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pentyne posted:The show went off the rails when the producers/network demanded that the show drop the environmental aspect that was a major part of season 1 and focus on action/drama, which ended up killing it. Roy Schieder was excited about the show when he got the casting call and jumped on it because of the focus on sea ecology and environmentalism, but season 2 was nothing but time warps, undersea dragons, robots, and other cliche poo poo. Then season 3 dropped that and focused on the growing world conflicts etc. I remember back at the time one of my friends told me there was an episode where they took their submarine to Hell and killed Satan with a spear or something, was that really a thing that happened? pentyne posted:After Heroes season 1 there was nowhere to go but down, and ho boy did they go down. Season 1 was some of the best television on at the time, The 2006-07 TV season was pretty dire, but if you really believe this then you're forgetting huge portions of season 1.
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Jun 15, 2014 17:50
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Gynovore posted:Hell, I should have thought of Heroes as an example of a show that went downhill. Season 1 was as good as television gets; great premise, top-notch writing and acting, great SFX and production. Season two meandered from one plot to another and wasn't as sharp. Season three was just plain bad, with stupid time travel stuff that didn't even make sense. I didn't even know there was a fourth season until last year, I had thrown up my hands halfway through three. Heroes had way more problems than the writer's strike. I remember interviews with Tim Kring where he admitted he had no idea where the show was going, had little interest in any of the characters beyond their origin stories, etc. He generally comes across as one of the most clueless showrunners ever put in charge of such a big project. Seriously, how did this guy suddenly go from running a mediocre procedural show(Crossing Jordan*) to being suddenly regarded as a hot property, on the basis of nothing at all? I guess he must have a talent for bullshit if nothing else, and if Heroes was about anything, it was about the power of bullshit to convince an audience that what they're watching is something special, rather than just a clumsy rehash of popular geek properties of the past. Season 3 was the TV equivalent of a car on fire with no driver at the wheel. It seemed as if every time a new plot development was introduced, something else would happen to almost immediately undermine it. As far as I can tell this was purely down to the writer's room being a disorganised mess with no-one agreeing on anything. So if someone tried to push the story in one direction, someone else would come along and undo it, which is an absolutely ridiculous state of affairs for any show, not least one that was supposed to be a big deal at the time. *Incidentally, searching this show on youtube brings up two or three real videos and hundreds upon hundreds of spam uploads and fake accounts, all reposting variations of the same randomly generated slideshow, all with zero views. It's guess it's some kind of weird monetisation scam, but it's very loving odd. I mean, why that show?
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Jun 15, 2014 20:44
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I guarantee you Dominion is going to be what youre looking for OP. It hasnt started yet (premiers June 19) but theres no chance this show isn't going to be a huge piece of poo poo.
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Jun 15, 2014 20:59
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Outcasts is some pretty top tier terrible sci-fi. It was a BBC production riding in the wake of BSG set on a frontier colony in outer space and going for the same ~worthy human drama using science fiction to examine the Big Issues~ thing, except the show was completely unengaging and blandly written from the first episode and the entire cast didn't have a single drop of charisma between them, so instead we had the most po-faced attempts at profundity imaginable: protracted scenes of important people with terrible secrets listening intensely to classical music whilst brooding at the camera, a sombre kid repeatedly quotes Keats' poetry at portentous scenes like it really means something and the working class regular folk who run the colony just continue to act more bewildered and depressed at the end of every episode as some new crisis or revelation about the terrible secret of space leaves everything worse than it was before. If you've got the stomach for it it's pretty impressive how much unwarranted self-importance they managed to cram into one eight-episode series (before it was cancelled due to astronomically bad ratings).
No Dignity fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Jun 15, 2014 |
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Jun 15, 2014 21:55
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Pellisworth posted:Yeah, Farscape is mostly good-to-exellent with a few turd episodes here and there, and it goes downhill somewhat in the last season as they face cancellation and budget cuts. The show makes heavy use of practical effects (Jim Henson puppets, tons of makeup and crazy costumes) instead of CGI which actually has made it age quite well visually. I guess it's bad in that it's low-budget and doesn't take itself particularly seriously, but I'd definitely put it in the top 5 sci-fi series since ~2000. All of the characters are pretty incredible. Pellisworth posted:Yeah, Farscape is mostly good-to-exellent with a few turd episodes here and there, and it goes downhill somewhat in the last season as they face cancellation and budget cuts. The show makes heavy use of practical effects (Jim Henson puppets, tons of makeup and crazy costumes) instead of CGI which actually has made it age quite well visually. I guess it's bad in that it's low-budget and doesn't take itself particularly seriously, but I'd definitely put it in the top 5 sci-fi series since ~2000. All of the characters are pretty incredible. Farscape's story was just the work of some insane geniuses. It suffers from a lot of "oh lets just invent something to solve this problem in the last five minutes" but somehow it's just incredible. Also, it includes my favorite scene on a TV show ever, where the villan, Scorpio (?) implants a chip in the protagonists brain to harvest his memories, upon retrieving the chip, he sucks the nuggets of brains off of it and eats them. Oh, and also Scorpio tries to eat Jon's unborn child from the mothers womb in order to get at his fetal-inherited memories. Yes, those things happened.
