Where are the decent scifi series?

[KennyR]

If detective series had been as poorly represented as scifi through the years, Scooby Doo might be a good example of a detective series.

Campy, cliched, unimaginitive - and that's the good ones. :-) Star Trek TNG was good for its day but has aged very badly, and later spinoffs were very poor, with feeble characterisation and weak plots, usually involving some kind of time travel. By the end they just stopped relying on stories to attract viewers and just got buxom birds in tight catsuits to do that. Some unwritten Star Trek law goes that, the more episodes you make, the crapper the theme tune and the duller the characters have to be. And the tighter the catsuit.

I suppose Babylon 5 managed to prop up the scene for a while in the mid 90s, but latex aliens and its degeneration into a war of Light vs. Shadow threw it into the Bad Scifi Cliche Bargain Bin (which Farscape, Crusade, Andromeda and their ilk have never actually crawled out of since the beginning).

Lexx was startlingly original (not to mention pervy), but it eventually got really, REALLY boring too, taking whole series to tell a story that could be done in half an episode. This fate had been suffered the last series of Dr. Who two decades before. When ideas run out, just spread one good idea over six episodes, oh and show more cleavage. It works, honest...

Scifi is a genre where imagination should run wild. Weird dystopias, strange worlds, the struggle of individuals to comprehend their existence in other-worldy societies so alien they're hard to comprehend. In mid-2004, I now find myself in a situation where there is no decent scifi left at all. The days are gone where I could be impressed with a series which involves whole alien species and their diverse socialogical situation being shown as lesser known actors in latex masks all wearing the same clothes. Oh, and time travel stories. Again.

Just as well we have CSI. Pffh.

[odin]

At least we have something decent coming up in the cinema, I Robot. With masteractor Will Smith as main cast. That's bound to make a good combination. Asimov and Smith.


Well, perhaps there is a small chance they haven't screwed up. Has there even been a single decent bigscreen adaption of any Asimov story?

[cecilia]

Oh, don't get me started!
there are so many excellent writers and stories - Harlan Ellison, Friz Lieber, Blish, Asimov, etc etc etc
and all Holly-Crappy-wood wants to do is make formula, predictable s.h.i.t.

yawn!

I did enjoy B5 because Joe sure made a effort to write stories about charaters. and harlan was in the background giving advice.

one of the reasons I got an amiga was because I could see the possibilities for making science fiction using such a tool. maybe someday.
I mean, I HAVE made important contributions on other peoples projects (obviously), but I'd like to do mine.

[KennyR]

odin wrote:
At least we have something decent coming up in the cinema, I Robot. With masteractor Will Smith as main cast. That's bound to make a good combination. Asimov and Smith.

:lol:

The closest Asimov ever got to big screen popularity was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which he co-wrote the story for. It sucked.

I know most of Asimov's stories don't suck though. I'd be frustrated beyond belief if I was the man. He must be the most successful scifi writer who's been ignored the most by Hollywood.

[QuikSanz]

@ KennyR,

We should have a new Battlestar Galactica series soon. If you didn't see the pilot it's very different.

Chris

[odin]

Now, you can't be serious if you mean that the original Battlestar was good. Great fun in a camp-ish sort of way, but good? Nah :-).

Mind you, one of my earliest childhood memories is playing Battlestar with a 3*2 and 1*3 legobrick stuck on each other acting as Vipers :-).

[QuikSanz]

@ odin,

You can't tell Who,s a Cylon.

Chris

[PMC]

KennyR wrote:

The closest Asimov ever got to big screen popularity was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which he co-wrote the story for. It sucked.

I know most of Asimov's stories don't suck though. I'd be frustrated beyond belief if I was the man. He must be the most successful scifi writer who's been ignored the most by Hollywood.

I didn't know Asimov was involved in ST Motion Picture!  The story wasn't THAT bad IMHO.  The film sucked because the acting was poor, the characterizations were awful and the director seemed to be biased toward special effects at the expense of everything else.

