Enterprise, genre TV, etc.

Okay, so scuttlebutt has it that UPN is moving Star Trek: Enterprise to 9PM Wednesday, against Angel (as opposed to 8PM Wednesday, against Smallville). Even more importantly, they're talking about firing Rick Berman. And the whole future of Enterprise, and, since it's the only part left right now, the future of the whole Star Trek franchse, is in jeopardy.

First off, there's a lot of time on the network TV schedule that's not against other genre programming. Why, oh why, nust network idiots think that their show can ``win'' instead of getting the same large(r) ratings for all the programs?

Second, as good as it will probably be to get rid of Berman, and I hope the rumor's true, why can't they go ahead and get rid of Braga as well? They don't have to worry about Jeri Ryan walking off set anymore. And, for that matter, why does ST have to pander and specifically present large-busted women? Even Nicole deBoer, a flat-chested woman if there ever was one, claims that she was forced to wear a padded bra. Why did they cast her in the first place, then? But Jolene Blalock seems to have gotten a silicone-ectomy, at least in the chestal area.

Third, if they cancel Enterprise, might UPN pick up the vastly superior Firefly? It doesn't have the franchise behind it, but it's probably less expensive, if still more expensive than Fear Bachelorette or whatever.

Stating my biases up front, I've always been a big fan of Babylon 5, among other reasons, because it's (almost) always had good writing, strong characters, and never pandered to the need to "sex up" outer space (and yet still had its share of sexy scenes...). JMS, the producer/writer/creator of B5 has written extensively on the net about the "notes" he's gotten from higher-ups trying to dumb down his shows (recently, both Crusade and Jeremiah got such notes). He quit Jeremiah rather than compromise his vision of the show.

Now, we return your attention to UPN and Fox. Will UPN management ever allow there to be a quality program like B5 or Firefly? It's debatable. Fox scuttled Firefly, for all the same reasons that I could see UPN not understanding it. Given the amazing hash that the Trek writers have made of the Trek continuity, it would take not only the firing of Berman, Braga, and their cronies, but it would also take clueful management to hire a good writer who can be trusted to rebuild a better Trek and jettison all the cruft. Is UPN going to stick its neck that far out? I really doubt it. I'd rather they put the Trek franchise to bed for a decade or two and let somebody else resurrect it later.

Yeah, but Jeremiah absolutely sucks. I watched it the first season (I think I saw all the episodes) and laughed more at it than I did at most of the sitcoms I watch. It's absolutely hysterically bad. I didn't know he quit, though. Sounds more like a cop-out when he realized how bad the show was. Also, they cancelled Odyssey 5 in favor of it, and O5 was a much better show, although still far from great.

And, for that matter, why does ST have to pander and specifically present large-busted women?

While I agree with your overall point, I think 7 of 9 was more than just a woman with big breasts. Her character was far more interesting than anything else on Voyager, or at least in the few episodes I watched. Actually it has long been my contention that Star Trek writers can’t seem to write “strong” women. 7 of 9 seems to be the only success, and the line of failures is long. Starting with Yar and Pulasky all the way down to (now Admiral) Janeway.

Most of the women on DS9 were well done, I think.

Well I wasn’t ever a big fan of DS9 (though I liked it far more than Voyager), so I really don’t remember much about it. I didn’t really care for the first officer very much, and the trill (Dax?) didn’t really strike me as a “strong” character. But I understand there was a lot more character development in DS9 than the other series, so perhaps I misjudge based on early episodes (If TNG were judged on its first season it certainly wouldn’t fare well).

Tangentially, JMS's Babylon 5 was tremendous (well, the first four seasons, at least) and met with high regard from SF fans. But then he made some TV movies in the B5 universe that had no relationship to the overall arc of the B5 story. These were met with less regard, to put it mildly.

When he heard complaints about said movies, he said something along the lines of ``When I created B5, I wanted to do something different and it was liked. Now that I want to do something different again, it's dismissed. Therefore I'm pissed off at the fans.''

The moment I heard this, I immediately disliked JMS, despite really enjoying B5. His apparently huge ego wouldn't allow him to accept that the reason that folks liked B5 was not because of the scripting, but the plotting. It was the big epic storyline that was important, and the effects that it had on his well thought-out characters. But as soon as you make a standalone TV movie that can't effect the show itself, you throw away the epic story and the character development. All that's left is the scripting. And you know what? He's really bad at it.

