 'enterprise' are financed. but i always thought that it was with the fifth season that the accountants could finally throw away the bottle of red ink.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
earmarked to keep the voyager probes up and running.
That way you'd be funding real space stuff and it still has Star Trek relevance.
No, he's talking about the original Star Trek series from the '60s. And he's right -- it started out fairly good, but the third season wasn't all that great, e.g. Abraham Lincoln flying through space.
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Dude, that show sucked. Talk about beating a dead horse.
Weird aliens that always look like humans, good guys that ALWAYS win at the last possible moment with some crazy technical miracle, magical SciFi gadgets that are backed with ridiculous jargon, doctors with miraculous cures for every insane ailment.... bleh, spare me.
I love SciFi, and there was a point in time when that entertained me, but I need a new story. This one has be rehashed and told too much.
As far as space dramas go, my money is on the new Battlestar Galactica series. No doubt, it's an old title. But at least is has been reworked to avoid tired SciFi cliches.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
No, the lethal blow to Firefly was that it was a lightly rehased western set in space. Yes the writing was good, but the plots were unoriginal and repetetive.
He said his reasons were because he needed a character that was closer to the Shadows to pull off what he would do later. He realized when the first season was finished that Sinclair would be sitting around on his thumbs until season 3. Sheridan was strictly a story decision.
Last time I checked, The Animated Series is since TOS, and it did not run 7 seasons.
you do realize that for all the hoopla over BSG Enterprise still beats it in the ratings.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I actually wanted the series to be based on the 29th-century USS Relativity - I mean, imagine if the time travel was the core of the show, and not just a Deus Ex Machina gimmick to pull a retcon out of a hat?
... maybe the last decade of star trek has all been a dream?
While we're at it, imagine if Rod Stewart hadn't been involved, and if Gene Roddenberry was still alive, and if he kiboshed Enterprise to keep Firefly alive
I just get so sick of the Firefly fandom always popping up to spout all their little reasons and conspiracy theories about why the show got cancelled. First, did you even watch the show when it aired? Or are you yet another fan late to the series on DVD? Because, if you had watched it, you would know that it aired three episodes (9/20,9/27,10/4), was pre-empted once (10/11), and then aired five more episodes (10/18,10/25,11/1,11/8,11/15). Hardly what I would call preempted CONSTANTLY. If so many of the fans wouldn't have been so freaking late to the party, maybe it wouldn't have had Nielsen numbers that went 4.0, 3.6, 3.3, 2.7 for the first four episodes. Notice a trend? You want more 'facts'. Among all fox original shows, Firefly placed 14 of 15, 14 of 16, 12 of 12, 12 of 14, 15 of 15, 19 of 20...etc.
As far as the out of order argument, that's just stupid. What are you, 8? If you couldn't figure out what was going on in the show by watching The Train Job, then I am not entirely convinced you can operate a television in the first place. It's not rocket science, it's TV.
I could go on, but let me just sum this up for all of the Firefly, Dark Angel, Farscape, Enterprise, Roswell, Miracles, Milennium, Invisible Man, etc fans out there. These shows were cancelled because nobody fucking watched. It really is that simple. Get a top 20 rating and the network will trip over their dicks doing things for you. Flounder at the bottom of the list, nice knowing ya chump.
Instead of asking why all these networks keep cancelling all of the sci-fi shows, you should be asking why sci-fi fans cant be bothered to watch the shows in the first place. Why does a show have to be in danger of being cancelled before anyone can be bothered?
I am one of the biggest Firefly fans you will run in to, but I don't blame Fox for cancelling their last place show. I blame the crappy Whedon fans that didn't watch, and didn't tell people to watch. I blame every bastard I have seen post on a message board after seeing the DVD something like "This is a great show, why did it get cancelled?"
Granted, some were, but that's not why they had guns...no one was supposed to get on the ship anyway. It's not like you could just stroll in.
In fact, the only person who boarded the ship against their will snuck on there, via shadowing them and an EVA. As far as we know, there is no commonly used 'hostile boarding procedure', and thus carrying guns around to protect against that would be stupid.
So if you're watching it thinking it's Star Trek and random people can beam onto your ship, sure, the guns are stupid. (Although slow slug-throwers aren't that dangerous.)
But on Firefly, worrying about people being on your ship is rather akin to worrying about people breaking into your airplane. It's silly and just going to kill you both if they try.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
So... you watch shows because everybody else (or at least those who decide ratings) watch the show?
Well, don't we all to some degree? I watch it because it's good, but it's a good show that's getting great ratings and has a wave of critical support that supercedes even Farscape or Firefly, and especially Enterprise. As far as not seeing Battlestar, there are other ways of getting it both legally and questionably (the first episode is available on scifi.com).