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Yahoo To Produce Sci-Fi Streaming Sitcom
jfruh (300774) writes "As the heydays of Internet portals recede into the mists of history and Yahoo tries to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up, the company has decided to dip its toes into the incredibly expensive and unpredictable world of producing full-length television shows to compete with the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and HBO. One of the two may intrigue Slashdot readers: Paul Feig, co-creator of the cult '90s hit 'Freaks and Geeks' (and more recently the director of 'Bridesmaids') will product "Other Space," a comedy-adventure about a misfit group of space travelers who stumble onto an alternate universe. The second show, about a fictional Las Vegas NBA team, will appeal to Yahoo's sports audience." I wonder how long it will be until Google, Microsoft, and Apple are also all producing TV shows.
There's no kind of atmosphere.
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Microsoft already IS producing its own shows.
No friggen clue why. I'm pretty sure Apple and Google are smarter than that. Especially Google, since they've got youtube and just have half the internet produce their video content for them.
For the last couple of years, mobile and "cloud" were the new things. Both absurd from a certain point of view - mobile because what were people doing with it exactly? Facebook and Snapchat? And cloud, as a concept, is not new. Every few years, companies don't have a choice and need to move into new markets because they're getting yelled out by shareholders. Fine. "Original Programming" is the new thing now? Everyone wants to do this (Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, now Yahoo, probably Facebook next month), they want to have a set top box in the living room that can be used for everything, but the irony is laughable because you need to own practically every set top box on the market to get all of the content out there since no one company has everything.
So, "Original Programming" is going to be three times as expensive as cable and you'll be tracked and data mined.
It's 45 years of age with teenage kids giving him trouble, bad spousal relationship, mid-life crisis...etc.
"a comedy-adventure about a misfit group of space travelers who stumble onto an alternate universe"
Otherwise known as a Yahoo board meeting
Red Dwarf is funny, but the whole space setting is just a backdrop to comedy that really could be set anywhere. I think the frustration that the OP expresses (or at least the frustration that I personally feel) is that there is little television or film that is hard science-fiction, where the dialogue doesn't consist of vacuous technobabble for color, but instead real or plausible scientific concepts actually drive the plot.
Kind of sounds like Red Dwarf.
Maybe they plan on stealing the Red Dwarf episodes, then using CGI to cover the Red Dwarf ship with the American stars and stripes and to replace the faces of the characters with something more pro-American, like the face of Tom Cruise (for Lister), the face of some Silicon Valley engineer (for Rimmer) and the face of Vin Diesel for "the Rottweiler" (formally "the Cat", but "the Cat" just isn't "American" enough). They could call the show "Red, White and Blue Dwarf", or the "Star Spangled Dwarf", or "Shock and Awe Dwarf" or something. I think it would be funny if their budget ran out before they had a chance to dub the voices over with something more American sounding. In my opinion, Vin Diesel would sound better as a British Rasta than he does now...
Yeah yeah,
Firefly is just a thin veneer of sci-fi over what could be a perfectly viable western.
Star Wars is just a veneer of sci-fi over a story that could be set in feudal japan with kame spirits.
A lot of Star Trek could be set in 1600's age of sail with minimal amounts of retrofitting teleporters into rowboats, shields into hull integrity, and scanners with sonar.
You want hard sci-fi. This is soft sci-fi.
Hard sci-fi is about how people deal with changes. The change caused by scientific progress is the topic being explored. Soft sci-fi is everything else, but set in the future.
I would also like more hard sci-fi shows/movies/games. But I'm ok with soft sci-fi too.
It's like "gifting" something..."to product" is "to make a product", right?
No. Producting is analogous to amateurducting. You see it all the time on those home renovation shows. Amateurducting doesn't have taped joints, holes cut through the floor joists, electrical junction boxes buried in the cold air returns. But with producting, you get even warmth all through the house, and everything is up to code and safe.
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Something moody, dark, and raw megatech-feeling like the superb German movie Cargo (I think it was 2009) mixed with Aliens (2 and 4), a dash of Firefly for style, and a splash of original Star Wars for colour (less of the force and more of the wacky non humanoid alien races). I would watch the shit out of that. Revelation Space would probably come closest.
IMHO, hard sci-fi doesn't sell too well to large audiences. Star Trek is more high-brow. Star Wars and Aliens, IMHO, needs the 2-hour film format to work. I'm really surprised that Firefly didn't last. It had fun and interesting characters, interesting back stories, plots that weren't run-of-the-mill stuff. Yes, there was comedy but it was nicely blended. I kinda hope Nathan Fillion decides to produce a new version of the series when he's done with Castle.
Hell, I'd like any sci fi on TV these days. I want my spaceships, dammit!
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