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Could Fuller Take Trek Back To TV?
bowman9991 writes "Bryan Fuller, creator of the TV show Pushing Daisies and a former Star Trek writer and producer, is geared up to make it happen. The new Star Trek TV show would be based on "old style" Star Trek, rather than the more recent incarnations and variations: Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation. There hasn't been a Star Trek TV series since Enterprise was canceled after four seasons in 2005. Fuller wrote twenty one Star Trek episodes over four years, two in Deep Space Nine's final season, and the rest for Voyager. He also produced Voyager's last season. If J.J. Abrams' reboot is successful (and the latest trailer suggests it will be!) perhaps we'll see him involved with a new Star Trek TV show with the style and impact of Fringe or Lost. The new Star Trek movie featuring a young Kirk and Spock is in cinemas May 2009." Besides his work on many episodes of Trek, Fuller's work includes Dead Like Me and some of the best of Heroes. (He's one of the names I actively seek in the writing slot.) Between him and JJ Abrams, the era of Rick Berman looks to finally be at an end. Cross your fingers.
Rather than another series that will result in overpriced DVDs, I'd have loved to get a DS9 or Voyager Movie or two...
Sort of like Voyager then in that they too were Lost (in the Delta Quadrant)? Only this time I want 1,2,3,4,5,6,8 and 9 of 9.. In fact I see no reason to have any other cast member that a bunch of 7 of 9's... Well maybe a leather clad Janeway, hmmm I seem to have gone off topic.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
And Voyager was such a great series. Sarcasm intended.
Unless you liked hearing about the latest Fucktoquadillion gigastream of pure hexashitrillic energy the borg were beaming at voyager's past timestream in order to attract the hirogen to hunt them and the leprosy dudes to steal their organs.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
pushing daisies was amazing and it wasn't until the show was canceled and i started looking around that i even realized who fuller was, but have since recognized that I have long enjoyed his work without knowing who he was.
Now I know who to credit for all the entertainment that I really liked (Voyager, Season 1 heroes, Pushing daisies...)
It's a shame that pushing daisies didn't make it. I think the show was a huge victim of the writer's strike. The shortened first season killed the audience and it never recovered. it's been very disappointing for my wife and I because the shows we can watch and enjoy together are few and far between, and this was one we both really liked.
We also both really liked Heroes Season 1, but Season 2 was a complete disaster and neither of us watch it any more. It's weird how it all seems to be about fuller's presence or absence (in hindsight).
They hired Fuller for writing on Heroes again, but I think it's too late. They should just kill the show.
Oh well.
Sometimes a soul should just be allowed to pass over. Let that field lie fallow for a decade or so at least.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Rick Berman: TNG
Bryan Fuller: Failed ABC series and Voyager
OP loses credit
Something tells me Fuller won't be nearly as big into the big-breasted ladies as you might think. I think we're more likely to see buff dudes.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"If J.J. Abrams' reboot is successful (and the latest trailer suggests it will be!)..."
Yes, because trailers are always the best source for determining a film's success. In fact, why bother releasing the movie, since its success is assured?
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Voyager? Wasn't that the worst one of all? That machine should have been a little more banged up at the end but yet they had even more resources than when they started out. I know trek is BS but damn the same stories over and over get old after a while.
Let it die for a few more years at least.
Star Trek was always a fantasy to me as an engineer about what 'could be'. Just over the progression of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY you could see incremental improvements in technology. Voice controls actually worked, bio-neural networks, etc. STOP recreating (and fucking up) the original story line.
TOS happened, it's done with. Quit going before it. Stop milking the lives of Scotty, Kirk, or the beginning of the beginning of the federation.
Set something 90 years out from the end of VOY. Put the first Cardassian (or other former enemy) on the bridge (Worf). Maybe bump up Warp speed or another method of going fast (But not Warp 10 retarded shit VOY broke out). Invite some scientists writers, the writers of Futurama, to the initial writings and get some pseudo-science based technologies. Just make up some new shiny tech. Don't fill it with too much technobabble. (Stargate was a good balance in my mind).
You could easily make it dark too. DS9 is hands down my favorite series.
Federation Civil War?
Fall of the Federation?
STOP GOING BACK IN TIME.
You'd have to change the animal so much that it wouldn't seem recognizable. The old formula has become such a cliche that there's absolutely nothing you can reuse from it. Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots, everything that makes Trek Trek is what's been killing it. It's like asking "Can we make a healthy Big Mac?" Yeah, and by the time you're done removing everything that's bad about that burger, you're left with nothing but lettuce and sesame seeds.
