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Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
But this is far more important.
I'm fucking dying, I can't breathe I'm laughing so hard
I'm fucking dying, I can't breathe I'm laughing so hard
Jacobkosh on
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oh my god
Brilliant people with lots of free time to work on odd and/or nostalgic hobbies.
We've already seen Captain Proton, and Fairhaven, and Dixon Hill... so why not?
(Really, the only difference between this and, say, Vic Fontaine's club is that this is based on a recognizable (to us) IP instead of something safely generic, and the latter has interactive characters; but I haven't watched the original vids yet, maybe they rez in a studio audience and a holographic Bob Barker at some point.)
Imagine how it would change entertainment. Go through a muder-mystery as a detective, then go through it again as the killer and try to escape. Or even if it's not interactive/choose-your-own adventure, just think how much a story would change depending on which character you chose to play.
No one puts 6 series from the same property into production who isn't desperate to make a dime off said property. This is no different then Disney with Star Wars, except a little stranger because it's not like they just bought the thing. Aggressively try and monetize the property. Full speed ahead, greenlight everything. And streaming has lowered the bar towards turning shit into a TV series. Which we are seeing all over the place with various streaming platforms.
At peak 90s Trek, I'd say almost certainly the height of Trek's mainstream cultural cache, they had like 2 things in production at the same time.
Maybe three, counting movies? Pretty sure there were at least a couple movies done while TNG/DS9 or DS9/Voyager were still on. But never this bizarre level of desperation in trying to get traction on something.
I'm not bothered by trying a bunch of new Trek things, but I'm plenty irritated that they have such little confidence in anything they're putting out that they're just putting out a shitload of stuff. On top of that, somebody pointed out in the last thread that the only thing they seem to not be trying is to just make a damned Trek show that works like regular Star Trek. Voyager was terrible because it was terrible and Enterprise tanked because it tried to do the same overdramatic one-upmanship crap as Discovery; it had nothing to with the format and everything to do with showmakers who thought they knew better than making a Trek show like Star Trek.
Something as hokey and campy as SG-1ran for ten freaking years by playing to the strengths of their formula instead of fighting them, and it only got really awful around the last season (which was, big surprise, the same time scifi was trying to spin off multiple more "serious" SG shows). It doesn't take billion-dollar budgets to make this stuff work, just stop fighting what works instead of thinking "different" equals "better".
I mean yeah they're throwing a bunch of stuff out there to see what works, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Voyager and Enterprise weren't exactly gems.
I think the major difference between TOS, SG-1, DS9, TNG, and B5 compared to Voyager, Enterprise, and SG:U (I'd throw Discovery in there, but I checked out three or four episodes in on that), is that the good shows did a better job of developing interesting characters. Plot and story and the action of the week isn't nothing, but if you've developed characters that the audience is invested in, then they'll care about what's happening because they care about the characters. Looking at Trials and Tribble-ations for example, on the surface it sounds like bad fan fiction that should have gone over like a lead balloon. It's a time travel episode that hooks directly into one of the great TOS episodes, sounds cheesy as hell. But it works like gangbusters because we've all become fans of the DS9 cast at this point and we're enjoying the romp down nostalgia lane almost as much as they are. Now imagine sticking the Voyager crew in there and consider just how dull and miserable an experience that would have been.
And it's a brilliant premise.
Oh, just realized this is about something else, lol.
Would be pretty hard to edit that bar fight so that everyone is just beating up Neelix.
Tangential, my favorite ever:
I was worried it was going to run with a Rick & Morty vibe, but I didn't get that at all, so now more optimistic than I was!
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Yeah, I'm not following how "business seeks to make money off its property" is per se evidence of desperation.
While streaming has made it easier to greenlight shows, it has not made it easier to keep those shows running. Streaming shows get cancelled all the time, because no business will continue to expend significant production costs on a failing product. Here, CBS has not only continued expending significant production costs, it has increased its investment.
Disney bought Star Wars and immediately greenlit a new trilogy and bi-annual side movies. The response to TFA was such that they greenlit at least one more trilogy. Then Solo flopped. Disney didn't respond by greenlighting more productions; they cancelled the side stories. TLJ and ROS had disappointing box offices relative to TFA. Disney has effectively put any new movies on the backburner and appears to be focusing on its TV properties.
