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Like some of you out there, I started watching television in the late 1980s, and I have good memories of sitting in front of a black and white television screen, watching reruns of TV shows that seemed great and interesting. Of course, almost 30 years later, when I go back and watch those television shows, there is a lot missing. I can see where the plot is ending up before I start, and there is not much that changes from episode to episode. I've been spoiled by arc-based and "prestige" television, where watching an episode is interesting because we want to see what happens next. But lots of those old shows had great characters, and some good drama. If they were adapted into an "arc-based" show, how would they flourish in the modern day? Which shows would work, which wouldn't? These are three shows that I think would make interesting arc-based shows. 1. Night Court. This half hour comedy from the 1980s varied between drama, standard sit-com plots, and wacky/surreal comedy. It had a large cast, but most of them were stuck with a single character trait. It would be interesting to see what could happen if the idea was relaunched with more character development, and an ongoing plot. 2. The Secret World of Alex Mack: Nickelodeon show from the 1990s, about a teenage girl who gets super powers. It varied between science-fiction plots, and her having typical junior high problems. It was fun as a kid, but the plots are predictable now, and the special effects need updating. 3. Perry Mason. This show is famous for its hokey endings where the real criminal loudly confesses from the gallery, but many of the episodes have good legal drama and investigation before that point: they just need to wrap it up in under an hour, and that made the stories seemed rushed. More time would give legal drama in a less corny fashion.
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Sep 15, 2017 19:36
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 20:57 |
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Sledge Hammer! certain to rival The Wire.
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Sep 15, 2017 19:56
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Old action-adventure shows from the 60s, I suppose. Mission: Impossible and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Avengers and the various ITC productions and so on. They wouldn't lend themselves to having series-long storylines but they're the sort of things that would have a overarching season-long story if they were produced today and I think that would suit them. Of course, all those old Lew Grade shows - The Champions, The Saint, Department S, Man In a Suitcase - would be crossing over with each other as well.
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Sep 15, 2017 21:09
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Wheat Loaf posted:Old action-adventure shows from the 60s, I suppose. Mission: Impossible and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Avengers and the various ITC productions and so on. They wouldn't lend themselves to having series-long storylines but they're the sort of things that would have a overarching season-long story if they were produced today and I think that would suit them. There's apparently a new Saint show on Netflix
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Sep 15, 2017 23:18
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Davros1 posted:There's apparently a new Saint show on Netflix Thought it was just a one-off but will have to check.
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Sep 15, 2017 23:26
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Netflix is bringing back Lost in Space next year. That was my favorite sci-fi show as a kid. There's some preliminary nerd rage with Parker Posey being cast as Dr. Smith. The Robot is being described as a cross between Iron Man and Gort.
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Sep 15, 2017 23:35
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glowing-fish posted:2. The Secret World of Alex Mack: Nickelodeon show from the 1990s, about a teenage girl who gets super powers. It varied between science-fiction plots, and her having typical junior high problems. It was fun as a kid, but the plots are predictable now, and the special effects need updating. I actually tried writing an Alex Mack reboot a while back. It was the mid aughts and I was in my 20s, so it was grimdark and terrible. My go-to answer for this is always Quantum Leap. The concept resists serialization, but you still have stuff like The Evil Leaper and the Abigail Fuller trilogy that you could parlay into full season arcs if you know what you're doing.
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Sep 17, 2017 00:33
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[quote="“Mister Kingdom”" post="“476441261”"] Netflix is bringing back Lost in Space next year. That was my favorite sci-fi show as a kid. There’s some preliminary nerd rage with Parker Posey being cast as Dr. Smith. The Robot is being described as a cross between Iron Man and Gort. [/quote] I loved LiS as a kid, and I dig Parker Posey so am intrigued to see if she can pull off the best role.
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Sep 18, 2017 04:53
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glowing-fish posted:
Would The Wire satisfy this request?
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Sep 18, 2017 09:51
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Realistic Seinfeld, where they all keep getting worse jobs and shittier places to live as time goes on. Kramer becomes a junkie, George an alcoholic who hangs himself in the series finale, Jerry ends up working the door at a comedy club.
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Sep 18, 2017 11:31
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Mister Kingdom posted:Netflix is bringing back Lost in Space next year. That was my favorite sci-fi show as a kid. My dear boy, if you'd like to meet me in the foodcourt i'll tell you more.