I'd say Firefly was a great model on how to do a space show that wasn't Trek but it died after a season. I'm not really sure how that happened given the fan support, it must have just been Fox superdickery more than anything else. But aside from that, Firefly gave us a space show that was like Trek only in so much as there were spaceships -- everything else was as different from Trek as it was from other shows. Even the basic premise -- "Imagine you made a TV show about Han Solo before he and Chewie joined the Rebellion" -- even that description carries certain assumptions the show blew away.
Galactica has good production values and good acting but the writing is a crime. Half of the uber-plot of the show is a mystery, what's the Cylon's angle? What are their motivations? Why did they do what they did? And a good mystery writer needs to know how it happened before the first chapter's written because support for the whodunnit has to be written in to every subsequent chapter. Not having a clue and just pulling it out of his ass at the end is cheap and unsatisfying and that's the approach Galactica's taken. Heroes as well for that matter, and Heroes season 1 was completely awesome, it was only the later post-Fuller seasons that turned into a giant crap sandwich. But as far as BSG goes, the original was completely derivative of Star Wars and the remake seems to draw a lot more from network dramas in terms of pacing and feel.
I'd say Babylon 5 was the true post-Trek show. You could see the inspiration from Trek but it also drew on a hell of a lot of other sources, really steeped in scifi goodness. It moved beyond what Trek was and DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, they were all muddling around at the same level. They never really rose to the challenge. The times they tried, they were just ripping off B5 plots instead of doing something bigger, better, and smarter. And that's sad because for all of the greatness that was B5, there was still room for improvement.
I remain in the "stick a fork in Trek and call it done" camp. I'll take a look at the new movie just to be charitable but my expectations are extremely low. I'm willing to be surprised. I just feel that if they really want to do a wonders of space exploration and discovery show, they should really nix the whole Trek thing and come up with something brand new. The CGI has come so far these days, they can get away with stuff that couldn't have been imagined.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
And I think this is a good thing, but I can't help hearing the voice of the pushing Daisies narrator doing the classic Trek introduction.
"Our five year 3 days and 32 minute minute mission..."
And that is the problem. Look at how bad it really was. Not in comparison to even worse shows. But in comparison to GOOD shows.
They had set up a really interesting concept ... and then totally neutered it. Everyone on the ship were best friends. Even though a large chunk of the crew had declared their own war. And the ship somehow kept getting repaired. And the borg were suddenly very weak. And do we really want to go into time travel?
Now compare that to Firefly's only season. Some of the crew did not like other members of the crew. The captain was not perfect. They had to work to keep the ship flying.
Rather, Kate Mulgrew entering a restaurant near Times Square a couple of months back.
I heard the voice then I did a double take, and sure enough it was her.
She looked old.
I was tempted to go in and say hi, but I'm not that much of a geek.
This Sig does not Exist.
They just don't get it anymore. But I'll say it anyway. Science fiction and superhero comics are about satisfying male adolescent psychology. Stray from that with ass-kicking females wielding blasters and you will crash and burn. No female captains. No ass kicking female aliens. Male to male conflict. Have a strong, even arrogant male lead who is the ONE WHO IS QUICKER, SMARTER, almost all the time. It is NOT a group effort. It is about a superior male captain. Look to the original Kirk. Note that Spiderman succeeded and made a LOT of money. Unsure adolescent male becomes confident, capable, and powerful when he puts on the spiderman personality. And he saves the FEMALE....who does not kick his butt anywhere in the movies. Nor does she somehow acquire powers of her own to satisfy modern Political Correctness. As for a Vulcan, the Vulcan MUST be a blend of Vulcan and Human. It is not optional. The Vulcan exists entirely to explore human psychological and social truths. By itself, a Vulcan is a piece of cardboard.
One more point of many more I could make. Science fiction has taken the depressing direction of the failure of humanity. Star Trek I was about the success of mankind. Get back to that. Apparently "serious" series makers did not feel very adult making a story in which mankind succeeds. Ok, do it again. Get them lost. Get them destroyed. Get them wandering around. Make the characters "real" by making them mean, nasty, slutty, jerks. Make them inferior and struggling. Have the female characters engage in comments about how stupid, inferior, ridiculous, juvenile male motivations and behavior are. Fail as a series.
Oh, and don't engage in the ridiculous, like making a holographic doctor or having an alien doctor who knows more about human medicine than humans. Jeesh, who came up with that grating piece of nonsense? Someone making a job for a friend? And the sick bay should not be bigger and more technologically advanced than the bridge. etc etc etc.
