Slashdot Mirror
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.
Enterprise never had a chance to grow. The first two seasons of Ent were decent, but still a bit mediocre. The third season was a nice ride, but not the show we really wanted out of the prequel. Manny Coto's 4th season is EXACTLY what the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd seasons should have been, but too little too late. I love the show, always will, but TV politics have ruined many a good show. Look at the original Star Trek, or look at Farscape...
In their place, reality TV dominates. Why watch intelligent TV when we can have Growing Up Gotti?
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
There should be plenty of room for all 3 fans in my parent's basement
I mean, what could the network possibly be thinking? Don't they understand that they're cancelling the most original, innovative and entertaining Sci Fi show of this generation? How can they cancel a show with such a devoted following? How can they turn their backs on well-developed characters with their flaws and nuances? What about the great staging and the inspired writing? How can they ignore such incredible potential?
What about the tremendous buzz behind the show? What about the devoted legions of fans who are careful to never miss an episode? The ratings on this have to be through the roof -- everyone I know watches it religiously! Christ, I know people who went out and got TiVO just so they could start going out on Friday nights again without chancing setting their cheap VCRs wrong and missing it!
I mean, I'm upset, I'm angry and most of all I'm just plain astonished. I just can't get my head around this. I mean really, it just doesn't compute. I think the SciFi network ought to be ashamed of themselv...
(whispering, pause)
Oh, wait, they cancelled Enterprise?!? Just 100% for sure this time? Pft, well duh! Gee, you really had to be Miss Cleo to see that one coming. All the attention this was getting, I just figured that they must have cancelled Battlestar Galactica! Heh, oh Jesus, don't scare me like that! Heh, my hands are still shaking, man, you freaked me out! Whew...
C'mon, are you serious? You mean there were actually people willing to pay to see more of this crap? Like, real money? C'mon! An online petition with two signatures I might buy, but *pay*? Riiight....
Cancelling Enterprise... Yeah, whatever. Tragedy for all three fans of the series, I'm sure. Heh, pft... "Save Enterprise". Yeah, let me get right on that! What will the galaxy do without the heroics of Captain Archer, inspiration to mildly retarded people everywhere? What about all the memorable characters we know and love, like... er.. You know, hick-sounding white guy! Or british-sounding white guy? Or the chick in with the big boobies? (okay, 100% seriously: I will miss those boobies, but then again there's always the internet). LOL, "Save Enterprise". Ooh! We got to save Enterprise! Because, you know, it's, um, like a TV show with spaceships or something. Heh.
Whew.
Hey, is it July yet? Man, I couldn't believe that cliffhanger -- I tell ya, I haven't been genuinely surprised by a TV show in ages...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
One down, reality shows, Friends reruns and 60 Minutes to go.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
"I'm sorry son, we'll never allow a hooker in this house, and that's final!"
I don't get it.
Breaking news: Cancelled show cancelled.
Good riddance, if you ask me.
Have you read my blog lately?
Season 3 tried to bring in a good story arc (it was good). Season 4 is pretty good, but it's too little, too late.
Seasons 3 and 4 are what seasons 1 and 2 should have been like. That Cold War temporal thing when NO WHERE.
The first seasons didn't have very gripping episodes. You had the same moral dilemmas and tired clichees and the blatant use of T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) as a sex symbol to attract testosterone-pumped young males. This is something she herself didn't like - Blalock wanted T'Pol to have more depth.
But anyway... Enterprise was interesting at first. It was interesting to see starfleet outmatched against pretty much everyone they met and how they dealt with the situation.
It is certainly sad, but I guess they had their chance. Blame the Diabolical Duo Berman and Bragga. They have the negative Midas effect. Anything they touch turns to crap. Which is why the first few seasons of DS9 were also not that great. It didn't get interesting until Michael Piller took it over and Berman turned his attention to Voyager. The actors in Enterprise, I think, did a decent job.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Paramount might be waiting for Berman's and/or Braga's contracts to expire before they relaunch another ST series again?? Perhaps they want a producer that can create something other than crap? Hellooooo... Coto or Joe??
Maybe they have more neurons then we give them credit for...then again
Well a girl could hope....
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
"Star Trek Enterprise is yet another Star Trek show since the original series to run a full six seasons."
:)
Maybe because it's getting cancelled after the fourth season?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
"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?
I can just see it now. Sam Beckett going back in time and saving Scott Bakula from making the worst career move of his life (After Major League 3, that is).
All they need to do is go back in time and kill the Nazis that cancelled the show! ...Oh wait, that's why they're being cancelled...