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Sep 18, 2017 12:49
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There must be a Wild Wild West reboot waiting to happen. You could even have Jim West as an African-American lawman in Reconstruction times like in the Will Smith movie, but unlike the Will Smith movie (because I'm pretty sure it had been in development then was repurposed as a Will Smith vehicle) you'd have room to explore that.
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Sep 18, 2017 12:54
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Wheat Loaf posted:There must be a Wild Wild West reboot waiting to happen. You could even have Jim West as an African-American lawman in Reconstruction times like in the Will Smith movie, but unlike the Will Smith movie (because I'm pretty sure it had been in development then was repurposed as a Will Smith vehicle) you'd have room to explore that.
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Sep 18, 2017 13:14
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Toplowtech posted:I see your wild wild west and i say Mission Impossible. Set in the 60s and not a tom cruise vehicle. See my first post in the thread.  You've got the Arrowverse today, so you could have the same thing except with Mission Impossible, Man From UNCLE, various ITC shows etc. (Kim Newman to be hired as head writer).
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Sep 18, 2017 13:26
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Mission: Impossible had a very, very tiny bit of serialisation, where somebody that Phelps had screwed over in one episode recognised him off-duty in a later one and went after him for revenge, but that was all. Seconding Wheat Loaf's suggestion of the ITC shows like Department S and The Saint - and I'll add one. Space: 1999 could have been Galactica 2004 in 1975, a small group of humans thrown into an extremely hostile and uncaring cosmos and being forced to survive on their wits and ingenuity as they look for a new home... except, y'know, it was a Lew Grade production in 1975. Literally the only continuity element in the whole thing was that the rear end in a top hat commissioner who ended up stranded on the moon with everyone else at the end of the first episode reappeared after an inexplicable absence weeks later, only to die a horrible ironic death. The writers didn't even remember that one of the crew had had a baby! The first season did have the whole business with the "mysterious force" that was supposedly guiding Alpha into the situations they encountered, but it was so woolly and vaguely-applied that it doesn't really count as an arc. (And it was tossed out of the airlock along with Bergman and Morrow for the second season anyway.) If I were showrunner of a hypothetical Space: 2099, I'd have the moon leave orbit not as a result of a nuclear accident, but because of some kind of huge and deeply-buried alien technology that's been found and kept a secret by the military contingent (setting up a military/civilian conflict from the start) on the base. They set it off, the moon is thrown through a space warp to some seemingly random point in the universe... and from then on it warps again every 48/57/76.3 or whatever hours. If you're off the moon when it goes, you're stuck where you are forever, so there's a built-in timeclock to every episode. Need to see if this planet's habitable? Don't get captured by the locals. Investigating a derelict alien ship? Be quick about it. And of course, maybe the moon's course through the universe isn't as random as it seems... And keep track of how many people die and how many Eagles explode, for Christ's sake. It's not hard!
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Sep 18, 2017 15:23
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One older BBC programme that actually did have a degree of serialisation was The Omega Factor with James Hazeldine and Louise Jameson; premise was that a journalist (Hazeldine) discovers he has extra-sensory powers when he survives a car wreck which kills his wife, so he teams up with a shadowy government research group to pursue the evil psychic (Cyril Luckham) responsible for causing the accident. It only lasted about 10 episodes and only more or less finished its story; it didn't really have the space it needed to fully explore its ideas. Hazeldine's character goes back to London after spending the series in Edinburgh (it was a BBC Scotland production) after Luckham's villain is killed, but after he leaves, his boss at the aforesaid research project is met by a mysterious woman and disappears, so there was a hook for more stories. It's a pretty good series and a precursor to a lot of "street-level mystery sci-fi" stuff like The X-Files that would become popular in the 1990s. If you brought that back and gave it to, say, Paul Abbott or even Charlie Booker, you could get a lot of mileage out of it. It's a rare series that I think would lend itself very well to having this big storyline with conspiracies and mysteries which weaves throughout an entire series run.
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Sep 18, 2017 15:36
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The Prisoner episodes were basically self-contained, weren't they? If it were remade it would be interesting to give it arcs.
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Sep 18, 2017 16:45
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Mechanical Ape posted:The Prisoner episodes were basically self-contained, weren't they? If it were remade it would be interesting to give it arcs. It wasn't very good.
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Sep 18, 2017 17:19
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And half the arcs just went literally nowhere (like the gay son of #2) because they were unexpectedly given only half as many episodes as they planned, after it was too late to go back and change much
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Sep 18, 2017 20:00
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Blakes 7.