Anyway, there have been a great many Sci-Fi writers who deserve to have their work adapted to film.  There's the likes of Arthur C Clarke (isn't Rendezvous With Rama sitting unreleased somewhere?), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - Lucifer's Hammer would have been the ultimate disaster movie, much better than Deep Impact IMHO.

Isn't there a remake of War Of the Worlds due soon?  If it's set in the original Victorian Britain then it will something different...

[mikeymike]

I didn't mind ST1, but it's been a good few years since I've last seen it, and I think I've only seen it once.

TNG was the only decent ST series IMO.

[PMC]

odin wrote:
Now, you can't be serious if you mean that the original Battlestar was good. Great fun in a camp-ish sort of way, but good? Nah :-).

Camp as a field full of tents :-)

Do you remember the battle scenes in Battlestar?  They used to play the same three or four dogfight sequences in a slightly different order to give the illusion of big battle taking place.

That's directing on the cheap  :lol:

[cecilia]

mikeymike wrote:
I didn't mind ST1, but it's been a good few years since I've last seen it, and I think I've only seen it once.

TNG was the only decent ST series IMO.

no, THE best Star Trek was the first and the original. (what seems to be called "classical", now). They wrote about characters and ideas. and you had a set of really good actors.
People have tried to recapture the magic, and have never quite gotten it.

[KennyR]

cecilia wrote:
no, THE best Star Trek was the first and the original. (what seems to be called "classical", now). They wrote about characters and ideas. and you had a set of really good actors.

Agreed. The original ST was good for its day because it was really original and had good relationships between characters. The characters themselves weren't given a whole load of history and emotional baggage and then told to try to portray it - Deniro could do that, most actor's cant, and usually try to end up with some boring angry angst-ridden character that softens as the series goes on (i.e. B'ehlana Torres). The ST characters were colourful and eccentric, and well acted. A little mould cast maybe (at first), but they worked and were popular. The baggage was added later to suit.

I'm not sure "real" characters work in scifi, since many of the writers lack real world experience, to be blunt. It would be interesting to see Scorsece direct a scifi film, for instance. ;-)

TNG didn't have such interesting characters, but it still had something - good stories, for a start. Stewart showed his star quality portraying Picard's wisdom and diplomacy, Worf was a good role, Data was an interesting character (if irritating later). But the women were window dressing and Riker and LaForge were rather dull (they obviously tried to make Riker be another Kirk, but the actor wasn't up to it and changed their minds).

TNG has aged though. I still laugh my ass off about the episode where they take on a load of country bumpkins in rags, and the love interest woman among them is wearing eyeshadow and mascara. :lol:

Damn, I'm arguing seriously about Star Trek on an internet forum. Geek alert. :-P

http://immolation.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/greatfx.jpg

[PMC]

they obviously tried to make Riker be another Kirk, but the actor wasn't up to it and changed their minds).

What an damning verdict on Jonathan Frakes's acting skills! ("Spaaaaaahhhhhhk!  Some.  Kind.  Of.  magneticenergyfield". cue lots of arm waving, slow fighting and pouting at camera.  Shirt rips).

With TOS, none of the character's histories were relevent, which made it easy to watch without having to think back to old episodes or follow a drawn out plotline.  Nothing else mattered but the story being played out during the 40 minutes of storyline because it was all about plot.  Again, it allowed decent writers to come and go (inlcuding Harlan Ellison IIRC) because they didn't have to write around comlex character guidelines.  Ironically, the most complex character was the one portrayed as unemotional, thus Spock was the logical choice (groan) to cameo in TNG.

[PMC]

http://immolation.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/greatfx.jpg

@KennyR

Is it me or is one of those purple dudes giving Picard the bird?

:-D

[mikeymike]

Damn, I'm arguing seriously about Star Trek on an internet forum. Geek alert.

Maybe you should get a job? :-)

I edited the posts to convert images to URLs to fix page width.