TOS: enjoyed it in reruns as a kid. Thought the first season ruled, the second season was mostly good, the third season was headed downhill fast. Lesson: the quality (read: intelligence level) of the show's producer(s) matters. TNG: first seasons wildly uneven. Cheesy opticals (FX), unclear story lines, characters were thin at best. Season 5 was generally good. In the end, okay, but cut out about half the episodes. Lesson: quantity does not equal quality. DS9: A great idea, indifferently executed. The whole Bajoran gods idea could have been a fantastic bit of sci-fi, but in the end they just were used as deus ex machina. The introduction of the war story arc (although probably a response to Babylon 5) rescued it and made me actually want to tune in. Lesson: go somewhere with your big idea by giving the writers a framework. Voyager: Interesting idea (lost, out of touch), horribly executed. Janeway was in need of serious medication, as she was at a minimum bipolar. I wouldn't follow her as a leader for a month, much less years. The producers introduced ideas and at the end of the episode would use the "magic reset button" of time warp, tech change, or the jargon of the week. The ship acquired technology which gave it advantages, then the next episode it would be gone and might as well have never existed, to say nothing of frequently suffering damage which should have required time in dock. Utterly uncompelling and frustrating. Lesson: there's no point in having a show if it's not going anywhere with the characters, story or even the technology. Enterprise: I knew that when I heard who would produce that it would be garbage. When I heard the theme song, after cleaning up the vomit, I knew my worst suspicions were nowhere near what they should have been. The time-machine reset button, the unbelievable screwing with the canon, the notion that a ship could be remote controlled all the way from the Romulan Empire... Just...let...it...die, folks. The idiots who produce it are incapable of doing good work. It's just a money machine to them. Giving them your money is counterproductive. Find someone talented like Joss Whedon or Strasczinsky (sp?) instead. Don't save Enterprise.
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.
I do get pissed when I see a good TV show cancelled before it has a chance to find an audience. But a proper chance is two or three months, not 3 years.
Even most Trekkies found the early Enterprise scripts rancid. Stand back from your Trekkieness for a minute and consider that from the network's POV. They spend millions of bucks on a TV show, and it can't even inspire enthusiasm among hard core fans who are supposed to be a lock. Any other show that screwed up that badly wouldn't have lasted a full season, never mind getting renewed twice. Didn't get a chance? Spare me.
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.
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... but please fuck off already, you fucking nerds.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
When Gene Roddenberry created the original series, he attempted to make the series as inclusive as possible. The TOS included characters such as Uhura (black African, NOT African-American), Sulu (Asian, not Asian-American), Chekov (Russian), and many other diverse characters. In one eposiode of the TOS, when Kirk was going through some kind of court-martial based on video evidence, the Starfleet judges (admirals, actually) included not only a person of Mongoloid descent but also of Asian Caucasian descent (he looked like a South Asian). That is two out of 5 judges which is quite impressive given that the TOS was made during the 1960s when racial equality was just coming of age.
After the TOS, successive Star Trek shows became more and more white and American-centric. Anyone who looked Asian in those successive shows could not be mistaken as a person who came directly from Asia as their behavior was too American. Ditto for the "blacks". Travis Mayweather is a prime example of this American-centric nature of the successive Trek shows. Why couldn't they just have named him Emekah Olowokandi or something like that??
Where the heck were the Africans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Middle Easterns, the Egyptians, the Brazilians, the Mexicans, and of course, the Australians in the Trek shows after TOS??
Only Trek: Deep Space Nine even tried to come close to Roddenberry's ideal. Dr. Julian Bashir was obviously Middle Eastern. But they could have had a Nigerian or a Kenyan as the black commander instead of Benjamin Sisko from Louisiana.
Unfortunately, Star Trek TOS was and still remains the ONLY Sci-Fi show that attempted to be inclusive of all cultures and individuals around the world. After TOS, nothing came close. Not even Battlestar Galactica.
that could have been a believable story for a /.'er if you hadn't mentioned "wife."
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!"
Are the fans just less hard core?
Uh...no. I consider myself a hardcore Trek fan. I've never once gone to a con or even put on rubber ears. I kinda pride myself on that fact. But the shows...I know my Trek. I recently decided to download all the episodes and watch the full series. I hadn't watched any shows before, because of all the bad press other fans had given it. But I wanted to give it a chance before making a final decision.
And my final decision is this: let it die. As much as I hate saying that, I believe it's the right thing to do. It was a good concept, but poorly executed. The first problem I found was that there was too much emphasis on "filling in the gaps." They tried to explain away everything that the other shows introduced. The most glaring offence was the Borg episode. For god's sake...BORG?!? This says that the Enterprise-E crew were stupid enough to leave a whole crapload of future technology laying on Earth, potentially polluting their own timeline. AND that the Temporal Police or whatever they want to call themselves didn't do their jobs. For what? To explain away why the Borg invade the Alpha Quadrent 200 years later? Wasn't that already explained in TNG? The whole episode should have been killed in writing.