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Sep 18, 2017 21:20
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Less "classic television show" and more "Saturday morning cartoon", but Pirates of Dark Water deserves a reboot like seemingly every other late 80s/early 90s IP has gotten. Look at the series bible, it was crazy ambitious and I really want to see what it'd be like in a format that could just run with it.
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Sep 18, 2017 22:14
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actually I wish there were less arc-based shows and more episodic ones because I would rather watch one show where they wrap the story up in an hour and then go do something else. Im sure all these new shows are great but I have avoided them because I dont want to get tied up watching 7 seasons of something just to see what happens
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Sep 18, 2017 22:34
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1. Tales from the Crypt or the Twilight Zone. Hear me out. It'd stay pretty much an anthology series as they've always been, but I say move it in to a straight up shared universe (they are all the rage, after all) and work a through line about a major background plot into all the episodes leading to the end. They have very different tones but I think you could reboot both on that concept. Twilight Zone has been rebooted a few times before, so I think Tales would draw more buzz. 2. Let's get 90s and gently caress in here and say TIME TRAX. I will say right now I don't think this show would hold up to my memory of it, the most enjoyably insane low-budget cop drama where the future cop's weapons and high-tech computer look like a loving credit card and key ring (save on prop money, much?!?) but somehow I watched this show every Goddamn week. 90s nostalgia has to kick in sometime, so gently caress it, give me a 10-episode Netflix run of this. ED: You know this is 90s as gently caress because of the XTREME X title 3. I realize A) They are already doing this except lovely as gently caress and B) this is drawing ire, but frankly I think the Star Trek franchise is built more for a serialized show than an episodic one to be honest. The show that got the most serialized by far was the best thing they ever did so gently caress it, they should try again once people forget the clusterfuck they're doing now.
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Sep 19, 2017 02:01
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KoRMaK posted:Would The Wire satisfy this request? I don't know much about The Wire, but I don't think it is the type of show that would have an animated Wile E. Coyote on it, right? Arc-driven Night Court would probably look a lot like Parks and Rec, only more so.
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Sep 19, 2017 02:33
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Payndz posted:If I were showrunner of a hypothetical Space: 2099, I'd have the moon leave orbit not as a result of a nuclear accident, but because of some kind of huge and deeply-buried alien technology that's been found and kept a secret by the military contingent (setting up a military/civilian conflict from the start) on the base. They set it off, the moon is thrown through a space warp to some seemingly random point in the universe... and from then on it warps again every 48/57/76.3 or whatever hours. If you're off the moon when it goes, you're stuck where you are forever, so there's a built-in timeclock to every episode. Need to see if this planet's habitable? Don't get captured by the locals. Investigating a derelict alien ship? Be quick about it. And of course, maybe the moon's course through the universe isn't as random as it seems... Haverchuck posted:actually I wish there were less arc-based shows and more episodic ones because I would rather watch one show where they wrap the story up in an hour and then go do something else. 
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Sep 19, 2017 05:39
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Haverchuck posted:actually I wish there were less arc-based shows and more episodic ones because I would rather watch one show where they wrap the story up in an hour and then go do something else. Im sure all these new shows are great but I have avoided them because I dont want to get tied up watching 7 seasons of something just to see what happens Sure, there's a lot of appeal in being able to dip in and out of something. You need something to occupy your time for an hour, you can just stick on an episode of something like TNG and it'll keep you entertained.
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Sep 19, 2017 09:31
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Another old ITC/Gerry Anderson show that would benefit from modern storytelling is UFO. For those who don't know, it's literally the inspiration for the XCOM series (as in, the original game's creators freely admitted to plundering it for ideas), about a secret military organisation that fights alien invaders. The show did have traces of arc-based storylines, about main character Straker's marriage being destroyed and his young son dying because he was forced to put duty and secrecy before his personal life, but mostly the stories were standalones where not even the aliens' motivations were consistent. They're coming to Earth to harvest our organs because their planet and race are dying... except when they sometimes try to wipe out all life on the planet. Those wacky aliens, huh? It also suffered from production problems where the closure of its original studio meant a long hiatus while everything was moved to another, during which time several of the main cast went on to other work and had to be replaced. So in the series as shown, major characters appear and disappear between episodes at random! It could kind of be justified by saying that "it's a military organisation, and they were on other assignments at the time", but it's still jarring.
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Sep 19, 2017 11:29
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Land of the Giants. loving awesome stuff. Giant pencils everywhere...
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Sep 19, 2017 11:37
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