I'd agree that the early 90s were Trek's peak in mainstream culture, specifically seasons 3-7 of TNG. DS9 and Voyager never enjoyed that level of success, and TNG was Trek show on the air for 6 of its 7 seasons.
Yeah RDM has said a couple times that one of the reasons S7 of TNG was weak was because he (and others) was directly involved in S7 of TNG, whatever season it was of DS9, and doing preproduction on the Generations movie.
Voyager was mostly terrible because that cast had some pretty lackluster chemistry. That's a fixable problem, but not an easy one, especially given the premise of the show.
If nerds will tune in for Walking Dead, they'll definitely show up for Trek
I'm not sure I accept the premise, either. Both Picard and Discovery take elements of the things that existing Trek series emphasised, and run with them (Disco does epic scope really well, and is slowly building that bridge-crew camraderie, though it's not coming of as an ensemble show, Picard has some tight characterisation and more contemplative, thoughtful tone and room to move, for example).. And Lower Decks has some of it too, off that trailer. Which is all good. Neither of those shows is TNG, and for me that's OK. Variations off the main theme are cool.
I'm genuinely not sure what "regular Trek" is, if we dismiss Voyager and Enterpise and Disco and Picard and Lower Decks. What is the ideal Trek that people are looking back at here? Given how much of the early seasons of TNG and DS9 were...not great, and how TOS gave us masterpieces like Spock's Brain, I don't really understand the harking back to some golden era of Trek. Some have been better than others in aggregate, but IMO it's far too early to judge the new stuff. I'm reminded of how much people hated TNG when it first came out.
We're in a renaissance of Trek right now, and as someone who grew up with one or two series on TV at once, it's amazing. We won't all like all the bits of it, and that's OK too (ask me about Discovery's Klingon throughline). But everyhting I've seen has hit some of the key notes of the existing material, and it's asking questions, either explicitly or in the background, about people and who and what we are. Maybe there's more Big Booms now, but...not always, and there always seems to be a heart I can get behind.
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Dude, it took Disney years to scale back their Star Wars plans. But their first reaction, just like we are seeing now with Star Trek, is greenlight a billion things and try and make the franchise print money in any way it can. Pump all the money into it and see what returns you can get. And streaming shows are relatively cheap on average, if only because they have so few episodes and the distribution costs are so miniscule.
Frankly, you seem aggrieved by the word desperation for some reason and that's like the entirety of your argument. And I'm just not sure why.
Until, suddenly and to the great detriment of something that started out very promising, it doesn't - because we have a Big Dumb Plot and a Big Dumb Problem and we have to wrap it up now now now go go go.
IMO, of course.
The pilot of Picard seemed kinda contemplative. Maybe the 2nd episode too, they all kinda blend together at some point. It didn't really keep going from there though.
And in the process jettisons two of its most interesting characters.
It was amazing how the show pivots from what it seems to be about at the start to something completely different, but still involving romulans for some reason.
Yeah - unsurprisingly we diverge here. I think the MacGuffin exists, sure, but it’s in service to the story and the characterisation, and the pace is still far slower and more thoughtful. The last couple of episodes noticeably ramped up The Action, but I clearly wasn’t watching the same show you were!
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Yeah I'm annoyed at how people in this thread talk about what real trek is when what they mean is "TNG, specifically", because that was the series they grew up on.
I get the same feel from people talking about how the new Star Wars films "aren't Star Wars."
Star Trek is a big ol' setting and I like seeing it get explored for all the rich potential of that universe instead of "always this one particular kind of Starfleet cast."
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Also when DS9 was about "boldly staying"/"going nowhere", and what's with the weird guy made out of jello? (He's no Data or Spock, that's for sure.)
Second, the illness was a fantastic Sword of Damocles that they solved way too early. It would've been a constant source of tension throughout the series, especially if they followed All Good Things' lead and had Picard lose cognitive function. That was their chance for groundbreaking storytelling, and they wasted it.
Maybe they can do cool things with Synth!Picard, since he's a literal Ship of Theseus problem, but that's a lot less relatable than the cruel decline of age.
I would get your point, if anybody actually was saying "Star Trek is this particular series". Seeing as I haven't read anything like that as people regularly use a variety of Trek material for reference as to what makes good Star Trek, I have no idea what you have to be annoyed about on this front.
I don’t know that the variety being used in the way you describe is actually that… well, various.
