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Sarah Connor Chronicles — Why It Died
brumgrunt writes "Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of network. The two were never going to get on. Plus: how the Terminator name proved more hindrance than aid."
...in some fashion. Fox has learned that geeks buy DVDs of TV shows they once loved. Sometimes they even make new content.
I think more to the point it was none of those things. He's using the terms to rationalize why the show was canceled. Basically saying the show was too good for FOX and that's what FOX canceled it but if it was on another network, it would have lived on...honestly, no, because it SUCKED!
Bottom line: another Logon's Run.
The show was good, a handful of people here saying it sucked makes no difference in the big picture. What the article dosn't talk about was the change-over in corporate leadership and show time scheduling. As the studio leadership changed over, they had new people take over that wanted to push their perfered shows; the re-do the scheduleing and put Terminator: TSCC at a time slot that was certin to kill the show, just so they could take the better time slot and push their programming. Also, they never really announced when they changed from the orignal show day and time. The die hard fans picked up on this, but the regular viewers who enjoyed the show had no clue and figured, hey guess it got cancelled and never bothered to look into it further, so the ratings dropped, and the show finally did get cancelled. Too bad, it was a good story line, and they never had filler episodes, each episode was a continuation of the previous, which i liked very much.
A simpler explanation is that this show was just another attempt to increase the profits of the terminator franchise.
I don't think that in itself a problem - I'm looking forward to seeing Terminator 4, after all - I guess the problem was trying to cash in on the name, but also Fox expecting it could be done on the cheap.
Whether it was an attempt to make profit or not, I've always thought a TV series spin off would be interesting to see - in particular, showing stories set during the war (which this series did to some degree, and which Season 3 would have shown far more of, by the looks of how it ended). I don't really care who does it, as long as it's done reasonable well (and I think this show was generally good), and as long as they actually follow through with it.
But instead Fox give us a half-story that's cut off on a cliffhanger, with lots of loose ends around. It means that although I loved it, it's useless to the Franchise as a whole (unless someone else continues that story). I also fear it makes it far less likely that anyone else will want to do a TV series based on it (because of the expectation of failure, but also the confusion in all the additional storylines that have to be considered non-canon).
I can understand trying to build a storyline to try to build a base to build the story on, but to spend an entire season doing so...not the way to make good TV. They spent the entire season moving towards something, but we never really got any idea of the something until the last 45 minutes of the season.
let me spell out a basic point here: Terminator = Action there was little action this season.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Sci-fi stories don't all take part in the same Universe, and there are only 2 properly hard women in TTSCC (not including Cameron). Though I noticed the guy who invented Ghost in the Shell does seem to like his female protagonists (Dominion Tank Police, Appleseed, and probably more I don't know about), and he doesn't do much to make them unique from show to show..
which is totally what she said
non-populist, meditative, complex
... and yet they way I learned it existed was through bus stop posters of a woman in a vest with a shotgun slung over her shoulder.
Target your marketing.
And none of them mattered.
Once the killer robot gets a head shot on the boy (he's dead, no chance of resuscitation) the show is over. The "very complex plot with many main characters" collapses because there is nothing else to carry it.
A well written series would not have that flaw.
Skynet could end up ensuring that it never gets created.
Funny you should mention that. Whilst watching T2 the other day with some friends, we were taking a little trip on the Time-Travel-Paradox line, and came up with this little nugget:
If in the original film, the 1st Terminator sent back had indeed completed it's mission and killed Sarah Connor, then that would have ensured Skynet never gets/will be created.
Im starting to wonder if Summer Glau is cursed. We will see with the next series she is in that is absolutely fantastic and get's canceled. Third time is the charm right?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Claudia Christian (Susan Ivanova) made unreasonable demands for cash, so the character had to go away.
Debatable. I saw Claudia Christian on stage at a con the weekend of the announcement, and she told her side of the story. She said that she had just asked for some time off (three or four episodes) to work on other projects, and Strazynski refused. That was the deal-breaker in her new contract, so she refused to sign. Then JMS spread the story that she was greedy. She said in public that she did not ask for more money.
As I said, this is her side of the story, but I found her very personable and believable.
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That's a too circular, which wouldn't explain how the machines got created in the first place.
T2 made a point to say that Cyberdyne expedited (but not originally responsible for) the development of skynet and the machines. T3 (as crappy as it was) drives this point by stating that no matter what, "Judgement Day" was inevitable (thus couldn't be stopped by simply destroying Cyberdyne), and that skynet would be created with or without Cyberdyne- this time the Air Force's Cyber Research division would be responsible.
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You make a good point about series there. TV should do more miniseries in which a story is developed and completed drawing to a definite ending. The stories are more compelling when they don't look like they're contrived to keep the series going indefinitely.
I don't agree. There were two possible endings to the story in Terminator 1 -- Either the T-800 is destroyed and pieces of it are recovered by Cyberdyne systems or it survives and, to quote a famous engineer from another movie about time travel, "How do we know he didn't invent the thing?" Cyberdyne systems could have found themselves with a new chief researcher with a few odd habits and a mean temper.
The only way for the closed time loop which created Skynet to be broken is if the Terminator is completely destroyed such that no trace of its existance can be found. This happened in the last scene of Terminator 2, which is why the story ended there and no effort was made to make a second sequel, TV series, or anything else like that.
Kind of like how there only needed to be one Highlander movie.
1. It was on Fox. They always cancel good shows after one season.
2. That this show wasn't good was why it got a second season. Being scifi was the final nail in the coffin.
3. It wasn't very good and didn't have much direction. Writers wasted too much time on meaningless filler.
4. Most fundamental problem -- the Terminator universe is tapped out. There's not really many more stories to tell, at least not with the current characters.
