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Did JMS Ruin Television SF?
San Francisco, 10:32 AM
Tue Dec 8
28 posts in the last 24 hours
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Did JMS Ruin Television SF? |
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06/15/09
I think there's an inherent problem in the discussion based on the several terms being conflated. Lots of TV series, American and otherwise, had broad arcs t them prior to B5. The difference was in the degree of pre-planning and the use of certain tools like foreshadowing. Usually, on these shows, they'd get together at the end of one season and/or the beginning of the next, and figure out what they wanted to do, or undo, keep, or lose. It's the difference between deciding where you want to drive before you go, and making it up as you drive.
B5 was the first weekly series to use the tools of the novel -- introduction, rising act, complication, climax and denouement, one per season -- in a television format, which required that you work out all of the story ahead of time so that you could use those devices properly. And over the years, it stayed relatively close to that design, even with a number of bumps along the road.
Dr. Who (of which I am a fan) had its ongoing arcs, but they tended to vary from doctor to doctor, series to series. The closest parallel to what we did on B5 was Blake's Seven, where you can definitely see and feel the degree of pre-planning that went into it.
There's no question that once B5 introduced those devices, other shows picked them up, to greater and lesser degrees. But ANY tool, over-used, or mis-used, can become oppressive with time, and that may be the case with story arcs in SF. Now, it seems, you have to create these vast, elaborate arcs if you want to be taken seriously, which I think is a mistake. I think you need both variations.
I didn't create B5 to say "this is the way SF should be done," I created it in that style because that was what I wanted to do, the specific story I wanted to tell. If there were tools there that others could build upon, all well and good, but it wasn't an object lesson in Here's How It Should Be Done Henceforth.
Which is why, for instance, of all the DC titles I could've chosen to start with, I asked for Brave and the Bold, so I could do single-issue standalone stories in an industry dominated by massive, internecine arcs. I think there's room for both...in comics, AND in TV.
06/14/09
06/14/09
06/14/09
"The greatest novelists of the time, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Thackeray and Joseph Conrad, chose to publish their newest works of fiction in installments. These installments ran in popular magazines and newspapers or were produced in cheaply bound sections over a period of many months."
[www.unc.edu]
06/14/09
In the years since, it's become compulsory for science fiction and fantasy series to have a grand vision
All that's being said is that EPISODIC sci-fi should exist also, along with more long, series-based Sci-fi. You shouldn't be REQUIRED to invest 72 hours in a series of DVDs to catch up on what you want to watch when you're sitting down for an hour in front of the tv.
What's wrong with that statement? Why does torchwood HAVE to have a long story arc? I don't want it to. It's why I miss The Middleman. That was fucking great. Hilarious episodes you could watch then stop watching.
Seriously though... Does anyone actually remember trying to START watching B5? It was pretty messy. You'd tune in one episode and there was a guy who was the assistant to the ambassador and then the next time you watched, he'd have returned from super-ninja training camp and the first officer was a lesbian and eight new alien species have been introduced along with three wars... WTF?
06/14/09
06/14/09
A) the very TERM "arc" as applied to this kind of TV storytelling was invented in the 1980's (yes, the Eighties) by the show "Wiseguy" -- not SF at all, about an undercover FBI agent. Lots of people didn't even have VCR's back then, let alone all the options we have. And somehow the poor benighted denizens of the 80's managed to keep up weekly.
B) hello, pre-revival "Doctor Who", anyone?
C) he's a wanker.
06/14/09
This is also just wrong. In the DVR/Netflix era, story arcs that stretch for a season or longer are the only way to craft great stories. Think of all the weakest episodes of Sarah Connor Chronicles or the X-Files, and they were always the ones with disposable one-shot characters and bizarre dialogue or visual motifs that show up in the first and third acts. When a show can do great encapsulated episodes, that's swell, but that shouldn't be the rule. This the same Law & Order vs. The Wire argument, and guess what? Law & Order is obviously for suckers.
06/14/09
06/14/09
06/14/09
Also, Ice-T.
06/14/09
The promos are brutal, but if you follow crime in the news, in general, it's interesting to see what their writers do with some of these stories. And I loved the stuff with the governor they did this past season, how they tied re-election politics into the prosecution of high-profile murders. When the show's good, it's very bad. When it's bad, you get gems like, "Is this because I'm a lesbian?"
But then, this is a scifi blog, so I probably shouldn't be blabbing on about crime procedurals.
06/14/09
06/14/09
06/15/09
JMS may have stuck to the spirit of the plan, but the letter of the plan was (thankfully) thrown out the window the instant O'Hare left the show. What we got was infinitely better than was we were supposed to get. Ironically, JMS seems to generally do better when he's having to regain his bearings than when he's filing the original flight plan. The only clear exception is how muddled the Telepath storyline in S5 turned out, but even that whole kerfluffle ended up giving us Deconstruction of Falling Stars, which is one of my all-around favorite episodes (and which was _never_ part of the plan until the day they found out they weren't cancelled a year early after all).
