Okay, so scuttlebutt has it that UPN is moving Star Trek: Enterprise to 9PM Wednesday, against Angel (as opposed to 8PM Wednesday, against Smallville). Even more importantly, they're talking about firing Rick Berman. And the whole future of Enterprise, and, since it's the only part left right now, the future of the whole Star Trek franchse, is in jeopardy.

First off, there's a lot of time on the network TV schedule that's not against other genre programming. Why, oh why, nust network idiots think that their show can ``win'' instead of getting the same large(r) ratings for all the programs?

Second, as good as it will probably be to get rid of Berman, and I hope the rumor's true, why can't they go ahead and get rid of Braga as well? They don't have to worry about Jeri Ryan walking off set anymore. And, for that matter, why does ST have to pander and specifically present large-busted women? Even Nicole deBoer, a flat-chested woman if there ever was one, claims that she was forced to wear a padded bra. Why did they cast her in the first place, then? But Jolene Blalock seems to have gotten a silicone-ectomy, at least in the chestal area.

Third, if they cancel Enterprise, might UPN pick up the vastly superior Firefly? It doesn't have the franchise behind it, but it's probably less expensive, if still more expensive than Fear Bachelorette or whatever.

Stating my biases up front, I've always been a big fan of Babylon 5, among other reasons, because it's (almost) always had good writing, strong characters, and never pandered to the need to "sex up" outer space (and yet still had its share of sexy scenes...). JMS, the producer/writer/creator of B5 has written extensively on the net about the "notes" he's gotten from higher-ups trying to dumb down his shows (recently, both Crusade and Jeremiah got such notes). He quit Jeremiah rather than compromise his vision of the show.

Now, we return your attention to UPN and Fox. Will UPN management ever allow there to be a quality program like B5 or Firefly? It's debatable. Fox scuttled Firefly, for all the same reasons that I could see UPN not understanding it. Given the amazing hash that the Trek writers have made of the Trek continuity, it would take not only the firing of Berman, Braga, and their cronies, but it would also take clueful management to hire a good writer who can be trusted to rebuild a better Trek and jettison all the cruft. Is UPN going to stick its neck that far out? I really doubt it. I'd rather they put the Trek franchise to bed for a decade or two and let somebody else resurrect it later.

Yeah, but Jeremiah absolutely sucks. I watched it the first season (I think I saw all the episodes) and laughed more at it than I did at most of the sitcoms I watch. It's absolutely hysterically bad. I didn't know he quit, though. Sounds more like a cop-out when he realized how bad the show was. Also, they cancelled Odyssey 5 in favor of it, and O5 was a much better show, although still far from great.

And, for that matter, why does ST have to pander and specifically present large-busted women?

While I agree with your overall point, I think 7 of 9 was more than just a woman with big breasts. Her character was far more interesting than anything else on Voyager, or at least in the few episodes I watched. Actually it has long been my contention that Star Trek writers can’t seem to write “strong” women. 7 of 9 seems to be the only success, and the line of failures is long. Starting with Yar and Pulasky all the way down to (now Admiral) Janeway.

Most of the women on DS9 were well done, I think.

Well I wasn’t ever a big fan of DS9 (though I liked it far more than Voyager), so I really don’t remember much about it. I didn’t really care for the first officer very much, and the trill (Dax?) didn’t really strike me as a “strong” character. But I understand there was a lot more character development in DS9 than the other series, so perhaps I misjudge based on early episodes (If TNG were judged on its first season it certainly wouldn’t fare well).

Tangentially, JMS's Babylon 5 was tremendous (well, the first four seasons, at least) and met with high regard from SF fans. But then he made some TV movies in the B5 universe that had no relationship to the overall arc of the B5 story. These were met with less regard, to put it mildly.

When he heard complaints about said movies, he said something along the lines of ``When I created B5, I wanted to do something different and it was liked. Now that I want to do something different again, it's dismissed. Therefore I'm pissed off at the fans.''

The moment I heard this, I immediately disliked JMS, despite really enjoying B5. His apparently huge ego wouldn't allow him to accept that the reason that folks liked B5 was not because of the scripting, but the plotting. It was the big epic storyline that was important, and the effects that it had on his well thought-out characters. But as soon as you make a standalone TV movie that can't effect the show itself, you throw away the epic story and the character development. All that's left is the scripting. And you know what? He's really bad at it.