Go back and watch B5 with that in mind. You'll hear more turgid speechifying than you'd ever thought was possible, even in personal moments. I can understand it in the political aspects of the show, but you'll often have two characters just talking to each other and it sounds the same.

That's not to say that B5 was bad. It wasn't. It was great. But that success did not follow over to Jeremiah. The story arc is thin and the show is very episodic. There is some character development, but, I'm sorry, Sideshow Luke Perry and Theo Huxtable can't pull it off. (Not to mention that awful, awful actress that plays ... well, really, any of the women on the show, but specifically, Theo, the opposing, um, warlord?)

Anyway, JMS needs to note what he does well (story arc, not episodic scripting) and manage his ree-zources better.

Jadzia Dax was a strong character, but not in the way many sci-fi kids would want. So many ``strong women'' in sci-fi are really strong men in women's bodies. (Honestly, much of Kira -- the first officer -- was that way.) Jadzia was very feminine, but not a damsel-in-distress. It wasn't a terribly well fleshed out character (I think that Terry Farrell was probably one of the weakest actors on the show, and I get the feeling she was hard to work with, given her work history), but it was well written for what it was.

There were other women on the show, too, and few were typical sci-fi window dressing. Ezri Dax (who took the place of Jadzia after Terry Farrell left the show), Vedek/Kai Winn (one of the main bad guys, if you want to put it that way), Keiko O'Brien, Casidy Yates, even Leeta, to some extent.

So many ``strong women'' in sci-fi are really strong men in women's bodies.

Yes, and I hate that. That's what I think of Yar, Pulaski (a female McCoy), etc. I liked Crusher and thought she had "strength", but not the kind those other characters (that I didn't like) tried to employ. Seven, OTOH, seemed be possess a masculine strength without being annoying. Sure she was half machine, but at least she was interesting. And actually I didn’t find her that attractive. Sometimes big breasts are just big breasts.

As for the DS9 women, perhaps I just need to give the show a chance. I plan on buying the DVDs some day so I can view them in order, but that'll be after I finish TNG and do B5.

Give DS9 a chance. I'd say B5 is better, but only very slightly. And DS9's first season wasn't the best. It really picks up starting with season 2.

I honestly never gave Voyager a chance. Well, I gave it a little, but by the time I saw two phantom Voyagers, two surrenders, a remake of Spock's Brain, and a resolution involving telling the bad guys ``well, don't do it again'' in the first five episodes, I gave up.

I tried to give DS9 a chance, I really did, just because of TNG. I watched like two whole seasons before realizing that I cared absolutly nothing about these characters. Voyager got one full season out of me and Enterprise about 4 episodes before I gave up. Beavis And Butthead ..err...Berman and Braga should have been axed a long time ago, I think it is too late to save the franchise now, and I am not sure anyone has the vision to do so in any case.

Babylon 5 lost me when they had the giant copout on the whole shadow war. There was the great climax they were reaching, everything was moving towards a resolution, and then the way it finished was so terrible it made my head spin. I'll avoid details to avoid spoiling people who are planning on seeing it, but the people who watched it know what I am talking about. In one episode I went from a rabid fan to never watching another episode of it. The interesting part of the series died with that episode, leaving all the crappy human goverment stories to fill the rest of the series. No thanks.

Good sci-fi tv shows seems to be few and far between. It's sad really, there is so much potential there for good shows, but no one seems both willing and able to do it right.

Why, oh why, nust network idiots think that their show can ``win'' instead of getting the same large(r) ratings for all the programs?

Hell, I can never understand why the hell networks do anything they do. I'm still waiting for the day they realize that it is next to impossible to move a show to another night when is not a long-time hit show. Hell, some networks move shows more then twice before their 3rd season. If it's Simpsons (which I started watching when it was on Thursdays), then you can do it, because the fans will follow.

But the plan these days is to put new shows into hit TV nights to get them watched, then move them to a relatively unwatched night. It seems they don't remember that those much-watched nights came about by putting multiple popular shows in one place.