5. They're trying to follow up a mega-budget best action movie of all time with a small-budget TV series. Never will a budget be more painfully obvious than in that situation. "We can't afford to fight the Romulans, we don't have the budget for it! We'll have to negotiate."
After T2 I felt that there was really no more need for any sequels, the story was done. If they absolutely had to tell a story, the only one left was the future war. Keeping up with the time travel at this point would have just become a paradox wankfest. T3 turned out to be as weak as everyone feared. T4 has the potential of being good but some of the reviews I read are fairly devastating saying it has 'splosions but no heart, no characters to invest in.
As far as a Terminator TV show goes, it has all the weaknesses of a time travel movie sequel. More terminators have to get sent back, it runs the risk of becoming Highlander except instead of immortal of the week we get terminator of the week. You also end up with villain decay. Arnie was terrifying in T1 and it took a whole movie to kill him. In the TV show you have T-800's showing up and getting whacked with a single blow. Granted, in T1 they had access to shitty weapons and a T1 going up against infantry with heavy weapons would actually be at a disadvantage. Arnie never moved fast enough to avoid taking hits in T1, he was just tough enough to absorb the damage. If the cops were armed with 50 cal machine guns, he'd probably have been immobilized. Anti-armor weapons would blow pieces off of him, hyper-alloy combat chassis or no. But this makes a lot of sense. A Terminator isn't designed to be the perfect armored fighting machine, that's what the huge tanks and hunter-killers were for. The Terminator was about infiltration, trading protection for camouflage. It can pass for a human until it gets close enough to do some damage. It can crawl through the warrens the humans live in, places where the larger units can't fit.
The producers really should have gone and invented their own show instead of making a Terminator spin-off. But if they were dead-set on doing Terminator, they should have just set the whole thing in its own continuity and said "Let's do a Terminator where we don't ignore time paradoxes but embrace them." Show the timelines changing over the course of the show, some things the characters recognize and other things are left only to the audience to observe. Ok, so originally Skynet is getting its ass kicked and decides to time travel to stop the resistance. The war was sixty years in the future and there was no John Connor, it was trying to kill someone else. Kyle Reese was sent back in time, couldn't protect the original target but met and fell in love with Sarah Connor and fathers John Connor. Knowing that the war was coming, they can create a resistance movement before Skynet strikes. The war still happens and now Skynet makes the same time travel assassination decision but focuses on John Connor instead. It fails but pieces are left behind from the original Terminator which accelerates the research program that develops Skynet. Skynet itself is unaware of these changes to the timeline. When it tries sending back a T1000, it schisms the timeline and now there are two competing futures with one common past. Only one of these futures can be realized. So now Skynet is at war with itself since each one wants to be the sole victor.
The way that would play out in the show would have been a fucking head trip. Events of previous episodes may or may not have happened. Characters who were killed may end up being alive again no
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T3 kinda addressed that though. Even with the chip destroyed, and all the research at Cyberbyne gone, Skynet was still created by a seperate time a bit later.
Part of the theme of that movie (and part of what the show missed and I hated it for) was that Skynet was sort of an unavoidable eventuality of humanity's drive towards better computers and technology. Skynet is going to come about regardless, and everything the Connor's do is only staving off the inevitable.
I think that in the same manner, Skynet is also trying to fight the inevitable. If by some weird chance he kills John, another leader WILL take his place. Just as humanity is destined to create an AI opponent so are they destined to create a leader to fight it. That's the neat thing about the last episode of the show that I did like (thought it was not addressed too deeply). When John jumps forward that last time, he jumps into the future. He skipped the entire time that he was supposed to be fighting. NOBODY knew him or had every heard of John Connor . . . yet the resistance was still there and fighting.
That's what bugs me about Sarah Connor. Rather than trying to prevent the war which is basically going to happen regardless, her ass should be stocking up on weapons, ammo, etc, and John should be becoming as badass as possible. Essentially, everything that was implied as happening off-screen between T1 and T2 that they just gave up on after another terminator showed up.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
As harsh as the AC above is, they definitely have a point. You can't see Glau's bones in her arms and, from carefully studying all the large size pictures I found find of her on Google Image search (some of the most worthwhile studying I've ever done...) I believe that those are her natural boobs.
Breasts are pretty much the first thing to go on a woman when they stop eating - they're mostly made of fat after all. After that you can see the bones in their arms and also the bone structure in the face becomes clearly visible.
Victoria Beckham is one of the classic celebrity examples of someone who doesn't eat enough. Notice the fake breasts - you can clearly see her right nipple through that top, it points slightly up and to the right - and you can see her cheek bones far too clearly.
I'm not saying she has a proper eating disorder as that would be totally unfair and impossible for me to know. I'm just pointing out that that's what people start to look like when they do have a disorder. Obviously it can get far worse; I've known an adult woman whose weight fell to about 4 stone.
Summer Glau is physically perfect, neither too fat nor too thin. We should have her preserved, naked and petrified, for all time!
Nick
They have ships that can move from planet to planet with relative ease (and seemingly great speed) and yet they still used 6-shooters and shotguns as their weapon of choice. WTF Mate?
Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if kinetic energy (things that shoot stuff at high velocities) will always be the weapon of choice even far in the future. Even with advanced materials of today, it's really hard to stop a very fast and heavy projectile without using something very heavy which would still probably take permanent damage. Phasers just seemed silly to me because if you had the technology to create such a thing, you probably had the technological level create some lightweight device that could repel such a weapon.
Even if there were advanced weapons, the crew of Firefly could barely afford to keep the ship together, so it make sense that they would use old school weapons.
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