Go back and watch B5 with that in mind. You'll hear more turgid speechifying than you'd ever thought was possible, even in personal moments. I can understand it in the political aspects of the show, but you'll often have two characters just talking to each other and it sounds the same.

That's not to say that B5 was bad. It wasn't. It was great. But that success did not follow over to Jeremiah. The story arc is thin and the show is very episodic. There is some character development, but, I'm sorry, Sideshow Luke Perry and Theo Huxtable can't pull it off. (Not to mention that awful, awful actress that plays ... well, really, any of the women on the show, but specifically, Theo, the opposing, um, warlord?)

Anyway, JMS needs to note what he does well (story arc, not episodic scripting) and manage his ree-zources better.

Jadzia Dax was a strong character, but not in the way many sci-fi kids would want. So many ``strong women'' in sci-fi are really strong men in women's bodies. (Honestly, much of Kira -- the first officer -- was that way.) Jadzia was very feminine, but not a damsel-in-distress. It wasn't a terribly well fleshed out character (I think that Terry Farrell was probably one of the weakest actors on the show, and I get the feeling she was hard to work with, given her work history), but it was well written for what it was.

There were other women on the show, too, and few were typical sci-fi window dressing. Ezri Dax (who took the place of Jadzia after Terry Farrell left the show), Vedek/Kai Winn (one of the main bad guys, if you want to put it that way), Keiko O'Brien, Casidy Yates, even Leeta, to some extent.

So many ``strong women'' in sci-fi are really strong men in women's bodies.

Yes, and I hate that. That's what I think of Yar, Pulaski (a female McCoy), etc. I liked Crusher and thought she had "strength", but not the kind those other characters (that I didn't like) tried to employ. Seven, OTOH, seemed be possess a masculine strength without being annoying. Sure she was half machine, but at least she was interesting. And actually I didn’t find her that attractive. Sometimes big breasts are just big breasts.

As for the DS9 women, perhaps I just need to give the show a chance. I plan on buying the DVDs some day so I can view them in order, but that'll be after I finish TNG and do B5.

Give DS9 a chance. I'd say B5 is better, but only very slightly. And DS9's first season wasn't the best. It really picks up starting with season 2.

I honestly never gave Voyager a chance. Well, I gave it a little, but by the time I saw two phantom Voyagers, two surrenders, a remake of Spock's Brain, and a resolution involving telling the bad guys ``well, don't do it again'' in the first five episodes, I gave up.

I tried to give DS9 a chance, I really did, just because of TNG. I watched like two whole seasons before realizing that I cared absolutly nothing about these characters. Voyager got one full season out of me and Enterprise about 4 episodes before I gave up. Beavis And Butthead ..err...Berman and Braga should have been axed a long time ago, I think it is too late to save the franchise now, and I am not sure anyone has the vision to do so in any case.

Babylon 5 lost me when they had the giant copout on the whole shadow war. There was the great climax they were reaching, everything was moving towards a resolution, and then the way it finished was so terrible it made my head spin. I'll avoid details to avoid spoiling people who are planning on seeing it, but the people who watched it know what I am talking about. In one episode I went from a rabid fan to never watching another episode of it. The interesting part of the series died with that episode, leaving all the crappy human goverment stories to fill the rest of the series. No thanks.

Good sci-fi tv shows seems to be few and far between. It's sad really, there is so much potential there for good shows, but no one seems both willing and able to do it right.

Why, oh why, nust network idiots think that their show can ``win'' instead of getting the same large(r) ratings for all the programs?

Hell, I can never understand why the hell networks do anything they do. I'm still waiting for the day they realize that it is next to impossible to move a show to another night when is not a long-time hit show. Hell, some networks move shows more then twice before their 3rd season. If it's Simpsons (which I started watching when it was on Thursdays), then you can do it, because the fans will follow.

But the plan these days is to put new shows into hit TV nights to get them watched, then move them to a relatively unwatched night. It seems they don't remember that those much-watched nights came about by putting multiple popular shows in one place.

Now I hear a rumor that they're moving the wonderfull Scrubs to another night. What the hell?? They're losing Friends and don't want to groom Scrubs to replace it? Is the humor in it just not broad enough? No, it's probably just because NBC just wants to make their "Must-See Thursday" a night of reality shows. Oh, how I hate "The Apprentice."

In one episode I went from a rabid fan to never watching another episode of it. The interesting part of the series died with that episode, leaving all the crappy human goverment stories to fill the rest of the series. No thanks.