The future will be more of the same, only different. Remember that.
E Proelio Veritas.
Frankly the whole charm of the TOS was that it wasn't -that- far into the future, and the basic characters just worked.
By creating Kirk and Spock and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise, Roddenberry gave us the modern equivalent of a Hercules myth. We can milk Kirk and Spock for two thousands years, and, if we are as good as the Greeks, we should.
And frankly, I'm sick of all the darkness in present science fiction. Science is advancing more all the time and if there was ever a time for optimism based on a scientific society, NOW is it. Humanity can improve, and will improve, and having a series that reminds us of what our future could be, if we chose to do it, and reminds us of our ongoing moral obligations, is a damned fine thing.
Sick of all these moral halfwits running around in sci-fi these days. Poor Adam's crying again on Galactica. Big woosy. Poor Col Tigh's drinking again, and he's a fricking Cylon. That show had all sorts of promise and then they made Adam cry all the time and Tigh into a Cylon. What the frak is that. I'm sick of complexity in characters. I want -Gods-.
This is my sig.
I think it would be a nice twist if they created a new show about Starfleet Academy. Set it in the post Nemesis Star Trek universe so as not to step on the toes of either TOS, TNG, or the JJ Abrams reboot. The story could follow the life of a select group of cadets through the rigors and trials of attending and graduating from the Academy. Would definitely allow them to provide a more 'human' look at the Star Trek universe while still getting technical enough to appease the Trekkies. Another benefit is that at the end of the show's run at the Academy, we would have a new crew, fresh out of the Academy to put on a starship for a 5 year mission and see them grow through the ranks.
"There are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -AE
I loved Pushing Daises but it failed fair and square.
I think some of these "high concept" shows are only really good for a dozen or so episodes. Unfortunately, the US system expects everything to run for 7-8 years or be deemed a failure. If PD had been made in the UK they'd have done two runs of 6-12 episodes, finished the story and gone out while they were ahead (c.f. Life on Mars UK vs. Life on Mars USA).
Heroes is another case in point: Season 1 found a fresh new way to do a superhero origin story. Shiny*. Unfortunately, once that was finished, well, either take up the spandex or go back to your families and quit whining, guys.
(also c.f. the 6 episodes in each season of BSG which are really, really good or how much better B5 got when they crammed two seasons of plot arc into one...)
Now Trek doesn't have to be high concept if they go back to the basic TOS/TNG formula: not stuck in the delta quadrant; not stuck on a space station in the vanguard of a galactic war; not a pawn in the great time ware. Nope, just a starship crew on a continuing mission to explore strange new worlds and go where no man/person/reptile/walking tree-oid has gone before. Think of a story, any story, they can stumble into it.
If they want high concept, do a movie or mini series.
* Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, everybody on the CColonBackSlash blog is probably whining about how rubbish Season 8 of Firefly is turning out to be, and asking why the hell they cancelled the Simpsons in 1995.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I liked the TOS, because there was much more of an unknown quality to the enemies - Spock was distrusted by many crew members, WTF were Romulans? - oh SH*T they look like Spock.
I much prefer the renegrade style, wild west Kirk, than Tea and Crumpets Pickard (although he is damn good)
Yes - weekly defeats with the Federation in jeopardy would be quite tense and exciting to watch.
..........FULL STOP.
Yes - weekly defeats with the Federation in jeopardy....
Was a regular thing during the last few seasons of DS9.
I gave up religion for Lent.
The original series was fantastically uneven. At the high end it was unmatched by anything that followed with episodes like Amok Time, City on the Edge of Forever, Devil in the Dark etc. At the low end, well it made me want to hurl chunks.
A common thread between many of these great episodes was great writing be authors like Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon. Bring in some good writers from Sci Fi and you will have great episodes again.
TNG was more even but never reached the heights of the great ToS episodes. Brent Spiner though was terrific.
Enterprise was mostly crap, but the 4th season where they reverted back to the old ToS/TNG formula it was pretty good. Of course by then everyone had given up on the series so it was too late.
Fringe ignores word 'science' in SF :P
I wish that's all Fringe did. Unfortunately, the writers of Fringe kidnapped, beat, and sodomized science in front of it's own children. Then, when done, gave each other high-fives for doing such a great job.
It's like they have some kind of scientific buzzword dartboard in their office that they use to write the jargon that their characters use.
Honestly, it was the most interesting piece of Star Trek since TNG. Implement some DS9 continuity and I think it could be really successful. Just my two cents.
I hope this means the Captain gets to bang a lot of hot alien babes again.
