Also TV now: This show/movie did well 40 years ago so we rebooted it with people who never saw it, a shitload of special effects, and totally missed why it was popular in the first place.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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They did this a lot in the 90’s too. Production companies love to ground an IP into the dust.
That explains why I'm so familiar with boomer shows and movies, despite being a millennial. There was a lot of old content and remakes on TV then.
When I was growing up I thought Gilligan's Island was a much bigger deal than it actually was.
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NuTrek that you?
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Conversely
Producers find a new show idea that looks interesting and could be popular .....
Writers: yeah we got this idea that could be turned into an hour and a half hour long film ... it's very interesting, great plot dialogue, and there's a great twist
Producers, executives: Great idea! I love it! But it would give us more content if you could turn it into a series instead. Take the whole film and stretch it out across seven one hour episodes.
Writers: how?
Producers, executives: just cut it up into seven parts, slow everything down and make a dramatic cliff hanger at the end of every episode.
And then, Kai Patterson comes in and cuts it back down into a pretty good standard length film which I see as a win.
Opposite problem, too. Take what was supposed to be a series and shrink it down to a movie. The Section 31 movie comes to mind. It's so much better if you view it as if it were the pilot for a new series, but that's never going to happen.
Also writers: We don’t give a shit about the source material the fans love. Fuck these nerds.
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Also TV now:
Murder mystery.
"Comedy" that's all about murder mystery.
Depressing drama.
Drama about murder.
Murder comedy that's mostly just drama.
Documentary about murder.
Depressing documentary.
I miss the good engineering docos, how it's made etc. And shows like Mythbusters.
There's nothing quite like that now.
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I'd rather have them kill shows immediately than right before the final season. See Westworld, Expanse and (almost) Snowpiercer. I'm currently really anxious about Yellowjackets.
Firefly still hurts though.
Firefly still hurts though.
With age comes wisdom. I realized some time ago that we get to love Firefly because it never lived long enough to be bad. No one talks about famous actor James Dean becoming an ultraconservative asshole, being closeted racist, or a serial abuser of women. He died before anything like that could happen. Firefly is the same way. It lives in our hearts with all of the potential it could have been. Contrast that to Game of Thrones which had a wonderful start and a dreadful and forgettable end.
How many people today would say "Lets binge watch all of Firefly from beginning to end!" vs "Lets binge watch all of Game of Thrones from beginning to end!"?
This is how I've always felt about it too. All of Whedon's other shows had twists that made the audience hate entire seasons; there's no reason to believe Firefly would have escaped that pattern.
So instead of being sad it died early, we can be glad we can still imagine where it could have gone in the best case scenario. The vision in our minds will likely be better than what we would have got if it'd continued.
No need to worry about Jayne's inevitable face-heel turn, or whatever other terrible subplots could potentially have cropped up in later seasons like River developing explicit (rather than merely suggested) incestuous feelings for Simon, or Inara betraying the crew for a cure to her disease (before being welcomed back a season later), or Kaylee getting killed off out of nowhere because Whedon loves doing that to characters of her archetype, or YoSaffBridge becoming a core crew member after we learn her tragic backstory even though her awful personality hasn't changed at all.
And that's not even getting into what the network execs, who hated the show, would have done with their meddling. Things could have been so much worse. Fans should console themselves with the fact that the show at least died with its dignity intact, and we even got a movie that resolved a few of the major hanging threads.
No one talks about famous actor James Dean becoming an ultraconservative asshole, being closeted racist, or a serial abuser of women. He died before anything like that could happen. Firefly is the same way.
Something like this would have happened even if Joss Whedon wasn't revealed to be a scumbag. Adam Baldwin, the actor who played Jayne, went on to become a major mouthpiece for the alt-right and a mainstay of conservative Twitter. IIRC he's even the one who named GamerGate (not that the name required even a modicum of creativity).
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The Expanse would need at least 3 seasons to catch up to the books. I'd rather they stop at the actual end of an arc (which is followed by 30 year time skip, mind you) than half ass through and botch the ending of the entire series.
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The Netflix show, House of Cards, in the first few minutes of the first episode, Kevin Spacey stumbles on a hit-and-run and there's a badly injured dog. He puts it out of its misery.
According to Netflix who wanted it removed, it led to a major drop off of people dropping off the show. But to the showrunner, that's the point.
Now, people drop off that show when Kevin Spacey appears so whatever.
a major drop off of people dropping off the show
Uhh.. what? So more people kept watching?
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Why the point?
My guess is that if you didn't like the dog scene, you wouldn't like the rest of the show. The tone is the same.
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Its the idea that not every character should be likeable and not all media should be without friction.
I... generally think stuff like that in the first few episodes is really stupid. Mostly it just turns things into misery porn and is a great way to alienate your audience. I think a much better approach is to lure the audience in so that they don't quite realize when Walter/Saul/Kim became truly irredeemable monsters... even if that tends to lead to people never realizing it.
And I think it is extra disingenuous to pretend that House of Cards was some daring show that bucked all the norms. It wasn't HBO levels of sexposition but they definitely were playiing up the "you can't watch this on network TV" from the first episode.