Woah, wait. You left off right on that episode? I admit, things were rushed (and outside the control of the makers of the show at that time), but, there were some interesting things that happened after that tieing much more then just the shadow war together.

It is a shame the original plan for the 4th and 5th season got squished into just the 4th season though.

might UPN pick up the vastly superior Firefly?

Are you saying that Firefly continued after Fox cancelled it?

That would be wonderful news, if true -- but I think Joss Whedon only made about a dozen episodes, and that was it. IMHO the best Sci-Fi series ever on television.

tanstaafl.

There are three episodes on the DVD set that were never broadcast, and he's written a movie script for it that's been purchased by Paramount, but the project has not (yet) been greenlighted.

On the DVDs, there are some interviews, and one of the interviewees (a bigwig production guy, IIRC) says that the best of all worlds would be if the movie was made and then some network might pick up the TV series again.

FWIW, The Family Guy was picked back up after being cancelled due to exceptional DVD sales. Firefly's DVD sales have also apparently been outstanding. Of course, Firefly's bound to have cost a lot more.

on the DVD set

There's a DVD set? Omigod... now ordered from Amazon!

Why don't people ever tell me these things?

I found it interesting that with 579 reviews at Amazon, the average rating was 5 stars.

No wonder Fox cancelled it.

tanstaafl.

Okay. Knowing exactly how stupid this sounds and how likely it is that the answer is not something easily expressed... For those that don't really watch TV much, what is Firefly?

Firefly is a science fiction TV show set in a universe without aliens where there are a good number of terraformed worlds. The ``core'' worlds formed an alliance and decided that all the other worlds needed to join, which sparked a civil war between the Alliance and the independents. The Alliance won. Our main characters are a crew commanded by two people who fought on the side of independence and a motley crew of other characters. They are pirates and scavengers, sometimes with a heart of gold, sometimes not so much.

The backstory closely follows the basic ideas of the old west, where the losers of the US Civil War went after leaving civilization to escape a world they didn't want and the law that might be pursuing them. There are even Indians in Firefly, though they are bigger boogeymen than is warranted by US history. To drive home this point, there is a very strong Western genre feel to the show. There's a lot of cowboy talk and folks often dress in a western manner. This is the part that throws a lot of people, but I think that it lends the show a sense of realism, like they really exist in a specific culture.

There's also quite a bit of cultural intermingling. The characters are basically Western/American, but the backstory implies that the Alliance may have been an alliance between the US and China. As such, Chinese culture features prominently. There's a lot of dialog in Chinese, very little not understandable from context. It provides, amongst other things, a way for the characters to curse without having to resort to ``felgarkarb'' or other obviously made-up words. There's also other visual cues to the Chinese influence, but, at least as far as the show got, it wasn't really important, but just more of a backdrop. As far as I remember, there were never even any speaking characters who were Chinese, although some of the upper-class folk have Chinese family names despite not being Chinese ethnically.

Of course, I say all of this and it's not really important. It's just the back story. The show is not really about all of that. It's about the characters. I mean, it's still an action TV show to some extent, and there are firefights and whatnot (though not ship-to-ship combat), but what really matters, and what makes it so good is the relationship of the characters to each other, how they change, and how the characters change. What's truly amazing is how well that was accomplished in, like, eleven broadcast episodes.

I know you said you don't watch TV much, but one of the important drawing points of the show is that it's created and driven by Joss Whedon, the creator behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and its spinoff, Angel), which, itself, has much less to do with vampires than it has to do with creating and exploring well-developed characters. It retains the crisp, scintillating writing of his other shows. One place where it diverges from Buffy is in the superb cinematography. It looks like a '70s western -- lens flares and so on -- very handheld and intimate. The CGI stuff of the spaceships must be done by the same folks who worked on Battlestar Galactica, but it works here because it fits the rest of the cinematography. As they say during the commentaries, most sci-fi is very austere and antiseptic. Not so on Firefly. Almost every aspect of the show is superb. I cannot praise it highly enough.

If you have any interest in real science fiction, I suggest that you go pick up the DVD set. If you're only interested in shoot-em-ups or treknobabble, though, I'd avoid it. There's very little padding of that nature in the show. (Caveat: I enjoy Trek, too.) I'd say that if you liked Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5 that you'll like it quite a bit.

Excellent!!! Thanks for the great summary!