And if the Captain is a woman, so much the better.
What?
We've done the five year mission, then went forward several hundred years to the next generation, did the space station thing, got lost in a new sector of the galaxy and then went back to the beginning. Now we go back to the beginning, again?
I'm sorry but Star Trek has got boring. It follows a formula, new technology, new badder enemy, war, combat, new technology, beat bad guys - go home. Every ST after TNG followed the exact same formula, days of our lives in space.
The only hope for ST is what made it interesting in the very beginning TOS and TNG, science fiction Forget all the lame 'b' grade effects, effects are the only thing that have made trek pleasing to watch, it was the imagination that filled in the gaps when I first watched TOS, and at the time it was the most ground breaking thing on TV - fuck IT WAS TV - and the story was king!!!
but, no no no these shows are seen as 'franchises', not a craft that sparks the imagination of the viewer, as one lame idea after another is tried. I'm sure I'm not the only sci fi fan that is banging their head in frustration. Now I'm sure that the new Star Trek movie will work, but it will work in the way that when a Chinese artisan copies a work of art faithfully and skill fully, yet they still don't understand the idea that brought the art into being in the first place.
For Star Trek to work in the future (are you listening Star Trek producers) you need to get back to what Star Trek was and should be a vehicle for hard science fiction. Go read Greg Bear Eon, Eternity (get Greg Bear to write the episodes) then call on Allister Reynolds and Robert Reed or half a dozen other sci fi writers that other slashdotters could name. Better yet, make the entire story Open Source or Creative commons and start asking for submission for stories from the fans. Two words Paramount BIG FUCKING IDEAS.
For fuck sake make Star trek in your face science fiction again, or just say it's over, cause the way it's being killed is just sad.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
TOS Enterprise could do about warp 8, but there was a chance of engine damage above warp 6. There was 1 episode where an alien took over and modded the engines and it did around warp 14 or so. There was a computer game in the 70's called trek or strtrk it place a limit of warp 10 as the max speed a star ship could travel. The closer you got to warp 10 the greater the probability you would time warp. I think the voyager episode was a tribute of sorts to the computer game " +++" ;-)
The rest of the series had a faster than warp 10 being possible. Maybe there where parallel universes and warp 10 was the limit in one but not the other. ;-)
I disagree. In the past couple of years, my husband and I have been Netflixing all of TNG, as well as BSG (though we're caught up now) and, for a couple weeks, Babylon 5. We agree that while TNG was a very good show once it hit its stride in season 3, a bit more continuity would have made it really great. In fact, we're noticing the bits of continuity that we never noticed when it was on and we were in jr high (like Worf's several-season dealing-with-the-empire arc), and that alone is making the series even better for us. We love BSG for its serialness, and Babylon 5 we appreciated the serial nature but couldn't get past how bad each individual episode was.
And there is definitely a happy medium to be found between "cliffhanger at the end of every episode" and "everything tied up with a neat little bow." To leave sci-fi, Scrubs strikes this balance very nicely. There are a lot of multi-episode arcs (often found in the subplots), and continuity in general is something that happens consistently rather than once a season, but the actual main plot line of each episode is almost always resolved at the end. You get actual character development over time, unlike many traditional sitcoms, but you can also watch a single episode and be satisfied at the end.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
44 years spans at least three cultural generations.
The original Trek was military culture familiar to the WWI and Korean era veterns of the 1960s.
The New Generation was 'yuppies in space' - well-healed baby boomers, team organization, yada, yada, yada.
The newer Treks never quite caught the pathos of the younger generations. The GenY's are individualistic and artistic, sort of like "herding cats in space" - not your corporate team players. Another Roddenberry scifi show called Andromeda captured this pathos better.
I cant really characterize the newest adults - the 9/11, Iraq War, and Second Depression generation. The generation always plugged into electronic communication and networks.
The New Generation made an interesting prediction that seems to be coming true - the death of television. I recall one episode where some 21st century types were revived from hibernation and asked about television and money and the crew said they didnt do those any more. Roddenberry's uptopia did not have money or TV.
They could make a show named 'Star Trek' which shows the exploration of space, first contact with an alien civilization, how faster-than-light travel was developed, etc. And slowly progress towards the 24th century, to the level of Star Trek we know.
In this new show, the characters will watch Star Trek (TOS, TNG, DS9) just for fun. Actors from previous series could make cameo appearances as themselves, being interested in space travel.
The show could be serious, almost a documentary, which shows the dramatic side of space exploration, the politics, the international competition, the effects on people' lives, the change of culture. It could also have a side like X-Files, with conspiracies about UFOs etc, which are later resolved.
Your criticisms are interesting but like so many people, you lack perspective.
The fact is, right now more people are wealthier than they ever have been. Many of our problems today, are problems of wealth. That is a good problem to have. Bad problems to have are rampant starvation. We're WELL on the way to making all of humanity less hungry than ever. China is lifted out of poverty, India is on its way out. Dude, that's 2 billion people that can eat, that couldn't. That have money, but didn't.
Our lifetime is a TRIUMPH of progress. Even this present recession is a minor calamity compared to what other people have gone through in the past.
We take it for granted any more that when we choose to have a child, that the child will live. This was not possible even 50 years ago.
We take it for granted that when we turn on the tap water, it will be safe. By and large it is safer water than it has ever been. 100 years ago, we had the likes of cholera to worry about. Today, it doesn't happen, and neither do many other diseases born of bad water.
We have more food than ever, of every kind, and if you want all natural food, you can get that too.
Landfills might be choked with trash, but landfills are only a tiny portion of the overall earth. In the northeastern United States, a great reforestation has taken place and within our lifetimes. And there are more birds than ever before. Just look up... there used to be few birds, and now there are great and enormous flocks of them migrating. I didn't see -that- when I was a kid.
Cars are definitely better than they have been. Today's econobox weighs less, goes farther, handles better on a tank of gas. You might rip computers, but where once people bought manufactured goods subject to the tolerances of the human eye and hand, now they get consistent and reliable products made perfectly by a machine. This allows consumers to have goods of a greater complexity than ever before.
I'm routinely critical of science because in the short term, it is politicized, and over-promises. But the thing is, all of those incremental advances do pile up in a way that works out good for humans. We may find, as we advance more problems to solve, but, there's no denying that that past we leave behind, at least in terms of technology and lifespan and the human condition, is nowhere near as bright as the future that lies ahead.
Either the USA or the Chinese are going back to th e moon. It looks Mars will finally survive a Democratic administration. We have better unmanned space probes heading out to newer places than ever before. I would have NEVER thought that we would see pictures of Pluto's surface in our lifetime and we're going to get that. We are getting counts and pixel sized images of planets in other solar systems.
And plus, hell, Microsoft is shipping a version of Windows that actually works, Linux can finally recognize my mouse in X without screwing everything up, and Intel CPUs can add.
This is my sig.
When the politically correct newer versions of Trek came out, and changed the line "To boldly go where no man has gone before" - which was one of the greatest ever! - to a neutered, lame "no ONE has gone".... it pretty much jumped the shark.
I mean, everyone knows that only the first two seasons of TNG were any good (The Naked Now deserved a frigging Emmy!), after which Roddenberry died and Berman shitted it up with characters like Reginald Barclay, Gowron, and Locutus of Borg. Berman could never help create a character as perfect as Wesley Crusher and he should've stopped trying. And then he comes out with that boring, actionless piece of fluff called Deep Space Nine, which was so awful that it ran for only seven seasons in an oversaturated market. Some Cardassian tailor with a mysterious past? Who cares? An all-out war between the Federation and some major dominion in the Gamma Quadrant, filled with intrigue and plot twists? Who wants to see that?
Sarcasm aside, I think what CmdrTaco meant is that we should hope for the end of the era of Brannon Braga. He's the one primarily responsible for Voyager and Enterprise, and the only things he did that were good for the franchise were because of Ronald Moore.
Rob
Babylon 5 we appreciated the serial nature but couldn't get past how bad each individual episode was
How far in did you watch it? It gets seriously better about half way through the second season. Some of the season 1 episodes are painful to watch (I'm primarily thinking of TKO here), but by the time you get to season 3 that just doesn't happen any more.
Give Babylon 5 more of a chance, the first season is terrible, to the point that I had a hard time getting through. But someone promised me that if I held out to season two I would be hooked and that I would think it the best Sci Fi out there. Well, the second promise never held, but it is my second favorite Sci Fi out there. And once you hit season 3 you won't be able to stop even to sleep.
Starships on Trek have been done. You can't do yet another one, without falling back onto the old formula. DS9 was good because it was a different formula, but even it got stale after a while. Star Trek Academy would suck, please don't do that. If Trek does come back, I'd like to see a show based on the idea of a (Culture reference here) "Special Circumstances" team, a group of top Starfleet specialists who are basically a special operations team that are show into dangerous situations, and with limited equipment and resources they need to resolve a serious problem that concerns the Federation. Or something else. Just not yet another Enterprise.