DS9 snuck through because it was the “red-headed stepchild” to which Berman wasn’t paying as much attention, but if you look at the rest of ’90s–’00s Trek there’s a pretty clear throughline of “lightning in a bottle” (TNG seasons 3+) to “bad photocopy of the lightning bottle” (VOY) to “bad photocopy of the photocopy” (ENT). @Jacobkosh covered this in the last thread, but Berman was terrified of letting Star Trek be anything other than slight variations of TNG. And the franchise on television died a slow, agonizing death.
Maybe enough time has passed without one that people are jonesing for another photocopy, and that’s fine (hell, I might like it too as long as it’s not the only thing on offer), but I would like to see a Star Trek for which nostalgia is not the primary draw. The “throw stuff at the wall” approach that CBS is currently using has not found a winner yet, but it still could, and I don’t think that would be true if all we were getting was a less jokey Orville.
(The movies have the same issue in their own bubble. Let’s face it: eventually, someone’s gonna have the brilliant idea to make The Wrath of Khan a fourth time.)
No one is saying it in words, but any time someone brings up a counter-argument to "since when is Star Trek about this?!", it never counts because of some reason or other.
Example: "Why is Picard about edge cases and border communities, Star Trek wasn't about that!" Well, actually the entirety of DS9 was exactly about that.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
This show is legit the best television I've ever seen. And that is with people hyping it up.
This doesn't seem at all accurate. When people talk about "What Star Trek really is" they are almost always talking about the entire late-80s to mid-2000s run because, well, that is by a large margin the majority of Star Trek. The entire era we think of pretty easily from TNG to ENT is pretty consistent in terms of style and tone. Even when it's bad it's very recognizably from the same mould. There is of course the TOS-is-the-only-true-one people too but they just aren't as numerous for the past, like, 3 decades. And that's not even touching in on all the tie in material out there, from books to video games to whatever else.
Given a look at the history of things that are labeled Star Trek that have been produced, it's not at all strange to see what a lot of people think of as Star Trek is that 90s TNG era type thing. Because it's most of those things that are called Star Trek. By sheer volume and longevity.
Like shit, fucking Enterprise, the red-headed stepchild of that era, is still more content then all of the streaming stuff they've made since then combined.
Since when is Picard about edge cases and border communities?
To be fair, maybe I misinterpreted:
Because I'm not the boss of you, and you can feel that way, but that seems to suggest that regular Star Trek is, well, TNG. Episodic, reset button stuff optimised for syndication. And, don't get me wrong, I love that stuff too. But I think now we have as much Trek in production as has ever previously existed, we may have to accept that what was regular Star Trek is now just a part of a far larger Trekkian gumbo. I think that's awesome, though I can see why people might not.
If we get there via the process of CBS funding eleventy series, and seeing which ones have viewers, well, at least we also got eleventy series. I guess I don't see the problem with more Trek, in hopefully infinite combinations of format and style.
ETA: To @Sneaks point about the process not finding a winner yet; I dunno. I can't speak for the actual viewing figures/profit margins, but they're spinning up a third season of Disco and don't show any signs of slowing down. They might not be a winner for all of us, but someone is making to worthwhile to make all these things
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When people have pointed out, "uh, that thing you're complaining about from Picard is a copy of the exact same thing in X", people in the thread have said, "Oh but X is bad, are we saying we're OK with BAD things?"
I'm paraphrasing and reframing, but the idea of Captain Rios needing/wanting money, the idea of there being this area of lawless space that the Federation isn't controlling and keeping sanitized, the idea of Rafi living in a shack in the desert, were all areas of complaint in previous threads. Picard isn't necessarily about those things, but that is where the setting is placed, just as it was in DS9, and some of the story juice is used on those things.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
That said, of all those things Rafi is the one that made no sense. It's Earth. Described numerous times, including in slightly derogatory fashion in DS9 on a few occasions, as a post-scarcity paradise. The whole "now I'm stuck int he desert getting by on scraps" thing was pretty silly.
1. The entire character arcs of Raffi, Rios, and Seven.
2. Hugh's storyline on the Artifact.
Border communities:
1. The entire Romulan diaspora, which is a focus for at least half the season.
2. The treatment of Ex-Bs aboard the Artifact and in the wider galaxy.
3. The fears of the synths vis a vis organics, and the Zhat Vash efforts to exterminate them.