Now I hear a rumor that they're moving the wonderfull Scrubs to another night. What the hell?? They're losing Friends and don't want to groom Scrubs to replace it? Is the humor in it just not broad enough? No, it's probably just because NBC just wants to make their "Must-See Thursday" a night of reality shows. Oh, how I hate "The Apprentice."

In one episode I went from a rabid fan to never watching another episode of it. The interesting part of the series died with that episode, leaving all the crappy human goverment stories to fill the rest of the series. No thanks.

Woah, wait. You left off right on that episode? I admit, things were rushed (and outside the control of the makers of the show at that time), but, there were some interesting things that happened after that tieing much more then just the shadow war together.

It is a shame the original plan for the 4th and 5th season got squished into just the 4th season though.

might UPN pick up the vastly superior Firefly?

Are you saying that Firefly continued after Fox cancelled it?

That would be wonderful news, if true -- but I think Joss Whedon only made about a dozen episodes, and that was it. IMHO the best Sci-Fi series ever on television.

tanstaafl.

There are three episodes on the DVD set that were never broadcast, and he's written a movie script for it that's been purchased by Paramount, but the project has not (yet) been greenlighted.

On the DVDs, there are some interviews, and one of the interviewees (a bigwig production guy, IIRC) says that the best of all worlds would be if the movie was made and then some network might pick up the TV series again.

FWIW, The Family Guy was picked back up after being cancelled due to exceptional DVD sales. Firefly's DVD sales have also apparently been outstanding. Of course, Firefly's bound to have cost a lot more.

on the DVD set

There's a DVD set? Omigod... now ordered from Amazon!

Why don't people ever tell me these things?

I found it interesting that with 579 reviews at Amazon, the average rating was 5 stars.

No wonder Fox cancelled it.

tanstaafl.

Okay. Knowing exactly how stupid this sounds and how likely it is that the answer is not something easily expressed... For those that don't really watch TV much, what is Firefly?

Firefly is a science fiction TV show set in a universe without aliens where there are a good number of terraformed worlds. The ``core'' worlds formed an alliance and decided that all the other worlds needed to join, which sparked a civil war between the Alliance and the independents. The Alliance won. Our main characters are a crew commanded by two people who fought on the side of independence and a motley crew of other characters. They are pirates and scavengers, sometimes with a heart of gold, sometimes not so much.

The backstory closely follows the basic ideas of the old west, where the losers of the US Civil War went after leaving civilization to escape a world they didn't want and the law that might be pursuing them. There are even Indians in Firefly, though they are bigger boogeymen than is warranted by US history. To drive home this point, there is a very strong Western genre feel to the show. There's a lot of cowboy talk and folks often dress in a western manner. This is the part that throws a lot of people, but I think that it lends the show a sense of realism, like they really exist in a specific culture.

There's also quite a bit of cultural intermingling. The characters are basically Western/American, but the backstory implies that the Alliance may have been an alliance between the US and China. As such, Chinese culture features prominently. There's a lot of dialog in Chinese, very little not understandable from context. It provides, amongst other things, a way for the characters to curse without having to resort to ``felgarkarb'' or other obviously made-up words. There's also other visual cues to the Chinese influence, but, at least as far as the show got, it wasn't really important, but just more of a backdrop. As far as I remember, there were never even any speaking characters who were Chinese, although some of the upper-class folk have Chinese family names despite not being Chinese ethnically.

Of course, I say all of this and it's not really important. It's just the back story. The show is not really about all of that. It's about the characters. I mean, it's still an action TV show to some extent, and there are firefights and whatnot (though not ship-to-ship combat), but what really matters, and what makes it so good is the relationship of the characters to each other, how they change, and how the characters change. What's truly amazing is how well that was accomplished in, like, eleven broadcast episodes.

I know you said you don't watch TV much, but one of the important drawing points of the show is that it's created and driven by Joss Whedon, the creator behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and its spinoff, Angel), which, itself, has much less to do with vampires than it has to do with creating and exploring well-developed characters. It retains the crisp, scintillating writing of his other shows. One place where it diverges from Buffy is in the superb cinematography. It looks like a '70s western -- lens flares and so on -- very handheld and intimate. The CGI stuff of the spaceships must be done by the same folks who worked on Battlestar Galactica, but it works here because it fits the rest of the cinematography. As they say during the commentaries, most sci-fi is very austere and antiseptic. Not so on Firefly. Almost every aspect of the show is superb. I cannot praise it highly enough.

