TV Musings

[shakatany]

Well that was a very interesting ep of "Lost". I love the way Sawyer maneuvered events and people there on the island. So in honor of him I'm posting the link to The Sawyer Song just in case anyone hasn't seen it

Comments

[shakatany]

You Brits have another way of creating TV. I recall each season/series of "Blake's 7" was 13 eps long. Also the many seasons of Doctor Who each had various numbers of eps. And there was another series called "Oxbridge Blues" where each ep was a different length some short like 20 minutes and some long like 75 minutes so that the writing dictated how long it would be so the stories were neither expanded or compressed to fill a specified timeslot. I think with downloadable TV that might be a valid style of making a show.

Shaktany

[belleimani]

In "Andromeda" when Kevin Sorbo fired Robert Hewitt Wolfe and discarded his multi-season story arc and made the show into basically stand alone eps, the series went downhill rapidly. (Trivia question: anyone know the name of the first actor to play Dylan Hunt?).

So, so true. It seems like writers don't focus as much anymore. One of the things I'm loving about Supernatural is that you can tell that even though they 'solve' a mystery each week the show continues to drop hints about the boys and the overall arc within each ep.

I think it helps that there are only two main charcters as well though.

When does a cast become too much of a cast?

[shakatany]

Good question. With the addition of the other survivors "Lost"'s cast is becoming a bit unwieldy though I hear that one will soon depart. I hated it when ME added Andrew and those potentials in S7 as I felt they took away the focus on the core group. I think Straczynski managed nicely with the cast of B5 so maybe that's the key: does the show have one person who can keep track of everyone or a group of creators who let characters slip through the cracks. "Supernatural" hearkens back to the old style roadtrip shows with just 1 or 2 characters like "The Fugitive", "Route 66", "Then Came Bronson" and "Run for Your Life". Nowadays it seems that large casts are more prevalent which is strange as the bigger the cast the more expensive a show is *tries to figure out the Hollywood mindset and fails*

Shakatany

[belleimani]

One of my biggest problems with the last year of Buffy was Andrew. He was an unnecessary character played by a not-great actor whose lines sounded like they should've been coming out of Xander or Willow's mouths.
The potentials I could deal with a lot better, since it made since that if they were dealing with the 1st evil it would do it's best to elimnate the Slayer line before it really got cooking.
Lost, lost me, no puns intended, with the several things:
Too much focus on C/K/L/S/J. 47 people survived yo. Why do we see these 5's issues every fracking week?
Boone's death. I felt it was unnecessary and not even done well and the only thing that saved it was Ian Somerholder, Matthew Fox and Terry O'Quinn.
Introduction of a bunch of new characters that meant nothing to me, except Crazy French Lady and Mr. Eko who are awesome but I think I'm more inclined to the actors then the characters.
Also most shows are supposed to have a continuity editor and a show bible just because many learned with the Star Trek franchise that if you don

[shakatany]

Yeah as we Trekkies used to say in regards to the discontinuities "Why can't everything be perfect?" *g*

Shakatany