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Jun 16, 2014 17:56
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Gotta second the V remake. The original show got more appealing/convincing visual effects, those loving green screens  V also got more done in its miniseries than the remake managed in two seasons (or so it feels). The "obama is the antichrist" thematic angle vs the original "What if you woke up in NAZI GERMANY? p.s viva la france" is also mindboggling.
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Jun 16, 2014 18:10
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raditts posted:I remember back at the time one of my friends told me there was an episode where they took their submarine to Hell and killed Satan with a spear or something, was that really a thing that happened? I don't think they killed Satan but I'm pretty sure they ran into Poseidon in second season.
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Jun 16, 2014 18:13
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Scorpius in general was one of the best sci-fi villains ever. Arguably made greater by the fact that in the end, he got everything he wanted. And the show's charting Crichton's long, slow descent into madness was epic.
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Jun 16, 2014 19:18
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Gynovore posted:If you want an example of a show that took a nosedive, Lexx. The first season was amazing, the second was hit-or-miss, the third plodded and rambled, and the fourth was loving embarrassing. I don't even separate the seasons anymore. I own the whole series on DVD and to me, I love the whole thing in all its greatness and horrible-ness. But it's a show where I could easily see how somebody would loathe it, so when anybody mentions having watched it and hated it I don't even bother defending it. I love it and that's all. I like to think of Lexx as Farscape as written by Richard O'Brien.
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Jun 16, 2014 19:25
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Falling Skies needs to decide on a tone and commit fully to it. It needs to either embrace the cheese and go balls to the wall or firm up the story telling a bit. Right now it's stuck in the limbo of of pretty terrible TV but not terrible enough to laugh at how bad it is. What really sucks is they do know how to pull of season finales which keeps bringing me back to the next season. But then they waste 90% of the next season with boring filler.
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Jun 16, 2014 20:08
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V had a scene where a religious person told the alien queen that she would never overcome the power of the human soul. Then she spent half a season trying to find a way to literally suck the soul out of people's bodies. This was completely serious and bit intentionally funny.
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Jun 18, 2014 07:44
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Orphan Black, Arrow, and Defiance are legitimately interesting and fun shows. I doubt you'd be able to make much of them if you're trying to do a parody journal. Lost Girl kind of fits, but it's really tongue-in-cheek and knows full well it's basically a CW production of True Blood at best. So, it's more charming than serious. It does have some pretty bad special FX though if that's what you're going for. I'd have to echo the shows that tried to piggy-back off of Lost's success with the serialized sci-fi premise. Flash Forward and The Event were pretty bland, though they don't feature much in the way of special FX, really. The last few seasons of True Blood have been downright terrible, but mostly in comparison to how great the first few were. I also did not hear too many great things about The Tomorrow People, but that's also a remake of a remake so I don't know if that counts for your "modern" requirement despite airing last season.
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Jun 18, 2014 08:20
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Farscape. Just watch something already, we need feedback
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Jun 18, 2014 10:28
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Rocksicles posted:Farscape. If nothing else, I love Farscape where Crichton points out a poorly thought an alien kidnapping plan. The alien plan was to knock him unconscious, then he points out that a severe concussion would most likely kill him or at least result in severe brain damage. OK, then they want to shoot him in the foot, then he pointed out that if he was shot in the foot or the hand, he would most likely die from shock or blood loss. Then he just went full Blazing Saddles, grabbed a gun, and took himself hostage. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Jun 18, 2014 |
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Jun 18, 2014 11:47
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If you can track it down (I believe most of the episodes are up on Youtube) Siberia would definitely work. It was this single-season slapped-together thing NBC shat out to fill a summer timeslot; the idea was that a group of people were dropped into an abandoned Russian town for this reality show where they were supposed to live for a year and make a new society but there started to be random deaths BECAUSE DINOSAURS, no, seriously!. It has shakey-cam bullshit but somehow it was really entertaining.
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Jun 18, 2014 13:11
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Astrofig posted:If you can track it down (I believe most of the episodes are up on Youtube) Siberia would definitely work. It was this single-season slapped-together thing NBC shat out to fill a summer timeslot; the idea was that a group of people were dropped into an abandoned Russian town for this reality show where they were supposed to live for a year and make a new society but there started to be random deaths BECAUSE DINOSAURS, no, seriously!. It has shakey-cam bullshit but somehow it was really entertaining. This actually sounds pretty sweet. But then to did Terra Nova.
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Jun 18, 2014 14:33
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Dr_Amazing posted:This actually sounds pretty sweet. But then to did Terra Nova. Terra Nova was pretty sweet. 
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Jun 18, 2014 15:12
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Astrofig posted:If you can track it down (I believe most of the episodes are up on Youtube) Siberia would definitely work. It was this single-season slapped-together thing NBC shat out to fill a summer timeslot; the idea was that a group of people were dropped into an abandoned Russian town for this reality show where they were supposed to live for a year and make a new society but there started to be random deaths BECAUSE DINOSAURS, no, seriously!. It has shakey-cam bullshit but somehow it was really entertaining. Oh yeah, that wasn't too bad but you have to not worry about plot holes because the whole thing falls apart very quickly if you spend any time thinking about it.
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Jun 18, 2014 15:47
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eriktown posted:Scorpius in general was one of the best sci-fi villains ever. Arguably made greater by the fact that in the end, he got everything he wanted. I'd like to think that the writers of Farscape just really had a lot of fun writing the show and didn't filter any ideas and just ran with everything they thought up.
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Jun 19, 2014 16:37
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