If you have any interest in real science fiction, I suggest that you go pick up the DVD set. If you're only interested in shoot-em-ups or treknobabble, though, I'd avoid it. There's very little padding of that nature in the show. (Caveat: I enjoy Trek, too.) I'd say that if you liked Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5 that you'll like it quite a bit.

Excellent!!! Thanks for the great summary!

<typing>a m a z o n . c o m</typing>

For background, the characterization that you refer to is something I really like. I have the entire Babylon 5 series on DVD (or pre-order for season 5), so this sounds extremely good. Thanks!

I have to warn you that there are only about a dozen episodes ever produced and it was intended to run much longer than that. Many of the characters have mysteries associated with them and they are never resolved. It 's possible that they might be in some upcoming presentation, but there are no guarantees that any such presentation will ever happen, even if it looks promising right now.

However, since you've never seen it before, I envy you, as you'll get to watch the episodes in the correct order instead of the order in which FOX decided to air them. Specifically, you'll get the pilot first, which many people I know consider to be one of the best things to have been presented on TV that year, despite that FOX decided to broadcast it last, after they'd cancelled the show.

And it should go without saying, but I'll do it to make sure: don't listen to the commentary until after you've watched all the episodes. They give stuff away. I think one of my friends got burned by that watching the Buffy DVDs when they referenced something important that happened two years later in a season not even released on DVD at that point.

Oh, and if you've never watched Buffy, you should definitely check that out, as well. More horror-fantasy, not sci-fi, but similar respect for characterization. (Were you pissed off at what they did to Lennier in the last season of B5, too?)

Greetings!

Cool! Warnings taken and that should not be a problem. I am familiar with Buffy, but only casually. I was pleased with what I saw. But I do not watch much of anything, really.

B5 - ah yes. He did get a bad deal at the end. But it is somewhat appropriate, based on his character's evolution. There were hints that something like that would happen, becoming stronger in the later episodes. Another character I feel a bit sorry for was Talia Winters.

> Woah, wait. You left off right on that episode? I admit, things were rushed (and outside the control of the makers of the show at that time),

Yeah, I remember the whole deal, I was a pretty avid reader of the Babylon 5 newsgroup at the time. It was so cool that we could get to talk to JMS personally. I remember all the drama about whether the show was going to get canceled or not. Still, there is no excuse for how that ended. Regardless of all that, the conclusion that we had been waiting for for more than 3 years, this great epic arch of the storyline the likes I had never seen before on TV, ended like that?!? I felt personally insulted and offended. It was that bad.

I do vaguely plan to borrow or rent the DVDs and watch it all the way through now though. When I get around to it.

What, exactly, is ``that'' which offended you so much? I thought it made sense and hammered home the point that it isn't really these huge ideals of order and chaos that are the problem, but, rather, the people who follow those ideals blindly.

I think that there are some other issues with the show at that level -- that, once they resolved that it wasn't good/evil, but order/chaos, that there were no chaotic good characters, despite that there were lawful evil ones in addition to the lawful good and chaotic evil ones. (Do you think he borrowed from D&D a little, maybe?)

I think the reason that the show was so good was that it showed individuals, albeit important individuals, changed by the events around them. If you were waiting three seasons for a big space battle, then you were waiting for the wrong thing.

Darn, it's anamorphic widescreen, and only $35.00. I am weak.

<click click>

<click click>

What? No "One Click"(tm)?

Woo-hoo! Two more sales for me!

Open letter to all the companies who put television shows onto DVD:

$75.00 is too much to buy a season's worth of a TV show, even if it's the best show in the world. This is the first TV series I've purchased on DVD, and the only reason I did was because it was only $35.00. And that's sight unseen, I have no idea if I'll like it or not. $35.00 is a really good sweet spot in terms of pricing. $19.00 for decent movies, $35.00 for a TV series set, that's my sweet spot. Charge me over $20.00 for a movie, and it had better be a blockbuster that I'm dying to own or else I won't buy it.

Did you not own a laserdisc player?

And you are getting only about half a season.

> If you were waiting three seasons for a big space battle, then you were waiting for the wrong thing.

