[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Yes, Paramount has fallen into the same hole Disney did once Walt was gone: Keeping the place running for the stockholders.

Any publicly held company does that. Where they all lose their way is understanding what does the best for the stockholders. They get focused on short term results at the expense of long-term survival.

Of course, I think it was doubly tragic with Disney, because they had a true entertainment visionary as its guiding force. I think Paramount hasn't had that kind of visionary approach to the business since movies went color... they were in the hole before Disney fell in.

I think I agree.

And it must be a source of real frustration for a lot of folks within Disney. They got extraordinarily creative people there -- if senior management will allow them to be. There have been as assortment of folks over the years who left Disney to hang out their own shingle because they were being stifled.

Paramount's answer to keep Trek going turned out to be plenty of cheesecake, battle after battle, rehashing old material and reviving familiar (popular) characters, and hitting that reset button every hour on the hour. That hasn't worked with any SF show on TV, so Paramount was fooling itself when it assumed that it would work for the mighty Trek. Just putting their efforts into good storytelling would have done the trick... but Paramount doesn't seem to understand SF at all, so they could never see how the story was at all important.

Show me a TV studio that does understand Story, in other than fits and starts and almost by accident rather than design,

Firefly remains a perfect example of the state of American TV today: It was commissioned, sight unseen, because Joss Whedon had just come off of the successful Buffy series. But being so original, Firefly was canned by those same executives for being too far outside the formula box. You can count the number of shows outside of standard formula that successfully run on TV on one hand... you'd need hundreds of hands to count those non-standard shows that were never given the chance to run. And this, despite the quality of writing, the depth of the characters, or the overall quality of the production.

And Joss Whedon illustrates another issue. I passed on Buffy for the first season, as the premise was a "You must be joking!" matter. But people whose taste I respected raved about it, so I gave it a try and got hooked. If you were capable of buying the premise, the characters were dead on, and the story was compelling. Then came Angel, which was a mixed blessing. The problem was that Joss Whedon was a genius, but others weren't. There was one of him, and he had two hands and 24 hours in a day. So any random week, you might see a great Buffy, or a great Angel, but not both, and sometimes neither. The more his attention was split, the less there was for any particular show, and the quality suffered. Being both show runner and lead writer for a show is a more than full time job. Now try doing it for two shows....

Buffy was the first show since Babylon 5 went off the air that I actively tried to watch every episode, and was upset if Real Life got in the way. Toward the latter part of Ange's run, I didn't care if I saw any particular episode.

And Joss is an example of a writer with a sure hand for character but less ability to fully plan his world. Fantasy tends to be based on magic. Magic has rules, and underlying principles governing its operation. Good fantasy writers keep that in mind, make those rules, and play by them. They construct their world as carefully as any hard SF writer postulating new scientific development, the technologies those will make possible, and the implications of having and using such technologies.

If there were any rules governing magic in the Buffyverse, they weren't apparent in the produced shows. It appeared he never really thought out his cosmology. He just pulled rabbits from his authorial hat. I knew some folks working on stuff like Buffy role-playing games where rules like that would be required who were tearing their hair in frustration trying to keep things consistent. They couldn't, because Joss didn't.

Instead, we get Terminator turned into a TV show, and a remade Bionic Woman and Night Rider. Old ideas, all (so far) badly written, but if it fits a successful formula... who cares?

All of this is why I've recently taken to buying DVDs of the material I like (TV and movies), and ignoring most broadcast TV for the most part.

I essentially don't watch broadcast TV. We have cable, and my SO watches a great deal, but it's not the usual network fare. With the exception of some genre stuff like Dr,. Who and Torchwood, the set is normally tuned to Animal Planet or the Food Network.

I'm usually glued to a screen, too, but it's this one.
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Dennis