<typing>a m a z o n . c o m</typing>

For background, the characterization that you refer to is something I really like. I have the entire Babylon 5 series on DVD (or pre-order for season 5), so this sounds extremely good. Thanks!

I have to warn you that there are only about a dozen episodes ever produced and it was intended to run much longer than that. Many of the characters have mysteries associated with them and they are never resolved. It 's possible that they might be in some upcoming presentation, but there are no guarantees that any such presentation will ever happen, even if it looks promising right now.

However, since you've never seen it before, I envy you, as you'll get to watch the episodes in the correct order instead of the order in which FOX decided to air them. Specifically, you'll get the pilot first, which many people I know consider to be one of the best things to have been presented on TV that year, despite that FOX decided to broadcast it last, after they'd cancelled the show.

And it should go without saying, but I'll do it to make sure: don't listen to the commentary until after you've watched all the episodes. They give stuff away. I think one of my friends got burned by that watching the Buffy DVDs when they referenced something important that happened two years later in a season not even released on DVD at that point.

Oh, and if you've never watched Buffy, you should definitely check that out, as well. More horror-fantasy, not sci-fi, but similar respect for characterization. (Were you pissed off at what they did to Lennier in the last season of B5, too?)

Greetings!

Cool! Warnings taken and that should not be a problem. I am familiar with Buffy, but only casually. I was pleased with what I saw. But I do not watch much of anything, really.

B5 - ah yes. He did get a bad deal at the end. But it is somewhat appropriate, based on his character's evolution. There were hints that something like that would happen, becoming stronger in the later episodes. Another character I feel a bit sorry for was Talia Winters.

> Woah, wait. You left off right on that episode? I admit, things were rushed (and outside the control of the makers of the show at that time),

Yeah, I remember the whole deal, I was a pretty avid reader of the Babylon 5 newsgroup at the time. It was so cool that we could get to talk to JMS personally. I remember all the drama about whether the show was going to get canceled or not. Still, there is no excuse for how that ended. Regardless of all that, the conclusion that we had been waiting for for more than 3 years, this great epic arch of the storyline the likes I had never seen before on TV, ended like that?!? I felt personally insulted and offended. It was that bad.

I do vaguely plan to borrow or rent the DVDs and watch it all the way through now though. When I get around to it.

What, exactly, is ``that'' which offended you so much? I thought it made sense and hammered home the point that it isn't really these huge ideals of order and chaos that are the problem, but, rather, the people who follow those ideals blindly.

I think that there are some other issues with the show at that level -- that, once they resolved that it wasn't good/evil, but order/chaos, that there were no chaotic good characters, despite that there were lawful evil ones in addition to the lawful good and chaotic evil ones. (Do you think he borrowed from D&D a little, maybe?)

I think the reason that the show was so good was that it showed individuals, albeit important individuals, changed by the events around them. If you were waiting three seasons for a big space battle, then you were waiting for the wrong thing.

Darn, it's anamorphic widescreen, and only $35.00. I am weak.

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What? No "One Click"(tm)?

Woo-hoo! Two more sales for me!

Open letter to all the companies who put television shows onto DVD:

$75.00 is too much to buy a season's worth of a TV show, even if it's the best show in the world. This is the first TV series I've purchased on DVD, and the only reason I did was because it was only $35.00. And that's sight unseen, I have no idea if I'll like it or not. $35.00 is a really good sweet spot in terms of pricing. $19.00 for decent movies, $35.00 for a TV series set, that's my sweet spot. Charge me over $20.00 for a movie, and it had better be a blockbuster that I'm dying to own or else I won't buy it.

Did you not own a laserdisc player?

And you are getting only about half a season.

> If you were waiting three seasons for a big space battle, then you were waiting for the wrong thing.

I was waiting for something big, and instead we got...nothing. Not a damn thing. It was one of the biggest cop-outs in TV history. This huge upcoming war, this conflict that had gone for longer than human history, was resolved by....asking everyone to go away?!? The only way it could have possibly been worse was if JMS had had Sheridan wake up and realize it was all just a horrible dream.

$75.00 is too much to buy a season's worth of a TV show, even if it's the best show in the world

Darn straight! I'm having trouble pushing myself to buy a season at $45. Fortunately I think you can get the entire series of The Critic for around $35 on Amazon.

I think TV on DVD is just catching on. Hopefully in the future we'll see the prices drop to the $35 level across the board.

*edit*
Except, of course, for Seinfeld. If they ever decide how much money each of them gets for participating, we'll end up paying $100 a season