I was waiting for something big, and instead we got...nothing. Not a damn thing. It was one of the biggest cop-outs in TV history. This huge upcoming war, this conflict that had gone for longer than human history, was resolved by....asking everyone to go away?!? The only way it could have possibly been worse was if JMS had had Sheridan wake up and realize it was all just a horrible dream.

$75.00 is too much to buy a season's worth of a TV show, even if it's the best show in the world

Darn straight! I'm having trouble pushing myself to buy a season at $45. Fortunately I think you can get the entire series of The Critic for around $35 on Amazon.

I think TV on DVD is just catching on. Hopefully in the future we'll see the prices drop to the $35 level across the board.

*edit*
Except, of course, for Seinfeld. If they ever decide how much money each of them gets for participating, we'll end up paying $100 a season

For what it’s worth, I have no problem plunking down $100 for a season of good drama. I have three TNG seasons and two of the X-Files. Granted I don’t have a large amount of disposable income so it’s taking me a while, but so far I’ve been very satisfied with what I’ve gotten for my money. I should point out that I’ve bought a couple of these used and paid more around the $60-$70 range for those. Anything over $100 is too much for me, however, and I’ve seen places carrying both series for $125+.

You owe it to yourself to at least watch the rest of that season. It plays out more after that episode, in ways that I think you'll like. And for reasons that they talk about in that episode.

I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think it was as big a disappointment as you do. At the same time, I don't think that knowing that it would have been picked up for another season would have changed the ending of that storyline significantly. It was obviously what he intended to do. The fact that it pissed you off so much obviously means that he didn't do his job properly, though.

Let me ask you, what would have been a more appropriate ending? For there to have been a big space battle that resulted in the rout of the Old Ones? A big battle followed by the psychobabble that you hated? I suppose we could go with the idea that the bad guys end up winning and the human race is marginalized.

It just seems to me that there had to be some ultimate resolution, not just another thousand-year delay, and that it couldn't be as a direct result of human influence. He may have written himself into a corner, but I don't see a better way out. Honestly, though, given his source material, I can see his choice, and I don't think that he unintentionally wrote himself into a corner.

> $75.00 is too much to buy a season's worth of a TV show, even if it's the best show in the world.

That is quite a bit, what series has sold for that much? I find most run in the 50 dollar range. But still, from a pure hours-of-entertainment-per-dollar perspective, they are a very good deal. You are getting eight or nine DVDs and close to 20 hours of material for that price. I have bought several now; the complete Monty Python, 3 seasons of Highlander, 4 seasons of Sopranos, the first season of Law And Order. All of them have been a great deal and I will certainly buy the remainder of all those sets as they come out. Hell, at this point, I would guess I have twice as many TV DVDs as I have movie ones.

That is quite a bit, what series has sold for that much?

Both X-Files and Star Trek. And that's used. New it's difficult to find either for les than $90.

All the Star Trek series, X-Files, Babylon 5, others I can't think of. Oh, The Prisoner. Any BBC/A&E released thing.

BTW, they need to release the animated Star Trek series on DVD. That'd be cool.

> You owe it to yourself to at least watch the rest of that season.

Yeah, I was pretty miffed at the time; I was pretty emotionally attached to the series. Perhaps now I could watch it a bit more objectively. I do plan on watching it again, I considered it to be the best sci-fi series ever made during the time I did watch it, and certainly nothing has come along since to top it.

You really ought to check out Firefly. It really is one of the top few sci-fi TV series of all time. It's hard to compare a dozen episodes of one show versus five or seven seasons of another, but I'd say that it is my favorite sci-fi show of all time.

I did see the first epidode, and it seemed ok. Certainly better than TNG's or Babylon5's first episodes. But the network did an amazingly good job of hiding the rest, I never managed to catch another episode.

35 bucks heh...ok, I will check it out....click (just one)

If you're referring to the first episode broadcast that had a train robbery in it, then I'd say that was the next-to-worst episode (the worst being one of the ones never broadcast). And it was written as a new pilot over a single weekend when FOX told them that they needed a new pilot on a Friday afternoon and wanted the script on their desk before they came in Monday morning. Given that that's what they can do under extreme pressure, expect better for ones written on a normal schedule.