Besides that was the over-sexual use of T'Pol. You saw this happen with Voyager when Seven was brought in. They decided to start off with some hot babe in skintight uniforms on this one, killing the show's credibility in the process. Then there was the sterile acting of Reed and Archer in the first 2 season. Most of the cast was guilty of this actually. This I think was more caused by letting nearly every actor in previous shows have a chance to direct on Enterprise. And speaking of previous actors, there was far too many actors from previous shows playing in Enterprise. Part of the joy I got out of watching the show was spotting recycled actors. I've seen the guy who played General Martok on DS9 play at least 3 other characters in other Treks, including playing a Klingon on Enterprise. And they should have NEVER let Ethan Philips play a Ferengi, since he was the easiest to spot from playing one on Voyager. I didn't really like them bringing in Ferengi in the first place, but it sorta fit with the Star Trek Universe laid down by TNG. Storyline-wise, I wasn't impressed with the Temporal Cold War, and it really didn't do anything except introduce even more inconsistances in the Star Trek Universe. But at least they wrapped that up. The fourth season was picking up steam, and I would have liked to see that have been the first season. But it's too late. The damage is done. This is a hardcore Star Trek fan saying: Let It Die...
I don't dress up, or go to conventions or nitpick the blueprints of every Federation ship, I am just a fan. I fall deeply into the cores of every show there is almost, and their writing style.
I grew up on Star Trek. From TNG, to DS9 to Voyager and now Enterprise. I expanded my sci fi tastes to Farscape (god I miss it, so much), Firefly, Stargate SG1 and Atlantis, Buffy, Angel (more fantasy on those last two), and I even started to get into Battlestar Galatica despite how I don't like it's politic driven stories.
What is left? Sure Stargate SG1 is around but how long can they keep it going? I love Ben Browder being added to the cast but seriously, it's on its last season or two. Atlantis shows promise but I'm gonna say it lasts maybe 4-5 seasons. I'm not a huge BSG fan, it's good but I can't feed my sci fi craving off of just it alone.
Trek is gone. Paramount has basically said "fuck you" to the fans. I mean how much money has been raised here, for more episodes? Once Enterprise is over I will be removing UPN from my digital cable lineup just like I did "G4TV" after they shafted TechTV.
Even the Sci Fi channel learns from its mistakes. Sure they fucked over Farscape after season 4 but at least they had the balls to make a mini series to AT LEAST TRY and give fans closure. Paramount will finish this season but at what cost? It's a sheer slap in the face saying they won't accept money for new episodes. I mean what other show on earth thats cancelled/going to be cancelled could be run simply by fan donations? I'd pay money every week for Trek. Alot of fans would too.
Am I too far gone to be objectional? I think not. The first few seasons of Enterprise had their lows, I mean they really had their lows. But they had some good episodes too. And even more so I love Enterprise cause it's more human. Alot of themes, ideas, and ways of things are still done in the time period of Enterprise. People still wear hats, watch old movies, have more human forms of recreation. It seems silly but it relates more, you can actually imagine 100 years from now some form of space flight similar to warp drive, you can see how the Trek timeline actually fits in. It's doing what a prequel does, tells the backstory and sets up the future series.
Monday through Thursdays I usually watch dvd's to fill the gaps. Ocasionally I'll tune into Smallville on Wednesdays. Fridays are Trek and Stargate for me. Saturdays maybe the new weekly movie on HBO might be entertaining, and Sundays will always be dominated by The Sopranos and Carnivale.
Prime time tv is owned by sad reality tv. We have become a society of lemmings following whatever is popular and being entertained by the lowest common denominator entertainment. Even Picard would order our extinction, out of fucking mercy.
Aw Frell this
Blimey, the knives seem to be out for Enterprise now. It's like some sort of anti-fanboy brigade or something. Do people think it's fashionable to knock Enterprise or something?
Yes the series had plenty of problems. Yes, there were plenty of lost opportunities to explore the implications of the absence of things like the universal translator and teleporter.
But compared to some of the utter shit that infests tv, was it really so bad? Worse than soap operas? Or reality tv? Or those pop idol things?
To those people who seem intent on shouting "good riddance" after it, were you strapped to a chair and forced to watch it or something?
Maybe it could have been better, but as one of the few shows to portray the future in a positive light, it provided me with a good few hours of undemanding light entertainment.
I for one will miss it.
If the fans could have made a deal which somehow involved pushing more merchandise, then this might have worked. Its all about the licensing - the studios make little money on the actual series with the big money coming from ties to the show. That is evidenced by this comment from the article:
"We believe the franchise is still very vital as evidenced by the fans' demand for books, DVDs and all sorts of related merchandise."
Lightly rehased(?) western set in space?
What's unoriginal about that? What was repetitive about it?
BTW, the original Star Trek was just a lightly rehased(?) cop show set in space. You may not have liked the western themes (and who could like those ridiculous gingham dresses and the humongous sun bonnets?) but the ideas made sense and the plots were great. The lethal blow was Fox's idiocy. The demographics on the show were virtually identical to the demographics for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which was on WB. Different networks, same ratings; one got what, 11 seasons? while the other got 13 episodes. The difference? Idiots in charge. Same thing that fucks up everything.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon