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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."
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
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.
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.
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
That was really Admiral Janeway who came from an alternate timeline to dine at Olive Garden.
Fun fact: the ablative hull armor is actually made of stale Olive Garden breadsticks.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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.