You really ought to check out Firefly. It really is one of the top few sci-fi TV series of all time. It's hard to compare a dozen episodes of one show versus five or seven seasons of another, but I'd say that it is my favorite sci-fi show of all time.

I second that. Awesome show. I'd rank it as my favorite sci-fi show as well. Joss is a genious. I was so pissed when they took it off the air.

It occurs to me that my other favorite sci-fi TV show, Max Headroom only lasted 14 episodes, too. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with those that last longer.

And of course one of the best TV series ever, Fawlty Towers, only made it to a dozen episodes.

This?

Yeah, but there's a whole different paradigm in the UK in regards to producing TV shows. In the US, we tend to make aound 24 episodes a year until the ratings no longer bear out the production. In the UK, the thing to do seems to be to make six episodes, wait four years, then make another six episodes and call it quits, regardless of how popular the show might be.

I, honestly, still don't get it.

I, honestly, still don't get it.

What don't you get:

a) the UK way of doing it
b) the US way of doing it
c) Fawlty Towers

It think the UK/US difference comes down to two factors, budget and writing team sizes. In the US lots of shows are written by large teams of writers, so coming up with 26 episodes of material every 12 months (even if it isn't all good) is easier than with the typical UK writing team of one or two people.

I'd far rather have a dozen or two dozen episodes of a consistently well written show than 5 years of 26 episodes a year with patchy writing. Not that there aren't some US shows that manage 26 good episodes every year.

I guess the part I don't get is the delay. In the case of Fawlty Towers, there was a delay of four years and some between the two series. It just seems to cause so many issues. Actors constantly looking for new jobs. Getting the audience to remember from one series to the next. Scheduling. I don't know. It's just a different paradigm that doesn't inherently make sense to me.

I guess thinking about it as the product of a very few writers as opposed to a staff of writers makes more sense. I suppose that Curb Your Enthusiasm is more like a UK production in that sense.

Except, of course, for Seinfeld. If they ever decide how much money each of them gets for participating, we'll end up paying $100 a season

I wouldn't pay $100 to have every Seinfeld episode ever recorded, even if they threw in a $110 rebate.

It must be a good show because so many people praise it so highly, so I guess that the problem lies with me.

Nonetheless, I can state that of all the Seinfeld I have ever watched (maybe three hours total) I never saw anything that even made me smile, much less laugh.

I suspect it is a generational thing -- I am probably too old (within spitting distance of 6 decades now) to "get it".

tanstaafl.

but what really matters, and what makes it so good is the relationship of the characters to each other, how they change, and how the characters change.

YES!

I was going to write interminable paragraphs saying just that, but you did it better than I would have.

I didn't know who was behind Firefly when I watched the first two episodes, but I commented on how similar it was in execution to Buffy. So when I finally got around to checking, I wasn't surprised to find out it was Joss Whedon.

That method he uses of taking a truly eclectic cast of characters and building a series around their interrelationships without making it a story about just one "star" character and a bunch of satellites... I love it.

If you like that type of program, another one you should check out is "Joan of Arcadia". The story premise sounds so awful I won't even reference it here, because if I did nobody would bother to watch it. Just remember, as in Firefly, it isn't about the story, it's about the PEOPLE. I recommend it highly.

tanstaafl.

Really? It did sound awful. I might check it out.

If you like that type of program, another one you should check out is "Joan of Arcadia". The story premise sounds so awful I won't even reference it here, because if I did nobody would bother to watch it. Just remember, as in Firefly, it isn't about the story, it's about the PEOPLE. I recommend it highly.

I'll second that. I never thought to watch it and I happened to see an episode over at a friends house and actually liked it. It's well written. It has a good "feel" to it. Funny too.

Wonderful! I've been watching Joan as well! It's one of my "guilty pleasure" TV downloads. Along with Tru Calling, Smallville, and several others. It's a very good show. I've always really liked Joe Mantegna, too.

So yeah, I'm a recent college graduate who drives a minivan and really likes a family TV show


And Doug, I don't admit it to my friends much, but I'm not the biggest Seinfeld fan either. I like it more than you do, as in I can watch an episode when it's on and chuckle from time to time, but my best friends considers it his favorite TV show of all time. I, on the other hand, can think of dozens of shows I like better than that.