06/14/09
Besides, do we really want to return to the kind of TV programming we got in the 80's? I know we look back at a few classic series with love and affection but on the whole the state of television seems to have changed for the better, and the shift to long arcs has resulted in real attention on writers and writing that only existed in fringe fan cultures a decade or more ago.
06/14/09
06/15/09
Stan Lee ruined Spiderman by not making him not suck from the very start. The only decent Spiderman is Miguel O'Hara.
06/15/09
Kudos.
06/15/09
I picked up at least the first issue of every 2099 series, and followed most of them through to the end, but that was always my favorite (dunno which one you think is the other one that didn't suck, but on a guess it'd have to be either Doom or X-Men). I also have, somewhere, one of only two Spiderman 2099 action figures that I know to have gone into mass production (it had a "base" that could be hung on a wall like a picture). The most recent one had a craptastic paintjob due to deep muscle grooves on the chest that resulted in voids on the "deaths-head" emblem, so I skipped it after long searches that failed to turn up one that didn't have dots of blue showing through the red.
06/15/09
X-men started at "Okay" and devolved quickly to "meh." I had forgotten about Doom 2099 actually, that wasn't that bad. Ravage, Hulk and Punisher were pretty horrible from what I recall.
06/16/09
Ravage and Punisher were the two that I know I dropped right off the bat, but I don't actually remember GR 2099.
06/14/09
And while B5 did have an incredibly well set up story-arc, shows like X-Files really set the stage for shows like Lost. The funny bit about Lost, X-Files, TNG, BSG, and other so-called long arc shows... the writers are still flying by the seat of their pants without a plan. Planned shows are almost impossible to pull off, especially in America, because no one knows how many seasons you'll get. So it turns out the best long arc planned shows wind up being 6-20 episodes long.
06/14/09
Definitely.
06/15/09
Lost is less lost than the other series you mention (and TNG was a straight-up episodic show, assuming you mean ST:TNG). Between how the show has stayed fairly consistent over five years, the fact that they pointedly contracted for years 4-6 with the firm intention of ending the show at that point, and the fact that when they were first announcing the end-run contract Lindelof/Cuse let it drop that they were on the verge of running out of flashback material for some of the characters, I can't believe even a tiny bit that they didn't have at least some idea of where they wanted to end the show when it first hit the airwaves. Maybe they didn't have the process plotted out quite as well as JMS did, but then again if you've ever had the chance to read his original treatment and five-year synopsis, the show is barely recognizable for what it was originally supposed to have become. Most notably, S5 of B5 was supposed to end with the station being destroyed in an attack, with another five-year series (Babylon Prime) set to follow on its heels and finish the story. Oh yeah, and there was going to be another war between Earth and Minbar. And Babylon 4 was going to end up being the replacement for Babylon 5, with Sinclair being one of the few characters who would be there for the entire 10-year run. So, even when you have things carved in stone, you still can't say for sure that things are going to turn out exactly the way you envisioned them.
06/15/09
06/15/09
Pretty much all shows have permenent changes taking place from the first episode to the last (even The Smurfs introduced new characters at one point). What I'm getting at is that TNG had very few major storylines that crossed from one episode to another (two-parters excluded), and even fewer that crossed from one season to another. And when they did, there was _NO_ mention of those storylines during the interim. Q may have been a regular visitor to the Enterprise bridge, but how many times did the Trial of Humanity come up? I can only remember hearing about it in the first and last episodes. Moriarty? Two episodes at the beginning and end of the series, but nothing in between. That's not "arc" of any sort in my book. "Arc Light" is what Dr. Who or Rocky & Bullwinkle used to do, where a single story was told over the course of a handful of episodes, and then the story ended and the next episode started a new episode.
No, TNG may have had permanence of character development in one sense, but it was still ruled by the reset button. Other than Yar dying (which required an Act of Roddenberry to accomplish), the occassional promotion, Crusher's hiatus, or who Troi was sleeping with at the time, the characters were pretty much locked in stasis from the first episode to the last. Picard was Picard was Picard from the very start. Sure, he stopped wearing the onesie uniforms, but he had essentially the same personality at the end of every episode. Now, compare that to the changes that occured with Garibaldi, Londo, or G'Kar, and it becomes even more evident.