Print, not TV, but one of my favorite authors is Harry Connolly and his Twenty Palaces series had a pretty infamous chapter that was all one long run on sentence (I forget how many pages but I want to say 5-10?). You don't necessarily realize it in the moment but it is a hard read that is mentally tiring and it perfectly suits the contents of the chapter. Apparently basically every single beta reader hated it and he has alluded to it being why his Agent and Publisher dropped him and... I probably would too. I loved it but it very much hurt the overall pacing of the book to a large degree.
But that was also 3 or 4 books in. Not the first chapter of the first book (which was a child burning to death horribly... Yup. Connolly definitely got a hold of some incriminating photos or something).
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Apparently I have horrible taste because every show i like gets canceled in the first or second season
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I hate when they release streaming shows one episode per week. I am not going to watch it until it’s done and I catch up on other shows. Stop trying to get me to watch weekly, it’s not going to happen. That’s just not how people watch tv anymore.
So a new show to me is new for a solid year before i can get to it sometimes. So many times a show gets cancelled before I can watch it and half the time I lose interest once I know it’s cancelled
Maybe I'm weird but sometimes I actually enjoy streaming one episode per week, especially if I like the show, it just forces me to spread it out.
I used to hate the weekly model when streaming became popular, but I think people are better viewers when they watch weekly. It's easier to have ongoing water cooler conversations about each episode, so your show gets consistent buzz. Plus you don't have the extreme of a whole year+ to wait between seasons. If a classic show ended in May you could start a new season in September. By the time most modern shows have new seasons, I forgot 40% of what I saw last season.
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Honestly there is so much back catalog to watch, who even needs a flood of new stuff? I can't possibly keep up.
That's the problem.
All new TV must compete with the rest of the gag streaming catalog.
I mean, this is entirely untrue. There's a bit in the first episode of the renewed 4th season of Family Guy joking about it. This was 20 years ago. FOX had already stumbled on the "people are more excited about the first season of a show" formula that Netflix wouldn't adopt for another decade.
And that's not even considering the graveyard of television in the 80s and 90s. Shows nobody even knew about until they'd been cancelled (American Gothic, the Original Battlestar Galactica, Freaks and Geeks) or shows that flared out from the enormous budget (Alf, Dinosaurs) too soon, but developed cult following after they were gone.
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the one thing i do appreciate is them dropping filler episodes
Oh no, filler is a good thing. Filler gives you time to know the characters, and adds depth and color to the world. Filler is where writers actually get to stretch and try out ideas. Filler is what makes a show feel full.
Imagine the X-Files with no filler. We'd lose the Jose Chung episodes, "Home," "the Post-Modern Prometheus," and so many other great episodes. Without the filler, it's just an endless slog through Chris Carter's poorly planned mythology. Just the smoking man and vanishing babies for ~~eleven~~ nine seasons.
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Community has the best "big round number" episode.
And also the best bottle episode.
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That's some rose colored glasses right there.
TNG, Voyager... Rough first seasons leading to excellent series
Also see Life on Mars, Journeyman, Freaks and Geeks, Pushing Daisies, and Freaking Firefly.
None of this is new.
I love Freaking Firefly.
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They make a lot of shows now that would never have been greenlit back when all shows had to be hits. It's possible to have a niche now.
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I know the 26 ep a season shooting schedule was hell on actors, but it really allowed for more variety in episodic shows. There could be good eps and stinkers in a season without it impacting the overall show. Plus it gave you more time to weave in on-going plots while also giving room to explore specific characters more thoroughly.
It worked for sitcoms and Law and Order, but generally I prefer the tighter writing that can come with shorter seasons.
I'll take 10 excellent episodes over 26 fair-to-good episodes any day.
It also guaranteed work for those actors. A 3 season show meant you had steady work for 3 straight years and could still do auditions when you had time. This 10 episodes every 3 years is dumb
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Back when you had TV on a specific schedule, you were forced to watch things as they were. If a show was clunky, well you didn't have much choice in the matter, it was watch that or change channel or go outside.
With on-demand stuff, you can just completely skip over stuff you might actually like because the first few episodes are clunky. Why should I watch something clunky when I have the choice to watch something I know is good from the start?
...I'm still not watching One Piece though, I don't care how good it gets later.
Every 100 episodes of one piece has 10 good episodes. Fans of the show will clip those 10 episodes and yell from the rooftops that it’s the best show.
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Is there a television show that doesn't have a gun in it?
Game of Thrones?
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I'm currently re-reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, and something struck me. If this had been made into an HBO/... show, like, 8 years ago, it could have been a genre- and generation defining TV event akin to Game of Thrones.
But if it was to be produced today? It would be a cringe, plastic-feeling knock-off akin to Netflix' Last Airbender.
There is a weird inverse relationship between how long audiences will wait to give a show a chance, and how long execs (specifically Netflix) will give the show.
I think there must be more to the Netflix example. Maybe they are monitoring other data points like web searches or show mentions on fora to quantify buzz and work out if the show has hit potential with target markets. Either that or they get some new opportunity for creative accounting with each show.
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