@jl_roush:
Unfortunately...no. The thing with Lost was probably mentioned in one of their official podcasts (that being where I get most of my out-of-show info), but the only source I know of for the treatment and five-year synopsis is Book 15 of the JMS Scriptbook series, which could only be obtained by buying the other 14, all of which are permanently out of print at this point. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that someone posted those bits online, but buying in for Book 15 cost at least $550, so not only was the pool of potential posters considerably reduced by that figure, but a lot of those who did buy them would probably be a lot less likely to post that info due to how much it cost them to get ahold of than if they'd been able to buy a single book for $20 or less.
06/14/09
LOST is probably more to blame as it was the first extremely successful and popular arc based show and immediately afterwords you start to see many more arc based shows.
06/14/09
06/16/09
Nah, Sopranos got a lot of critical acclaim, but it was a cable series. No, check that, it was a cable series on a premium channel. Viewership was pretty damn tiny compared to what even shows that get axed before they've run even a full season on broadcast networks pull in.
06/14/09
What a wanker.
JMS created the show, was executive producer and even directed and "acted" in B5's final episode. He developed the opening credits as well.
B5 was his vision. If being able to preside over your own vision is being a "control freak", then I don't know what to say to Mr. Wright. Most people would kill to be able to have that much creative control over their own creation, be it in television or film. The studios usually wreak havoc on anything creative. I applaud JMS for being able to steer the ship without completely losing his mind.
When JMS did let someone else wander into this world, they were giants of SF- Harlan Ellison, D.C. Fontana, Neil Gaiman and David Gerrold. At least this "control freak" let in some of the best.
Perhaps Wright doesn't have the writing chops to create something that can sustain itself for longer than five episodes.
Again...what a wanker.
06/15/09
Harlan Ellison never "wandered" in the B5 universe. He just got consultant credits, which pretty much ensured that he'd never actually put pen to paper.
The fact that you cited David Gerrold is a bit amusing, since his one contribution is quite possibly the most despised episode of the entire series.
Also, most often when JMS let someone else wander through his universe, it was Larry DiTillio, who wrote 7 of the 18 non-JMS eps of the primary series, and was slated to write at least one episode for the first season of Crusade.
06/15/09
06/15/09
Don't run the B5 boards on IMDB, do you? Maybe it's not the most despised, but it's certainly on a lot of Worst Ten lists.
I've recently started having huge (new) problems with it from a purely scientific POV. Even a single cut is enough that they write the kid off as essentially dead? How the hell have they survived long enough as a race to become spacefaring? Not only are children walking injury-magnets, but certain careers are guaranteed to result in broken skin, especially in an industrial revolution. And if they have anything akin to mosquitos on their homeworld...
As for being a fan, I watched the pilot, all but one episode and the last five minutes of Infection (fire alarm went off due to a boiling pot of water) of the original series, and at least three of the made-for-TV movies all in original broadcast, usually in a group of no less than a dozen other sci-fi fans.
06/15/09
06/16/09
No, because the back slightly-more-than-half of S5 has a lot of really good stuff. The complaints about S5 almost always boil down to not much more than "hated the Telepath bit, _a_lot_".
06/14/09
Dr Who ALWAYS had arching visions for its serials, from day 1, and even Star Trek TNG had some series lasting storylines (the Borg, Q.) Hell even Blakes 7 had them.
Blaming JMS for something that for all purposes he took from soap operas, and dramas just shows his utter lack of knowledge of his own cultures sci fi heritage.
06/15/09
Oh, if you're going to count any instance of a permanent change, even when it doesn't constitute a primary story-arc, then you can go back even further to shows like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, where the series premieres would have introduced significant changes as they transitioned from the start-of-premiere setup to whatever would be used as the basic setup for every subsequent episode.
That's not what B5 did. Where Wright is wrong is that there are very few shows that can legitimately claim to stand where B5 does in terms of long-form storytelling. Buffy can't, because that show revolved around seasonal story-arcs. Yes, permanent changes continued to affect the course of the show, but every season pretty much led up to a Boss Fight of some sort, at which point everyone patted each other on the back and had a little vacation from the daily grind. Then a _new_ seasonal story-arc would start up, and things would proceed as normal (this is the same thing that Heroes does, only they've done some half-season primary story-arcs).
The only other show that I've watched that follows the same level of long-form storytelling that B5 used is Lost. Stargate leans more to the serial storytelling with some seasonal arcs thrown in. Heroes is definitely about the seasonal arcs. I haven't watched nBSG, but I've alternately heard claims that it it also follows the series-long story-arc pattern, or that they were clearly writing it on the fly instead of having a clear idea of where they were taking the story from Day 1.
06/14/09
06/15/09
There's a difference between a series that features regular multi-episode story-arcs and a series that features a near-continuous primary story-arc. That, as far as I am aware, can sorta be credited to The Prisoner, though one could argue that due to its length it wasn't much more than a really long miniseries.